Electorate, Would I Lie to You?

ELECTORATE Would I Lie to You? AAP http://www.skynews.com.au/news/politics/federal/2016/06/24/pm-says-shorten-caught-lying-on-medicare.html PM says Shorten caught lying on Medicare  Published: 12:09 pm, Friday, 24 June 2016 PM Malcolm Turnbull says Bill Shorten has been 'caught out lying' on his Medicare scare campaign. Malcolm Turnbull insists Bill Shorten has been 'caught out lying' over Labor's Medicare scare campaign. The opposition leader, appearing on the ABC's 7.30 program, was not prepared to put hand on heart and repeat his claim the coalition had a plan to privatise Medicare.  [comment:  what are they, 5 years old?  It doesn't matter where their hands are, these tossers aren't to be believed.] Instead Mr Shorten told host Leigh Sales: 'I can say to the people of Australia that this election and their vote on July 2 will determine the future of Medicare'. He also took the opportunity to argue the Liberal plan, which included a freeze on indexed Medicare rebates, was 'scary'. The prime minister, campaigning in Launceston on Friday, seized on Mr Shorten's apparent change of language. 'He was asked to put his hand on his heart and repeat his lies and he wouldn't,' Mr Turnbull told reporters. 'He has been lying about Medicare and he's been caught out.' Mr Turnbull accused Labor and trade unions of calling older voters at night and 'frightening them with lies'. 'Now if somebody is running for prime minister and they're prepared to lie about something as important as that to vulnerable Australians, how can you trust anything else he says?' Mr Shorten, for his part, accused the prime minister of having 'his hand in the policy cookie jar'. 'It is not what Malcolm Turnbull is saying now about a particular privatisation task force that's got me worried, what it is piece by piece, if given the chance, he will dismantle Medicare,' he told reporters in Darwin. Labor campaign spokeswoman Katy Gallagher denied Mr Shorten was softening Labor's line of attack. 'There hasn't been any change to Labor's position at all,' she told reporters in Canberra. 'We are continuing to talk about our concerns about Medicare and potential privatisation.' AAP http://www.skynews.com.au/news/politics/federal/2016/06/24/pm-says-shorten-caught-lying-on-medicare.html LABOR PSEUDO LEFT BILL SHORTEN RE:  DONALD TRUMP REPUBLICAN, USA Australian Financial Review " ... Mr Trump reached the number of delegates needed to secure his party's presidential nomination on Thursday. He has vowed to break the North American Free Trade Agreementand the Paris climate agreement, does not support the Trans Pacific Partnership and said he would slap a 20 per cent tariff on imported products." Bill Shorten ... saying US Republican candidate Donald Trump's views are "barking mad" ...  Shorten feels free to hurl insults Malcolm Turnbull hit out at Mr Shorten over the comments on Friday, despite two of his ministers raising serious concerns about a Trump presidency. AFR COMMENT The Shorten pseudo 'left' politician, from a party that wants wants to give their country away, has the nerve to be critical of Trump, while he and his Labor party parrot Liberal party policies, having abandoned Australian working classes, as far back as the late 1960s. Notice that both Liberal and Labor capitalist serving & nation screwing assh*les are at one when it comes to slagging off an American patriot that's opposed to trade agreements. Is there any actual material distinction between these two capitalist serving Australian political party assh*les?   Donald Trump, US Republican, position sounds more my idea of the left than anything the Australian Labor Party lowlifes stand for. The Australian Labor Party & its union buddies ought to be challenged by forming alternative authentic left political parties and unions that represent socially conservative Anglo-Australian / European working-class interests ... assuming there still remains anything left of an Anglo-Australian or European working class in the country.   COMMENT Medicare is destined to be privatised when the politicians sign up for the US 'free trade agreement' (Transpacific Partnership (TPP)), which is a corporate free for all, in which national sovereignty, democracy, the welfare and the will of the people, will mean jack sh*t, on signing up for this American corporate rort. I don't see that Shorten Labor tosser opposing the free trade agreement. All his political party opposes is the ISDS clause. While that's a positive, the entire free trade arrangement is sh*t and would be opposed in its entirety by any genuine left party that had national (and, particularly, mass, working-class) interests as a concern. Both the Liberals and Labor are sh*t.  Greens are even sh*ttier. I wouldn't vote for any of these assh*les. ONLY VOTE WORTH MAKING IS A NATIONALIST VOTE COMMENT  Labor's refugee/immigration policy negates any reason whatsoever to vote for this capitalist serving, working-class undercutting and working-class resource redistributing, fraud of a 'left'. CORPORATIONS GET THE TAXCUTS ... Prime Minister used similar rhetoric in Sunday night’s debate against Bill Shorten to make the case for his plan to cut taxes for firms with revenue of more than $2 million. ... look at how far, or how low, Labor has drifted since Keating’s time. Shorten described the Turnbull government’s plan to cut company tax as “useless and hopeless”. It went largely unreported, although for a leader to describe a tax cut as useless and hopeless in an election campaign sounds like news to me. Next day when he was quizzed about it, Shorten back-pedalled slightly to say “the truth (or troof if we are to be strictly accurate) of the matter” was that it was the wrong time and the wrong priority, despite the fact after last year’s budget he chided the government for not providing small business with an even bigger tax cut and invited it to work