On the Coalition’s failure to govern convincingly
Peter Matters writes: Re. “Rundle: the government’s Escherian spiral to nowhere” (Monday). All of us Australians owe Mr. Abbott some heart felt thanks. In the past, Coalition parties have always been considering that they owned the automatic right to govern as the natural state of affairs and the electorate more often than not has been going along with this concept. Mr. Abbott has finally managed to relieve us of this strange habit.
The nitty gritty of Senate voting
Martin Gordon writes: “Rundle: c’mon everyone, let’s play Senate Bingo!” (Tuesday). A lot of the logic and labelling in this piece was somewhat simplistic or faulty. In a practical sense, the three parties of opposition are the ALP, the Greens and the Palmer United Party. They have 38 votes. For the Coalition it needs one of these parties to support any legislation for it to pass.
As for the ALP, they really only have 25 Senators, and assuming the Greens back them they only have 35 votes in all. They would also be largely beholden to Palmer too, and possibly more hamstrung. Lots of fun!
Like during the 1980’s through to 2013, the Labor government often found it could pass unpalatable budget measures because almost always the Coalition supported them. If it was in government, it would need the same formulation again.
Odd how when the ALP introduced the half-yearly excise indexation of fuel in 1983, there were no howls about it being “unfair” — probably because it was their initiative! It is also odd it did no reactivate indexation during the 2007-2013 period either.
The shadowy world of metadata use
Tom Osborn writes: Re. “Who can access your metadata?” (Tuesday). I’m still wondering how phone booking of taxis know my home address without use of an illegal reverse phonebook.
MR Gordon’s comments about the coalition passing legislation is rubbish. The entire Rudd Gillard era legislation was achieved in spite of the coalition.
And there were plenty of good policy measures that were voted down by the coalition, in particular, abolition of rebates for medical funds for high earners, and taxation of substantial superannuation pensions above around the $110 k per year.
There were plenty of taxation measures that were voted down by the coalition. Mr Gordon embraces ancient history and has to go back to early parts of the Hawke/Keating government to find coalition support for genuinely forward looking policy.
Oh, except for superannuation,
and water, education, health, the aqueducts, ………
I’m still wondering how phone booking of taxis know my home address without use of an illegal reverse phonebook.
Same way they know my “home address” even though I always call with a mobile. You’ve called them before and they saved the address they picked you up from in their database.
With the current technology, why is a reverse phone book illegal anyway?