I think the LNP will win but I won't be happy about putting up with TA for the next few years. Either the Liberals are going to run bigger deficits than Labor or they are going to cut the hell out of welfare and social services. It makes no sense to me why they would oppose the sensible Labor policy of tightening up on FBT car leasing and propose the maternity leave scheme funded by taxes on big business. Interested to hear where the cuts are going to be. If they leave it til the last week they might be able to fly it under the radar with some help from Rupert.
But I think you better get used to the budgie mad monk...me thinks he will pull through.....
don't say that Blondie im going to put some money on Rudd to win when i finally get around to setting up an account at sportsbet
Disclaimer: always gamble responsibly
Elastic
20 Aug 2013, 04:17 PM
I think the LNP will win but I won't be happy about putting up with TA for the next few years. Either the Liberals are going to run bigger deficits than Labor or they are going to cut the hell out of welfare and social services. It makes no sense to me why they would oppose the sensible Labor policy of tightening up on FBT car leasing and propose the maternity leave scheme funded by taxes on big business. Interested to hear where the cuts are going to be. If they leave it til the last week they might be able to fly it under the radar with some help from Rupert.
i don't have faith in either one of them but that concern might be unfounded..
At the end of the day the RBA runs the show anyway
This election has always been Labor's to win. Starting behind, it needed messages and policies to cut through to the public to get the momentum necessary to overtake the Coalition. Two weeks in, and with three weeks to go, that remains the case. Can Labor pull back the poll deficit and win? Definitively yes. How? Well, as Ronald Reagan used to say, ''It's not easy, but it is simple.''
Most importantly, Kevin Rudd has to project a clear picture of Australia's future with Labor. This election is, in reality, a choice of two futures. Tony Abbott has committed himself, rather oddly, to a policy platform that is almost entirely driven by Labor and the Greens. He will implement Labor's DisabilityCare and Julia Gillard's legacy Better Schools and he will reverse Labor's mining tax and carbon price. Oh, and then there's his own emblematic policy of paid parental leave - hated by his own side and business, and backed solely by the Greens, no wonder since it's a tax on big business to expand state welfare massively.
Parties of the centre-left can only win with a compelling vision based on future and fairness. The absence of a Coalition vision should make this contest so much easier. The best policy has edge, crunch and lift. It cuts through to the public, it is specific and it inspires.
That happened last week with Rudd's promise on gay marriage - four days after the dull debate Katy Perry was raising it to Abbott's discomfort. More should be made of Better Schools. The backflip by Christopher Pyne and Abbott should be mercilessly attacked, but the real weakness is that the Coalition is literally tax and spend on this issue.
It will give the extra cash to states, the Catholic system and independent schools with no strings attached. Bill Shorten, and before him Peter Garrett, have tied agreements to raising schools standards. There is no better issue for connecting with the aspirational suburban voters that Labor needs to bring back.
Then, Labor needs to be relentless in its pursuit of the Coalition on costings. This may seem like an abstract, indeed arid, area of debate. But it goes to competence.
Joe Hockey cannot be allowed to bang on for three years about debt and deficit and then say it doesn't matter whether his numbers add up. He has made the bottom line the symbol of economic management. So be it. Now it's his turn.
Take paid parental leave, a policy costing $6 billion. Do the numbers add up? Certainly not, at the very least the 1.5 per cent levy falls short simply because the fall in corporation tax has been part of the collapse in revenues that Labor has suffered. But more, that levy is intended to be balanced by a 1.5per cent cut in corporation tax. So there are, in reality, two spending commitments. How on earth does that work?
A sustained attack on costings would hurt the Coalition because it goes to credibility. Abbott's trademark since he became Opposition Leader has been discipline - both personally and in his caucus and the Liberal Party. He has been disciplined everywhere except in spending; here he remains true to his true Big Government self. Attacking here wedges him with his party, which is nervous about this side of him.
Labour must be thanking their lucky stars that Tony Abbott has been at the helm of the Liberal Party. It's the only thing that has given them a genuine sniff of an upset.
I'm still trying to work out whether or not Clive Palmer is taking the piss. Australia desperately needs a fourth major player in the vein of centre-right libertarian(ish) party coming to the fore to shake things up. I'm very disappointed that he is the face of it tbh.
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
JS Mill.
So Timmy, I expect you will be coming out for Tony to stop the boats and all that good stuff?
Property acquisition as a topic was almost a national obsession. You couldn't even call it speculation as the buyers all presumed the price of property could only go up. That’s why we use the word obsession. Ordinary people were buying properties for their young children who had not even left school assuming they would not be able to afford property of their own when they left college- Klaus Regling on Ireland. Sound familiar?
