Never seen a government lose its base so fast

[HAL]

""? Me, mr Toben's appeal to the Full Federal Court failed ?

[pietillidie]

[Pies4shaw]

Actually, it's simple economics. Given that I charge the annual GDP of a small African country for each hour I work, there's only so much time I can allocate to being gratuitously misinterpreted for free.

[pietillidie]

[David]

[pietillidie]

[David]

Where I agree with P4S is that I see the (partisan) polarisation of political debate in Australia as an essentially bad thing. It cheapens the level of discourse in all facets, and helped make the cartoony coverage of the last election possible. The effects on the quality of ALP leadership and policy, in particular, have been devastating.

Clearly, something's going wrong when a petition like this can attain 22,000 signatures:

https://www.change.org/p/tony-abbott-show-us-your-papers-renouncing-your-british-citizenship-before-you-were-elected

These are the sorts of trivialities that replace meaningful debate with mere barracking. And while I don't necessarily agree that Abbott's daughter's scholarship is a 'triviality' in of itself, I think pinning it on him is.

(Having said all that, I am still confused as to how misusing taxpayer-funded transport can be a career-ending move for some politicians but just a minor scandal for our PM and attorney general.)

[pietillidie]

^All I would say is that was his choice at his own level of reasoning and propaganda, David, not yours. He won't give you the other discussion because he will lose even worse on it. So all you're doing is letting him off the hook.

[Tannin]

[Tannin]

PS: Don't bother pretending that it wasn't $60,000 or that it wasn't a bribe.

The money went directly to a member of his immediate family, that's not in dispute.

The money was not paid for any normal reason, it was paid because she was Abbott's daughter. We don't have to suspect that or guess it, we know it for a fact because we know that no other student was given any gift of that nature in that year, or the year before, or any of the other years going back for a very long time. It was a special payment, made to a student not suffering from the slightest financial difficulty - her family has five or ten times the income of the average Australian family.

We don't know what was expected in return for the massive gift. Quite possibly there was no specific expectation, just a general one of favours down the track at some point, but no-one in their right mind would just hand $60,000 to a family already way, way better off than the average Australian on a whim or for no reason.

Most damning of all, we know - it's on the public record - that Abbott kept the $60,000 gift completely secret. He didn't even declare it on the pecuniary interest register - the list of politician's gifts and other interests which was created specifically to deal with bribery scandals of just this nature back in the days of (if I remember correctly) the Howard Liberal government. The whole point of the register is that, by listing your interests, you show that your actions are above board and not tainted by bribery or self-interest. It doesn't actually stop you taking a bribe, but it makes your affairs public so that you can't do it without being found out.

It's a simple distinction: gifts you declare may or may not be bribes - sometimes they are perfectly legitimate - but they are out in the open and if they do constitute bribes, you have to be pretty careful about how you go about providing the favour the gift was designed to encourage or compel. Gifts you keep secret, on the other hand, especially very large, unexplained gifts like this one, are always bribes of one sort of another - if it was honest and above board, there would be no reason to keep it secret in the first place, and compelling reasons to make sure that you disclosed it so that people wouldn't get the wrong idea.

Finally, he failed to decline it or hand it back like an honest man, he kept the money it in the family and (if I remember correctly) is still holding onto it. (Or, to be more precise, holding onto the $60,000 of his own money he would have had to spend if it wasn't for the "lucky" bribe money.)

[Wokko]

Back to the thread topic

Andrew Bolt losing patience with Abbott's government too.

http://www.news.com.au/national/high-time-for-abbott-government-to-do-or-die/story-e6frfkp9-1227128645333

When the rusted on conservatives are after you and there is no more than a thin film to scrape from the left that despises you, your government is in big, big trouble. Like Labor losing the left before last election, it's a recipe for disaster.

[Tannin]

Amazing stuff, Wokko. It's a bit of a gobsmacker: boiled down, Bolt is saying that the recipe to fix the Abbott' government's sustained unpopularity is to bring in more policies like the widely disliked ones they already brought in or tried to bring in. In short, says Bolt, if you are in a hole, dig even deeper. The mind boggles.

[stui magpie]

[David]

Rookie question, perhaps, but why would Abbott have to declare a scholarship granted to his adult daughter?

[Culprit]