Month: June 2010

Rudd does not have the $$$

Posted by Chief Blogger – 10 June, 2010

Rudd is spruiking his mining tax in WA, claiming that he will invest $6bn from tax revenue to fund WA infrastructure.

Mr Rudd yesterday announced a new $6 billion regional infrastructure fund, to be paid for by the new super profits tax.

Under the proposal, the resource-rich states of WA and Queensland would get $2b each for infrastructure projects.

Today Mr Rudd told Mr Barnett to come up with a better alternative.

“[Colin Barnett] is very critical of the tax reform plan that we have made. My challenge to him is, what is his alternative plan?” he said.

Firstly the revenue from the mining tax has already been committed in the forward estimates. So Rudd does not have the money to pay for anything – other than by raiding the Future Fund. Secondly, what good is infrastructure when private enterprise has been destroyed by his odious tax regime. Essentially Rudd wants to replace private sector investment with public sector investment. Mining companies already pay for most of their infrastructure in WA. No one is seriously saying that Rudd will be able to provide ports, rail and road better than the private sector. Especially after the education building programme debacle. It is another crazy hair brain Rudd scheme.

Bob Brown’s campaign slogan: people come second

Posted by Chief Blogger – 10 June, 2010

The minor rise of the Greens in recent Federal polls has prompted Bob Brown to ask to be involved in the election debates – assuming there will be any. I say well and good, let him debate on TV. It will finally give people an opportunity to scrutinise what is an immoral and radical political party. The One Nation of the political left – except all people always come second. It’s the anti-discrimination thing.

As one brilliant writer on an ABC blog recently wrote:

….the Greens are the ultimate in sanctimony without responsibility.

Think of any Greens policy and the likelihood of it being implemented should be enough to scare the gray hairs of the Green’s main political supporters – retired public servants.

As for the values themselves, increased taxes on the rich are a staple of debate in Marxist university politics, but one wonders how keen the Green supporters in the inner city are to see their taxes rise. Increased company taxes are good policy, as long as you’re not the poor average citizen paying subsequently increased prices. And still, the Greens get a pass.

Kevin Rudd would die for that kind of leeway. Tony Abbott would kill for it.

The main stream media were not prepared to give One Nation a pass, but the Greens get a ticket to ride every time.  Just take Bob Brown calling poor on the back of court proceedings which he lost – despite being a multi-millionaire.

Bob Brown was happy to call for hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to cover the court-ordered legal costs of his dismissed lawsuits against Tasmanian businesses, despite having considerable personal wealth and assets. The cashed-up Senator was happy for ordinary supporters to pay his bills, despite already having the bulk of the money raised and being easily able to borrow the rest.

I still remember the ABC giving Bob Brown a bit of free advertising when he was trying to sell his pictures to raise cash to pay of his legal fees. Despite the fact that he has millions owing to him as part of his superannuation and his partner owns a large sheep ranch in Tasmania.

Worse, he was happy to take cash from figures like Dick Smith. How could the Greens claim any type of impartiality on issues from aviation to business taxation reform when their leader spruiks for cash from someone like that?

John Howard specifically eschewed an investment share portfolio for the whole of his public life, on the grounds that he didn’t want to create even the appearance of financial impropriety. Kevin Rudd’s wife divested herself of all her Australian business interests for the same reason. But Brown, who wants to share the debate stage with the major leaders, feels no need to abide by any such moral code.

The whole article is awesome. Rudd should do what Abbott had the courage to do – not accept preferences from fringe dwellers like One Nation. Rudd should take a similar position with the Greens. As you expect ABC readers were livid that such blasphemy could be shown under the banner of the ABC. Credit where credit is due.

Costello catchs out Heather Ridout

Posted by Chief Blogger – 9 June, 2010

Heather Ridout as an ALP apologist and head of the Australian Industry Group has been roundly sounded out by Peter Costello as a Rudd patsy:

Which brings us to the members of the Henry review. All, including Henry, have a public sector background except Heather Ridout, the chief executive of the Australian Industry Group. She was obviously appointed to give a business perspective.

After the report’s publication she talked warmly of the new mining tax. It was, she said, “a move in the right direction”. She must be the only business representative to think so.

