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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Wokko wrote: | | Hard to say, I remember Howards polls looking pretty dismal mid term and he'd always turn it around but throwing sweets at the electorate. Not as easy to do in a downturn though I suppose. While people didn't like Abbott, I've never known anyone to say how much they like Shorten (Abbott has a lot of support to go along with a lot of hatred, nobody cares about Bill). I think Tone would've ripped him apart in the debates as well. |
Unlike in America, I don't think anyone much pays attention to the debates here. One of the good things about our system is that most people understand (at least to some extent) that they're voting for parties, not individuals. I feel a great deal of antipathy towards Shorten and actually prefer Turnbull as a politician (his cowardice as PM aside), but I will still preference the ALP above the Liberals because I know, broadly, what those parties stand for and what they are likely to do in government. I think a lot of people feel the same way.
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Culprit 
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
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The LNP are in disarray, very similar to the Rudd/Gillard debacle.
J Kennet | Quote: | believes Malcolm Turnbull has burnt the goodwill he had after taking over the top job and going to the polls in July is simply about self-interest.
"They're trying I think to use this talk of a double-dissolution, an early election, simply to cover up their own failings," he told radio 2UE on Wednesday.
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http://www.9news.com.au/national/2016/03/09/09/37/jeff-kennett-criticises-early-poll-talk |
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Jezza 
2023 PREMIERS!
Joined: 06 Sep 2010
Location: Ponsford End
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The honeymoon is over for Malcolm!
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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There was no real honeymoon. He has to *keep* batting away the morons in his own party, dealing with a pretend opposition which by nature of a two-party system is always thereabouts, and set his narrative.
All this in a context of the sulking, backward and destructive "poor us we no longer rule the world at will" attitude gripping Anglo-America, and eating people's creative brains.
On his narrative - if anything at all can compete with beating up refugees or fantasising about the grand old days of world dominion - something is brewing in the right spot. This is a bit of a mess of an article, but the bit I like is highlighted in blue. This hopefully signals Mal he has learned something from the NBN debacle, and may flag a shift in the small-minded thinking choking Australian planning. As some of us said during the NBN debate, if you're not considering the top line when it comes to infrastructure, your calculations are complete BS from the outset.
By the same token, without addressing density, this could also just turn into "dislocated" sprawl. Anyhow, it's worth a look.
| The Canberra Times wrote: | City slicker Malcolm Turnbull hitches a ride on the urban express
The Turnbull government is working on something other than tax reform, and it's something potentially bigger.
As the prominent economist Professor Ian Harper has said, the economic benefits of getting cities right is "many multiples" greater than those of tax reform.
And, the way the government's ambitions on tax reform have been shrivelling under pressure from Labor, it's probably just as well that there's a bigger and better policy avenue opening up.....
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Anyone who suffers through the grinding, ever-lengthening commutes of Australia's biggest cities knows intimately the high personal cost of the daily frustration.
Turnbull's government intends to address this, laying out its cities policy as a central theme of its election campaign.
His cabinet will consider a cities discussion paper in two weeks' time, and publish it soon after.
Turnbull intends it to be a trademark of his prime ministership.
After the setback of losing his cities minister, Jamie Briggs, after a late-night incident in a Hong Kong bar last year, the task now falls to an assistant minister, Angus Taylor, a star Liberal Party recruit and assistant minister to the Prime Minister for cities.
"Cities policy is the biggest transformative lever you can pull to improve people's lives and economic productivity," Taylor, a former Rhodes scholar and McKinsey's management consultant, tells me.
Happily, the government and the opposition are trying to outbid each other on the ambitiousness of their cities policies.
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The government gave a few big hints about its intentions on cities on Friday.
Turnbull gave a speech on the subject, the same day that Fairfax Media reported that the average peak-hour traffic speeds fell over the past two years on most of the 124 Sydney routes monitored by the NSW government.
On the same day that reporter Inga Ting quoted an expert, Peter Phibbs of Sydney University, telling Sydneysiders the least surprising fact they've heard since being told they're in the middle of a heatwave: "We are just wasting more time driving around."
As if in response, the prime minister said on ABC radio that he favoured the "30 minute concept".
This, he said, "is the simple concept that most of people's day to day work, education, shopping or recreational activities should be located within 30 minutes of walking, cycling or public commuting from their home."
It's an appealing idea, one that Labor's Albanese articulated two years ago, yet it's an increasingly unrealistic one on current policies.
Around all the major cities, the trend is in exactly the opposite direction. The average weekly commuting time has lengthened by a fifth in the decade to 2011, according to the Grattan Institute, in Australia's largest cities. The average commute in the big cities? It was 34 minutes each way.
In Sydney, a quarter of commuters now have to travel for more than 45 minutes to get to work. And, of course, as long again going home, or over an hour and a half a day.
