Federal Government

The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, in the Road to Serfdom, warns against centralised planning and control. He also warns of the conceit evidenced by bureaucrats and politicians that they can regulate and manage the myriad, complex relationships and transactions underpinning an open and free society.

One doubts whether Minister Garrett or the educrats responsible for the draft Australian Teacher Performance and Development Framework have ever read Hayek’s book – if they had, they would realise how dangerous and counter-productive it is.

The teacher performance framework, released last week, represents the most recent milestone in the Rudd/Gillard education revolution and the mania the Commonwealth Government has to micromanage schools. Even though Canberra neither owns any schools nor employs any staff, all roads lead to Canberra.

Continue reading "Education revolution? Pah! It’s a bureaucrat bonanza" »

The blame game monster is back and it has been munching steroids in its brief absence.

Tomorrow’s Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting will be the first following both the NSW and Queensland elections and the subsequent realigment of the national political equation.

The long-standing fixture of state-federal animosity will be intensified by the dominance of Coalition premiers who will have a 4/2 majority.

Continue reading "The blame game monster returns. Now he’s ANGRY!" »

Veterans are once again engaged in battle, but this time they are not fighting on behalf of the Australian Government. They are fighting against it.

Serving and retired military personnel continue to be seriously financially disadvantaged by deliberate Government policy and they demand justice.

Armed with flyers and posters, they are engaging with the general public in Operation AWARE to explain their grievances and increase awareness and support for change in Federal Government attitude, an attitude that callously refuses to acknowledge the Government’s financial obligations to current and former Diggers, their widows and those who are on invalid and disabled pensions. 

Continue reading "Veterans need super, not a war with the government" »

It’s heartening to see Australian politicians taking a stand around Catholic clergy abuse, but the calls to action this week by Senator Nick Xenophon and Victorian MP Anne Barker don’t quite go far enough. 

We now need a Federal Government led, transparent national inquiry and mandatory reporting of all crimes revealed within the Church environment.

The Cloyne report, an independent state report released in Ireland into Catholic clergy abuse last week is the fourth inquiry in six years. All of the reports have been damning, chronicling the repeated failure of the Church to protect children, bring the guilty to justice and make the welfare of victims paramount.

Continue reading "Child abuse in churches is not yet history" »

With the debate raging about the carbon tax and whether the initial carbon price of $23 will lead to any meaningful reductions in greenhouse tax emissions, a new front has opened up in the debate concerning the real possibility that businesses will use the carbon tax as an excuse to price gouge.

Price gouging is already a problem in such areas as petrol, airport parking and even groceries. The petrol rip off is now ongoing in many regional areas and even in the city average petrol prices do not come down as quickly as they should when there are falls in the Singapore benchmark price used to calculate local prices.

Airport parking rates keep going up and visitors to major airports are held hostage to the monopoly power of the airport owners who get nasty with parking infringements if you dare to pick up a loved one from the “wrong” area.

Continue reading "We need CarbonWatch to stop price gouging" »

Sue O’Reilly, who has guest written today’s column on The Angry Cripple is a freelance journalist and the mother of a 21-year-old son with cerebral palsy. She co-founded Australians Mad as Hell last year with Fiona Porter to campaign for an NDIS and established a charity called Fighting Chance to help people with disabilities pay for essential therapy services.

Q: What do disability reform campaigners have to do to persuade Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott to spend some time talking to actual people with severe disabilities and family carers, prior to making a landmark decision on disability reform later this year that will directly affect the lives of several million Australians every day for decades to come?

A:  Raise at least $31,200, obtain tickets for the federal parliamentary press gallery’s exclusive annual mid-winter ball, and then bid at an auction for a few hours of our political leaders’ precious time.

Yes indeed. Seems if you’ve got enough money, then getting Julia Gillard’s or Tony Abbott’s attention is not that seemingly impossible a task.

Continue reading "Julia and Tony should spend a few years in a wheelchair" »

Are you fed up with costly political gimmicks by the Federal Government? Well, you should be as those gimmicks are costing you, the taxpayer, lots of money. We all know about the money wasted on Fuelwatch and GroceryChoice. While those debacles are long gone, they are not forgotten and serve as a constant reminder of how taxpayers’ money can be easily wasted.

That’s why we need to be vigilant to ensure that the Government doesn’t waste any more of your taxpayer money. Now there is one ongoing waste of money and that relates to the so-called Office of the Petrol Commissioner. Here we have a Petrol Commissioner at the ACCC that “watches” petrol prices.

You probably wouldn’t know, and perhaps don’t even care that we have actually had two different ACCC Petrol Commissioners appointed. The first left quickly, and the second one, Joe Dimasi, had been a long time ACCC staffer who was up-sized to a Commissioner title, with all the added costs to the taxpayer that a Commissioner title brings with it.

Continue reading "Sack the petrol commissioner - we’re paying too much" »

Graeme Samuel is set to go at the end of his second term as Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Chairman. There will be applause from those who think that his eight-year stint in the top job was just too long for anyone.

Others may applaud his imminent departure as they may feel that the ACCC could have done much more during his time.

History will in due course judge Samuel’s tenure, but as one ACCC Chairman departs another is on the horizon. Rod Sims has been nominated as Samuel’s successor. Sims will now be put under the spotlight.

Continue reading "New ACCC chief will need to tackle the top end of town" »

It is not often that you wake up on a Saturday in Sydney and have a choice of rallies to attend – but this is exactly what happened last week.

In case you missed it, the two rallies were organised in support and opposition to the proposed “price on carbon” strategy put forward by the Federal Government.