A point I made a little while ago. Ridout is totally isolated on the mining tax. Any pretense she once had to representing the best interests of business has now gone.

The mining industry is aghast. The government’s business adviser, Rod Eddington, says it should restart the whole process. The chairman of the Future Fund, David Murray, said the tax ”should be abandoned” in its present form. The Business Council of Australia has come out against it. The ANZ Bank has warned about sovereign risk. Which leaves Ridout isolated.

….Ridout will have to account to her members. Henry will not be on the ballot paper at the election. Rudd and Swan will be. The government has to fix this problem.

Costello makes the point that Ridout should have stood against the tax from the very beginning. She has since disappeared on the issue.

Rudd’s NBN falls over before the start

Posted by Chief Blogger – 9 June, 2010

Initial pricing has been released for the Tasmanian component of the National Broadband Network:

….Internode has undercut its rivals to claim the best value monthly broadband plan starting at $29.95 for 15 gigabytes of data at a download speed of 25Mbps with 2Mbps upload.

Internode’s most expensive plan costs $139.95 a month for 200GB of data at 100Mbps (8Mbps upload).

So Internode’s cheap plan is no different from ADSL 2 while the monthly download restrictions on both plans make the download speed almost irrelevant.  Furthermore, unless the entire world is hooked up to a fibre to the node optic system then your never going to get any where near those download speeds. The whole system seems an even bigger waste of money than first thought.

Rudd’s deficit worse than Greece’s

Posted by Chief Blogger – 8 June, 2010

According to the IMF, Australia’s structural deficit is worse than the many usual European suspects.

Further analysis here. Despite Treasury’s best efforts over recent months to blame the budget mess on the Howard government, international analysis suggests that the structural deficit is all Rudd’s fault:

Treasury has now replied that “significant structural changes in the economy over the past quarter century” meant it would be inappropriate to stretch its methodology back to the 1970s. Instead, it presented structural balance estimates going back to 1971 from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and to the 1980s from the International Monetary Fund. As Costello points out, these OECD and IMF estimates suggest that the budget remained in structural surplus until the end of the former Coalition government. Treasury used to show him such numbers, he says.

“In fact, the only occasion in 40 years when a government managed to produce a structural surplus was between 1998 and 2007 — the 10 surplus budgets which I brought down,” Costello says of the OECD and IMF numbers.

A structural deficit/surplus is how the budget looks when the business cycle is taken out of the analysis. So if the economy was at peak output, would the budget still be in deficit? If it is then it is a structural deficit, meaning that spending is too high relative to tax rates and regulations. The budget would never go into surplus, only on the back of cyclical movements in the economy, like commodity prices, etc….

A proposal for Turkish sanctions – UPDATE

Posted by Chief Blogger – 5 June, 2010

The WSJ editorial today leaves little doubt that the Turkish government is intimately involved in supporting terrorist and other Islamic fascist organisations. In concert with the IHH, Muslim Brotherhood and others, the Turkish government orchestrated the flotilla that attempted to break the Gaza blockade of Hamas. It has also been whipping up anti-Semitic rhetoric itself and through the Iranian and Syrian governments. It is passed the point of no return.

So the Prime Minister of Turkey calls Israel “a festering boil in the Middle East that spreads hate and enmity,”….

For all his (Turkish PM) denunciations of Israel’s alleged brutality in Monday’s raid, he was among the first foreign leaders to congratulate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his “victory” in last year’s presidential election. He’s also had no trouble getting close to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, despite the U.N.’s investigation into Syria’s role in the 2005 assassination of Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri.

So much, then, for the notion that Jerusalem has needlessly junked its friendship with Ankara for the sake of stopping a mere ship of fools. That “friendship” had already been degraded by a Turkish government that appears to have an ingrained hostility toward the Jewish state, remarkable sympathies for nearby radical regimes, and an attitude toward extremist groups like the IHH that borders on complicity.

