Kiwiblog

The best quote about the failed putsch against Julia Gillard I saw was along the lines that if you have the numbers you use them, if you don’t have the numbers you talk about it.

Gillard has now beaten Rudd three times in a row. Is this the end? Probably until they get wiped out in the election.

Rudd’s talk of how he will keep his word and not challenge is simply code for he did not have the numbers. If he did, then they would have no confidenced Gillard and he could have them declared he is not challenging but there is a vacancy. His supporters have been waging a destabilisation campaign with Crean meant to be the Kingmaker. Instead Crean’s career is now as over as Rudd’s.

Gillard comes out of this internally stronger, but the public must be even more wary of someone whose caucus is so divided.

Tony Abbott must think it is Christmas Time. He had a wonderful quote, which may resonate with the public:

“You deserve a government which is focused on you, not on itself,” he said.

Nice. Also true.

The Australian Labor Party is tearing itself apart. Great political theatre. News.com.au is doing a live update. Developments today include:

• Labor hid polls from their own leader so Rudd could be rolled in 2010
• A Labor MP has called om the Chief Govt Whip to resign for disloyalty to Gillard
• Rudd and Crean discussing a leader-deputy ticket to roll Gillard
• Simon Crean has both called on party to unite behind Gillard and also attacked her for “the class warfare politics she has waged”
• Labor has backed down and withdrawn their media regulation bills
• Crean has now called for a leadership spill and says he will not stand for leader, but will for deputy.

Glorious fun,

Antony Green has launched his 2013 election calculator. Antony is the premier election analyst in Australia.

It makes predictions for all 150 seats on the basis of either the swing or two party preferred vote. But it has some additional nifty features.

• Can select the results from a recent poll
• Can set individual swings for each state (and swings do not tend to be uniform across the country)
• Can factor in retiring MPs
• Can over-ride the projected result in a few marginal seats

On the latest (Neilsen) poll Labor is projected to lose 25 seats and win 47 while the Coalition is projected to gain 25 seats and win 98.

On the best poll to date for the Coalition, they would win 110 seats to 35 for Labor.

One can see why some of the Labor MP are thinking the unthinkable and Rudd may challenge again.

Michelle Grattan writes:

After an immensely long labour, Australian Communication Minister Stephen Conroy has produced a media policy mouse with a modest roar. …

It has a number of aspects but let’s deal particularly with some core controversial ones. A “public interest test” would be invoked when mergers or acquisitions threatened to reduce diversity. A Public Interest Media Advocate would make decisions on the basis of the test.

This advocate would also ensure that bodies dealing with media standards, most notably the Australian Press Council, met certain benchmarks for credible and effective self-regulation of print and online media.

Sounds a powerful role this Public Interest Media Advocate.

Whatever one thinks of the content of the policy, its preparation and presentation has been a shambles.

It was due months ago but held up by internal argument. Now minister Conroy has presented a take-it-or-leave-it package that he says must be through Parliament by the end of next week or the Government will drop it. The actual legislation will only be presented today.

That is outrageous, especially on an issue such as this.

The public will put the Government out of its misery in six months time.

Normally Oppositions gain seats and Governments lose seats in elections. Not so in yesterday’s Western Australia election.

Of 59 seats, the 2008 election resulted in the Liberals had 24 seats, their partners in the Nationals had 4 seats, Labor had 28 seats and there were three Independents. The Liberals won the two-party preferred vote by 51.8% to 48.2%. So it was a Liberal minority government.

The Liberals have had an 8.8% increase in their primary vote and are projected to go from 24 seats to 33, making them a majority Government. The Nationals picked up one seat also so combined they will have 40 out of 59 seats – a two thirds majority. Labor have been slaughtered going from 28 to 19 seats. Such a slaughter is not unheard of for an incumbent Government (like in Queensland) but is even rarer for an opposition.

News.com.au reports:

KEVIN Rudd would catapult Labor into an election-winning position if he was to be reinstalled as leader, according to a new Galaxy poll.

A comeback by the former prime minister would deliver a 14 per cent boost to Labor’s primary vote in Queensland, putting it in line to seize two-thirds of the state’s seats.

The poll of 800 Queenslanders, taken on the evenings of February 20 and 21, found that federal Labor’s support, with Prime Minister Julia Gillard at the helm, was stuck on 33 per cent – close to the primary vote Labor received at the last election.

