Xenophon Team candidate for Mayo, Rebekha Sharkie, previously worked for Jamie Briggs.
A former staffer of Jamie Briggs who will run against him as a candidate for Nick Xenophon’s fledgling party went on the attack yesterday, saying she was “not surprised” by the Hong Kong incident.
Rebekha Sharkie, who left Mr Briggs’ office to work for then state Liberal opposition leader Isobel Redmond’s 2010 election campaign, said she did not want to capitalise on her political opponent’s misery, but expected his constituents in his conservative South Australian electorate of Mayo would be disappointed.
Ms Sharkie, who was named as Xenophon Team’s federal candidate for Mayo this month, said she “voted with her feet” and left his office after sexist comments.
“Certainly, I didn’t feel that Jamie and my personal values were aligned. There were things said that were misogynist in nature,’’ she said. “His was typical of the attitude of the Abbott government: that women were either beauty queens or ironing ladies.
“As a person living in Mayo I found it disappointing and I certainly feel for (Mr Briggs’) family, particularly his wife. I also feel for the public servant who showed great courage in speaking up.”
Mr Briggs, who succeeded former foreign minister Alexander Downer in Mayo, fired back yesterday, saying Ms Sharkie’s comments were “a baseless claim made by a career opportunist”.
While the Xenophon Team has worried Mr Briggs’s former frontbencher colleague Christopher Pyne in his neighbouring seat of Sturt, Mr Briggs’s 12.5 per cent margin was thought to have strengthened under Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, given Mayo’s growing number of tree-changers moving to areas such as the Adelaide Hills and soft Liberals aligned with the new Prime Minister’s views on migration and climate change.
But this week’s Newspoll analysis, published in The Australian, shows South Australia is the only state to put Labor ahead of the Coalition on a two-party-preferred basis with 52 per cent support, putting the Mayo electorate in the crosshairs.
Senator Xenophon plans to run upper house candidates in every state, and lower house candidates in NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia.
From their website, "The Fadden Forum is an initiative of the Fadden Federal Divisional Council (FDC) of the Liberal National Party, designed to foster dialogue between the FDC and the business community and to provide support to the Liberal National Party's Fadden election campaigns. The Forum hosts numerous functions each year accessible to the public with additional events held exclusively for The Forum's membership."
The Qld Federal MP for Fadden is Stuart Robert http://www.robert.com.au. (Are there any links showing any connection to Stuart Robert and Kenton Campbell??)
The Electoral Commission of Queensland (ECQ) records show that jeweller Margot McKinney donated $5,000 to the Liberal Party of Australia on July 26, 2010.
On December 22, 2015, McKinney uploaded a photo of Bishop wearing the necklace to Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/p/_kFkE_tE6N
On December 22, 2015, Ringuet appeared in The Courier Mail advocating for the ending of Sunday penalty rates citing her business, The Great Escape Camping at Coopers Plains.
It’s believed a number of QRC board members believed Michael Roche’s comments in the wake of a Queensland farmer’s death were inappropriate.
Jason TinThe Courier-Mail
QUEENSLAND Resources Council boss Michael Roche described the death of a Queensland farmer as a “gift” to green activists in a memo written to board members to fend off internal criticism.
The QRC chief executive came under fire in October over a statement he issued after George Bender, a prominent anti-coal-seam-gas campaigner, took his own life.
The statement, which offered condolences to the Bender family and noted the industry was “saddened” by Mr Bender’s passing, also controversially claimed public debate had been “hijacked” by some activists and politicians after the tragedy.
It is understood a number of QRC board members believed Mr Roche’s comments in the wake of Mr Bender’s death were inappropriate, with some raising concerns with the peak resources body.
In an extraordinary two-page memo obtained by The Courier-Mail, Mr Roche defended his actions to board members, arguing he had “been hoping that the strong media focus might abate after Mr Bender’s funeral … but instead it went to a new level”.
“For anti-coal and anti-gas group Lock the Gate, this tragic set of circumstances has been a gift,” he wrote in the October 28 memo.
George Bender. Picture: Lock The Gate
Mr Roche wrote that the controversial October 27 media statement, which he described as a “carefully worded circuit breaker”, was part of an attempt to “head off reactive support for the head of steam Lock the Gate was building on the back of Mr Bender’s death”
The QRC boss insisted the statement was respectful of the Bender family and said the feedback had been “overwhelmingly positive”. Mr Roche acknowledged in the memo that two QRC members had expressed concerns about the statement.
