The Abbott Government

[SirRumpole]

Don't hold your breath. The majority of the press gallery, at least, have their eyes firmly closed to any questioning of Labor on how they'd plan to fund all the projected spending.

As they were to how the Coalition would fund their promises or cut spending when the Coalition were in Opposition.

The media's lack of rigour and slackness of enquiry in keeping the Opposition to account is one of the reasons we are in this mess now.

If the media had made proper enquiries of Abbott and Hockey before the election we would have discovered they had no idea what they were going to do.

 

[Tisme]

As they were to how the Coalition would fund their promises or cut spending when the Coalition were in Opposition.

The media's lack of rigour and slackness of enquiry in keeping the Opposition to account is one of the reasons we are in this mess now.

If the media had made proper enquiries of Abbott and Hockey before the election we would have discovered they had no idea what they were going to do.

I noticed facebook and twitter chatter is starting to question how Gillard managed to get legislation through a minority senate and Abbott can't negotiate likewise. I'm guessing that lack of skillset is why the independents swung behind Gillard to form govt.

 

[Calliope]

Gollard had a Labor/Green Senate majority. It was only in the Reps that she had to court the so-called Independents.

 

[SirRumpole]

I noticed facebook and twitter chatter is starting to question how Gillard managed to get legislation through a minority senate and Abbott can't negotiate likewise. I'm guessing that lack of skillset is why the independents swung behind Gillard to form govt.

I don't think it's a guess. It's pretty well known from what Oakeshott and Windsor said that Abbott's lack of willingness and ability to negotiate was one of the main reasons they supported Gillard.

 

[basilio]

Or leave it in Government hands and charge more and more taxes, to pay for it?

Funny that no one is asking the Government to spend taxpayers money, to open a supermarket, in competition against Coles and Woolies?

Maybe because that would be a pretty dumb thing to do? There are ways to regulate supermarket trading and simply allowing competition like Aldi works wonders.

On the other hand...Once upon a time we had a government established bank the Commonwealth. While it traded as a stand alone entity it offered effective competition to the private banks. It obviously had to pay its way and it returned dividends to the Federal government. A nice little earner actually.

But it's main role was ensuring that private banks didn't get too greedy with interest rate spreads, fees etc.

Of course that is all history now. The Commonwealth bank was privatized and the banking privateers have jointly managed to make the banking industry enormously profitable and in particular ensuring that management are appropriately rewarded.

But in the end the customers pay for these enormous profits. Its a direct transfer from our pockets into theirs.

Would you like to hear about CSL, Telstra etc ?

 

[sydboy007]

Don't hold your breath. The majority of the press gallery, at least, have their eyes firmly closed to any questioning of Labor on how they'd plan to fund all the projected spending.

They may be, but I'm sure the coalition, will be asking the question of the media.

Taking cheap shots at the Government, for trying to reign in spending, will come back to haunt Labor IMO.

I'd argue that Labor faced the exact same situation where Abbott was promising the world pre election and no one was listening to Labor ask where the money was coming from. Abbott was against reigning in the tax expenditure to those drawing more than $100K in tax fre super pensions, he was against asking those using novated leases to actually log their private and business usage to justify their claims. Where was you outrage when Abbott was saying no no no and offering no viable alternatives?

It's a crappy situation to be in, but at least the media seems to give whoever is in opposition a free kick.

Hopefully as the next election draws nearer all parties will face a lot tougher scrutiny as to how they will achieve what they say they will.

 

[Logique]

Funnily enough, I can see some logic in their defunct Medicare rebate changes. If short consultations include medical certificates (for which the employer should contribute as well) and repeat renewals then maybe the patients should either pay more or the GP, as some do, not require a consultation for writing repeats or in simple cases of flu or gastro where the patient has recovered after a few days off and now just needs to satisfy their employer.
The government's problem, as usual is just charging in without consultation or any explanatory justification and trying to bluff their way through instead. There may be some logic in what they are doing, but without explanation and taking the public with them, they are on a hiding to nothing in the polls.

Quite so.

The time is right for a systemic review of the health delivery system. Without question there are cost corners that could be cut. But let's be fair and factor in the savings from preventative medicine, as the AMA has rightly said.

And how about some legal relief for doctors. Witches in Salem got a fairer trial than a modern day doctor who makes an innocent mistake. Doctors indemnity insurance must be huge cost to them. Why do people think they get shunted off to endless (expensive to the system) pathology tests and specialist referals.

