Ned Kelly survives today in a number of guises.  Politicians who squander taxpayers’ revenue on idiotic schemes such the pink batts rort. Faceless bureaucrats in Departments such as Fair Trading, the RTA and DOCS who use the full force of the ‘system’ to crush ‘dissenters’. Eastern Suburbs spivs who can afford the greasiest lawyers to avoid justice and buy ‘respectability’. Oil industry executives who manipulate the price of petrol. Big banks and monopoly grocery chains.  The list goes on.

Australians tend to cheer for the battler who takes these rorters on and their patron saint in this regard is Ned Kelly.

In reality, the people we rely on to protect us from law-breakers are the police.  And their job is getting harder and harder in our emerging nanny state.  The recent hysteria directed at the police who pursued a serial lawbreaker that resulted in the death of a young family was pathetic.  What if Anita Cobby had been in the back of that car and the police had called off the chase?  It’s a fair bet the whingeing wallies would have just opened their mouths, changed step, and attacked the police from a different angle. (more…)

The widening gap between political spin and substance was put on public display during the recent tele-debates.  Even the worm revealed itself as a card-carrying Labor supporter!

Kevin Rudd is a political chameleon who can change his persona and his language to suit whichever audience he is talking to. Climate change, until recently the greatest moral issue of Kev’s time, has quietly disappeared off his political radar.

Rudd has now shifted from the ‘great big tax’ he wanted to impose via his unworkable climate change legislation to a ‘great big lie’ over health funding during Tony Abbott’s term as Minister.  His claim that Abbott ripped $1 billion out of the health system between October 2003 and December 2007 is at odds with Treasury records that show the health budget actually increased from $7.11 billion to $9.76 billion during that period.

Kev also had a bit of a memory lapse during the debate.  He forgot to mention grocery watch, fuel watch, whale watch, the pink-batt calamity, the school computers and assembly hall rorts the Copenhagen catastrophe or his promise to ‘tow the boats containing illegal refugees back to sea’.  (more…)

If truth in advertising applied to election slogans the NSW Labor Government would have to run with ‘Vote Labor – Pay Later – Sucker!’

Last weeks we learned that it’s now time to pay the piper for Labor’s mismanagement of our electricity assets and Krudd’s bungling of the climate change debate (which has quietly been relegated  as ‘the greatest moral issue of our time’.  Every household in NSW will now pay an additional $317 next year to pay for Krudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.  

In addition to this every household will have to pay up to $601 extra because of the mismanagement of our electricity asset by the most incompetent Labor government NSW has ever known.  Bloody minded unions and weak-kneed Labor politicians capitulated before the alter of self-interest when our electricity assets were at a premium.  Billions of dollars have gone down the gurgler since then and now we all have to pay for their incompetence. (more…)

Tony Abbott’s plan to pay working mothers to stay home with their babies for the first six months has been attacked by big business, big unions, feminists, the commentariat and by Kev himself.  This is a good indication that it will appeal to Labor’s forgotten families.

Young families face great stresses in today’s society as they juggle the responsibilities of work, school and childcare.  These stresses can lead to breakdowns in the family unit which invariably lead to lose-lose situations for all concerned.  Our ageing population and the trend for smaller families demands that we seek ways to increase the fertility rate. (more…)

Climate change, global warming and cloud hugging, ‘the greatest moral challenges of our time’ just a few months ago have now been relegated to Kev’s ‘too-hard’ basket.  Obviously Penny Wrong didn’t get it right!  And Midnight Soil’s lead singer still can’t bring himself to say ‘sorry’ to the four families who lost their loved ones in Kev’s ill-fated Pink Batts rort that saw another $2 billion of taxpayers money washed down the gurgler.

Imagine the outcry if it had happened under John Howard’s watch!  A vicious public campaign would have been funded by the chattering classes vowing to give up a latte a day and donating it to their new cause (no doubt they would have claimed it against their taxpayer funded job!). (more…)

If the NSW health system was a patient it would be in intensive care.  Its internal organs i.e. Area Health Service bureaucrats, mostly Labor mates, would be regarded as cancerous cells and be removed. 

Even the Prime Minister reckons there is a lot of krudd in the system and has threatened his NSW Labor counterparts with a Federal takeover of our hospitals if they don’t lift their game. (more…)

 The teaching profession, arguably one of the most important of all, is under stress because of the stifling impact of big government, cumbersome bureaucracies and ideological unions.  

The results of Labor’s big government trying to micro-manage service delivery has proved a disaster for the $43 billion National Broadband rollout, the $16 billion Julia Gillard National Memorial Classroom rort, the $2.3 billion pink-batt disaster, and the $1.5 billion cost blowout that has only delivered 150,000 of the 1 million computers promised for students.  (more…)

 The teaching profession, arguably one of the most important of all, is under stress because of the stifling impact of big government, cumbersome bureaucracies and ideological unions.  

The results of Labor’s big government trying to micro-manage service delivery has proved a disaster for the $43 billion National Broadband rollout, the $16 billion Julia Gillard National Memorial Classroom rort, the $2.3 billion pink-batt disaster, and the $1.5 billion cost blowout that has only delivered 150,000 of the 1 million computers promised for students.  (more…)

The election of Tony Abbott as Leader of the Opposition is great news for Julia Gillard and bad news for Kevin Rudd.  Voters now have a choice between a real bloke and an insipid pretender.  

Australians seem to like Abbott’s knockabout style despite media attempts to focus on swimming togs which happen to be his uniform as a volunteer surf-life saver.  He is also a long term volunteer at his local bushfire brigade.  Since his days at Oxford where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, played rugby as a front rower and won the heavyweight boxing championship Tony Abbott has maintained a strong empathy with ordinary Australians. (more…)

2009 will be remembered as the year of the GFC and the ETS.  For the first half of the year all Labor Government politicians blamed the GFC – or Global Financial Crisis to those who prefer plain English – on everything but the weather.  That came later with the ETS – or Emissions Trading Scheme. (more…)