Being excited by a bit of political expressionism in a city where Saturday morning priorities are usually shopping and cappuccinos, I decided to attend not just one but both.

Continue reading "To manufacture fortunes we need contentious ‘taxes’" »

With the fate of the proposed flood levy hanging in the balance as we await the outcome of negotiations between Senator Nick Xenophon and the Federal Government, it‘s timely to have a close look at the whole issue of disaster insurance and the insurance industry generally.

A sad reality emerging from this summer’s national disasters is that not only have we been as a nation generally under-insured for natural disasters, but more significantly for consumers the insurance companies are basically a law unto themselves when it comes to paying out on insurance contracts.

As anyone who has tried to take on an insurance company knows all too well, the legal cards are stacked in the company’s favour.

Continue reading "Let’s get medieval on insurance company’s arses" »

As far as insults go, “disgusting” is right up there. The Macquarie Dictionary tells us it means to cause nausea or loathing, to offend taste or moral sense, to cause repugnance by something offensive or distasteful.

“Disgusting” is the term which Labor has chosen to describe Tony Abbott’s attacks on the $1.8 billion flood tax. Treasurer Wayne Swan led the charge on Sunday saying it was “frankly disgusting” that Tony Abbott was playing politics over a measure aimed at rebuilding homes, saying the only home the Opposition Leader was interested in was The Lodge. Other senior ministers have since taken Swan’s lead, with the Climate Change Minister Greg Combet repeatedly using the d-word yesterday to rip into Abbott over his stand, saying he was unfit to be PM.

With the resumption of Parliament just a week away, and the Gillard Government still juggling the often contradictory policy demands or rural independents and inner-city Green MPs, Labor has finally adopted a much tougher strategy towards Abbott in 2011. More accurately, it’s finally adopted any sort of strategy at all, beyond hoping he’ll somehow go away.

Continue reading "Disgusting or deserved? Labor’s new Abbott strategy" »

The resounding response to the flood levy has been: We want to donate of our own free will, not be forced to cough up. We pay enough f(#*&*king taxes. We want to know where all our money went.

By all that’s unholy, Australians hate paying taxes.

Clearly, it hurts when you see your payslip and feel the plasma-shaped hole left by the taxman. More seriously, the “working poor” phenomenon is real, and some people are finding it much, much harder to meet their everyday living expenses.

Continue reading "Get angry. Then get over it." »

Julia Gillard faces her biggest political test since becoming Prime Minister to win the approval of parliament for the $5.6 billion flood rescue package.

And she be may forced to negotiate a permanent Natural Disaster Fund if she wants to win the backing of key rural Independent MPs and the Greens. NSW rural MPs Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott are demanding a long-term solution to fund the regular bushfires and floods that ravage rural communities across Australia.

The Greens - who are likely to back the flood rescue plan - also said they are opposed to climate program cuts announced as part of a raft of savings measures. But at least one Independent MP - Queenslander Bob Katter - said he loves the levy and will support it when it comes before Parliament.

Continue reading "The uphill battle to the levy" »

Julia Gillard today extracted herself from the sucking political quagmire of the past two months with a package of flood recovery money which appeals to the heart as well as the exchequer.

Gillard was bogged down in the response to the three-state inundation while just about every other public figure associated with it had their standings enhanced.

She was always seen by critics as a superfluous figure distracting from that nice Anna Bligh, or annoying flood victims with intrusions. Her clothing, hair-do and even her emotional commitment were savaged.

Continue reading "Both sides have a history of imposing levies" »

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Simon McKeon succeeded Professor Patrick McGorry as Australian of the Year yesterday. Yet in the year of Professor McGorry’s reign, the Federal Labor Government has largely remained silent on the very issue McGorry was recognised for; mental health.

According to the most recent figures, 2,191 Australians took their own lives in 2008.

Statistics tell us at least ten times that - another 20,000 - were hospitalised for self harm or an attempt. And this is a conservative figure, with ongoing debate about discrepancies between ABS figures, and coroner and police reports.

Continue reading "Thousands of suicides show the system’s broken" »

Faced with the unexpected arrival of about 400 refugees in her town, I doubt she’d say “There goes the neighbourhood”.

She wouldn’t worry that the presence of asylum seekers would cause a dip in property prices, or complain that the kids (most of whom will be under five) will shoplift.

She wouldn’t argue that we should make male asylum seekers take the place of Australia’s own soldiers at war. And she wouldn’t say that we should demean refugees and make them suffer in order to deter more people from coming.

Continue reading "What would Mary do? Tips from a hometown hero" »

This week Kevin Rudd is in New York City, this time not as Kevin 747, or even Kevin ‘07 but rather as Kevin 0.7.

In the year 2000 world leaders got together to discuss how we could eradicate poverty. The result was the heralded Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) a set of aspirational targets designed to alleviate poverty by 2015. This included goals such as halving hunger, progress on infant and maternal health and universal primary education.

Each developed nation was asked to give 0.7 per cent of their gross domestic product (GDP) toward achieving these goals, Australia has only committed to 0.5per cent.

Continue reading "Hi, I’m Kevin 0.7 and I’m here to help" »

Sometimes I feel we get stuck due to a failure of imagination. We know we need to change, but don’t know how. The climate crisis creates this feeling in a lot of people I know, because the problem seems just too big and the changes too hard.

The idea of an Australian economy run entirely by clean renewable energy is one that I’m sure most of us would love to see become reality. However, we are told that because the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the sun doesn’t shine all the time it isn’t possible. Or maybe it is a nice idea but unaffordable and potentially damaging to the Australian economy.

Continue reading "A startling new vision for repowering Australia" »