Menzies House

Labor is blue – through and through

By Perkin-Warbeck

Come September when we spring into Spring, we will all be able to give due honour, respect and love for somebody very important in our lives.

Naturally I refer to Father’s Day, the very first Sunday in September. After all, there’s no other event in September requiring us to show deference to, or respect for, any other sort of so-called authority figure.

In my case, it has been a good few years since my dear old dad went to his maker but I still make a point of thinking kindly thoughts about him on that special day. There was a time when I would give a lot of thought to an appropriate gift and, invariably, I would select a beautiful and tasteful tie. Quite a few were, I recall, blue.

Is it me or is it my blue tie?

According to Anne Summers, Women should be aware Abbott's blue-tie brigade, we (does that include or exclude men?) should all be aware of men in blue ties. Come election time, September 14, we (does that still include or exclude men?) should vote for a woman simply because a woman can make sure we have more women in our Federal Parliament. You’ve got to love affirmative action.

Summers warns us that if we do not vote for a female PM just because she is female then “Australia will go from having one of the highest representations of women in government in the democratic world to a very ordinary presence when compared with similar countries.” Make sense? Sure it does!

All women are equal but some are more equal than others

By Perkin-Warbeck

I bet you didn’t know that there are WOMEN and then there are women.

I have this on the highest possible authority – Emily’s List, no less – which proclaims in the preamble on its website, “A woman candidate, to be satisfactory, must be a ‘feminist’ in the best sense of the word…she should believe absolutely in the equality of status, liberty and opportunity between a man and a woman. A woman candidate that is shaky on this matter, or not sufficiently imbued with its importance to be able to speak convincingly on the matter, will do the movement towards establishing women in Parliament far more harm than good.”

Emily’s List is the ALP affirmative action crowd, the official sisterhood, comprising Labor women who presumably pass the “satisfactory” test. Prime Minister Gillard is a proud member.

Centenary of the 1913 Federal Election

A couple of weeks ago on 31 May 2013 was the centenary of the 1913 federal election, which went unnoticed.  It was one of the most critical elections in Australian history and its story needs to be retold, writes John Ruddick 

Between 1901 and 1910 Australia had eight Prime Ministerships with no party having a majority in either the House or the Senate.  The backdrop to this period of political flux was the seemingly inexorable rise of Labor. 

In 1901 Labor had just 14 seats in the House (out of 75) making it the smallest of the three parliamentary parties.  In 1903 the Labor tally almost doubled to 23 and then strengthened in 1906 with 26 seats.  The election of 1910 saw Labor not only win a clear majority in the House (42) but almost two thirds of the Senate.  It was a historic victory - Labor was the first openly socialistic party to win a national election in the world.

Of blame deflected

Opinion.

Waleed Aly says our responses to terrorism are not about the loss of innocent life—we only think it is.  He also claims terrorism is just a perpetual irritant. Aly would have us believe that while terrorism is an inconvenient pain in the butt, it kills relatively few people and is not any kind of existential threat. Such thinking conveniently ignores the London bombings, the killing of over 3,000 innocent people at the World Trade Centre, the two Bali bombings and a string of terrorist bombings and thwarted terrorism threats here in Australia.

Aly, is an Austraian-born Muslim who thinks multiculturalism doesn't lead to parallel societies, or isolated sub-cultures, as he calls them.  He doesn't believe there is any link between multiculturalism and terrorism.  This claim, of course, dismisses the experience of countries such as France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, and lately England, all of which are either legislating, or about to legislate, the end of multiculturalism. Aly completely ignores the words of Lee Kuan Yew, the father of modern Singapore, who said that only Muslims refused to be integrated into the Singaporean society.

The ABC gets itself completely facted

By Perkin-Warbeck

In this other world there is a publicly funded TV and radio broadcasting organisation - let’s for argument’s sake call it the ABC – which gets more than $1 billion a year from the taxpayers and which has a public commitment to the highest ethical standards of journalism – a commitment to truth, balance, impartiality and all of that.

This ABC has long prided itself on being above politics; in fact it has made a point of publishing and promoting its journalism code of ethics and stresses that all journalist employees must pay heed to it. Presumably, the journalists employed by this ABC are also members of the reporters’ trade union, the Media Alliance, which also has its own lofty code of ethics.

Now it is only four months or so to an election in this parallel universe and a conservative government headed by a Prime Minister – who for want of a better name is called Tony Abbott – is desperately hanging on in the face of overwhelming opinion polls which shows it is headed for electoral oblivion. An aggressive, hard-hitting Opposition headed by – again for want of a better name – Julia Gillard is so far ahead in the polls that the likely outcome almost defies gravity.

On a Queensland House of Review

March 24, 2012 was a historic day in Queensland's history, writes Michael Smyth

Not only due to the utter devastation for the ALP, but also due to its ushering in of "conservative" rule in this state; a sign that the Right in Queensland has shaken off the spectre of Joh.

Before the apologists of Joh get outraged by such a statement, I want to clarify what I mean.

Joh did some good things for Queensland, but his government was ultimately undone by the shortcomings of some of its members.

Gillard’s porkies to schoolgirls

Allan Essery exposes a pack of fibs told by the Prime Minister to an assembly of Queensland schoolgirls. GC.Ed.@L.

On the 9th of May this year the Prime Minister, Julie Gillard, visited the St John Forest College for young ladies at Braken Ridge in Queensland.  During that visit she addressed students and took questions.  A 14 year old student asked the Prime Minister when she intended to meet with the Alliance of Defence Service Organisations to discuss defence superannuation as she had promised two months earlier.

Prime Minister:  ''We, aah, we have a system of pensions for former defence force personnel and they are pensions that are more generous, as they well should be, so those pensions are very generous. For me I think it is very important to continue the generous pensions system, you know, when I say generous I mean in comparison to the old age pension. I don't want to suggest, you know, compared to lots of in the work force it's generous, it's an amount, you know, in excess of the old age pension so I want to see us having a really good system to, aah, support our retired personnel.''

Rebuttal: Defence superannuation is a defined benefit for a superannuation scheme as opposed to a welfare scheme which the old age pension is.