Elections With the latest coup against Malcolm Turnbull, Australia now had five Prime Ministers in five years

[Ruprecht]

Seems dead in the water but it's the new deputy's signature piece.

Do you think scomo is just the whipping boy for the drubbing they take next election and then replaced with Bishop or Dutton?

I can't imagine they'd let Dutton face this debacle just to reinstate him after losing the election.
If the primary issue they were facing was Turnbull's lack of credibility with the conservative wing of the party, Morrison has that.
Although if they are struggling with an identity crisis over their traditional representation of pro-business, low tax, anti-union positions, Morrison's not the one to shift to right-wing populism.
Neither is Bishop.

 

[tkotom]

Per capita we are one of the highest CO2 contributors on the planet, and we're also extremely susceptible to it's impact.
From the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, the loss of coastal property, the increased severity of droughts (primarily in the South West) etc.
Not to mention regional effects from migration from Kiribati, Vanuatu etc.

Having a comparatively small population isn't an exemption from responsibility.

You’re looking at it with blinders. Australia is per capita high because it is a country that a majority of the world relies on for crucial resources, not for beach chairs and shitty appliances.

You could fit australian’s contribution to climate change in a micro corner of India where their cattle and lack of respect for the environment are destroying the world.

You say “per capita” as though the individual Australian people are contributing in any significant way. They aren’t. It’s the massive industry which the world absolutely needs.

Australia is one of the cleanest places in the world.

 

[Arkain2K]

 

[Nooob]

It feels like we have new PM every week in the last 10 years since Rudd got deposed out of nowhere.

 

[Arkain2K]

LOL @ this Texan popcorn entrepreneur getting flooded with thousands of messages from frustrated Australians.

The messages are a lot more lighthearted now that people realized what happened.

Peter Dutton from Texas is getting confused with Australia’s wannabe PM​

By Benedict Brook | August 24, 2018

​

A 30-YEAR-OLD popcorn entrepreneur from America called Peter Dutton, who was confused online for the Australian prime ministerial hopeful of the same name, has embraced the unexpected fame with his “new found Aussie family”.

But he revealed an awkward call with his mother who thought he was in trouble when the media maelstrom hit.

There are some big differences between the two Duttons. For a start the Texan Mr Dutton is black and about 18 years younger. He can also name an AC/DC song, something his Australian namesake this week failed to do.

“This has been a wonderful experience,” Mr Dutton said.

The Austin resident has described how he first twigged something odd was happening a few days ago.

“I experienced an influx of tweets and some were kind of harsh so I tried to figure out what was going on.”

Eventually he worked out he had the identical name as the former home affairs minister.

He tweets under the handle (@PeterDutton5) while the PM contender is (@PeterDutton_MP).

The US Dutton tweeted: “I wish the people of Australia would look at my profile and realise I’m a 30 yr old black man before sending me tweets and DMs.” That only encouraged more people to get in touch.

“When it first happened my wife was trying to get sleep she was like ‘why are you still up scrambling around’ and I was like ‘you have no idea, the tweets just won’t stop’,” he told Channel 7’s Sunrise this morning.

“My mother called me at 3am our time and she was like ‘what’s going on, I got a call from Australia looking for you?’ She doesn’t have Twitter so I had to update her and she was like ‘I cannot believe this but if it were happen to someone it would happen to you’.

“I decided to embrace it and have some fun with my new found Aussie family.”

He said now they knew what was going on, his family “found it hilarious”.

Mr Dutton has never visited Australia and he said he knew little about the country, aside from it was beautiful and had koalas.

“I have never been to Australia’s but it’s the top of my list now,” he said.

And he does like the music.

“AC/DC gets me through my morning runs,” he said, nominating Thunderstruck as his favourite of their back catalogue.

The Australian Mr Dutton couldn’t name any AC/DC’s songs when asked on Triple M on Wednesday, a feat only matched by Malcolm Turnbull, who tripped up when asked the same question in a past interview.

America’s Mr Dutton said he had been given the name “the people’s PM of Australia” online.

“I’m keeping the name now, people have embraced me,” he said.

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/r...n/news-story/22b6d79b27757629515fa098b5271908

 

[Ruprecht]

LOL @ this Texan popcorn entrepreneur getting flooded with thousands of messages from frustrated Australians.

The messages are a lot more lighthearted now that people realized what happened.

Peter Dutton from Texas is getting confused with Australia’s wannabe PM​

By Benedict Brook | August 24, 2018

​

Yeah, I saw that.
There were calls to bring him over and make him PM anyway.
Because... why not at this point?

 

[Arkain2K]

With Malcolm Turnbull's demise, the Liberal Party's true fear is coming to pass
By Annabel Crabb | August 24, 2018http://www.abc.net.au/news/annabel-crabb/167108

It's taken 14 years for the Liberal Party to work Malcolm Turnbull, like a splinter, out of its flesh.

And today, in a final bout of demented junkie-scratching, they've finally done it.

In the end, the party's break with him was not — whatever anyone says — about policy. It was, and always has been, the inability of the party to accept collectively that Malcolm Bligh Turnbull is one of them.

It's the greatest rejection of his life. And this is a man whose mother walked out on him.

It's also the most expensive, because in Mr Turnbull's pursuit of acceptance within his party in this second period as its leader, he's given up — to please them — so much of what he brought with him into politics.