The first response to Turkey’s drift to Islamic fascism would be to suspend their involvement in the Joint Strike Fighter programme, cancelling their JSF industrial contracts, with an investigation into their continued membership in NATO. Denying Turkey access to key military hardware and information would over time greatly erode their military and industrial edge over Israel. Giving Turkey access to this type of technology would be a back-door way for Iran to re-constitute, to some extend, their phantom Air Force and other aspects of their military. Now that it is becoming more apparent just how virulently anti-Semitic the Turkish government is, Australia could not in all good conscience continue its membership in a programme as important as the JSF, of which  Turkey is a foundation member. If the US does not move to suspend Turkey’s involvement in JSF, Australia should withdraw from the programme and hold a competitive tendering process to replace our Hornets.

Australia should remove the Turkish flag from the Kemal Atatürk Memorial in Canberra. If this results in a tick for tat reaction at ANZAC Cove so be it. Australia had a crucial role in liberating Palestine from Ottoman rule in WWI – an essential pre-condition for the establishment of the Israeli state. We were the first country to vote to give the Jews a homeland. Australia’s greatest general was a Jew. Given this historical background, Australia in all good conscience cannot continue to have the flag of an increasingly radicalised government fly in such a prominent location in our national capital. It is becoming embarrassing.

Enact a two year moratorium on immigration from Turkey and other like minded radicalised Islamic nation-states. Unfund the teaching of Turkish in Australian public schools.

UPDATE

In case you needed anymore convincing:

TURKEY’S Prime Minister says he doesn’t view radical Palestinian group Hamas, Israel’s arch-foe, as a terrorist organisation.

“Hamas are resistance fighters who are struggling to defend their land. They have won an election,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday in a speech broadcast live on television.

“I have told this to US officials… I do not accept Hamas as a terrorist organisation. I think the same today. They are defending their land.”

So Turkey is basically aligning itself with Hamas, who is at war with Israel, the USA and virtually every other western country.

Amazing! ABC provides a balanced story on the Gaza blockade

Posted by Chief Blogger – 5 June, 2010

We know that the Turkish government backed the Muslim Brotherhood and other rag tag Islamic fascist groups in their Gaza blockade busting flotilla. From the ABC PM with Ely Karmon, a Senior Research Scholar at the International Institute for Counter Terrorism in Israel

ASHLEY HALL: So do you think that Turkey, the Turkish government engineered this situation to turn the two countries into enemies?

ELY KARMON: In my view, it is no doubt that this was organised, plannified. On the one hand to try to break the Israeli-Turkish alliance, but on the other hand also to support Hamas because Hamas actually is a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood, is a brotherly party of the AKP.

AKP is the governing party in Turkey. However the ABC keeps on referring to the flotilla as ‘aid ships’, as if it was a factual reference. It is highly contentious. They are blockade busting ships. The Israel offered to transport their ‘aid’ to Gaza over land but the offer was refused. Is there any humanitarian ‘aid’ on the ships? It has not been confirmed. There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza anyway. The whole place is paid for by the UN.

Has Rudd totally lost his mind?

Posted by Chief Blogger – 4 June, 2010

So the latest on Rudd’s mining tax. Okay so over $100 billion in mining projects have either been canceled or are facing delay, the entire mining industry is opposed to the tax, nearly the entire financial sector including the Future Fund Chairman David Murray and by extension most of the Superannuation industry and the government’s own business adviser Sir Rod Eddington oppose the tax,  every state government except Tasmania opposed to the tax – including having QLD ALP Premier Anna Bligh publicly wanting Rudd to dump the tax altogether, every business lobby group except Rudd apologist Heather Ridout oppose the tax, with virtually the entire financial press opposing the tax – including the WSJ, even the ABC is running critical stories on the tax, the government’s own Resources Minister Martin Ferguson privately opposed to the tax and any economist with a slight free-market ilk also opposing the tax. So when Xstrata announces the closure of multi-million dollar projects and the loss of thousands of jobs because of the tax, how does Rudd respond?

“All I can say is you should take what big mining companies, very big mining companies have to say in this big debate about them paying more tax with a bit of a grain of salt sometimes,” Mr Rudd told the Seven Network’s Sunrise program.

