Oz Election Forums (ozforums.com.au)

Howard's time is up. When the electorate decide its time for a clean out they usually reach for a broad brush. Many people have been waiting for the goodship SS Coalition to right herself from her list, but this ship isn't coming back. The worst bit is yet to come for the government though. Something to do with abandoning ship and every man for himself. When it comes to political survival some will turn on their own just to keep themselves afloat. It won't be pretty.

From the 'The Age"
"while the Queensland figure (48 to 52) appears, according to Mr Stirton, to be an aberration due to small sample size, because his home state has previously been polling strongly for Mr Rudd."

Refreshing to hear a pollster be so frank. Every other poll this year has found the ALP with a strong lead in QLD.

We can finally assume Howard is the underdog, and for all the MSM saying he does well fighting out of a corner, being the underdog is not quite the same thing, and doesn’t suit him at all. It is almost over. I notice the online RW brigade is now almost impossible to find.

Howard can take a lot of the credit for pushing the Liberals to the right. Didn't the Brogden stuff come out of his office?

Either way, the right wing have won. A Rudd govt. will be further right in economic and many social issues than any '80's Lib. govt. would have dreamed. Rudd to quarantine Welfare payments? Rudd to relax border security?

Fools gold folks.

No doubt about it, the Liberal Party need a clean-out and a purge of all the extreme right-wing that have infiltrated the party. While the Liberals have held the centre-right ground, they have been electable. With the drift of the Liberal Party to the right, they have abandoned the centre ground, which is where most of the swinging voters lie. Now the ALP have claimed the centre for themselves. This is the pendulum of Australian politics at work.

The ALP will drift back to the left after the election. It might take six weeks or six years, but it will happen eventually. There's nothing wrong with that because the country needs to drift back to the left. After a decade of unrelenting attacks on employee unions but constant pandering to employer unions, the policy balance in this country is seriously out of whack. The balance needs to be restored and the polls reflect this. The winds of change are a howling gale and come November there will be a change of government in Australia.

Why has the public mood drifted in this way? The Government have abused their Senate majority. Governments that do this inevitably do badly at the next election. It happened to Chifley in 1949, and it will happen to Howard in 2007. In addition, there is a growing discontent among the electorate. When Howard is claiming that we've never had it so good but large numbers of people are losing their homes to wage cuts and interest rates rises, it is not surprising that there is a growing discontent among the electorate. The Coalition cannot patch things up in a few months. Even if they did repeal Workchoices and cut interest rates by 1% before the election, that would only restore the status quo of 2004. In addition, there are things that cannot be undone, such as police investigations against sitting Liberal members and a vast legacy of broken promises.

So who do we trust? Not them any more.

Tobe, I sincerely hope that the era of wedge politics will be over, and that the Liberal Party will return to what it is, a party of liberals, not a collection of right wing hangers-on who take their political instruction from the U.S. Republican Party Handbook, edited by Karl Rove.

It's a disgrace where this party has ended up, and a good clean out will be the best thing for it to re-establish its true identity.

Should Labor win and not have control of the Senate what is the likelihood of the Senate blocking Labor's changes to WorkChoices legislation? And a double-dissolution?

IS ABBOTT A MORON?

Tony Abbott is unable to fathom why everyone hates them since they are such a good government. It is hard to know if he is being genuine here or not.

He thinks they have been a good government? On what grounds?

Let me tell you Mr Abbott the reality not political spin. Your government has been terrible and drags Australia down.

1. We know the strength of the economy comes form Hawke/Keating reforms and the global/China booms. It basically works on auto-pilot. The only credit Costello can take for the economy is not palying with it too much. The Government's Economic credentials should be compared to that of a good Book-keeper. Yes you bought in GST, sold off Telstra [was that good?]

