Dsmithy70 wrote on Jun 25^th, 2011 at 5:17pm:

WORTH REPEATING!  

Quote:


It would be nice if it were true. The total tax burden on the Australian public as a percentage of GDP increased to record levels under Howard. By the end of his reign the Liberals were about handouts and vote buying, not tax cuts.

Time's up for tear-down Tony

June 25, 2011

The Opposition Leader's bare-knuckled biffo can take him only so far before a more positive strategy is needed.

[...]

His angry oppositionism has been highly effective. A prime minister who has only a dubious legitimacy in the public mind has been unable to defend herself against his bare-knuckled biffo.

He has put aside any pretence at being an alternative prime minister. His budget in reply ignored the budget. His parliamentary speech to welcome the New Zealand Prime Minister was supposed to be a national act but Abbott mischievously turned it into a political one.

He refuses to respond substantively to the actions of the government. He homes in laser-like on the carbon tax and asylum seekers.

Instead of positioning himself as an alternative prime minister, he criss-crosses the country on a stunt-a-day campaign to get his eight seconds a night of footage onto the television airwaves.

As Gillard works her way through her scripted lines and deploys the spousal prop in a transparent effort to warm up her cold image, Abbott calls for a "people's revolt". She gets increasingly confected and he gets increasingly angry.

Abbott the Angry has successfully knocked Gillard down in the public perception. Only 13 per cent of people think that Australia has become "a better place" in the year Gillard has been prime minister, while 51 per cent say it has become "a worse place", according to an Essential Media online poll this week.

Yet consider the objective conditions. In the past year, average wages are up by $21 a week, share prices are 5 per cent higher than they were a year ago and unemployment has fallen from 5.2 per cent to 4.9. Visitors from abroad have difficulty understanding exactly why Australian seem so disgruntled.

But perhaps the most extraordinary indicator of Abbott's triumph over Gillard in public perception is what he has managed to do with the issue of asylum seekers. Another Essential Media poll asked: "Is the issue of how Australia handles asylum seekers more or less important than issues such as managing the economy, education and health services?" An astonishing 50 per cent said it was as important or more important. This is a gut reaction, not a reasoning one.

But this strategy has limits. The people's rejection of Gillard is not an endorsement of Abbott. How could it be? He offers little more than the negation of her. Labor's Anthony Albanese calls him "all opposition and no leader".

It is perhaps no coincidence that the people rate them equally when asked which is their preferred prime minister. In the latest Herald-Nielsen poll, Abbott and Gillard both scored 46 per cent. He has dragged her down to his level.

There are signs that Abbott's approach may have reached what the great Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz called "the culminating point of victory". All successful generals are tempted to continue with a winning strategy, even when it has outlived its usefulness and needs to be reappraised.

"This culminating point in victory is bound to recur in every future war in which the destruction of the enemy cannot be the military aim," Clausewitz wrote. Why can't Abbott aim for the destruction of the enemy?

First, because of the fact that he does not control Parliament and cannot force an election to give real-world effect to his dominance in the polls. There is a clear contradiction between Abbott's dominion over the public mood and his impotence in Parliament.

This week demonstrated it powerfully. Abbott has managed to turn the Australian public against the idea of a carbon tax. Yet when he tried to force Parliament to call a national plebiscite on the carbon tax, he failed immediately. It was a stunt - the outcome of a plebiscite does not bind a government, and Abbott said he would not be bound by it either.

Gillard may be the head of a minority government, but she has so far shown an iron grip on a parliamentary majority.

Of the 151 bills that the Gillard government has supported, 151 have passed the House of Representatives. Abbott has successfully blocked nothing, and successfully proposed nothing.

As the government proceeds to get its signature initiatives through Parliament, Abbott risks looking increasingly ineffectual, full of empty bluster and with nothing else to offer. This week the national broadband network crossed a serious threshold towards becoming reality. The likelihood is that the carbon tax will, too, in the months ahead. Successive losses in Parliament will expose Abbott and demoralise his troops.

Second, because true victory cannot be scored on opinion polls but in a federal election. And to win an election, Abbott will truly need to be an alternative prime minister. If he wants the people to vote "yes" he has to represent something more than...

Julia and Tony, don't go tax-cut crazy before a poll

June 25, 2011

BEWARE of politicians bearing tax cuts: they are mainly interested in what is good for them at the next election, not what is good for the nation as a whole.

Desperate politicians have a nasty habit of promising us what their focus groups and interminable polling say we want. What they should be doing is concentrating on delivering what we need instead.

There is a very big difference. The H. L. Mencken quote ''nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public'' is normally applied to TV programming, but it also could read no politician became unpopular by underestimating the electorate's love of handouts.

It is a little scary that the next federal election could become a repeat of the dreadful 2007 Howard v Rudd competition, with both sides throwing harmful tax cuts at the voters. The danger would be that a victorious Tony Abbott might keep a big tax cut promise at a time when it would hurt rather than help us.

Abbott has a political problem with his entirely political crusade against Gillard's carbon tax: if he really did try to unwind the thing, he would also have to unwind the tax cuts Gillard is funding with the carbon tax to compensate lower income households for the tax. He also has much the same political problem with his inane promise to unwind the resources rent tax (RRT) - how to avoid a backlash from businesses receiving a tax cut out of the RRT revenue and individuals who have been promised higher superannuation contributions. (I don't believe for a minute he will unwind it, but we will let that pass.)

Tony's answer is to just promise tax cuts anyway, funded out of 'magic pudding' savings and bracket creep, relying on strong economic growth in the next few years courtesy of the commodities and capital expenditure booms.

Julia, for equally political reasons, has committed Labor to giving away most of the RRT revenue and only using a minority of it for building the infrastructure we need to achieve sustainable growth. The cuts compensating for the carbon tax are nominally revenue neutral, but there's a strong likelihood of over-compensation and who knows what further wild promises an extremely desperate Labor might make in an election campaign that would be matched by an extremely ambitious coalition.

The last time there was such competition, such promises did us more harm that good. Yes, Peter Costello was delivering his much ballyhooed surpluses, but they were a constant and produced no fiscal drag when we needed it - Costello oversaw dud policy in his last few years as Treasurer, forcing the RBA to smash us with interest rate rises.

This time in 2008, the RBA's core inflation rate was running away at 4.1 per cent, unemployment was just 4.2 per cent and the headline variable mortgage rate was a whopping 9.45 per cent and about to rise another notch.

Instead of again buying votes with tax cuts, we need politicians honest enough to address the looming explosion in health costs and age pensions as well as the need for a much bigger spend on education and infrastructure. The first two are a given, the last two are what's required to afford the former and build an economy that can make the most of the commodities boom and successfully move beyond it.

Sunday, June 26, 2011



http://bigpondnews.com/articles/TopStories/2011/06/26/Gillard_rejects_Abbotts_ta...





http://www.smh.com.au/national/abbott-put-to-the-sword-over-gospel-truth-gaffe-2...