Parliamentary Pressure Cooker

Senator Cory Bernardi sums up the current political situation in Australia:

Parliament has resumed for 2012 and the political temperature has not cooled since we left last year. The pressure is already starting to show within the Labor-Greens alliance as Labor leadership tensions take hold.

That Kevin Rudd still covets the job of Prime Minister is no surprise to political observers. He has not cauterised the deep wounds left from his brutal political butchering at the hands of Julia Gillard and the faceless men of the Labor Party. The fact that many of those faceless men are prepared to even consider reinstalling Rudd as leader says a great deal about the parlous state of our federal government.

Notwithstanding the perverse pleasure in observing the leadership woes of the Labor Party, it is morbidly fascinating to see the desperate scramble by Greens leader Bob Brown to vigorously defend the power that was handed to him by Julia Gillard.

Only weeks ago, Brown was attacking Gillard for being duplicitous and breaking her word in respect to logging. Now that she is under fire from within, in a transparent bid to keep her in power (so he can remain in charge) he has now denied any broken agreement.

In fact, Brown has actually condemned any criticism of Prime Minister Gillard as ‘sexist’; further evidence that those devoid of any coherent or logically persuasive argument resort to name calling with the preferred tags being ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’. In the PC world, these are almost guaranteed to silence any dissent from those that fear the associated character assassination.

That such slurs are most often levelled by the Australian Greens should come as no surprise. They loathe freedom of speech and freedom of thought - except when it applies to their own world view. Any questioning of their counter culture agenda is deemed ‘hate speech’ and holding them to account for their policy failures is being ‘extreme’.

But the Australian people are waking up to the dangerous agenda put forward by the Labor Party and the Greens. Whatever their rhetoric, the end game is bigger government, higher taxes and a growing public debt. Ultimately the result is a dysfunctional, inefficient and stifling government which creates a less prosperous society.

The evidence of this end game is overwhelming. We had zero jobs growth nationally in the last year, our national debt has grown to over $160 billion, cost of living increases are crippling household budgets and business investment is gradually drying up. These are all a direct result of the policies of the past four years.

That the Labor-Greens alliance will not take responsibility for these massive failures is a sad indictment on the character of the players involved.

The rarest words in politics are those uttered accepting responsibility and yet they are the words the public are craving most to hear.

Although perhaps not as much as hearing the Prime Minister call an immediate election!

Senator Cory Bernardi is the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition and a Senator for South Australia. This article is courtesy of his personal blog which can be found at http://www.corybernardi.com.

Comments

[dante]

1.

"The rarest words in politics are those uttered accepting responsibility" ... so chances are one day you and your side of politics will accept responsibility for your push to widen the gap between rich and poor, for supporting tax custs for the mining magnates, for providing tax breaks for polluters. We are waiting....

[John Mc]

2.

How long will it take for left-wingers to accept:

- eliminating the 'gap between rich and poor' just makes everyone poorer, including those currently on the bottom rung, and makes it harder to climb the ladder as well;

- high taxes kill whatever industry they're applied to, even if it's highly profitable to begin with; and

- Not applying a tax on someone doesn't mean you're giving them a tax cut.

[bluebell]

3.

Unfortunately, the biggest job killer is on it's way - its called Gillards Carbon Tax.

[kraka]

4.

Dante-perhaps you can name a few countries where this doesn't ring true.

Socialist/communist = poverty,oppression,less rights for most of the people.

Capitalism/democractic whatever you want to twist it is not perfect but it is the best system available at the moment.Not everyone is born equal, it is not a perfect world, there has and always will be those who are worse off though in a democractic country like Australia a large majority of those who are worse off can only blame themselves-not some evil mining magnate.
In Socialist and communist countries pretty well everyone who is poor is a result of the government and their totalitarian policies. Power corrupts absolute power etc etc.
Get over yourself-if mining magnates, democracy and capitalism are so bad please take advantage of that other great right afforded to citizens in countries like Australia-your right to piss off overseas and live somewhere else. Your incessant all money is evil rhetoric is really starting to sound like class warfare jealousy from the 19th century-and you consider yourself a progressive (puhlease)

[dante]

5.

John, your conclusions isn't backed up by history. For several thousands of years the gap between the very few but vastly rich and the multitude of extremely poor was immense ... then we had the industrial revolution that started producing goods at an increasing rate and, unless the vasr pool of poor people started consuming, there was little point continue to improve production methods ... and we had the raise of the middle class, and the rich elite was hit by income taxes up to 90% (research the tax rate in the USA over the past 100 years to confirm this). But the greedy rich and the 'born to rule' soon enrolled propaganda machine that spread the untruth that taxing the rich would make the entire population poor ... and steadly marginal tax rates have come down, and have come down faster where there are people like you that would believe anything as long as it was said by someone from your side of politics ... the people that benefit most from tax cuts or from not applying taxes are the ones in the highest income brackets ... the ones that have to pay a greater proportion of their funds for basic necessities are those with earning the least. It's a simple mathematical equation. Appropriate level of taxation does not kill anyone. generous tax concessions or breaks or failure to impose appropriate taxes widen the gap and does nothing else ... in fact it stifle production because less money circulate in the economy. Do a simple test: how much of $1000 will be returned to the economy if given to a single person or if divided equally between 10 people. I don't know what you have to protect but claiming that imposing appropriate level of taxes is improper is greedy.

[dante]

6.

What colour is the politics in Syria, what was it in Lybia, or Egypt, or what was the system under Marcos? You have a short memory and few blind spots.

[bluebell]

7.

Dante - If I was to distribute Australia's wealth equality, I can guarantee you it would be back in the same hands within 5 years. Unfortunately for you there will always be those that have a knack for creating wealth, and others that have it slip through their fingers. My uncle's situation has proved this point to me time and time again. He is (today) a wealthy man - yet he has LOST his fortune on more than one occasion in the past. He just has this knack of dusting himself off and starting all over - and winning. That doesn't come by accident, that comes about by being smart with a dose of hard work. I will however, grant you that society must look after it's most vulnerable citizens. Something that should be improved on where possible. I don't see Obama handing over his millions, or other left wing politicians for that matter. However, I will wager you that in 100 years time not much will have changed....because that is just human nature. Me first, and maybe you later. That is the story of humanity and so it will be to the bitter end. Your dream of utopia will never transpire, despite your huffing and puffing wishing it was so.

[liberal elitist]

8.

That is demonstrably false bluebell. Some people are harder workers than others, but the government can do a lot to change the distribution of wealth (and government necessarily changes the distribution of wealth no matter how 'small' it is). See for example this graph which shows that the distribution of wealth in the US has varied considerably over the past 100 years — depending on which year you look at, the wealthiest 1% earn anywhere between 10% and 25% of the country's total income. Highly progressive tax systems produce a more equitable distribution of wealth.

[John Mc]

9.

Dante, who has done more good in the world (and for that matter, done more to lift the living standards of the poor), Bill Gates or Mother Theresa?

[bluebell]

10.

[Highly progressive tax systems produce a more equitable distribution of wealth.]

Yes, they probably do.....but eventually the money still ends up going to the obscenely wealthy. It's like mixing oil with water. The oil always floats back up to the top.