This would see Tony Abbott lead the Coalition to victory by 55 per cent to 45 per cent on a two-party preferred basis in Queensland if preferences flowed as they did in 2010.

But Labor’s primary vote would soar to 47 per cent in Queensland if Mr Rudd returned to the leadership and faced off against Mr Abbott, the poll found.

Rudd is effectively campaigning full-time to gain the leadership back off Gillard. It will come to a head in March probably.

I’m not sure Rudd will win though. Generally MPs will vote for their own surivival, but a fair few Labor MPs would rather lose their seats than have Rudd back as Leader.

Talking of Australian Labor, people may enjoy this attack video put together.

Australian Labor has had a ferocious campaign against their technical ally the Greens in the last week or so.

The Australian reports:

IF you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas, the saying goes. It appears this past week there has been an outburst of violent itching within Labor ranks, attributed to the notion that lying down with Greens will result in a similar infestation.

The SMH reports:

LABOR’S recent declaration of war against the Australian Greens is a very public concession that the minor party has moved from political fringe dweller to a credible electoral threat.

The Daily Telegraph:

 OH dear, the marriage of Labor and the Greens is heading for the rocks.

A close friend of the couple, the NSW ALP secretary Sam Dastyari, wants the split formalised this weekend with a motion to the party’s state conference proposing that Labor no longer provide the Greens with “automatic preferential treatment in any future preference negotiations”.

Things are so bad, that in some seats Labor preferences Family First ahead of the Greens.

“Because I believe they are an extremist party and I do believe they have some very loony policies and what I think they are very effective at is portraying themselves as a kind of peace, love and mung beans party, that all cares about wombats and the trees and the grass and the environment, without exposing themselves to any critique of some of their very wacky policies.

Someone should look hard at some of the Green policies here.

The quote above is from Paul Howes the national secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union, a member of Labor’s ruling council.

But if you want an example of a loony Green policy in Australia, Mr Howes provides it:

If the Greens had their way, I doubt NSW would ever win the State of Origin.

There probably wouldn’t even be a State of Origin – we’d just sit around with Queenslanders and play pass the parcel. After all, the Greens in NSW have a policy of promoting “non-competitive sports” such as yoga, dance, trampolining and tai chi over the traditional sports that Australian children enjoy playing.

As their policy explains, the Greens “believe too much emphasis is placed on full body contact sports often causing unnecessary physical damage and confining opportunities for participation to the athletic elite.”

Sorry kids – no more rugby, no more Aussie rules, no more hockey or netball. Let’s all go meditate instead.

I’m not sure if the Greens who wrote this ridiculous policy have kids, or ever were children themselves, but expecting children not be competitive is just bizarre.

As far as I know the NZ Greens don’t have a policy against contact sport – but they do want to kill 1 in five cows to save the planet. Howes continues:

Labor has an obligation to stop extremists who threaten our democracy. We’ve done it before and we need to do it again.

Because make no mistake; the Greens pose as much of a threat to working people as Tony Abbott. They just hide it better.

Ouch.

John Hartevelt writes at the Dom Post:

Australia’s Labor Government is weighed down by billions of dollars of debt. It has suffered a credit downgrade.

It cooks up a plan for a historically huge selldown of shares in a key piece of infrastructure, aimed at curbing debt while keeping up capital investment.

As part of the process, it offers a loyalty bonus for local retail investors who hold on to the shares for a year. A cool $5.86billion is raised from the sale.

Two years later – after struggling through the early stages of recovery from the worst natural disaster in living memory – the Government is spectacularly bundled out of office after an election campaign marked by controversy over the asset sales.

The disastrous tale of the Anna Bligh administration in Queensland has not gone unnoticed by the National Party in New Zealand.

This is all true, but a salient detail is missing, which I think is quite important.

In Queensland, the ALP did not announce their privatisation plans until after the election. In New Zealand, National announced their policy ten months before the election.

The 2009 Queensland election was in March 2009. Less than three months later they announced their privatisation plans. Of course, the electorate got angry. In fact the announcement was a mere 73 days after the election.

