I want to see a rip-off of a "Cool Hand Luke" scene, with Ken Henry (not George Kennedy) saying "What we have here is a failure to calculate", while shoving a bucket-load of pocket calculators down a supine Mr Rabbit’s mouth (in budgie smugglers rather than Paul Newman’s shorts).
And the bets would of course be not eggs, but how many billion dollars "fell between the cracks"… (or did LNP numbers fall out of one crack?).
See Also: Read more »
Tony Windsor, one of the rural independents, discussed the $11 billion black hole Treasury found in the LNP policies. The LNP talks of $4 billion in "the adjustments of Treasury and Finance".
ABC report is here.
So, either Hockey’s "audit" comments were hokey, or pure lies, or their "auditor" was not competent, at the very least by not publically putting the caveats when the LNP were touting the dodgy figures before the election.
Let’s see a few comments from Tony Windsor who has to decide who he’s gonna trust:
There’s some questions that the Coalition will need to answer in terms of the magnitude of the black hole in their promises and funding arrangements.
Questions like making misleading statements in Parliament, how many voters would have actually voted for the Mr Rabbit team if they’d known the costings. Read more »
Want an explanation of the last few elections and the real cause of the hung parliament?
Go here: "Bogan Bribe Watch August 27th".
Do we laugh or cry at the probable truths? Read more »
Mr Rabbit and Mr Fox have joined forces and strategies, brazenly hiding the truth, scared enough to risk exposing their illegitamacy to be considered as, respectively, a government and a news outlet.
Mr Rabbit is trying to be a cunning fox who is Professor of Cunning at Oxford, as Blackadder would say.
Mr Fox is running like a scared rabbit, afraid of democracy, perhaps.
Even in the Murdoch broadsheet, the actions and reactions of key players affecting the decisions about who will be PM, are unreported, or buried.
The ALP might need to show grace to uniformed members of the Liberal Party, but can, and should, attack the "unlawful combatant", the Murdoch press, particularly "The Australian", making broadsheet readers search for halfway reliable news elsewhere, and making advertisers follow them.
Any person with knowledge of the raw unspun news, merely who said what and who did what, must wonder what both Mr Rabbit and Mr Fox have to hide, as the obfuscators must think the considerable potential damage from hiding facts is much less than the damage from their exposure. Read more »
And he’ll hold his breath until he turns blue to get one!
Senator Fielding threatens to be a one-man obstructor of Labor legislation by siding with the Coalition on every Bill that a minority Labor government proposes until his term expires on June 30, 2011. Of course he’s not acknowledging that potentially providing multiple Double-Dissolution triggers over the next 9 months is blatantly in his self-interest – he’s just lost his Senate seat in the last election – under the reduced quota in place in DD elections, he stands a good chance of winning it back.
But no – he’s just all so morally outraged by it all that he just has to make a stand. Read more »
Looking at where the multi-billion dollar holes Treasury discovered, I smell an agenda… as the biggest holes are specifically in areas the LNP would slash anyway given any excuse.
Health, education, and parental leave are something Mr Rabbit and his warren friends love slashing.
I can just imagine the lines they would love to use once in government, lines that could appeal to economic hawks in the rural independents, and economically gullible sections of the public…
Perhaps the costings would only be "discovered" after having started, leading to claims of "unexpected high demand" on funds, and then policy rollback.
The specific policy areas:
Does anybody think the LNP ever wants to spend a cent on these things? Read more »
Mr Rabbit has problems with some Nats, who want the pork they see as rightfully theirs, and threaten to sit on the cross-benches. Looks like he has even tougher strains on his negotiation and conciliation skills than Julia has.
The pork demands of Mr Rabbit’s "friends" are quite different from the reform and information demands of the rural independents – and perhaps shed light on some of the reasons the independents became independents in the first place.
They are not going to sacrifice funding for projects in their electorates to be specifically put into independent electorates
– Sen John Williams, Nationals
ABC News 2010-08-30
If Mr Rabbit cannot get his own house in order, what hope of order in the House, a key demand of the rural independents?
Hung Parliament – Where to From Here?
Last weekend Australians thought they were voting on who would form government. If Labor or the Coalition had won a clear majority, this would have been a reasonable summary of what the election was about.
But with neither side having gained a majority in their own right, the murky world of government formation under our system of unwritten constitutional conventions has been exposed to the light.
He lays it out as an FAQ:
Q: Can we go straight to another election?
Q: If the Opposition can produce an agreement with the Independents, does the Gillard government have to resign?
Q: What happens if neither side make an agreement with the cross benches?
Q: Would we have an early election if the government fell after a few months?
Q: Would there be another Senate election?
Q: Could any agreement with the Independents fix the term of Parliament?
Q: Will there be a vote on who forms government when the House first meets? Read more »
Today’s guest poster is Bernice, who is crabby one day, furious the next, and has been a Friend of HaT for many years. Crossposted from Bernice Balconey’s Baloney
Or how to defer to the new numbers men.
Not only is Swan’s curtsy most affectingly achieved, but Katter’s demure tilt of his head as well as his clasping of his attache case is beautifully choreographed. What could this possibly mean about who will form government? Read more »
Those explaining away ALP pain in Queensland and NSW federal seats might also try and explain Victoria… where it looks like a net loss of seats to leftish parties.
It cannot be because people have warm fuzzies about a wonderful state ALP government: the stench of incompetence and backroom ALP corruption under Brumby (either as Premier or Bracks’ puppet master) has even socialist me hoping for a Liberal minority government resulting from the upcoming Vic elections. Read more »
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