with him to take the rate down even further. ... Shorten also told the Australian Council of Social Service that “corporate tax reform helps Australia’s private sector grow and it creates jobs right up and down the income ladder”. Under Shorten, after prodding from the unions, Labor baulked at the free-trade deal with China and equivocates over the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. The Australian Australia Foreign Policy http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2016/06/12/australias-uncertain-election-season/ Australian election offers few choices on foreign policy 12 June 2016 Author: Russell Trood, Griffith University Australians will go to a federal election on 2 July 2016. At first glance the 19 seats in the House of Representatives that the Labor Party — the current Opposition — needs to win to take government seems a heroic undertaking. Yet, if the early polls are any indication, this may not be too far beyond its reach. There are several dimensions to the 2016 election that add to the mystery of the result. The leaders of Australia’s mainstream political parties have only held their positions for a relatively short period of time. Neither has led his party through the gruelling demands of a federal election. And this year the election campaign period will go for around two months, nearly twice as long as usual. But perhaps the greatest challenge is that this is a ‘double dissolution’ election — meaning that all 150 seats in the House of Representatives and 76 in the Senate will be up for grabs. It is the first time in nearly 30 years that Australians have experienced a double dissolution election. Predicting the result will be especially difficult. To form government the winning party will need to secure a majority of seats on the floor of the House, but to be confident of providing stable, effective government and to pass its legislative agenda, it will also need to have a reliable coalition of supportive senators in the Upper House. This has been wanting in recent Australian parliaments and partly explains the rationale for a double dissolution election. That said, this will likely be a very orthodox election with domestic political issues dominating the agenda over any significant international or foreign policy change. The Labor Party is making its pitch on increasing education funding, sustaining Australia’s high-class health care system and protecting the social security interests of its low-to-middle-class constituency. For Bill Shorten, the Opposition leader and former president of Australia’s trade union movement, this is the heartland of Australian politics. In contrast, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s national economic plan of ‘jobs and growth’ draws on his more eclectic life experience, including as an international businessman. Since becoming prime minister in September last year, Turnbull has consistently emphasised the great economic opportunities offered to Australians by the transitions (and disruptions) now taking place in the global economy. He has stressed that there has never been more exciting time to live in a world of change and transition where enterprise and innovation can flourish and underpin significant domestic economic gains. Against this background, it is unlikely that the election will provide much guidance on the future direction of Australian foreign policy. There is already a high degree of consensus, at least among Australia’s mainstream political elites, about foreign policy priorities. These include sustaining and deepening Australia’s security relationship with the United States, engaging with the Indo-Pacific, countering radical extremist terrorism and protecting homeland security. During his three years as opposition leader, Shorten has done little to embellish this agenda, being content to respond to international issues as they emerge. And while the election will demand a more comprehensive statement of policy, it will likely be well within the parameters of the liberal internationalism that has long been the cornerstone of Labor’s foreign policy. By contrast, the Turnbull government has already clearly marked its foreign policy ambitions. It will seek deeper engagement with the global economy through comprehensive free trade agreements and partnerships with Indonesia and India. Turnbull will also press hard, though perhaps unsuccessfully, for the Trans-Pacific Partnership to become a reality. Perhaps most notably, and with a significantly higher degree of emphasis from previous  statements on the subject, the Turnbull government’s recent Defence White Paper gives high priority to working with all countries to ‘build a rules based global order’ which incorporates agreed rules of international law and regional security arrangements. Once settled, the victor will have to face up to the pressing issues on Australia’s foreign policy horizon. In Japan, the Abe government was widely reported to have been disappointed, if not stunned, when Australia failed to award the contract for the development and manufacture of its new generation of conventional submarines to the Japanese contender. The decision raised doubts in Japan as to whether Canberra was seriously interested in developing a deeper strategic partnership. The answer is almost certainly yes, but rebuilding trust and confidence will demand some assiduous diplomatic attention. Likely to be of a more enduring difficulty for Canberra is China’s determined push to expand its maritime boundaries in the South China Sea. Australia shares widespread regional concerns about the destabilising consequences of these actions. But Canberra is wary of being drawn into confrontation with Beijing and will need to strike a finely tuned policy balance — especially with the United States — which protects its own national security interests. Finally, Australia has to address