“I take such feedback very seriously but in the end it was my judgment that the time had come to push back because land access for all members was (and is) under threat,” he said.
The Courier-Mail understands some QRC members are unhappy with Mr Roche’s advocacy, believing him to be too focused on publicly battling activists, rather than tackling issues such as royalties and red tape.
Mr Roche issued a statement saying “the council does not discuss publicly confidential board matters.”
Independent Queensland Senator Glenn Lazarus took aim at Mr Roche’s comments.
“If these comments are correct then they’re sickening comments, which do not reflect the sentiment of the people,” Senator Lazarus said.
He said the remarks failed to reflect “the feeling of the community and an understanding of the genuine shift that is happening across the country and across the world in relation to energy resources”.
Senator Lazarus has advocated for a “national approach to the conduct and management of CSG mining activities”.
Queensland Greens Senator Larissa Waters said Mr Bender’s death was a “devastating tragedy”.
“The continuing insensitivity of the mining industry to the wishes and needs of farmers and Queenslanders for clean water and farm land speaks volumes about the priorities of this industry,” she said.
For help with emotional difficulties, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or online
For help with depression, contact Beyond Blue on 1300 22 46 36 or online
The SANE Helpline is 1800 18 SANE (7263) or online
Had it not been for the booming, confident presentation by Scott Morrison of the latest mid-year economic and fiscal outlook this week, it would have been easy to conclude that this was just another Wayne Swan special.
The messages were the same: the economy is heading in the right direction; the way back to budget surplus is on track but we need to be “patient and measured”; and all new spending has been offset by “saves” (a horrible term introduced by Swan but now copied by Morrison).
Swan’s predictions turned to dust; Morrison’s are likely to end the same way. Delaying the year when the much-vaunted balanced budget will emerge has become something of an art form for all recent treasurers.
The real problem for this federal government, like the Labor one before, is that there is no political appetite for cutting government spending.
This is matched by the relative absence of any electoral constituency for lower government spending because so many households are recipients of government transfers and many pay no net tax.
You only have to look at the figures. Nearly half of households pay no net tax; they receive as much, if not more, in government transfers than they pay in taxes.
Even if we ignore age pensioners — more than three-quarters of those aged 65 and older receive a full or part age pension — we note that about 85 per cent of single-parent households pay no net tax and a quarter of couples with children are let off the hook entirely.
It is hardly surprising that there is such strong resistance to any move by a government to curtail spending on entitlement programs or in-kind benefits when such a high proportion of the population are not contributing to their cost.
Of course, no one begrudges the support provided to those on very low incomes, especially those who find themselves in diminished circumstances through no fault of their own. But when the support is increasingly snaffled by the middle class, the moral case for large-scale government transfers becomes much more ambiguous.
But one of the lessons of the past half-decade is that poor spending programs are incredibly difficult to reverse. Households quickly factor in any new transfers and benefits into their private budgeting calculations. Any withdrawals are then seen as harsh and/or unjust.
Ronald Reagan surely was right when he observed: “No government voluntarily reduces its size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear.”
Take the paid parental leave scheme. It defies common sense that better-off women can avail themselves of employer-funded leave at full replacement wages, then top up this payment by accessing the government scheme (18 weeks at the national minimum wage). After all, the vast majority of low-paid women simply make do with the government scheme. By any measure, this is unfair.
But when it came to modifying this arrangement — it was put in place by the Gillard government to appease the public sector unions whose members were likeliest to benefit from the two payments — there was a crescendo of complaints, including the accusation that any change was somehow discriminatory.
When it is deemed fair that a public servant on $120,000 a year can receive more than $44,000 in paid parent leave after having a baby but it’s OK for a shop assistant on $35,000 to receive only $12,000, our moral compass somehow has been misplaced along the way.
It’s hardly surprising that government spending remains essentially out of control.
In 2007-08, the federal government paid out $272 billion (in real terms) or 23.1 per cent of gross domestic product. Mind you, no one was really squealing then about how inadequate or insufficient these outlays were. The next year, government spending rose by $44bn or nearly 13 per cent.
Fast-forward to this financial year and the outlays are estimated to be $428bn or 25.9 per cent of GDP. This is down only marginally from the peak spending of the previous Labor government (26 per cent in 2009-10) that was rationalised as a response to the global financial crisis. In other words, government spending jumped to a new plateau and has never returned to anywhere close to the 2007-08 figure.
