Julia Gillard

Kevin Rudd is starting up the rumour mill again after his last cowardly leadership challenge. He always does this with a bit of seeding from the back benchers who then leak to outside sources.

Senior Liberal frontbencher Christopher Pyne says a Labor source has told him Kevin Rudd will again challenge for the leadership in June.

Mr Rudd this week revealed he now supports gay marriage, having voted against it in parliament in 2012.

Mr Pyne told ABC radio on Wednesday the change of stance on gay marriage was a signal Mr Rudd intended to challenge Prime Minister Julia Gillard.  Read more »

The left wing here likes to bag New Zealand, but how do the Aussies see us…well, a little differently than you would imagine.

Larry Pickering makes some astute observations as Australia heads into election season.

New Zealand was on the brink of recession prior to the Conservative government of John Key taking the reins in 2008. This small economy of 4.4 million people is now preparing for a series of record surpluses… and without the help of a mining industry.

Helen Clarke’s [sic] Labour Government left the country facing severe recession with a bloated Public Service sector and disastrous losses due to her takeover of the NZ rail system.

Abbott could do worse than take a look across the Tasman when attempting to repair the damage left by the union government of Julia Gillard and the incompetency of Kevin Rudd.

Are unions really the problem? They seem to be in Australia, having never really really dealt with them like we did in the 90s.  Read more »

SYDNEY – Investigations were under way Thursday into who lobbed Vegemite sandwiches at the Australian prime minister as she toured a Queensland school.

Julia Gillard tried to play down the prank on Wednesday at Brisbane’s Marsden state high school. “One kid thought he might just be a little bit naughty,” the prime minister said.

But the sandwich ‘whodunnit’ hit the headlines.

“I didn’t see a sandwich in the air,” Gillard told ABC radio on Thursday. “I did see half a sandwich on the ground.

“What I actually saw was screaming, over-excited and enthusiastic kids being very warm and very friendly.”

A video interview with the culprit, or is it Gillard’s knight in shining armour, is over the break.

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Julia Gillard reckons she can win…she oughta have a chat with Daryll Kerrigan:

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has given a fiery defence of her chances at the September election, saying she believes Labor can win as the “white noise” of politics falls away.

Ms Gillard was responding to News Ltd reports that Labor MPs were expecting a drubbing at the election, with one unnamed MP predicting a “bloodbath” with the loss of 35-40 seats.  Read more »

It looks like the hated carbon tax in Australia is destined for the scrap heap, Tony Abbott is really close to getting the numbers to axe it.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is looking more likely to be able to make good on his oft-repeated assertions to scrap the carbon tax should the Coalition win government in September.

Analysis of voting trends shows that should the present pattern continue to the election, the Coalition would effectively control both houses of parliament, making it powerful enough to repeal the carbon tax.

While Prime Minister Julia Gillard has previously claimed Mr Abbott will not have the numbers to honour his ”blood pledge” to scrap the carbon tax, an analysis of Senate seats up for re-election reveals a majority will likely fall into conservative hands.

Senior lecturer in politics at Griffith University Paul Williams said ”there should be no electoral or numerical obstacles to Tony Abbott repealing the act early in his first term”.

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Helen Clark’s government forecast a decade of deficits…National arrested that. In Australia Julia Gillard is similarly facing a decade of deficits despite promising many times to balance the books. Predictably the Liberals have attacked.

Australia faces a decade of budget deficits with the annual total set to pass $60 billion in 2023 unless governments take tough action to “share the pain”, an expert panel has warned.

The Grattan Institute’s assessment comes as Treasurer Wayne Swan confirms the budget has taken a $7.5 billion hit since the midyear update in October.

He told the ABC from Washington: “We have seen the terms of trade come down but the dollar didn’t move. That’s caused a hit, if you like a sledgehammer, to revenues in the budget since the midyear update of something like $7.5 billion. And of course the impact won’t just be in this financial year. It will also be across the forward estimates.”

The institute says that while notionally on track to surplus now, the combined state and federal budget deficits should reach 4 per cent of gross domestic product by 2023, which is about $60 billion in today’s dollars and would be about $100 billion in 10 years’ time.

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Corporate welfare is evil, who would’ve thought an ALP MP would call it?

Labor backbencher Ed Husic has questioned the government’s decision to spend more than $20 million on a Disney film, saying the money could be better spent on more urgent needs such as funding hospitals.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced on Tuesday that the government would pay Disney film producers $21.6 million to ensure the movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea would be filmed in Australia.

To justify the decision Ms Gillard said the investment could ”create up to 2000 jobs”.

Bloody expensive jobs. John keys movie deal was much smarter than chucking cash at the studio.  Read more »

There is a great article in the SMH about John Key’s popularity in Aussie, and how the LNP leaders might take lessons from Key.

New Zealand’s John Key may have set a national goal of catching up with Australia’s level of income per person, but when it comes to politics, Australia is taking lessons from the NZ leader.

On first blush, the conservative Prime Minister seems an unlikely role model. He was a Merrill Lynch investment banker, an occupation exposed in the year he was first elected as more likely to be made up of looters rather than leaders.

And he was known to harbour sympathy for disgraced ideas which dared not speak their name after NZ’s searing experience of conservative ideologues in the 1980s. The dirtiest word is privatisation.

But Key was not only elected in 2008, he was re-elected with a swing in favour of his National Party three years later. He didn’t win an outright majority; since 1996, no government in NZ has, and its mixed-member proportional voting system makes that especially hard. But his approval rating holds up around 60 per cent, with disapproval around half that level.

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Andrew Bolt looks at something that New Zealanders will be familiar with…a government that has won, and won handsomely wasting the win.

Tony Abbott’s biggest danger now is not losing the September election, but wasting the win.

The Opposition Leader has long worried his contest with Julia Gillard will get very tight. He’s a fretter.

So he’s been risk averse, making few promises to end what shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey called the “Age of Entitlement”, with an astonishing six million Australians living off benefits or state salaries.

He does not dare risk the fear campaign Labor would wage among public servants and pensioners.

Nor is he promising big changes to Labor’s controls over workplaces which are strangling productivity. He’s stuck mainly to promising a crackdown on rogue unions, fearing another union scare campaign if he went much further.  Read more »

The Courier Mail has released the latest Galaxy poll and it isn’t good reading for Julia Gillard or her government as the purge of ministers continues.

The only concerning part about this is that there are 32% of Australian’s too stupid to notice that Labor is in trouble.

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