2. You treated democracy, accountability and honesty as dirty things and treated the Australian people with total disrespect in:
(i) Lying us into Iraq - to help out a personal mate 
(ii) Keep us in Iraq to help out a personal mate
(iii) Using Justice as a poltical foreign policy toy by allowing Hicks to rot for 5 years
(iv) Turning a blind eye to the terrible torture of Habib [would you like have allyour fingernails pulled out tony?] (v) AWB bribery - we all know that Ministers MUST have known all about this - it is joke to deny it. Yet the Ministers having relative responsibility were not punished. In fact we have Downer laughing it off before the Cole inquiry. The govt thought because no one could come out and say they were corrupt on this that it made it ok. (vi) Tamapa raid - in using the military services as a political election toy you corrupt them as well as govt.
(vii) Baby Overboard - you people deliberately lied to the public just to win votes. Again the govt corrupts democracy, accountablility and uses the military as political election toy.
(vii) Manildra - this story defys credibility.
(vii) Cash for visas
(viii) Detention and deportation of Australian citizens by a rabid immigration dept spurred on by the desires of the govt.
(ix) Using racism, xenophobia, bigotry, intolerance as tools to win votes or rush in draconian laws.
(X) Dropping WorkChoices on Australians without a mandate and thus deliberately that creates a totally powerless workforce for the entire benefit of big business. Putting big business mates before the people of Australia who elect you to protect their interests not abuse them.
(xi) Adopting a disgusting form of Wedge Politics and viscious mud slinging similar to the USA model thus dirtying our democracy.
(xii) Adopting an aggressive intolerant and abusive form of governing. Each policy comes with threat and intimidation, esepecially when it comes to other states.
(xiii) Treating FOI as a joke and thus the Australian people with arrogance.
(xiv) Totally politicising the Public Service so much so that it sees itself as tool to keep the government elected.
(xv) Politicising the military and security services.
(xvi) Villifying and vicisously victimising any person or group who has an opposing view and also whistleblowers. AKA the character assasinstion of Justice Kirby on fake documents under Parliamentary privildge. The Red Cross, RSPCA, scientists on Climate Change, the whistlblower on Airport security, the reporters who would not divulge sources and a litany of other abuses in order to CREATE FEAR among the public service, non-govt organisations and the like - so there would be no voices disagreeing with the govts view.
(x) Abusing the processes of the House Of Reps, The Senate in order to reduce govt accountablility.
(xi) Handing over Australia's foreign policy to the USA
(xii) Making bizare defence purchases that inhibt our capabilities and can only cause suspicion as to reasons.

AND Mr Abbott we also know that
1. you intend to put another 1.5 million on AWAs next year
2. That you intend to force all Australians onto AWAs in the long term
3. You intend to make further more draconian WorkChoices legislation - akak Minchin 2006 address to Nicholls.
4. That it is your intention to destroy unions - which have been declared a fundamental human right in many countries.

SO Mr Abbott - you have been a good government? I think you mean to say the economy has been good for many years and you happened to be the government in power at the time. Yet it is Hawke Keating who set it up and China and the world that has pushed it along.

That you lot have been sleeping is proven by all the things the coming of Kevin Rudd has forced you to do.

This totally blindness as to what you are proves you should all be voted out.

Last edited by Nhullunbuy (2007-07-16 18:19:27)

Fagin wrote:

The Liberal party return to its roots? Not likely with the recent pre-selections of right-wing hard-heads Alex Hawke and Michael Towke. Abbott's chances of being leader of the party increase each time a neo-con is pre-selected.

I hope you are wrong Fagin, but sadly, I suspect you may be right.

Not entirely unreasonable 2353.

The ALP becomes Australia's "conservative" party
The Greens become the "progressive" party

Elections inside of 20 years become a battle between the ALP & the Greens.

This would require the ALP losing it's left faction and thinking, and while it's not prevalent in the public eye, the ALP left is still alive and strong at the local level. Their thinking is very similar to the greens, focused on social policy and bereft on economic policy which is generally the domian of the right (in my experience of inner city Sydney anyway)

IMO, the reason The Greens have been so successful in recent years is they have followed the logic that not being a major party, they don't need to have responsible or electable economic policies. Until they have solid economic policies, they will never have the electoral support required to be a credible opposition beyond the <30 yo demographic. It goes with the old saying, if you're not a socialist at 20, you have no heart, and if you're not a capitalist by 30, you have no brain....

I reckon a Lib split, whether litterally or idealogically, is more likely and more electrally palatable for their survival.

The Liberal Party won't split, I don't think. They'll suffer a defeat, wander around in the wilderness for a while wondering how could this have happened when everyone was doing so well, eventually come to the realisation that in fact not everyone was doing well, draft some new policies that reflect that change in emphasis, find a new leader that embodies it, and defeat Labor in 2016.