The reality is that the Coalition government has achieved very little in terms of reining in government spending, let alone actually cutting it year-on-year, which would lead to much more rapid fiscal consolidation.
(It is interesting to note that Swan did manage to cut government spending marginally between 2011-12 and 2012-13, but bear in mind that at the time the iron ore price was around the $US130 a tonne mark — now under $US40 — and some tricky accounting was used to achieve the result. It was also short-lived, with real government spending increasing by close to 8 per cent in 2013-14.)
One of the factors driving Canberra’s relentless urge to increase government spending is the Keynesian Kool-Aid that is liberally dispensed by bureaucrats and advisers and eagerly imbibed by all politicians. It just never seems to be good time to restrict the growth of spending.
Take this naive homily spruiked by the Treasurer about the supposed perils of rushing back to surplus: “Extreme responses would place a handbrake on household consumption and business investment growth, and will necessarily threaten the fresh momentum emerging in our transforming economy.”
This is another Swan-like statement, if there ever were.
If we look at the next few years, federal government spending continues to grow strongly, falling only slightly to 25.5 per cent of GDP in 2018-19, from the present ratio of 25.9 per cent.
And note the MYEFO figures contain the $80bn removed from state funding for hospitals and schools, as well as several savings measures from last year’s budget that are unlikely to eventuate — at least $13bn in total.
On the revenue side, the MYEFO figures point to a return to the long-run average, with government revenue predicted to be about 24.8 per cent of GDP in 2018-19, compared with revenue in 2007-08 of 25 per cent of GDP. (Some higher percentages recorded earlier in the decade were the result of the unusual confluence of rising commodity prices, before the hike in mining investment, and strong capital gains.)
It is a complete myth peddled by left-wing commentators (and even some sensible journalists) that the budget is in a pickle because of revenue.
Over-estimating future revenue streams, a favourite tactic in recent budgets, then finding the projections are not met is not the same thing as saying that we have a revenue problem.
We either have bureaucrats at Treasury who are incapable of providing accurate forecasts of future tax receipts — just check out the mistakes that have been made in respect of superannuation taxes — or treasurers too willing to put a positive spin on future revenue to paint an excessively rosy picture of the likely state of the budget. It is probably a bit of both.
Had governments managed simply to spend at the long-run average of government payments as a percentage of GDP in this decade, the budget would be back in surplus and government debt would be significantly wound back.
Tragically, Morrison’s best-case scenario is that, all going well, we should reach a balanced budget position in 2020-21, with a surplus recorded in the next year. But the surplus quickly peaks and begins to decline to insignificant numbers. There is absolutely no prospect that any debt will be repaid during the next decade or so unless a government decides dramatically to change tack.
The costs of rising government debt are beginning to mount, with interest payments predicted to exceed $20bn a year. Recall that $20bn buys a lot — it would pay for all family tax benefits or about 40 per cent of the cost of the age pension. It would make a substantial contribution to the cost of running the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
No doubt, the government thought it handled this week’s MYEFO release as well as could be expected, with most commentators lapping it up and supporting the Coalition’s continuing endorsement of big government and high taxation.
The Treasurer was remarkably sanguine about the total rise of $26bn in budget deficits across the forward estimates. He compared the path back to surplus to some sort of meandering family holiday drive with the potential for road blocks and delays. His inference was that it was just as annoying that voters should query the likely timing of a budget surplus as it was for the kids to keep asking when the family would reach its destination.
By the same token, for many voters, a future of high taxation is seen as neither here nor there because they simply pay so little, or none at all, in net terms. That the top 10 per cent of income earners pays half of total income tax revenue suits them down to the ground.
The one benefit of bracket creep (taxpayers automatically facing higher average tax rates) — on which the improvement in the budget figures contained in MYEFO continues to significantly rely — is that more and more households will be dragged into having to pay net tax.
Across time, the constituency for restricting the growth of government spending should expand.
While bracket creep has some insidious effects — it is hidden, regressive and affects work effort — it just may be preferable to some of the sillier and economically damaging suggestions to repair the budget that have been doing the rounds.
And on that note, isn’t it passing strange that there should be a full-blown inquiry into tax reform being undertaken by this government but no investigation into reforming government spending?
It tells us that all governments are essentially the same unless jolted by a potentially catastrophic reality or an out-of-the-ordinary personality or two. Sadly, neither of these conditions now exists.
“If a person’s sole source of income is the taxpayer, the
person, as a condition of benefit, must have contraception. No
contraception, no benefit.”