I don't mind Basilio's idea of a Govt run blood testing laboratory either. Donating at the centralized blood bank seems to go smoothly enough.

 

[sydboy007]

Gollard had a Labor/Green Senate majority. It was only in the Reps that she had to court the so-called Independents.

So your argument is that the house of representatives is a far easier place to negotiate in than the senate?

So you're saying it's less easy to get 39 senators out of 76 on side compared to 76 out of 150 on side in the house of reps?

Seems in the house of reps there's a lot more cats needing to be herded to get things through.

 

[sydboy007]

Quite so.

The time is right for a systemic review of the health delivery system. Without question there are cost corners that could be cut. But let's be fair and factor in the savings from preventative medicine, as the AMA has rightly said.

And how about some legal relief for doctors. Witches in Salem got a fairer trial than a modern day doctor who makes an innocent mistake. Doctors indemnity insurance must be huge cost to them. Why do people think they get shunted off to endless pathology tests and specialist referals.

I don't mind Basilio's idea of a Govt run blood testing laboratory either. Donating at the centralized blood bank seems to go smoothly enough.

Yes, I sometimes think it would be much better if the Govt stepped in and provided insurance to the medical and possibly legal professions.

Shouldn't be too hard to assess the risks involved considering a lot of the information is already in the public domain.

It shoudl also be relatively easy to have something like a 3 strikes and your back out into the private sector for your insurance, and knowing this it might make the few bad doctors improve or face being uninsurable.

The prob is the Coalition believes Govt shouldn't actually do anything. It might step in to help correct an obvious market failure, though their opposition to the NBN makes me think not, but they have the attitude that they'll still use the private sector to fix what in effect has been caused by the market.

Some will argue Govt can't afford to pay enough to lure talent of the right calibre, but I don't believe money is often the main motivator for a lot of people. Interesting work and challenges can be very rewarding to the right kind of people, and as Mike Quigley showed a sense of civic duty can also be a powerful motivator. Govts at all levels need a lot more knowledge on how to do, at least to make negotiations with the private sector less on sided, but more importantly having that knowledge inside would have helped stopped some of the gold plating of the east coast poles and wires which has doubled power bills, and hopefully would have stopped the building of some of the wasteful infrastructure built the last decade.

I just don't see the current Govt being amenable to actually building up the public service again to be something like it was back up to the 80s when privatisation and outsourcing started to be the economic mantra.

 

[SirRumpole]

Yes, I sometimes think it would be much better if the Govt stepped in and provided insurance to the medical and possibly legal professions.

Don't they already ?

I remember there was a big stink some years ago about the cost of medical indemnity insurance which was going to lead to doctors not working in public hospitals unless the government took the liability for them. Same for GP's I believe.

 

[Logique]

Don't they already ?

I remember there was a big stink some years ago about the cost of medical indemnity insurance which was going to lead to doctors not working in public hospitals unless the government took the liability for them. Same for GP's I believe.

Medical indemnity cover:

Medical indemnity insurance plays a vital role within the Australian health system by working to protect both doctors and patients in the event of an adverse incident arising from medical care.

While Australia’s health system is generally very safe, things occasionally go wrong and patients may sometimes be harmed in the process of receiving medical care.

http://www.doctorconnect.gov.au/internet/otd/publishing.nsf/Content/medicalIndemnityCover

 

[SirRumpole]

Medical indemnity cover:

Thanks.

There was a general crisis in public liability insurance circa 2002 which involved not only doctors, but basically anyone providing a service to the public, including councils and businesses of all kinds.

this gives some chronology of what was going on at the time

http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliam.../Publications_Archive/archive/publicliability

 

[Tisme]

.

On the other hand...Once upon a time we had a government established bank the Commonwealth. While it traded as a stand alone entity it offered effective competition to the private banks. It obviously had to pay its way and it returned dividends to the Federal government. A nice little earner actually.

But it's main role was ensuring that private banks didn't get too greedy with interest rate spreads, fees etc.

That's not what I was taught in social studies. Like most Australian enterprises there was insufficient anything to buffer the banks and utilities against global forces. Nationalisation was the answer to the collapses.

