It's hard to see the legal distinction between what Slipper was prosecuted for and what dear old Bronwyn did. Admittedly Slipper's guilty verdict was overturned on appeal but that was partly because the prosecution didn't call witnesses that they should have called.
The Abbott Government
- Thread starter Calliope
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explod
explod
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Was thinking of starting a new thread for Bishop, but so corrupt i could not be bothered. She's a goner. Poor ole Rabbit must be feeling a bit lonely.
Notice my ole Pal noco eased his postings.
Notice my ole Pal noco eased his postings.
Bronwyn Bishop used the chopper organized by her staff an she has not only paid back the $5 grand but has reprimanded her staff....I cretainly do not condone what took place....It should never have happened.
How come you don't talk about that Tasmanian MP who used $24,000 on chartered flights from Hobart to Launceston..Are your mob going to refer her to the AFP or will she pay back the difference between chartered flights and commercial flights.
Stop being so hypocritical...Show a bit of balance for once.
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explod
explod
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Ballance, what about the 80 grand on her overseas trips.
Why does a speaker have to go overseas anyway.
And answer the questions.
Oh, and an old one, eight times now, where under the libs are the jobs coming from?
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Why does the speaker of the house need two staffers anyway? One to make coffee and carry the suitcase, so fair enough... two?
$300k in travel and allowances for simply telling Labor MPs to sit down and let the Liberal speak?
I'm beginning to have a big sense of duty to my fellow Australians and may make sacrifices for public service.
MP's are ultimately legally responsible for their own travel and the difference between the Tasmanian MP (as bad as it is) is that they were at least on official travel unlike bronwyn bishop. Bishop would have had to ultimately sign the form saying it was official business.
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It is about time they dropped the word "service" and "servant", they are being paid a bloody lot of money and they all need a good "serve".
explod
explod
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Yes how about rounding up our great resourses and putting our people into working them. It would mean jobs.
Labor is destroying jobs in Queensland.
The jobs are coming from the incentive given to small business...Haven't you been reading the news or are to busy listening to the left wing ABC propaganda?
BTW...I have told you 8 times, governments don't create jobs ...only in the public service which is generally overloaded when Labor is in office.
explod
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Well they need to. Private enterprise will not, they are only interested in the reduction of wages and profits.
We need to go back to a socialist system and have the workers, who produce tangible value, create food and services away from private enterprise who are only interested in profits.
Did you know that nearly 20% of our efforts are at the desks of the finance industry. Another large percentage on residential developement. As just after WW2 we need to return to primary industry. Thatcherism is taking the world to unproductive oblivion. Soon, making money sitting on your ourt will mean ourt. As the costs on supermarket shelves are out of reach for basic workers it will be every person for himself. Greece are just entering that phase now. The bank teller machines will jamm.
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Are you demanding truth in advertising? Do you work for the ABC or in any way associated with them leftist lynch mob?
To be fair, they do serve people though - just not people like you and I.
Which makes sense because there's never been a case where the servant is better paid or richer than the master. The ratio of wealth and income from servant to master must at least be at least 1:100. If it's 1:10 it'll be boss and employee; if 1:1 it's mates; if 1:1.5 it'll be envy...
Saw some clips on American politics where the Koch Brothers is rumoured to have set aside about $200million to back any promising Republican. And a bunch of presidential hopeful are lining and pitching their credentials to them - how they've destroyed the teachers' and workers' union, how they took on obstructionist environmentalists and won...
And Clinton is bashing CEOs and bankers, the same people who paid her husband around $20 million last year or so for speeches.
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I thought that cutting the carbon tax and the mining tax would increase jobs. Opps.
Can gov't be sue for economic mismanagement?
If any person make policies like they do, they'd be sued for malpractice or collusion.
I mean... you can take the money directly into your pocket and use that money as you please to create jobs and make investment. But no, you let other people keep the money and hope and pray that they will not fire people and keep creating jobs.
Then with low to zero cost of borrowing, instead of borrowing to invest and create jobs you figured it's best to cut spending and make it tougher on those without jobs and impossible for those seeking jobs - not to mention missing out on the end product those jobs could get done.
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Incentives to small business are useless unless the consumer is ready, willing and able to spend money.
There may be a bounce in business confidence due to the tax incentives, but it will be a dead cat bounce because consumer confidence is low due to the ramping up of talk about increasing the GST and the outlook with the Chinese economy.
If the government want to increase consumer confidence then they need to offer some tax cuts to consumers and offset it with changes to negative gearing ($5 billion pa), super tax entitlements for the rich ($35 billion pa) and by strong action on company tax avoidance which Hockey has now bottled out of.
This government's priorities are seriously wrong.
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Application of science, technology, engineering and manufacturing plus natural resources (not just minerals but also agriculture, renewable energy etc) create real economic wealth whilst the service industries (retail, tourism etc) allow us to enjoy the benefits of that wealth.
Finance does not of itself create wealth, at best it enables other activities to create wealth. The sooner everyone realises that point the better off we'll all be. Money shuffling doesn't create wealth in the same way as the public service does not create wealth. It just transfers it and consumes some in the process. That said, the public service does provide some worthwhile outputs - few would want to live without law enforcement, emergency services or public infrastructure, whilst the same cannot be said of much of the financial industry.