Then, later on Friday, in a speech in Parramatta, the CBD of Western Sydney, Turnbull said:
"Rapid growth is a challenge because of the demand it puts on housing and transport, the problems of congestion and mobility, the concentration of high value jobs in only a few places and the lack of local jobs."
Indeed. Most new jobs are on offer within 10km of the centre of the major cities. But most new housing is more than 20km away from the centre.
"Our cities policy," Turnbull promised, "will address this by focusing on investment in transport and urban renewal, increasing the supply of housing and by improving amenity - making cities wonderful places to live."
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Rail-ready Turnbull has already committed to supporting a light rail project on Queensland's Gold Coast. On Friday he raised the prospect of a much more expensive project, supporting a rail link to Sydney's second airport.
The Badgery's Creek airport in Western Sydney is due to open in 2026, yet the planners say it won't have enough users to justify a rail connection till 2040. Turnbull challenged this assumption:
"Roads are not enough. World class airports share a common ingredient - fast and convenient public transport links. Just last week, Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al Baker said the airline would not use the new airport because it lacks high speed public transport links."
He said that a rail link wouldn't just narrowly serve the airport but should be considered as an asset for the people of Western Sydney more broadly.
He committed to studying ways to work with NSW to build the rail connection as soon as possible, by the time the airport opens, if possible.
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A very fast train has been studied since the 1980s but never made any progress towards reality. It is one of the great Australian dithers.
The Japanese had their shinkansen bullet train network built 20 years before. The Chinese have built 19,000 km of their high speed train network since.
The big flaw in all the feasibility studies to date, says Angus Taylor, is that they were premised on ticket sales as the only way to pay for them.
This thinking was never going to work, he says, and now about 30 different groups have approached the government with ideas for how it might be built and financed.
Such a rail line from Sydney to Melbourne could give rise to "two, three, four new cities of several hundred thousand people along the way, as the Japanese have done," says Taylor.
And the huge surge in land values that this would create opens one of the possibilities for paying for the project.
Governments could tap into the rising land values – through charges or taxes or project equity – and collect many billions in the process, a principle called value capture.
Crazy? Not at all. The Sydney Harbour Bridge was part-financed by a development charge on the surrounding areas at either end. The Pitt St Mall in Sydney used the same approach. Many of the world's great rail lines were paid for in exactly this way.
Here is the key to the new agenda – the financing. For the new projects – the Badgery's Creek airport rail link, the high speed Sydney-Melbourne train, for a range of other projects - the government is working on this and other mechanisms for raising the revenue without simply handing over federal tax monies.
"We used to do this," says Angus Taylor, "but we've forgotten how." He's determined to revive the experience.
Or, as Turnbull puts it, "the Federal Government will no longer be a passive ATM doling out grants for infrastructure".
The new – or, more accurately, revived – approach would make the federal government a co-developer instead.
It would make impossible projects possible. And this is something where Labor and Liberal agree. |
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/city-slicker-malcolm-turnbull-hitches-a-ride-on-the-urban-express-20160311-gngobq.html
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In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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Culprit
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
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| If the born to rule mob wish to stay in power they have to call an election soon. A double dissolution election is interesting and a massive gamble. Bring it on. |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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WTF is going on with the Libs and the Greens?  
Some in Labor are behaving like jilted lovers since the Greens agreed to the legislation to revamp the senate and there's talk of a Greens/Liberal preference deal.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Skids
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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| Culprit wrote: | | If the born to rule mob wish to stay in power they have to call an election soon. A double dissolution election is interesting and a massive gamble. Bring it on. |
The punters don't agree.... ALP @ $5 with the coalition a very warm $1.17.
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Don't count the days, make the days count. |
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Culprit
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
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| Skids wrote: | | Culprit wrote: | | If the born to rule mob wish to stay in power they have to call an election soon. A double dissolution election is interesting and a massive gamble. Bring it on. |
The punters don't agree.... ALP @ $5 with the coalition a very warm $1.17. |
Let's wait for a double dissolution to be called and see what odds are then on both houses. That is what I want to bring on. Call a DD is a massive call and a massive gamble as history has shown us not everyone votes the same way in the upper house. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| stui magpie wrote: | WTF is going on with the Libs and the Greens?
Some in Labor are behaving like jilted lovers since the Greens agreed to the legislation to revamp the senate and there's talk of a Greens/Liberal preference deal. |
Mostly Labor scaremongering. The Greens are quite rightly trying to position themselves as a bigger political force, and that's not going to happen if they're only willing to negotiate with one of the two major parties. At the very least, Labor shouldn't be able to take their support for granted.
Much of the hand-wringing is occurring in response to an interview with a skivvy-clad Richard Di Natale, in which he essentially said the Greens would always be more likely to support Labor but that he couldn't rule out dealing with the Coalition if need be. Next day, ALP politicians are all over the place warning about the Greens and Liberals teaming up.  That's politics, I guess.
