“Paedos in speedos”, Julian Burnside?

That’s some kind of activist you are there, Julian.

HUMAN rights lawyer Julian Burnside has apologised to Tony Abbott after branding him a “Paedos in speedos” on Twitter.

The prominent QC said the tweet, which was seen by users of the social media service as a reference to pedophilia, was a mistake for which he unreservedly apologised.

No Juliar, you’re the PM, it’s your fault

Doesn’t it just make you cringe when you hear stuff like the following?

JULIA Gillard has blamed Tony Abbott for the arrival of two new asylum-seeker boats, saying his refusal to back her Malaysian Solution made him responsible for the unauthorised vessels and all others that would follow.

Memo to the PM: Before your government took power, the boats had stopped coming. The ALP changed the laws, and the boats flooded in.

Do the math.

Former Labor heavyweight, Graham Richardson:

Now Labor brings in legislation that nobody wants into a parliament certain to reject it. This is a form of masochism: it is almost as if the government wants to keep feeling the pain of failure. This is a drawn-out execution of a misguided policy Labor should never have endorsed.

On his Sky show, he mentioned it was the end of a pathetic week in what’s been a pathetic year.

Hear, hear.

Yes, we will have to have an election to have an election

It’s all about PM Gillard essentially, effectively, circumventing the Constitution thus making it “impossible” to repeal her unmandated carbon (dioxide!) tax laws.

Details here.

The thing is, to the best of my knowledge, all Abbott has to do if and/or when he retains government is to present a “repeal bill” – so to speak – to the (hostile) Senate twice in 24 hours, naturally have it rejected, and then it is well within his right to call a double dissolution.

Juliar: you broke it, you fix it

That’s essentially what Opposition leader Tony Abbott could well be telling our PM come Monday.

OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott has given the strongest indication yet that he will not support the government’s changes to migration laws to enable the offshore processing of asylum seekers.

Mr Abbott said he was troubled by proposed changes to legislation that he said would give “entirely unfettered discretion” to Immigration Minister Chris Bowen.

The government needs bipartisan support for the proposals because the Greens have ruled out supporting them.

“My difficulty with the government’s proposed legislation is that it does strip out the protections that the Howard government thought were necessary,” Mr Abbott said today.

“The Howard government and the coalition not only has the patent on offshore processing, it’s pretty obvious having seen the legislation that we also have the patent on offshore protection.”

UPDATE

That “strongest indication” is obviously coming from Abbott’s DT blog.

This week in the parliament the Prime Minister has been demanding that the Coalition support legislation to validate the Malaysia people swap that the High Court struck down.

It’s not the opposition’s job to support bad policy from a bad government.

OK, so there’s kind of an out…

Our job is to promote policy that would actually stop the boats and to oppose policy that’s already been proven not to do so.

But really?

Malaysia is not offshore processing; Malaysia is offshore dumping.

That’s not a “strong indication”, that’s a firm NO.

Newspeak

This government and its cronies are so shameless its almost laughable.

First we have PM Gillard accusing others of hypocrisy

Then we have Greens leader Bob Brown claiming “the mining industry is already putting a huge strain on the rest of the economy.”

What kind of rainbows and unicorns fantasy land are these people living in???

UPDATE

And listening to Bolta and Price on MTR today, you have Anthony Sleazyville whingeing that the Opposition shut down Question Time yesterday when it was actually the government that did it – and only five minutes in!

Not just a lie, but the complete opposite of the truth!

Oakeshott’s the biggest dill here. All the rest, Craig Thompson included, will walk away from all this with their federal parliamentary pensions intact. Windsor will get one from The NSW parliament as well.

As a one-term federal MP (at under 15% popularity he doesn’t have a Gillard chance at a truth convention of being re-elected), “Poor” Rob will only get his NSW parliamentary pension (so yeah, there’s no need to feel too sorry for him).

Julia lives on

Yesterday, I took a punt and tipped that PM Gillard would be overthrown today.

No, that didn’t pan out, however Peter van Olsen suggests why.

If only winning an election were always this easy

And Tony Abbott promising to repeal the carbon tax is as much of a gift as it is a no-brainer.

Dam it!

Finally – and how overdue is this – a political leader who has the balls to say the bleeding obvious.

TONY Abbott has urged Australia’s leaders to overcome “dam phobia” and has established a shadow ministerial taskforce to examine what benefits more dams could deliver to the nation.

Er, electricity, less flooding, more drinking water, more water for our farms, homes, gardens and industry. The only flaw here is that do we really need a taskforce to help us come to these conclusions?

Anyway, great! And if Abbott would just stick to his “climate change is crap” mantra, he might be surprised.

But of course, the usual suspect can’t keep his mouth shut.

But Greens leader Bob Brown, who made his name fighting the Franklin dam proposal in the early 1980s, has attacked the plan to consider more dams as “ill conceived”.

Bob Brown is a cancer on our nation, pure and simple.

UPDATE

Via Tim Blair, QLD premier Anna Bligh says No!!! Don’t talk about it now!

First Gillard with the asylum seekers, now Bligh with this. What is it with Labor not wanting to talk about anything of importance yet at the same time calling for national discussions about just about every other useless topic?

The weird thing with Bligh on this one is that she did try to build a dam at Traveston, but was blocked by Garrett.

H/T george rock at Blair’s for the link (saved a bit of time).

