To suit themselves, largely. Pauline Hanson, Nick Xenophon and his mate Stirling Griff, plus Jacqui Lambie will get six-year terms. The rest of the crossbench will have to front up again next election.
The Greens, who had argued for a ‘fairer’ method, lose out. Only Richard Di Natale, Scott Ludlam and Peter Whish-Wilson get 6-year terms. Continue reading Senate terms decided by the major parties
Politicians have been out there bashing banks again with CBA’s announcement of a record $9.45 billion profit. Of course if the bank keeps up with inflation it will be a record, and because it’s a big company it will be ‘fat’.
The table in the AFR gives the profit as $9.247 billion as against $9.084 billion last year. The true measure is in net earnings per share (eps) which came in at 542.5 cents, actually down from 553.7 cents last year. That’s a drop of about 2%.
The final dividend was maintained at $2.22 per share, so shareholders breathed a sigh of relief that it didn’t go down.
Bill Shorten’s comment was ignorant, and I think disgraceful: Continue reading Fat bank profits
The vote is in, almost five weeks after we went to the polls. In simple terms, Malcolm Turnbull’s LNP scraped in with a one seat majority in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, with 30 seats and needing 39 to pass legislation, he has three options. He can link with Labor’s 26, or with the Greens 9, or look for 9 of 11 crossbenchers, where the voting blocks of 3 Xenephon (NXT) and 4 One Nation are both unavoidable.
To block legislation requires 38 votes, not 39 as Radio National has been saying. Hence Labor voting with the Greens and the ‘centrist’ Xenophon team can block legislation. Continue reading A gridlocked senate?
Brian and I have been saying for years that both the planet and the economy needed was for the world/Australia needed to do was to go on a WWll style war footing to save the planet and boost the economy. Now the US Democrats have endorsed a WW2-scale mobilisation on the climate challenge. Hillary is promising to mobilise a global effort on a scale not seen since the second world war to tackle climate change, if elected US president in November. Continue reading Mobilizing for WWll Push for Climate Action
In the AFR Fleur Anderson tells us that women are becoming demonstrably disenfranchised from the Coalition. Only 13 out of the 76 or 77 LNP MPs elected to the House of Representatives are women. There’s only one, Robertson’s Lucy Wicks, in the 35 seats of Australia’s most populous region, the Sydney basin. Three Liberal women were turfed out in favour of Labor women.
“To say Liberal women are dismayed is an understatement,” says Anderson. Continue reading Turnbull’s problem with women and has he bought an election?
Malcolm Turnbull was talking up his victory, saying the people had put its faith in his team, just as Labor took the lead by eight votes in Herbert (I think there are a few hundred votes to count, before the recount) and the Senate was far from settled.
He said the next term would be a term of “delivery” of his “strong plan”. He’ll have to shake a leg, because parliament won’t meet until 30 August, which could give him around two years. More about that soon.
The full ministry is at Wikipedia, but here are the main changes: Continue reading Malcolm tweeks his ministry
Voters wanting to elect a party of an independent other than the LNP or Labor, or indeed the Greens, are more likely to do so in the senate. Kevin Bonham says:
Tim Colebatch points out that we had 54 parties or combinations of parties running for the senate, and 631 candidates for the 76 seats. People voting for something different want their vote to mean something, so how is the new senate shaping up?
William Bowe (Poll Bludger) thinks (paywalled) it “looks no less problematic for the government than the one that preceded it.” Indeed it is likely to be more so. Continue reading Senate update
One of the reasons Mediscare worked, if it did, was because of the Abbott government’s record on broken promises. After being in government for eight months, by May 2014, the Abbott government had chalked up at least nine broken promises. Abbott had promised no cuts to the ABC or SBS, no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no shutting any Medicare locals, no one’s personal tax will go up, no changes to pensions, foreign aid would go up in line with the CPI, on Indigenous affairs Closing the Gap activities would be sustained at former levels, and ARENA (the Australian Reneweable Energy Agency) would have over $2.5 billion in funds to manage. Continue reading Moving beyond Mediscare
Standard & Poor’s looks in the first instance at a government rather than at political parties. I can’t find the statement freely available, but here are articles by Michael Janda at the ABC and by Jacob Greber and Phillip Coorey in the AFR.
Essentially S&P want to see the budget under control. Explicitly:
This week Phillip Adams interviewed H. Luke Shaefer, joint author with Kathryn J. Edin of $2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.
This piece by them says that the US official poverty line sees a family of three getting $17 dollars per person per day, that’s $357 per week for the family, or about $18,500 per year. ‘Deep poverty’ according this article, is the term used for the living experience of 22 million Americans, or 6.8% of the population, who have a cash income of half that or less. Continue reading Saturday salon 9/2
Bob Brown said on several occasions “We don’t want to keep the bastards honest, we want to replace them.” It may be a time to reflect whether this is a realistic prospect, or whether the Greens will settle into being a niche party of the left.
I’d suggest the the Greens are no longer primarily a protest party for those disaffected by Labor, and to a lesser extent the LNP. Rather they a party with an ideology in their own right, based on values related to the environment, sustainability, human dignity and social justice. As such they have become an enduring part of the political furniture. But the question now is whether their trajectory to replace Labor as the main party on the left is still on course, or whether it has seriously stalled. Continue reading Whither the Greens?
While Antony Green at the end of Saturday night deemed the election result unknowable, Bill Shorten gave a victory speech that declined to claim victory, but said the Coalition had lost their mandate. “Labor is back”, he said.
Turnbull waited until after midnight, claimed a victory in the making, and in what many considered an ungracious speech, blamed everyone except himself. It was a political speech which neglected some of the conventions. Michelle Grattan, in an excellent analysis, said he was “extraordinarily lacking in self-awareness”, “showed not a scintilla of humility” and “made no gesture of contrition, no promise that he had heard the message the people had delivered.”
Let’s look at the numbers. Continue reading What have we done?