From Crikey:
http://www.crikey.com.au/2016/03/11/labouring-hard-on-a-story-of-greens-liberal-conspiracies/
| Quote: | Labouring hard on a story of Greens–Liberal conspiracies
Bernard Keane
Labor won’t be too unhappy that Liberal powerbroker Michael Kroger has confirmed the Victorian Liberals are open to a preference deal (in Kroger’s terms, a “loose arrangement”) with the Greens because leader Richard Di Natale isn’t a “nutter”, and Di Natale saying he wouldn’t rule out supporting a minority Coalition government.
Both are, in a way unexceptionable statements — a Liberal-Greens “deal” would involve open preferencing by the Greens — e.g. not formally directing preferences to Labor. Antony Green estimated back in 2011 that this tends to reduce the Greens preference flow to Labor by 3% of preferences (not 3% of the vote). That is, in a very tight contest, it might make a difference, but otherwise it probably wouldn’t. And Di Natale’s comments indicated he’d probably back a Labor government — “it’s much more likely that the opportunity rests with Labor,” the Greens leader said. But under Christine Milne — by implication a “nutter” in Kroger’s estimation — the Tasmanian Greens supported a Liberal government in Tasmania in 1996.
Labor has been working hard to portray the Greens under Di Natale as drifting rightward. The Greens deal with the government on tax secrecy and, particularly, on Senate voting reform, have elicited near-hysterical reactions from Labor, with Sam Dastyari leading the charge. It was Dastyari who accused the Greens of “selling out tax transparency for a cheap, dirty deal with Scott Morrison”, and he wanted to crowdfund a billboard attacking the Greens on the issue. More recently, he used the Senate voting reform bill to theatrically accuse the Greens of selling out the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Dastyari permanently looks on the verge of self-parody, but as Joe Hockey and Mathias Cormann discovered, he can be a dangerous enemy.
That Labor votes with the government against the Greens on a regular basis, rather than once or twice, doesn’t tend to get mentioned by Labor.
Now Anthony Albanese, a target for the Greens in inner-suburban Sydney, is spruiking a “secret deal”. Any preference arrangement, however loose, and even a bland statement that Di Natale wouldn’t completely rule out supporting a Coalition government will be more grist to that particular mill (and, again, it’s not like Labor hasn’t preferenced against the Greens to its own detriment in years gone by — hello, Steve Fielding).
For all that, it’s important to remember that the Greens have done well under Di Natale: there was no dip in the party’s support after he replaced Christine Milne, and the Greens have continued to poll at around 10% in the Essential Report, despite Di Natale having far less experience and profile than Milne. In polling terms, there’s been an almost seamless transition between leaders, which didn’t happen when Milne replaced Bob Brown — the departure of the veteran Tasmanian caused a dip in the Greens’ vote, but it began recovering before the 2013 election (before a stunning performance by Scott Ludlam in the WA Senate byelection).
The problem is, the Greens need every vote — even with an ordinary half-Senate election this year, there are six Greens senators up for re-election, and in Tasmania they no longer have Christine Milne’s name recognition. The 2010 election delivered an exceptional outcome for the Greens in unusual circumstances — extraordinary levels of disillusionment with both an opposition led by Tony Abbott and a Labor Party that had knifed Kevin Rudd. Di Natale is thus leading them into what will be, even under the best circumstances, a tough election where there are likely to be casualties in the Senate, even if they can jag another seat in the Reps.
Expect a lot more talk of “secret deals” from Labor, and more stunts from Dastyari. |
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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ronrat
Joined: 22 May 2006
Location: Thailand
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The good thing is I have been taken off the electoral role. No politician is worth me spending a day and a 100 bucks in taxi fares to get to Bangkok.
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Annoying opposition supporters since 1967. |
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Skids
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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| Culprit wrote: | | Skids wrote: | | Culprit wrote: | | If the born to rule mob wish to stay in power they have to call an election soon. A double dissolution election is interesting and a massive gamble. Bring it on. |
The punters don't agree.... ALP @ $5 with the coalition a very warm $1.17. |
Let's wait for a double dissolution to be called and see what odds are then on both houses. That is what I want to bring on. Call a DD is a massive call and a massive gamble as history has shown us not everyone votes the same way in the upper house. |
Pretty sure that's factored in. DD election is $1.80 favourite with the same bookie.
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Don't count the days, make the days count. |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| How did you know that? |
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Culprit
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Port Melbourne
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| Malcolm Turbull is forcing the Senate back to pass Legislation on the building commission and if its not passed a DD election will be called. Or Bob Day's High Court Challenge could torpedo this. Or the Senate could pass the Legislation. Personally, let's have a DD as the Greens could end up with greater control and Malcolm's gamble could fail. |
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Skids
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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DD backed into $1.45. Odds unchanged for the parties; Lib/Nats $1.17, Lab $5.00
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Don't count the days, make the days count. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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