So began my column in The Australian of December 30 last year.
A minor tsunami ensued. In addition to 500, overwhelmingly favourable,
comments on the newspaper’s website, there were more than 432,000
“shares”, which meant that a huge number of readers wanted others to
read it. And they did — at least 1.5 million.
Clearly, many Australians are seriously worried about intergenerational welfare: people who have children while on welfare are likelier to do so if they come from a family that has been on welfare.
Some
charming twitterer suggested I was making a bid for Australia’s “most
repugnant person of 2014” because, they argued, “poor people … have
human rights”.
Others asked whether I had a parliamentary pension.
Others defended me by saying, “if he does he certainly earns it”. And
finishing with the comment “name me a politician who would even open the
subject but let’s not play the man on this important discussion”.
The Australian’s
editorial of January 3 this year was very cautious — “We do not
necessarily agree with Johns” — but, fortunately, in its inimitable
style, it published the piece regardless.
The
first was news that a Cairns mother had murdered seven of her children
and one other child. Inquiries revealed that the woman had her children
to four different fathers.
In the second story, a mother and two fathers were fighting a state
government department in court over the long-term guardianship of four
children. The mother had six children to the two fathers. The mother is
on a disability pension and is in supported accommodation. All six
children are in care.
It was time to write the book. The book is
now filled with case studies. Finding these was difficult. I applied to
the Chief Magistrate of Queensland, who is responsible for the
Children’s Court of Queensland, and to the head of the Queensland
Attorney-General’s Department for permission to access files.
Despite
providing assurances of anonymity of those involved in Children’s
Court proceedings, permission failed to materialise. Only when I
informed the department head that I would publish a statement detailing
the eight-month delay did I receive a response, within hours, denying
permission.
The other reason to write the book was to answer the critics.
The
religious, Catholics especially, argued the dignity of the individual
and the sanctity of life would be violated under a “no contraception, no
dole” regime. But Catholic women in Australia are as likely as
non-Catholics to use artificial contraception. Some Catholic women urge
that “women practise sexual restraint and demand men do the same”.
The slogan coined by English suffragette Christabel Pankhurst, “Votes
for women and chastity for men”, is a lot more practical. It reminds
women that the first was a breeze compared with the second. I would
rather intervene to save women from irresponsible men than wait for men
and women to give up on sex.
Some on the Left were outraged
because they believe that beneficiaries have rights. It is not a human
right to raise a family at someone else’s expense. Welfare rights are
not human rights; they are gifts of other taxpayers, granted under very
specific conditions. The Left frets about overpopulation and argues for
restricting childbirth in the name of saving the world from climate
change in 100 years. It appears not to worry about the unsupported child
to be born in nine months.
My libertarian colleagues are
squeamish about compulsion. They need to be reminded that it is not
compulsory to take a benefit. Their hope, a world in which there are no
benefits and charity alone steps in to help the unfortunate, is
impractical. Stopping welfare may stop intergenerational welfare but it
would not stop intergenerational poverty. The welfare state is here to
stay. I am a supporter, but it has a downside. It helps to create the
next generation of dependent citizens.
When someone chooses to
take a benefit, it is reasonable for taxpayers to place conditions on
the benefit. The condition lasts only so long as the person is on the
benefit. If someone is on an unemployment benefit they should be
searching for work, not starting a family. If someone is on a study
benefit, they should be studying, not starting a family. If someone is
on a parenting payment they should be bringing up their family, not
adding to it.
I applied to a previous regime to find out the number of children
born to women on benefits in Australia. The typical response was: “the
department does not keep that data”. That, of course, was duckshoving.
Having almost completed the book I had one last shot at finding out.
Graciously, new Social Services Minister Christian Porter had the
department provide an estimate.
We now know there are perhaps as
many as 60,000 children born each year to women who are on a benefit,
which is almost 20 per cent of all Australian births. As eminent
Australian economist Deborah Cobb-Clark, who has studied
intergenerational welfare, remarked, “Will there be enough policy levers
if it is not all about income or education?” I’m here to tell you that
we’ve done all that, and it doesn’t work: middle-class professionals
soak up most of the money.
I have spoken to scores of police,
judges, lawyers and social workers dealing with children in crisis. They
are sick to death of the poseurs in this field; they want some early
intervention that really works.
We need to intervene in a more
deliberate and immediate way to place women on a benefit into the
situation they would otherwise be in if they were in a relationship and
had a job and were planning for a family.
