So, “butter would not melt in his mouth”, Kevin apparently has a robust vocabulary when it comes to privately berating his factional colleagues including females.
Last week he and his cohorts used question time to plead the higher moral ground when it comes to allowing women parliamentarians to speak.
They complained mightily when the Leader of Opposition Business moved that “the speaker be no longer heard” when a female minister was droning on. But no such criticism for Kevin’s letting fly with the F word with female factional foes that had the temerity to disagree with his point of view.
Hypocrisy is the word that springs readily to mind but Mr Rudd’s justification for the swearing that this is just normal Labor behaviour adds arrogance and anger as apt descriptors.
Kevin took umbrage at Belinda Neal and her Iguana behaviour – perhaps he still has the name and number of the anger management counsellor he sent her to and should make an appointment for himself to keep the angry, arrogant hypocritical alter ego in check.
What price democracy?
Funding for political parties is a contentious issue – but they don’t run on fresh air – even though some will think they should.
Usually people concentrate on the amount spent at election time and then only by the Parties themselves.
The 2007 election turns that thinking on its head as the biggest spender was the Trade Union movement. And a new player, Get Up, also spent lots in support of Labor.
And that’s the problem (certainly for us) the pro-Labor media advertising spend was greater than the Labor Party’s spend but together more than double what the Coalition spent.
Often the analogy is made that Labor has the Unions and Liberals have the Employer Associations – Not So.
Unions are part of the Labor Party. Indeed the Labor Party is the political arm of the Union movement. Remember Simon Crean tried to take them, and their influence, on and lost his job!
Unions are also not subject to the same financial scrutiny as formal political parties thus in the last federal election the source of their funds remains illusive but their spending power was estimated as at least $20 million. Add this to the ALP’s spend of $15 million getting $35 million media spent to attack Liberal policies – particularly Workchoices – was vastly more than the Libs.
New spender on the block in the two financial years covering the 2007 election spent over $1.8 million.
At the same time this discussion is going on, major corporate players say they will no longer give to political parties and yet I would argue corporations contributing to the political process by donating to political parties makes them good corporate citizens.
Parties have to run organisations and comply with the already in place disclosure provisions.
The reality is that if the Liberal Party cannot compete financially with the ALP/Union juggernaut we risk a one party state.
Democracy doesn’t come for free, it needs competition and it needs financial participation from its citizenry to survive.
Nursing a sick state
You know the system is rotten when the NSW Labor Government thinks it can fix the hospital system by replacing Registered Nurses with Assistants-in-Nursing. New ratios of RNs to patients dressed up as reform to save money means a poor deal for patients.
We have been told for years we have a nurse shortage and yet this lot in NSW are effectively saying we can do with fewer.
Reminds one of the best Yes Minister episodes ever – the hospital that was a bureaucrat’s dream – no patients.
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