The article is a good read, and covers some good issues. But if you speak to people in Queensland, what most outraged them was that the Bligh Government was seen as dishonest by not announcing their plans before the election.

news.com.au reports:

Prime Minister Julia Gillard will have her hands full when parliament resumes this week, fending off fresh leadership speculation, facing a potentially heated caucus meeting and bracing for a new opinion poll.

Newspapers said Joel Fitzgibbon, the government’s chief whip, was openly canvassing caucus for votes to return Kevin Rudd to the top job.

When the Chief Whip starts lobbying for change you have real problems. The challenge for Labor is deciding between the leader the public hates and the leader the caucus hates.

Incidentally I was staggered to be listening to Morning Report this morning, and hear an interview between I presume one of the hosts and the RNZ Australian correspondent. The host said something like:

“So Kevin Rudd will just be getting on with the job of Foreign Minister” and the correspondent said “That’s right”.

Rudd resigning as Foreign Minister and challenging Gillard for the leadership earlier this year was a rather major news story.

News.com.au reports:

Detectives from Strike Force Carnarvon moved in this morning to raid the premises as part of their investigation into alleged corruption in the Health Services Union.

The head of the fraud squad, Detective Superintendent Colin Dyson, confirmed police were considering charging someone with attempting to hinder the investigation by removing information.

The Daily Telegraph reported that the person is Mr Williamson. The documents he attempted to remove were seized by police. Mr Williamson is also a former National President of the Australian Labor Party.

The Australian Labor Party is near terminal. Gillard’s tenure could well now be weeks, not months. The delay is working out who to replace who with.

Meanwhile back in NZ, Whale reports:

As regular readers will know I have been focusing on dodgy unions and their lackadaisical financial records.

One union which I highlighted was the Meatworkers and Related Trades Union in which I found over $4 million of members funds missing.

As a result of my investigations one of the meat companies laid a complaint with the Serious Fraud Officewho declined to investigate. Perhaps they should have not been so hasty in dismissing the complaint. Perhaps Helen Kelly might like to apologise to AFFCO after labeling their complaint as “hatred”.

I have learned yesterday that the Meatworkers and Related Trades Union has been ordered by The Registrar of Incorporated Societies to comply with the law and has required the Union to re-do their latest financial statement to include the figures for the unincorporated branches.

This means that the union claims that it was all above board for them to not issue consolidated accounts and essentially hide members monies in subsidiaries was based on poor advice and they are now being required to properly file audited accounts.

If this is correct, I am glad the Registrar has ordered compliance. Incorporated Societies are obliged to have their accounts in the public domain, and unions are not exempt from that – even ones affiliated to the NZ Labour Party.

You just have to watch this interview with Australian Labor Party MP Bill Shorten. The Guardian summarises:

Bill Shorten, the Australian workplace relations minister, was asked by Sky News Australia whether he felt the parliamentary speaker, Peter Slipper, should be allowed to go back to his job after being accused of sexual harassment and misuse of funds.

Aware Gillard was abroad, but unaware of what she’d said on the matter, Shorten replied: “I haven’t seen what she’s said, but let me say I support what it is she said.” Pressed by an astonished presenter to confirm he backed his boss even though he didn’t know what she’d said, he nodded: “I support what she said … My view is what the prime minister’s view is.” A new record in on-message obedience?

There’s a line between loyal and sycophancy, and that well and truly crosses it.

Hat Tip: Not PC

A guest post by Peter Freedman:

Former Health Services Union official Craig Thomson has been a naughty boy. He used a union credit card to visit ladies of the night, obviously to try and recruit them as union members.

Thomson is also a Labor MP. To be a Labor MP in Australia it is not quite compulsory to have been a unionist, but is certainly an advantage.

The dominance of unionists in the Parliamentary Party is distinctly unhealthy. Not only does it give the LNP a stick to beat the left over the head with, but union officials are not always nice people to know

Not that union connections are restricted to leftwing parties. Bill iBirch once confessed to me he had joined the Meatworkers Union when just a lad, probably not something he would bring up over the pinot noir at a National Party pissup.

Thopmson’s dilemma has been all over the rightwing papers and the LNP, understandably, are having a ball. Constant demands that Thomson release to the media his laundry list and the extent of his vegemite addiction are in the news every day.

Questions beginning “Given that the member for Dobell is a proven debaucher of innocent young females, could the Minister please explain……” tumble out one after the other like clowns in a circus.

