Tax rears its ugly head

Tax rears its ugly head. If there is one subject politicians hate talking about when an election is looming it is taxation which means Kevin Rudd will have a difficult time of it over the next couple of months. Already Labor is on the wrong foot with the success the Coalition has had in declaring that an emissions trading scheme is nothing more than a big new tax. Now there are the questions about how improvements to the big, bold new health system is eventually going to be paid for. And just down the track there is the release of the tax reform proposals that seemed like such a good idea when Treasurer Wayne Swan set up his inquiry into them. The two sides are going to get a lot closer in the opinion polls yet.

Another snub for Papua New Guinea. As if the last Coalition Government making Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare take his shoes off to go through an airport security check was not bad enough, a representative of this one is just painting our northern neighbour off the map. Leader of the House Anthony Albanese this week spoke enthusiastically about plans for Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to address a joint sitting of Parliament next Wednesday after a lunch in the Great Hall. “This is an important visit by our nearest neighbour and a good friend,” said the great Albo whose knowledge of geography clearly does not extend as far as knowing that PNG is less than 4km from our northern most shores.

Not this morning it didn’t. If Mike Rann thought his recent apology and yesterday’s court case would be the end of the Michelle Chantelois influence on the South Australian election campaign he would have hated this morning’s Adelaide Advertiser:

The paper certainly does seem to have it in for the Premier but he can take a little heart from the morning’s opinion poll showing that Labor is still ahead in the seat of Newland which the Liberals need to win to gain office.

New form of sponsorship. The recent heavy snow falls have left many German cities short of cash after paying for the expense of clearing roads and pathways and some are having difficulty finding the Euros necessary to fill in the potholes. The hamlet of Niederzimmern in the eastern German state of Thuringia has come up with the idea of seeking sponsorships to fill in a hole with tar,

In fear and trepidation. With some fear and trepidation about the reaction I might get from angry readers, I refer you to a half-way excellent column this morning by Andrew Bolt in the Melbourne Herald Sun. The man so many love to hate has taken as his theme the way politicians become pea-and-thimble shysters as they go about doing things like “stacking committees to produce the ‘right result’, fudging surveys to prompt the longed-for answer, and launching sham inquiries to give your crusading politicians exactly the dodgy conclusion they always wanted.” He gives some excellent examples of the practice but I call his column only half-way excellent because it only deals with tricks from one side of politics. In the Boltian world it is as if Liberals and Nationals do not engage in such misleading practices.

To realise that they do we only have to read the story by Steve Lewis and Ben Packham in the very same edition of the Hun. “Kevin Rudd faces a public backlash over the surge in boat people with voters believing Labor has broken an election promise to maintain tough border protection policies,” the couple write. And how do they know? Why, they have been given one of those fudging surveys to prompt the longed-for answer of course. Coalition polling shows up to 85 per cent of voters believe the Prime Minister has squibbed on a commitment to turn back the boats. And if that is not exactly the dodgy conclusion the crusading Coalition politicians wanted some gullible journalist to write I promise to punish myself by reading Andrew Bolt every day.

Beat up of the day. Commendable though the Lewis-Packham effort was, they can not win this morning’s award for the day’s biggest beat-up. That surely goes to the Matthew Franklin and Dennis Shanahan duumvirate in The Australian for their “Cabinet splits over tax, tactics” contribution. An absolute masterpiece full of un-named “several senior Labor sources” and “senior government sources” that prompted this comment on Twitter this morning called Shanahan inspects the real split cabinet:

Stung to the quick. Being a confirmed atheist stung to the quick by a reader’s comment yesterday that “I’m beginning to think you also belong to the Catholic media throng” I lead off my little summary of the day’s foreign news with this piece from the Guardian showing that it does not only happen in schools:

With that out of the way I  note that it is not just Australia that has this particular problem

And to end this item on a serious note — this is from the Straits Times:

No spin here just tactless stupidity. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott forgot about the spin this morning when asked on the Today Show why he was involved in a Fred Hollows charity walk. The reply:

“I guess because of the Aboriginal angle and ’cause it’s going through my electorate, I thought I better participate.”