So in other words Xstrata and by implication everyone else opposed to the tax is just lying. Tricking the public. Some grand conspiracy. Absolutely absurd. Rudd is desperate. Apart from a bunch of rang tag die hard socialist unionists and economists like Ken Henry and foreign governments that hope to benefit from capital flight from Australia, it seems everyone that is in the know thinks the Rudd tax is a bad idea.

Turkey, the real Gaza culprit

Posted by Chief Blogger – 4 June, 2010

Shocking WSJ article about Turkey’s lurch to Islamic fascism and conspiracy, hysteria and general mass paranoia.

The newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s daily read, claimed that Americans were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that local mullahs had issued a fatwa ordering residents not to eat the fish. The same paper repeatedly claimed that the U.S. used chemical weapons in Fallujah. And it reported that Israeli soldiers had been deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and that U.S. forces were harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. “organ market.”

More or less the equivalent lunacy whipped up on the ABC’s Q&A on a weekly basis.

The secular Hurriyet newspaper, meanwhile, accused Israeli soldiers of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul and said the U.S. was starting an occupation of (Muslim) Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Then U.S. ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman actually felt the need to organize a conference call to explain to the Turkish media that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. One of the craziest theories circulating in Ankara was that the U.S. was colonizing the Middle East because its scientists were aware of an impending asteroid strike on North America.

US colonising Indonesia? Hadn’t heard about it. If you read the rest of the article, what becomes even more crazy is that the Turkish PM in the interview with the WSJ won’t condemn, denounce or call the myths floating around the Turkish media and government as lies.

There can be little doubt the Turkish flotilla that challenged the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza was organized with his approval, if not encouragement. Mr. Erodogan’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, is a proponent of a philosophy which calls on Turkey to loosen Western ties to the U.S., NATO and the European Union and seek its own sphere of influence to the east. Turkey’s recent deal to help Iran enrich uranium should come as no surprise.

Turkey is the country that should be called to account. More from the National Review Online:

….all the Ergodan government is accomplishing through its loud rhetoric and veiled threats is to turn off both elite and popular opinion in the United States, where we are collectively asking, “Are we really allied with such a country and its values, and what are our responsibilities to it under the NATO accords?” Indeed, the more we review the Turkish question, the more it becomes clear that Turkish ambitions are growing antithetical to our own.

And to think that the three major parties in the UK seem officially to have no problem with Turkey joining the EU. Parallels are being drawn over Turkish ships trying to break the Gaza blockade. For instance a flotilla to the Kurds in Turkey or the US in Guantanamo Bay. How about a flotilla to ‘free the refugees’ in Christmas Island or in Naru, etc… How would Rudd react?

Heather Ridout side-lined over mining tax

Posted by Chief Blogger – 3 June, 2010

The Business Council of Australia has come out against the Rudd mining tax

The head of the council’s tax taskforce, Robert Milliner, said: ”Of most concern to the BCA is the failure of the [super-profits tax] to meet the principle that the taxation framework be characterised by stability and predictability, with any change prospective so as not to adversely affect existing investments or create perceptions of sovereign risk.

”The growing perception of sovereign risk has extended well beyond the resources sector to affect the business environment in Australia more widely. This is harming our international standing, and if not addressed will reduce investment and impede our growth prospects.”

This shows in a stark fashion to the ineptitude of the BCA’s main rival the Australian Industry Group, headed by ALP stooge Heather Ridout. This is what she said last month:

…the weight of expert opinion seems to be in support of this type of tax…

I mentioned at the time what an absurd claim this was, and the claim keeps on getting more and more absurd by the day. Just consider how Ridout is spinning it for Rudd on the news that the AIG’s own manufacturing index had recently dropped:

“The recovery remains patchy and consumer sectors in particular are clearly being affected by continuous interest rate rises, and there’s some undermining of confidence due to world conditions,”

So any cause other than Rudd’s record government debt and spending driving up the cost of borrowing and crowding out private sector investment. And as the BCA has pointed out, Rudd’s mining tax is undermining overall business confidence. Ridout’s ALP bias has become even more transparent. There seems to be – this is speculation – something suspicious about the relationship between Ridout and Rudd. Deals done? Maybe. Eventually what ever is really driving Ridout will come out in the wash.