And the police, Fair Work Australia and a very suspicious man in a grubby raincoat and felt fedora who looks definitely ASIO, have all been ferreting away to get the dirt on Craig T.

Julia Gillard is standing by this ratbag because she has no choice. When the cold winds of a snap election are blowing up your majority skirt all you can do is try to pull it down even if the result is that you protect a scumbag like Thomson.

My prediction is that Thomson will not be charged and if he is will not be convicted. Fucking a prostitute using your penis and someone else’s credit card is hardly the crime of the century.

Thomson, incidentally, was born in Wellington.

This is new Queensland Premier Campbell Newman on election night. Now recall that Labor Premier Anna Bligh launched a massive smear campaign against Newman and his wife’s family. She even said that Newman would end up in jail.

At 5:20 see what he says about Bligh. It is:

I want to acknowledge and thank the Premier for her service to Queensland and particularly I think it is appropriate this evening that we all thank her and particularly acknowledge her inspirational leadership during the 2011 floods and Cyclone Yasi

A very good start to his new job. He would have had every reason to be bitter about her smear campaign against him, but he rose above it.

Hat Tip: Andrew Bolt

Gillard has won 71 votes to 31. I think this is the highest margin in any contested leadership ballot for the ALP leadership.

Kevin Rudd will never be leader again, and I suspect never be a Minister again.

However I don’t think Gillard is entirely safe. If her poll ratings do not improve, then one or more other challengers will arise. Towards the end of this year is a key time for possible change.

One commentator said that the ALP caucus has to choose between a leader they hate and a leader Australia hates.

One pundit has the count as 68 for the leader Australia hates and 26 for the leader the caucus hates with 7 undecided.

From Twitter.

Overnight polls have shown that only Kevin Rudd could beat Tony Abbott, but Rudd’s leadership style is so disliked that Gillard looks likely to beat him by a 2:1 margin. Basically many Labor MPs would rather lose their seats and lose government, than have Kevin Rudd as leader again.

Australia Labor are having a nightmare campaign. Rudd resigning does not help Anna Blight. Then they have one candidate who is a 20 year old Brisbane student and trade unionist who is standing for Gregory, and has never ever been in the electorate – and worse says he may not have time to go there before the election!

Maybe the ALP should spin Gregory as being along SH1 from Brisbane, as NZ Labour did with an out of towner with Tauranga – it is only 1,000 kms away:-)

But the real nasty stuff is a 19 year old candidate Peter Watson who has been sacked. He was sacked originally for comments made a few years ago, but it seems his views have got worse, if anything:

Mr Watson also blamed Jews for the deaths of millions of people and said racist people were discriminated against.

This is a statement he put out:

As for what I believe in, I believe in the original values of the original labour and union movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

The Australian labour movement and the Commonwealth were both founded on the principles of preserving the Australian continent for the White European working man. 

That is why the labour movement supported the White Australia Policy and the deportation of Pacific labourers back to their native homelands. 

As an old labour socialist, I am opposed to multiculturalism, globalisation and to economic rationalism. 

It is a disgrace that successive labour governments have embraced those principles at the expense of working class socialism and White Australian Nationalism. 

The Australian continent must always be for the White working man and his family.”

How the hell does someone like that get selected by Labor? Even in the least winnable of seats, a political party should vet their candidates and you know ask them basic questions such as are you a neo-nazi?

The Rudd v Gillard war is heating up, and Gillard supporters have leaked this video of Rudd as PM cursing and swearing when trying to shoot a video.

The latest estimate is:

• Gillard 45
• Rudd 40
• Undecided 18

The bookies have Rudd at $2.40 to $2.60 for Gillard as the PM going into the next election.

The real winner is Tony Abbott whose odds of being PM after the next election are $1.36 to $3.10 for Labor.

Prior to that we have the Queensland state election where the coalition is at $1.12 and Labor at $5.75 to win. The election is on 24 March and the latest polls has the coalition ahead by 16% on a TPP basis.

It is becoming clear that Kevin Rudd will challenge Julia Gillard for the Labor Party leadership. The latest poll has him as Preferred PM by 57% to 35% for Gillard.

However I don’t think he will win. Too many in his caucus hate him, and going back to Rudd will just lead to more infighting.

