Labor’s IR scare campaign: can the souffle rise twice? Kevin Rudd has a big political problem.  Tony Abbott has thrown him off balance with a couple of short jabs and he is struggling to regain its composure.  Tony Abbott has achieved this by punching at the key failures of the Rudd Government. It has changed the dynamic on the ground all of a sudden. Labor’s marginal seat holders who just months ago were dreaming of an easy victory in the campaign this year are now talking darkly about the PM’s performance and wondering whether Julia just might be better. They are demanding some action to turn this around. They want something done to stop Tony Abbott and his momentum. So what will the Labor Party do? It will do what it does best – it will concoct a union funded scare campaign based on falsehoods. Why wouldn’t they? It helped get them elected in the first place. Last week we saw the Deputy Prime Minster on a public relations tour, not selling Labor’s own a... more

Australian apiarists left with half a bee industry Food security is one of the major challenges facing the world.  In the coming decade with the population expected to increase to around 10 billion, access to food particularly food that is safe and free from disease will increasingly challenge many nations. Australians are rightly proud of the high quality food that we produce.  But as the world grows flatter and we increasingly import food, the high standards that we expect in Australia come into question. An example of this is the Australian honeybee industry, which for all intensive purposes has its back against the wall. Only a few years ago Australia did not import honey, we were a net exporter.  But in recent times this has changed with a large amount of overseas honey being imported at far cheaper prices. In 2009 there were substantial imports of honey to Australia with 1,000 tonnes from China, 1,684 tonnes from Argentina and 120 tonnes from Europe, all of wh... more

The dambusters: tax review’s threat to mining South Australia stands at the edge of a potential golden era, a golden era of opportunity like the state has never seen before. A dramatic still from one of the exciting final scenes of the Henry Tax Review. It turns out that South Australia sits on a giant bed of yellow cake that, if managed properly, will drive the state for generations.  As China and India continue to grow at nearly 10% per year with no sign of stopping soon, their insatiable appetite for energy resources grows along with it. For instance between now and 2050 China will require an additional terawatt of power just to sustain their current levels of growth.  Given the desire to build emission free power plants, uranium is in high demand as a fuel of choice around the world particularly amongst developing countries. This puts South Australia in the box seat.  Australia has approximately 23% of known world resources with a large portion... more

Australia Day Australia Day is our opportunity to reflect and celebrate the things that unite us. A united community made up of a collective of nationalities and histories, brought together to live in our inclusive and free society. To be Australian does not require the disowning of your past but rather a willing commitment to our future. We are an inclusive society that is beyond celebrating achievement because of a person’s background but rather because of what they have actually achieved.  Our Australia is the great society it is today because everyday people do extraordinary things to make our community what it is.  Australia Day has rightly become the opportunity to recognise many of these everyday heroes who do so much for our community without being asked.  These volunteers do this work not because of obligation but simply out of love.  Love of their country and love of their community. Australia encourages people to dream and to live their dream. ... more

Hopes evaporate for the Murray-Darling The recent significant rain event in the northern stretch of the Murray Darling Basin has not only given hope to suffering farmers and rural communities, it has also placed a spotlight firmly on the fraud being perpetrated by the Prime Minister and the cabal of Labor Premiers when it comes to water policy for the Murray Darling Basin.  Only 18 months ago this group of ‘leaders’ stood together and waved around a ‘historic’ agreement in Chamberlin like fashion claiming that it delivered a national system of water management.  Not only has this been shown to be a complete joke by the torrent of water now flowing down the Darling, it has also shown the Rudd Government’s failure to invest in the necessary infrastructure to deliver real water savings before the rain came. In January 2007 the Howard Government announced a ground breaking national water plan that contained three essential elements - water buybacks, infrastructure investme... more

Net filtering 'plan' is a fraud In August this year I wrote a punch article about the lunacy of the Rudd Government’s proposed mandatory ISP internet filtering. At that stage it was a trial but on Tuesday this week Minister Conroy announced his intention to proceed with legislation to enact this mad idea. This is a policy that is based on a fraud so much so the Minister could barely explain it with a straight face yesterday. Not that I’m cynical about the Labor media machine but this announcement was dumped out the week before Christmas in the middle of a massive international negotiation on climate change when even the Minister admitted it was ready to go in October.  But I digress. The fraud is that Stephen Conroy and Kevin Rudd want you to believe that you ‘protect’ our kids from the ‘nasties’ of the internet by ‘filtering’ inappropriate websites at the internet service provider level. The truth is that you can do no such thing. You see the proponents of this ridiculous... more

The column on Kevin Rudd you wouldn't get in the post In the dying days of the1996 election campaign Paul Keating famously said “when you change the government, you change the country” in an attempt to scare people away from taking the baseball bat to his Prime Ministership.  He did it on the basis that the Australian people recognised John Howard and what he had stood for over the years.  The line didn’t work, the government changed and so to did the country. In 2007 when the doom of the campaign set in, John Howard used the same line to try and get people to focus on what Kevin Rudd really stood for.  This was ultimately a difficult task because at that time what Rudd offered the public was one great contradiction.  For instance he had described the day of the introduction of the GST as “fundamental injustice day” but campaigned as an “economic conservative”.  Following a visit to Iraq in late 2002 he had said: “Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass ... more

Entrepreneurial Spirit Beats Government Every Time Last week I was fortunate to be invited to be part of the launch of a new business on Kangaroo Island, which is in my electorate. Kangaroo Island is one of the most beautiful parts of Australia, it is frontier country.  But the very thing that makes it so beautiful for the hundreds of thousands of tourists is the same thing that makes it so challenging for its residents and its economy. Kangaroo Island is a giant land mass, some 4,500 square kilometres taking about two hours to drive from one end to another.  It is home to about 4,000 islanders and is most famously known for its natural tourism.  Some 60 per cent of international visitors to South Australia are there to visit KI. But while tourism is its most publicly acknowledged industry, agriculture has always been the mainstay of the island economy consisting of mainly cropping and aquaculture.  But the problem has always been that the 14 kilometre water... more

No interjections: Question Time needs reforming I noticed on Facebook recently that there was a group called ‘I confess: I watch Question Time and I LIKE it’. The group has surprising large membership of over three thousand highlighting the joy of Facebook; you can always find a niche! Some of the most famous and well known Parliamentary incidents have occurred in Question time. Remember the Paul Keating ‘I will do you slowly’ taunt to John Hewson and Peter Costello’s demolition of Labor’s Scoresby ‘free’ way broken promise or better still his dancing interpretation of Peter Garrett. Question time is ‘show time’ in Parliament and it has produced some of the very best and the very worst of our democratic institution. But Question time is more than just a clever one liner and jibes between the senior players; it plays a vital role in ensuring the government of the day is answerable to the Parliament and therefore the people. However I worry that the very strength of ... more

Julia: full-time worker or part time spinner? Over the last couple of weeks the Deputy Prime Minister has been plugging two developing holes in a massive dam wall. The first has been caused by the waste and mismanagement associated with the Julia Gillard memorial halls debacle. A programme wasting so much money that a school in Sydney is going to refuse free money. The second hole in the dam wall is growing quickly and relates to her changes to the industrial award system and her promise that neither workers nor small business would be worse off with her changes to the industrial award system. A promise she knew couldn’t be kept. A fortnight ago this trickle became a torrent when the Industrial Relations Commission said that the award modernisation process will lead to ‘potential disadvantage for employees’. The Prime Minister then attempted to mitigate this flood by suggesting that the ‘no worse off’ promise was an ‘objective’. But it was Lindsay Tanner who called Juli... more