The Commonwealth bank was a patriarchal remnant of conservatism that denied, women especially, any sought of liberal treatment to advance the society at a growth pace. It was a pricing fixing machine that lead the oligopoly of the banking system.

 

[Julia]

Where was you outrage when Abbott was saying no no no and offering no viable alternatives?

I expressed no outrage, syd. Just suggested to sptrawler that he should not hold his breath waiting for the press gallery to question the opposition about how they will fund promises. Why you should translate that into outrage I've no idea.
I've said over and over that I have no allegiance to or faith in any particular political party. I know that's hard for you to understand, given your own obvious attachment to all things Labor.
I voted for Paul Keating, Wayne Goss, Peter Beattie and Anna Bligh, this last to my shame given how I was taken in by her convincing public persona which belied such incompetence.

Then I voted for John Howard and did not regret that overall, aside from disagreeing with his decision to align us with the USA and UK on the ME invasions and ultimately on his failure to recognise when it was time to hand over to Costello. Had Costello taken over at that point, I doubt very much that we'd be in the position federally at least that we are now.

If you want outrage, the best recent example you can find is the fact that at the last Qld State election, the outrage of the electorate was so great that Labor retained just 7 seats in an 89 seat parliament.

Hopefully as the next election draws nearer all parties will face a lot tougher scrutiny as to how they will achieve what they say they will.

Agreed, but I don't realistically have any such expectation.

Govts at all levels need a lot more knowledge on how to do, at least to make negotiations with the private sector less on sided, but more importantly having that knowledge inside would have helped stopped some of the gold plating of the east coast poles and wires which has doubled power bills, and hopefully would have stopped the building of some of the wasteful infrastructure built the last decade.

We've been through this before. I understand that you are repeating the mantra created by Julia Gillard on the 'gold plating' idea but I've explained that in many regional areas at least in Qld, the infrastructure was anything but gold plated: it was simply upgraded to what should have been provided many years earlier.

Since the upgrade, we have had just one power outage in about four years, and that was fixed in less than 2 hours, despite affecting a regional area of more than 100 sq km.
This is in contrast to outages pretty much every time there was a bit of a storm, such outages lasting many hours, preventing businesses from functioning, traffic lights from guiding traffic, in addition to the obvious inconvenience, insurance claims etc for householders.

What has very much affected retail electricity prices are the subsidies paid to solar power households, both as a cost of itself, and because of the additional burden on non-solar households as fewer households are actually paying electricity bills and the fixed costs being spread over fewer people.

Don't they already ?

I remember there was a big stink some years ago about the cost of medical indemnity insurance which was going to lead to doctors not working in public hospitals unless the government took the liability for them. Same for GP's I believe.

Wasn't this confined to public hospital doctors? I think doctors in private practice have always needed to arrange their own insurance. I don't think that should be a government responsibility any more than government should have any say in how private practitioners run their practices.

 

[basilio]

That's not what I was taught in social studies. Like most Australian enterprises there was insufficient anything to buffer the banks and utilities against global forces. Nationalisation was the answer to the collapses.

The Commonwealth bank was a patriarchal remnant of conservatism that denied, women especially, any sought of liberal treatment to advance the society at a growth pace. It was a pricing fixing machine that lead the oligopoly of the banking system.

I have to disagree with your social studies teacher (or what you might have understood) .
The Hawke/Keating abour government proceeded with privatising the Commonwealth Bank. It was part of the 80's push to deregulate the banking system. It was not under any particular finacial threat (Mind you the 1990 recession did have major consequences for other banks at the time.)

The conservatism of the Commonwealth bank ? I suggest all the banks were conservative in their treatment of women. The fact was that the industr as a whole was conservative.

My main point was that privatising teh Commonwaelth Bank enabled the entire industry to chase profits with no regard for other considerations.nd we have paid for it.

 

[Tisme]

I have to disagree with your social studies teacher (or what you might have understood) .
The Hawke/Keating abour government proceeded with privatising the Commonwealth Bank. It was part of the 80's push to deregulate the banking system. It was not under any particular finacial threat (Mind you the 1990 recession did have major consequences for other banks at the time.)

The conservatism of the Commonwealth bank ? I suggest all the banks were conservative in their treatment of women. The fact was that the industr as a whole was conservative.

My main point was that privatising teh Commonwaelth Bank enabled the entire industry to chase profits with no regard for other considerations.nd we have paid for it.