The evidence of nearly 40 cycles in house prices for 17 OECD economies since 1970 shows that real house prices typically give up about 70 per cent of their rise in the subsequent fall, and that these falls occur slowly. Morgan Kelly:On the Likely Extent of Falls in Irish House Prices, 2007
In the last days of the 1996 election campaign, treasurer Ralph Willis was duped into releasing what he thought was a letter outlining secret Coalition policies. It proved to be a fake, and it all blew up in his face, sealing Labor's defeat.
On Thursday, in the last days of this campaign, something similar happened to Treasurer Chris Bowen. With Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Finance Minister Penny Wong, he stood before journalists in Melbourne's Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices to release secret Treasury and Finance Department costings he said demonstrated a $10 billion ''black hole'' in the Coalition's policies.
''There is an error of $10 billion in the claimed $30 billion of savings the opposition released yesterday,'' he said. ''This is based on advice from the departments of Treasury and Finance and the Parliamentary Budget Office.''
Mr Bowen and Ms Wong released three pieces of official advice, all months old, in which ministers had asked Treasury, Finance and the PBO to cost what they took to be Coalition policy. The departments came up with figures showing lower savings than the Coalition has claimed.
Ms Wong declared the officials' advice showed that ''$1 in every $3 that [the Coalition] counted as savings doesn't exist''.
The Prime Minister chimed in, declaring: ''What we're doing today is calling Mr Abbott on his truthfulness. This is a $10 billion fraud on the Australian people.''
Labor's campaign is ''in tatters'', leader of opposition business Christopher Pyne has declared, as Labor defends its release of Treasury and Finance documents to claim there is a $10 billion black hole in Coalition savings.
The war of words over Labor's black hole claims escalated on Friday, with a defiant Treasurer Chris Bowen and Deputy Prime Minister Anthony Albanese insisting the government's claims were correct – despite the secretaries of Treasury and Finance taking the highly unusual step late on Thursday of publicly denying that they had examined opposition policies.
Mr Bowen was adament on Friday that ''we stand by every word that we said yesterday''.
''In the press conference we said that we asked the Treasury and department of finance to cost these things before the election. We said that. But we also said that assumptions can change the costings. We said that,'' Mr Bowen said.
The Treasurer said the two department secretaries had simply affirmed that Labor had asked the departments to cost the policies before the election.
''If the opposition is so sure of their facts here, they can clear this up today by releasing their costings.''
Earlier, Mr Albanese also stood firm on the government's claims.
''Depending upon – all that Treasury and Finance have said is, if you change the assumptions, the details, the period of time of what have you, then you might get different outcomes,'' he told Channel 9 on Friday morning. ''And that's correct. Based upon the assumptions of what they're saying, on the opposition's own words, they're the figures.''
Asked how Labor came up with the $10 billion figure, Mr Albanese said, ''from Treasury and Finance. We released the minutes . . .''
He later acknowledged, ''What they say is that if you change the assumptions, depending on the detail of the opposition policy, then you might get a different outcome. So therefore they're not saying precisely these are the figures.''
On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Martin Parkinson and Finance Department Secretary David Tune issued a public statement advising that neither had examined the opposition's policies, and any modelling used for costing government policies before the election could not credibly be applied to opposition policies.
The statement said that the departments had been asked by the government to cost various ''policy options'', and: ''at no stage prior to the caretaker period has either department costed opposition policies''.
Late on Thursday the head of the Parliamentary Budget Office, Phil Bowen, also weighed in to the political stoush, issuing a statement that advised: ''Unless all of the policy specifications were identical, the financial implications of the policy could vary markedly.''
On Friday morning, Mr Pyne called Prime Minister Kevin Rudd ''the greatest make-up artist of all time'', and said the department chiefs had ''torpedoed'' Labor's campaign.
''Kevin Rudd had built his campaign around attacking the Coalition on a negative way and what [the] Parliamentary Budget Office, Finance and Treasury did yesterday was call Kevin
Rudd out to be a make-up artist and to have been lying about the Coalition's costings,'' Mr Pyne.
''Anthony Albanese can say whatever he likes; yesterday Kevin Rudd confidently went out and accused the Coalition of having a $10 billion black hole; in the afternoon the objective heads of the department said that was utterly false.
it says who do you think will win, not who do you want to win, boofhead!
"It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races." - Mark Twain on why he avoids discussing house prices over at MacroBusiness. "Buy land, they're not making any more of it." - Georgist Land Tax proponent Mark Twain laughing in his grave at humourless idiots like skamy that continually use this quip to justify housing bubbles.
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