Posted on 02/10/2015 2:33:53 PM PST by naturalman1975
BILL Shorten currently enjoys a substantial numerical lead in opinion polls over Prime Minister Tony Abbott. But the Labor leader knows his lead is soft, and that in a volatile electorate many voters may in time drift back to the Coalition.
Presumably that is why, in an attempt to impress Labor’s base and to lock in the welfare vote, Shorten has recently escalated his frantic class war rhetoric.
“We will fight to the last drop of our breath the brutal attack on the poor in Australia,” Shorten told Labor’s caucus yesterday. “We will put social justice back up the political priority.” Shorten claimed the Coalition government was “inflicting an extreme ideology through their own unfair budget”.
He was at it again during Question Time on Monday. “You are an extreme government motivated by an extreme ideology,” Shorten railed, looking like a furious, slightly less orange Oompa Loompa.
Given that Shorten’s knowledge of money mostly comes from marrying it, he could perhaps use some remedial economic education. It is by no means extreme to seek a balanced budget or to aim for a budget surplus.
Indeed, previous Labor treasurer Wayne Swan repeatedly promised to deliver a surplus, year after year.
Sadly, Swan’s economic “extremism” was entirely hypothetical. He delivered surpluses in the same way Shorten delivers straight answers: not at all. Here is an edited portion of Shorten’s recent reply to a question from the ABC’s Leigh Sales on how he might deal with Australia’s Labor-generated debt:
“For Australia to have a bright future, then we’ve got to go for growth. And the way you go for growth is you spend money on skills and training and higher education… What I’m spelling out is our direction for the future. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road’ll get you there.”
(Excerpt) Read more at dailytelegraph.com.au ...
The biggest problem in the Australian electorate at the moment is that everybody wants to maintain spending (or increase it) on their pet projects, and so many people don't seem to understand that that has to be paid for. Labor came into office with a massive surplus behind them carefully nurtured and grown by the conservative government of John Howard over a decade, taking advantage of the mining boom, certainly, but also being very careful. And then Labor delivered nothing but deficit budgets every single year - despite promising at their last two budgets to have a surplus next time. They got us into a hole that will take at least three years to get out of under ideal conditions - and then they use their position in the Senate to block any budget attempt to do it. They want a welfare state and free universal health care and near-free university education paid for by constant debt. All the conservatives want to do is trim those things - not get rid of them - to the level where we can afford them. It's not radical or extreme change - Australia isn't ready for that, even if it was wanted.
what conservative media?
The Daily Telegraph, The Herald Sun, and The Australian (also the Courier-Mail and Adelaide Advertiser, but they are less relevant). I’m not saying they are hard right, but they do generally lean conservative and support the Coalition. Because they behave responsibly, not dishonestly, it’s nowhere near as blatant as Fairfax media’s support for the left, and certainly nothing like the bias of the ABC.
In terms of television, we really have no conservative media, in my view, but we do have some in print.
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