There must be something wrong with my pointer, because the Commonwealth Bank used to be around when I was a boy, way before 1990.

https://www.commbank.com.au/about-us/our-company/history.html

 

[Smurf1976]

The prob is the Coalition believes Govt shouldn't actually do anything. It might step in to help correct an obvious market failure, though their opposition to the NBN makes me think not, but they have the attitude that they'll still use the private sector to fix what in effect has been caused by the market.

Some will argue Govt can't afford to pay enough to lure talent of the right calibre, but I don't believe money is often the main motivator for a lot of people. Interesting work and challenges can be very rewarding to the right kind of people, and as Mike Quigley showed a sense of civic duty can also be a powerful motivator. Govts at all levels need a lot more knowledge on how to do, at least to make negotiations with the private sector less on sided, but more importantly having that knowledge inside would have helped stopped some of the gold plating of the east coast poles and wires which has doubled power bills, and hopefully would have stopped the building of some of the wasteful infrastructure built the last decade.

+1000

I won't be too specific, info is from someone on the inside, but I'll say that it involves infrastructure not related to the energy industry.

3 public servants paid a redundancy late in 2014. Now they have had to hire 5, yes 5, consultants full time to do the same work and needless to say that's costing an outright fortune and will be forever unless someone decides to reverse the decision which rarely happens in practice.

Not much more can be said really. Lose the real knowledge of the actual infrastructure being managed that the former staff had, then you need more people with generic knowledge to get the job done as everything takes longer to investigate without that expert knowledge.

It's a bit hard to take the "we have no money" argument seriously when things like this happen all too often.

 

[IFocus]

Every time I read here the handwringing over the governments failure to get spending cuts while ignoring the massive spending increases Abbott has done never ceases to amaze me.


Abbott in trouble after Medicare fumble

The Government's backdown over the Medicare rebate is evidence of decision-making that is as chaotic as it is confusing, and does not augur well for a Prime Minister who continues to fumble, writes Norman Abjorensen.

The extraordinary volte-face of the Government over the short consultation fee suggests that either the PM changed his mind on a key policy at the last minute, or this has been one of the most humiliating rebuffs to a prime minister in recent years, with the new Health Minister, Sussan Ley, being sent out to announce the retreat just a day after it was talked up by Mr Abbott.

It appears that nothing has been learnt from the stalled budget - framed to appeal to the big backers of the Coalition, but with little chance of passing the Senate.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-16/abjorensen-abbott-in-trouble-after-medicare-fumble/6021208

 

[sydboy007]

We've been through this before. I understand that you are repeating the mantra created by Julia Gillard on the 'gold plating' idea but I've explained that in many regional areas at least in Qld, the infrastructure was anything but gold plated: it was simply upgraded to what should have been provided many years earlier.

Since the upgrade, we have had just one power outage in about four years, and that was fixed in less than 2 hours, despite affecting a regional area of more than 100 sq km.
This is in contrast to outages pretty much every time there was a bit of a storm, such outages lasting many hours, preventing businesses from functioning, traffic lights from guiding traffic, in addition to the obvious inconvenience, insurance claims etc for householders.

What has very much affected retail electricity prices are the subsidies paid to solar power households, both as a cost of itself, and because of the additional burden on non-solar households as fewer households are actually paying electricity bills and the fixed costs being spread over fewer people.

As far as I can tell, renewable energy costs have been relatively insignificant in the recent cost increases.

Not sure how you can say the fixed costs are being spread over fewer people. Unless a person disconnects from the grid they will pay their access charges like everyone. The fact the distributors were able to claim interest expenses close to 10% for the past 5 years was another major cause of the cost increase, and they're still being allowed to gouge with the next 5 year period calculated with a 7.X% interest rate, far higher than what their actual costs are.

You also need to understand how the merit order effect works, where renewable energy has acted to suppress wholesale electricity prices. Even the Govts hand picked review showed that renewable energy will likely suppress wholesale prices by more than the actual costs of support for the renewable sector. Considering the QLD Govt is planning to spend over $14B in fossil fuel subsidies in te next budget, the amount of support to the renewables sector is quite paltry in comparison.

 

[Julia]

Who is footing the bill for the subsidies being paid to solar panel users, syd?

As battery storage capacity technology improves, what I've read indicates more people will go off the grid altogether. How will that not affect costs for those remaining consumers?