Gillard though seems to be a walking corpse. Many Australians regard her a a liar and backstabber, and don’t even regard her Government as legitimate. Personally I think it is a pity, because as Labor PMs go I think she is better than Rudd and Keating.

Hence I think that Rudd will challenge Gillard, but the caucus will turn to a third choice to become Leader and Prime Minister.

The SMH reports:

An Australian Prime Ministerial staffer has been linked to yesterday’s ugly protest incident in Canberra, forcing his resignation and acutely embarrassing PM Julia Gillard.

In an early evening statement, the Prime Minister dismissed as ‘false’ claims that one of her staff had spoken to people at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy prior to yesterday’s angry protest that temporarily trapped her and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.

But Ms Gillard acknowledges that a member of her media unit ‘did call another individual yesterday and disclose the presence of the Opposition Leader at the Lobby restaurant. This information was subsequently passed on to a member of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.’ …

He is Tony Hodges, one of four press secretaries working in Julia Gillard’s media unit.

The link is deeply embarrassing for the Prime Minister and leaves her shouldering some of the blame for an incident where many had pinned responsibility on Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott.

This is typical Australian Labor tactics.  The press secretary would have leaked the info, hoping it would lead to anti-Abbott protests.

Instead it led to his own boss having to be dragged out by Police. And now they can’t blame anyone else for it.

A week ago I blogged on the fraud allegations around federal Labor MP Craig Thomson:

A federal Labor MP, Craig Thomson, is under huge scrutiny as when he was the head of the Health Services Union he spent around $150,000 on his union credit card including several prostitutes. He sued Fairfax a couple of years ago who reported this, but has now dropped the lawsuit, but Fairfax has all the documents under discovery.

There is no doubt he stole money off the union, and used their funds for his personal expenses. He denies he hired prostitutes and say someone else signed the chits.However the escort agencies were also rung from his cellphone and handwriting experts say the signatures are his.

There’s a more detailed post on this from someone in Australia tomorrow, but I want to focus today on the issue of why has he not been charged? Well simply because the Police say they can’t investigate unless the union complains.

So why has the union not complained? Wouldn’t any other organisation that had someone do this, complain?

The answer is because he is a Federal Labor MP, and if they complained, then he might be found guilty and might have to resign his seat which would cause a by-election. And if Labor lost the by-election, they may lose Government.

So to protect their mates in Labor, the union won’t complain to the Police. Never mind the fact $150,000 of their members fees were spent by this Labor MP. They put protecting Labor above their own members interests.

Now I am pleased to say the situation has changed. The union has now complained to the Police, after huge criticism of them for not doing so, and being seen to be complicit in covering up a crime.

But one can now have some sympathy for the union, in terms of the pressure they were under from Labor. Like a bad plot from the Godfather, the union secretary had a dirt-covered shovel left outside her home at 2 am. The story notes that “Labor party figures are angry Ms Jackson referred the allegations Mr Thomson faces to the police.”

I’ve actually recruited people to join a union in the past, and believe some unions do a good job of advocating for their members. There are some bad employers out there, and sometimes a collective approach is desirable in dealing with them.

But a real issue I have with many unions, is that they are literally part of the Labour Party, and put the interests of the political party ahead of the interest of their own members. A situation in Australia is a prefect example of this.

A federal Labor MP, Craig Thomson, is under huge scrutiny as when he was the head of the Health Services Union he spent around $150,000 on his union credit card including several prostitutes. He sued Fairfax a couple of years ago who reported this, but has now dropped the lawsuit, but Fairfax has all the documents under discovery.

There is no doubt he stole money off the union, and used their funds for his personal expenses. He denies he hired prostitutes and say someone else signed the chits.However the escort agencies were also rung from his cellphone and handwriting experts say the signatures are his.

There’s a more detailed post on this from someone in Australia tomorrow, but I want to focus today on the issue of why has he not been charged? Well simply because the Police say they can’t investigate unless the union complains.

So why has the union not complained? Wouldn’t any other organisation that had someone do this, complain?

The answer is because he is a Federal Labor MP, and if they complained, then he might be found guilty and might have to resign his seat which would cause a by-election. And if Labor lost the by-election, they may lose Government.

