OK, it’s (almost) official. The zombie Trans-Pacific Partnership, widely criticised as a huge, undemocratic corporate power grab, has been restored to life
What’s the latest move and is it irreversible?
Malcolm Turnbull
Asylum seeker Abdul Aziz Muhammad asked the ABC’s Q&A panel on December 4 in a video question why the 650 men on Manus Island are being used as political pawns in a life or death game.
Aziz, who has been imprisoned on Manus Island for 4.5 years, said he had seen 6 friends die because of violence and medical negligence.
The scenes are horrendous. Defenceless people, who are desperately seeking protection, find themselves at the mercy of authoritarian bullies. All they seek is safety.
And yet the totalitarian Yes voters are deaf to their pleas, as No voters, seeking nothing more than the right to institutionalised bigotry, suffer in silence with only huge swathes of the government and the Murdoch press daring to raise their voices on their behalf.
The federal Coalition government is on the skids. It seems only a matter of time before it will be forced to an early election.
The latest sign of panic by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was the November 20 decision to delay the last sitting of the House of Representatives by a week to December 4.
The stated justification for this blatant lock-out of opposition and independent MPs — that it would facilitate the passing of equal marriage legislation by the end of the year — does not wash.
The Coalition government of Malcolm Turnbull is in deep, possibly terminal, crisis.
The combination of the dual citizenship fiasco, the widespread resistance to the government's attempts to push its neoliberal agenda through a maverick Senate and the constant undermining of Turnbull by the right wing of the Liberal Party under the leadership of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has sapped any public confidence the government was given when Turnbull replaced Abbott only two years ago.
You’ve heard of those recessive genes,
And the masterful dominant types?
We could hope Malcolm’s progressive genes
Throve alongside his conservative stripes,
Even if mostly the latter prevailed.
Whereas Abbott’s mix of political genes
Seemed extreme, then more extreme when unveiled.
But Malcolm’s drum-banging terrorism scenes,
“Keeping us safe” (and Muslims uneasy)
By locking up ten-year-olds, now indicate
His progressive genes are feeling queasy.
He’s Abbott without the flags, so to state.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s enthusiastic embrace of Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is reprehensible, the Tamil Refugee Council said on November 2.
If the National Broadband Network (NBN) is becoming a “calamitous train wreck”, as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull claimed on October 23, then the fault lies with him.
He was the minister for communications in the Tony Abbott Coalition government who, in 2013, oversaw the disastrous decision to fundamentally change the NBN from Labor’s fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) model to a technologically obsolete fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) system. At the time, Abbott apparently wanted to “kill the NBN” entirely.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his business mates have wasted no time in coat-tailing US President Donald Trump and renewing their threat to cut the company tax rate.
Trump announced a plan on September 27 to slash the US corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%, at an estimated cost to the national budget of US$2 trillion over 10 years. He did not give any details, but it will be a massive public hand-out to big business. Meanwhile, Trump and the Republicans continue to seek to undermine health insurance for the poor.
A hallmark of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott was responding to falling opinion polls by holding press conferences full of totalitarian imagery, announcing moves to weaken civil liberties or intensify persecution of refugees in the name of keeping Australians safe from the apparent existential threat of terrorism. His successor, Malcolm Turnbull, is trying to out-do him.
It doesn't take much to set off Tony Abbott and his right-wing shock-jock chorus, does it?
When Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull referred, in a speech in London, to the historical fact that Robert Menzies went to great pains back in 1944 to not call his new political party “conservative”, but rather the Liberal Party, Abbott and crew started howling.
Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has re-launched his verbal war against his successor Malcolm Turnbull, with obvious relish.
In recent speeches, Abbott criticised leaked internal Liberal Party moves to bring forward a bill for marriage equality; called for an end to all new spending except for national security and infrastructure; and advocated freezing the country's — already inadequate — renewable energy target.
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