the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court’s decision to close the refugee detention centre on Manus Island. The decision punches a large hole in Canberra’s elaborately conceived regime to deter people smugglers and asylum seekers from looking to Australia. The issue resonates deeply within the Australian body politic and is highly controversial among wide sections of the community. The bipartisan consensus between the government and Labor on the issue is a further complication. Labor is struggling to hold together a febrile internal policy consensus against left wing opposition. The government will certainly exploit this split within Labor to its political advantage. At the start of the campaign, opinion polls indicated that the election could hardly be closer, with one predicting a Labor victory of 51 per cent to the Coalition’s 49 per cent, while another reversed these results. Over the coming weeks, the polls will no doubt fluctuate as Australian voters wrestle with the choice they have to make on 2 July. At this stage it is almost impossible to say that either side can be confident it has a clear path to success. Russell Trood is Director of the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University. http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2016/06/12/australias-uncertain-election-season/ Free Trade Agreements http://www.law360.com/articles/804406/australia-s-labor-party-wants-isds-nixed-from-trade-deals Australia's Labor Party Wants ISDS Nixed From Trade Deals By Caroline Simson Law360, New York (June 7, 2016, 7:54 PM ET) -- Ahead of a July federal election, Australia's shadow minister for trade and investment and member of the country's Labor party said Tuesday that a Labor government would oppose investor-state dispute settlement provisions in trade agreements and work to remove them altogether from existing deals. Speaking at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry Trade Forum, Sen. Penny Wong, an opposition leader in the Australian Senate, said that a Labor government would not accept ISDS provisions in any proposed trade agreements. Previous trade deals signed by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott contain ISDS provisions, including the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, despite concerns about the mechanism that have occurred in the country for years, she said. In addition, she noted that there are ISDS provisions in four of Australia’s earlier free trade agreements and in 21 bilateral investment treaties. "Some of these provisions were drafted many years ago and do not contain the safeguards, carveouts and tighter definitions of more contemporary ISDS provisions," she said. "A Shorten Labor government will develop a negotiating plan to remove ISDS provisions in these agreements. Where this is not possible we will seek to update the provisions with modern safeguards." Bill Shorten is the leader of the opposition for the Australian Labor Party. Concerns over the way ISDS provisions are being used to challenge public policies have been raised by economic and legal experts, including the government's Productivity Commission and the chief justice of the High Court of Australia, she said. Australia's minister for trade and investment, Steven Ciobo, is a member of the Liberal Party and has come out in favor of the TPP, calling it "very good news for Australia" in a February interview with Australian media transcribed on the trade ministry's website. He accused Wong of continuing to "fuel misinformation in relation to the impact of ... the [TPP]." "[ISDS] is a feature that has been in trade agreements ... for something like 30 years. In 30 years we've had one issue come up, and guess what? Australia won on that one occasion it came up," he said. "The Labor Party runs around and says they're going to tear up all of our trade agreements, that they want to renegotiate them all. It's just a really bad approach from Labor, so my criticism is actually directed towards Penny Wong and the Australian Labor Party." In December, Australia defeated a claim over its plain packaging legislation for cigarettes lodged by Hong Kong-based Philip Morris Asia Ltd., which is the Asian regional affiliate of the Philip Morris International group of companies.  [comment:  as if this is reason enough to ignore the future costs.  it looks like it's a win on a technicality specific to this case:  Philip Morris restructuring to take advantage of a treaty.  it's not exactly protection against future claims by companies.] The company claimed in the arbitration that the 2011 law, which imposed a sweeping ban on trademarks of any kind on cigarette packages, violated its rights under a 1993 bilateral investment treaty between Hong Kong and Australia by substantially diminishing the value of its investments in Australia. But a tribunal for the Permanent Court of Arbitration rejected the claim during an initial jurisdictional phase, ruling that the arbitration was an abuse of right because Philip Morris had restructured itself to take advantage of the Hong Kong-Australia treaty when it knew that a dispute was on the horizon. --Editing by Aaron Pelc. http://www.law360.com/articles/804406/australia-s-labor-party-wants-isds-nixed-from-trade-deals http://archive.is/rDPxt This was a bastard to edit.  Don't know why.  It was all over the shop.  I'm so sick of looking at this.   No matter how many times I look, it looks wrong to me ... as wrong as those mainstream Australian politicians.  LOL Blogger throwing up unwanted code is sending me mental.  When I look at the back end, trying to edit things, I see a gazillion unnecessary font and like codes it's easier to leave in than edit out.  But when it later comes to editing specific portions, it's a nightmare of picking through vandalised code because of the automatic Blogger unwanted insertions EVERYWHERE.  Blogger, please don't help.  LOL