So to protect their mates in Labor, the union won’t complain to the Police. Never mind the fact $150,000 of their members fees were spent by this Labor MP. They put protecting Labor above their own members interests.

John Robertson got recently elected Leader of the NSW Labor Party. He is a former union boss who many hold responsible for the civil war which tore NSW Labor apart. Here’s what Paul Keating said to him, in a letter in 2008. Some extracts:

“Your manipulation of the union base in New South Wales, with the connivance and support of the Party President, Bernie Riordan, succeeded in destroying the political life of both men, and with them, probably the Labor Government of New South Wales itself.

“When I came to see you about the Iemma Government’s electricity privatisation proposals in April 2008, you will remember me telling you that reckless indifference by you and Bernie Riordan to the Government’s fortunes, may see the Government destroyed and for which, you and Riordan would be held accountable.

“This letter is about that accountability.” …

When I met you and went through the history of the establishment of the east coast electricity market by the Government I led in the 1990s, and why the privatisation of the NSW power stations was consistent with the benefits of that market, you never offered one serious point in rebuttal.Not one cogent economic argument to thwart the logic. You batted the argument to one side, implying it would somehow be sorted before any rupture arose.

But instead like a banshee on a rampage, you tore at the Government’s entrails until its viability was effectively compromised. …

Let me tell you, if the Labor Party’s stocks ever get so low as to require your services in its Parliamentary leadership, it will itself have no future … the people of New South Wales have their problems, but they would be way better rattling through than turning to someone like you in some hope of redemption.

It may be a novel concept for you, let me say that the conscientious business of governance can never be founded in a soul so blackened by opportunism. …

I am ashamed to share membership of the same party as you.

So that is from the former national leader to the current NSW state leader. I think it will be sometime until NSW is governed by Labor again.

Bob Carr was Premier of NSW from 1995 to 2005, winning three consecutive elections. He writes on Labor’s loss:

IT has taken political talent bordering on genius. The creativity of a master such as Disraeli or F. D. Roosevelt to deliver NSW Labor a defeat of this scale.

And I don’t mean Barry O’Farrell, although his political tactics are wholly vindicated and his occasional Liberal critics silenced. The genius was that of the Labor Party, in turning what could have been a swing-of-the-pendulum defeat into something far worse.

At last count Labor dropped from 50 seats to 21.

In 2007 Iemma held seats thanks to a capital works budget bigger than all the other states combined, bigger than New York’s or California’s.

Then he made the silly mistake of wanting to make that huge infrastructure spend even bigger by selling the state’s electricity assets.

In 2007 this was surely not too big a request of a Labor Party which had seen the benefits to living standards of the reforms of the Hawke-Keating years.

A reasonable response of a union-based party might have been, “Yeah, mate, well, can’t really hold out against this one. Let’s allow a Labor government a great chunk of capital so it can push even harder with public sector expansion. Nurses and teachers will be the winners. And we’ll get guarantees for our members in the electricity sector.”

There were precedents – and, happily, they also point to policy success during Labor’s rule – the privatisation of Freightcorp in 2002 and of state-owned coal mines in 2001. Both benefited the budget and taxpayer. Both were supported by the unions because the private capital modernised the enterprises and shored up jobs.

Yet in a display of wilfulness and obstinacy, the opponents of electricity privatisation staged a public brawl at the 2008 ALP conference. It presented a hideous visage to the electorate. It was a symbolic repudiation of the McKell model, the style of NSW Labor since William McKell (premier 1941-47). McKell’s moderate ethos was based on middle course policies which gave the party support in the bush as well as the city. It was possible because the machine supported the parliamentary leadership, the premier of the day. This pattern prevailed under Joe Cahill, Neville Wran and me.

On this occasion, the party tore up the script that had given Labor these years of ascendancy and ritually humiliated Iemma and then replaced him, the first time in NSW Labor history a premier had been executed. Contemplating this turbulence, the electorate started deserting the party.

This moderate leadership meant Labor were in power from 1941 to 1965, 1976 to 1988 and 1995 to 2011. That was 52 out of 70 years.

What is interesting is one of the contenders for the NSW leadership is John Robertson – the former trade union leader who played a prominent role in causing the civil war in the party. I’m pretty sure new Premier Barry O’Farrell will be hoping they select him.