Anecdotally, on a holiday back to Australia, we took a steam train up near Gympie for a ride, the Valley Rattler, and at some of the stops, were asked to sign a petition against that dam.

UPDATE II

Dickie’s kinda right… comments do maketh a blog

Milton G at Blairs:

George, wrong dam.

Traveston Crossing was another Beattie/Bligh panic solution, due for completion after the Gold Coast desal and Luggage Point recycling plants came on-line. The big dam that would have avoided this waste of billions was the Wolfdene Dam, cancelled in 1989 by Goss and his bureaucrat-in-chief, one Kevin Rudd.

With a capacity equivalent to that of the Wivenhoe dam, Wolfdene would have played a critical role in boosting the region’s absolute water storage capacity in the face of prolonged droughts.

Labor to form minority government

Well, it was close, but not close enough for Tony Abbott and the Coalition. With independents Tony Winsor and Rob Oakeshott backing Labor, despite being in largely conservative electorates, Julia Gillard will be able to for a minority ALP/Greens government with a slim 76/74 advantage.

The mining industry must be overjoyed, along with a majority of Australians.

Dennis Shanahan:

Gillard built public momentum and expectation that Labor would form government with her alliance with the Greens and public campaigning.

This was despite losing her majority at the election and being behind in the number of seats, the two-party preferred vote and the primary vote as well as the voters in the three rural independents’ seats supporting the Coalition over Labor.

Think about that boys. Enjoy your fun while it lasts. And was it Oakeshott’s conservative electorate that persuaded him or that offer of a ministry? You be the judge.

The silver lining to all this is of course that an Abbott government wouldn’t have had much clout anyway, and probably not much will get done before July next year when the Greens get that Senate control. Unfortunately, if Labor is still around come that time, Australia can expect some very nasty stuff. As you proably well know, the biggest doozys will be power plants shut down, mining driven offshore, massive tax increases, an un-rortable $43 billion dollar white elephant NBN and probably quite a number of other disasters, too.

I must say, the weather’s been nice in South Korea lately.

PS And as we all know, no one knew of this Labor/Greens coalition before the election. No, that handy bit of electioneering came afterwards. Quite the con job.

UPDATE

Paul Kelly:

As far as the parliament is concerned I think there is now a real risk of a weak government delivering poor policy or not too much policy…

This is so much WIN.

An ineffectual government that can’t do squat? Meanwhile, the Greens are exposed for who they truly are? This is awesome.

Gillard

How sweet the sound.

So Bolt thinks Gillard’s speech was brilliant. Spare me.

Facts are facts. We have a fabian socialist, ironically being puppeteered by the Labor Right, whose biggest claim to fame was the BER, the Building the Education Revolution. Out of $16 billion, bar some spare change, all spent on buildings and not education, about a third of that has been wasted, it has disappeared.

And now that same person, Gillard, is in charge of (shut up, Yanks) our trillion dollar economy.

Bolt is on the money so often, but is way off with his Gillard love-in.

Why, Bolta? Because Abbott is so quiet? That “quiet” has worked.

As usual the MSM is way off the pulse, and should give Bishop, yeah, you know, her, a fair go.

And also just pre-emptively touting nonsense that Abbott won’t be able to attack Jules is just that… nonsense.

But we saw this with the MSM in 2007.

Ho hum, it’s all moot. The number of times Julia mentioned “stability” was most telling.

I’ve been told Kerry was pretty hard on Julia tonight.

LOL!

UPDATE

Finally, Tony Abbott is taking the gloves off with regards to Julia’s “handling” of the BER.

However, the Opposition greeted the new Prime Minster with derision. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said: “It’s clear that if you want to change the policies you’re going to have to change the Government. They’ve changed the salesman but they haven’t changed the product.”

With an election just months away – and hoping to blunt any political honeymoon for the new Prime Minister – Mr Abbott is hoping to target Ms Gillard’s central role in the Building the Education Revolution scheme.

He accused her of being principal author, along with Mr Rudd, of the “school hall rip-offs”.

And it looks like she’d better watch her back.

It really looks like the Labor MO is to get whoever’s popular to an election, then knife them at the first sign of trouble, especially if they aren’t doing the unions’ bidding.

Whatever happened to honour amongst theives?

H/T Merilyn Williams

UPDATE II

Passing thought: Gillard will say and do anything in the lead-up to the election. It’ll be what she does afterwards if Australia’s dumb enough to give the unions Labor another term that counts.

Why would Abbott go socialist now of all times?

Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair have both reported today on Opposition leader, Tony Abbott’s, mad plan to tax companies for paid maternity leave – to the tune of up to $150,000 per mum – for new mothers, even when most of those mothers already are eligible for paid maternity leave paid for by their employers.

One un-named Lib labelled it classic 1930s-esque socialism, and was subsequently rather embarrassed when told it was his (or her) party’s new policy.

And barely hours after it’s release, there is understandable angst within Liberal Party ranks.

Coalition MPs told The Australian Online that frustration was expressed at today’s meeting of Liberal MPs and senators that the Liberal leader failed to consult the partyroom before rolling out his policy idea of putting a 1.7 per cent levy on big business to pay for a six month paid maternity leave.

Hopefully this is a blip and Abbott isn’t choosing to go down the one-man-band road that Rudd has done. It would be a disastrous move if he were to do so.