There's a proper role for finance certainly, it is necessary to enable real wealth creation and functioning of the economy, but something is seriously wrong that it has become so large relative to everything else to the point that it now attracts many of the brightest individuals away from the real wealth creating activities that they'd otherwise pursue.
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Application of science, technology, engineering and manufacturing plus natural resources (not just minerals but also agriculture, renewable energy etc) create real economic wealth whilst the service industries (retail, tourism etc) allow us to enjoy the benefits of that wealth.
Finance does not of itself create wealth, at best it enables other activities to create wealth. The sooner everyone realises that point the better off we'll all be. Money shuffling doesn't create wealth in the same way as the public service does not create wealth. It just transfers it and consumes some in the process. That said, the public service does provide some worthwhile outputs - few would want to live without law enforcement, emergency services or public infrastructure, whilst the same cannot be said of much of the financial industry.
There's a proper role for finance certainly, it is necessary to enable real wealth creation and functioning of the economy, but something is seriously wrong that it has become so large relative to everything else to the point that it now attracts many of the brightest individuals away from the real wealth creating activities that they'd otherwise pursue.
Yup.
Saw an interesting interview recently where this economist was saying that since the GFC, about 90% of the capital of the American Fortune 500 were spent on share buybacks and dividends. Of that 90%, some 40% are paid as dividend (which in some limited way does mean cash in the bank for shareholders) but the 60% that's used in share buyback... well that just does nothing really but inflate the per share earnings and the share price.
So of the money that they have, these corporations spent 10% investing in real job, in R&D and actual product - the 90% are mere financial games that does not really create anything, not even wealth for shareholders in the longterm since - if taken as a whole - no new product or innovation, and no investment in jobs will mean no increase in demand and so the share price won't remain high because there's no increase in sales etc.
Maybe they're hoping that gov't will pick up the slag in investment and actual job creation.
Socilaism?
You say we should go back to a socialist system.
There are many models of socialism....Which on do you prefer.
Planned Economy
Self managed economy
State Directed Economy.
Market Socialism
Marxism.
Evolutionary and Institutional Economics.
Utopian Socialism
Revolutionary Socialism
Reformism.
Anarchism
Libertarian Socialism
Democratic Socialism
Religious Socialism
Social Democracy
Syndicalism.
Criticism
Main article: Criticisms of socialism
Socialism has been critiqued from numerous different perspectives. Because there are many models of socialism, most critiques are only focused on a specific type of socialism.[citation needed]
Economic liberals and right libertarians view private ownership of the means of production and the market exchange as natural entities or moral rights which are central to their conceptions of freedom and liberty, and view the economic dynamics of capitalism as immutable and absolute. Therefore, they perceive public ownership of the means of production, cooperatives and economic planning as infringements upon liberty.[419][420]
According to the Austrian school economist Ludwig von Mises, an economic system that does not use money, financial calculation and market pricing will be unable to effectively value capital goods and coordinate production, and therefore these types of socialism are impossible because they lack the necessary information to perform economic calculation in the first place.[421][422] Another central argument leveled against socialist systems based on economic planning is based on the use of dispersed knowledge. State socialism is unfeasible in this view because information cannot be aggregated by a central body and effectively used to formulate a plan for an entire economy, because doing so would result in distorted or absent price signals.[423]
Many economic criticisms of socialism focus on the experiences of Soviet-type planned economies. It is argued[by whom?] that a lack of budget constraints in enterprises operating in a planned economy reduces incentives for enterprises to act on information efficiently, thereby reducing overall welfare for society.[424]
Economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Mancur Olson and others not specifically advancing anti-socialists positions have shown that prevailing economic models upon which democratic or market socialism might be based have logical flaws or unworkable presuppositions.[425][426] In particular equilibria models based on neoclassical economics with the goal of achieving a distribution which is Pareto efficient have been shown to have such problems.[427]
In light of these criticisms, historians such as Howard Zinn retort:
Let's talk about socialism. I think it's very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had Mother Jones. It had Emma Goldman. It had several million people reading socialist newspapers around the country. Socialism basically said, hey, let's have a kinder, gentler society. Let's share things. Let's have an economic system that produces things not because they're profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism.[428]
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Indeed so.
No doubt this is the wrong forum to put such a radical idea, but what contribution does trading little bits of paper on the Stock Market contribute to the production of goods and services ?
If you were going to raise money to pay off the deficit without affecting the general economy I would say that a tax on share transfers would be a good place to start.
Better than raising the GST for everyone.
wayneL
VIVA LA LIBERTAD, CARAJO!
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Plod can you show me a single successful socialist economy?
....and not the furphy that Sweden Is socialist please.
....and not the furphy that Sweden Is socialist please.
explod
explod
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What we used to have under Menzies, Whitlam in particular, Fraser, Hawk and Keating. We have just drifted too far right under the Thatcherism idea.
And what's wrong with Sweden? Then we have Norway and Denmark.
Noco mentioned Von Miser's, a very wise fellow, loved his works on money and fair exchange. Austrian economics a great model. Even Keans admitted that and that his own model could not stop an eventual implosion.
We are supposed to be talking about our Guvmint.