It's not just the millions he's poured into the party's coffers, or his preparedness to shut up about the republic, or same-sex marriage, or his belief in a market solution to carbon pricing or indeed his belief in non-interventionist government; all tributes he has shovelled in to the ravening maw of his party in an attempt to appease its fire gods.

(Also sacrificed: some other erstwhile pleasures of the Turnbull flesh, like yelling at people he thinks are stupid, and quoting Neville Wran.)

It's that, in the end, it amounted to nothing.

Why did Turnbull get the sack? Good question

In the end, he led a party where it was possible for a right-wing minister (Concetta Fierravanti-Wells) to quit Mr Turnbull's front bench this week on the grounds that the front bench didn't have enough right-wingers, adding moreover that the Government's handling of the same-sex marriage debate was part of her disenchantment with the PM.

Right wing minister Concetta Fierravanti-Wells quit on the grounds the front bench did not have enough right-wingers.​

Even though in that precise instance Mr Turnbull followed so exactly the proposal nominated by Tony Abbott (with a postal plebiscite SUGGESTED BY PETER DUTTON) that he spent several months being kicked around like a footy in his own electorate, the gayest in the country.

Such cranially painful non sequiturs are not even remarkable any more, in this environment.

And if the National Energy Guarantee — which became the issue around which the anti-Turnbull mob gathered, in the end, to light their petrol-soaked rags — was the work of careful consultation between the right-winger Josh Frydenberg and the energy industry, whose leaders came to the party room on their knees begging to be given this certainty, and if it had public support and potentially broad support across the Parliament, then none of that matters now, because it's gone, whooshed away up that same mad pipe where the last few genuine attempts to arrive at some sort of part-way sensible national position on this particular policy issue went.

Why did Malcolm Turnbull get the sack from his party?

Especially at a point at which his Coalition government presided over jobs growth, an improving economy, and impregnable border protection — ordinarily the triple guarantors of a sound night's sleep for Coalition governments?

When you ask his colleagues, you get a bit of awkward shuffling and some references to the Longman by-election and typically an insistence that this is about policy not personalities, which turns out to amount essentially to Mr Turnbull's honouring of the Paris emissions targets to which Mr Abbott committed the nation in 2015.

Turnbull's crimes a vibe thing

Malcolm Turnbull will go down in history as the prime minister most disproportionately and gorily executed by his colleagues on the most nebulous of grounds.

Essentially, his crimes against the Liberal Party were a vibe thing.

Even when he was doing what his conservative colleagues wanted him to do, he failed to convince them because deep down, they felt he didn't really mean it.

Their fear always was that Malcolm Turnbull — despite everything he said — was secretly, in his heart, running a Labor government.

And isn't that funny.

Because that's exactly what they'll now get.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-24/malcolm-turnbull-liberal-party-fear-comes-to-pass/10160764

 

[Ruprecht]

You’re looking at it with blinders. Australia is per capita high because it is a country that a majority of the world relies on for crucial resources, not for beach chairs and shitty appliances.

You could fit australian’s contribution to climate change in a micro corner of India where their cattle and lack of respect for the environment are destroying the world.

You say “per capita” as though the individual Australian people are contributing in any significant way. They aren’t. It’s the massive industry which the world absolutely needs.

Australia is one of the cleanest places in the world.

No, the majority of our CO2 emissions are from our reliance on fossil fuels for electric power, followed by transport and agriculture.
Only the production of aluminium would severely shift the amount if it was calculated on the basis of consumption rather than production (but then we'd be hit with our own consumption figures for all our imports).
In terms of electricity consumption, manufacturing use has been in steady decline and was overtaken by residential and commerce and services in 2012. Mining and manufacturing still figure heavily in total energy consumption, but transportation is by far the largest sector there (39% compared to 11% for residential consumption).

It's the classic example of the tragedy of the commons. Individuals like you saying that, "my contribution is meaningless" rather than taking personal responsibility are precisely the problem.

 

[tkotom]

No, the majority of our CO2 emissions are from our reliance on fossil fuels for electric power, followed by transport and agriculture.
Only the production of aluminium would severely shift the amount if it was calculated on the basis of consumption rather than production (but then we'd be hit with our own consumption figures for all our imports).
In terms of electricity consumption, manufacturing use has been in steady decline and was overtaken by residential and commerce and services in 2012. Mining and manufacturing still figure heavily in total energy consumption, but transportation is by far the largest sector there (39% compared to 11% for residential consumption).

It's the classic example of the tragedy of the commons. Individuals like you saying that, "my contribution is meaningless" rather than taking personal responsibility are precisely the problem.

lol the link you posted does in no way confirm what you’re saying. It simply states that stationary power accounts for half of emissions and therefore insinuates that somehow the emissions per person must be high via a simplified reduction. Australia is a county which is able to function at a high level and have a positive global impact without contributing substantially to harmful greenhouse effects.

Per capita is arbitrary. How much deeper do you want to magnify it? Per capita rural. Per capita city. Per capita rural farmer. Per capita rural small acreage. Per capita hipster in the city.

Per capita argument is irrelevant. Australia is barely a speck on global emissions as a whole. You can’t chastise individual Australians when you have no empirical data to suggest that each person is somehow majorly responsible.

The sad part about rabid, anti Australian climate loons is that they are completely and shamelessly sackless when it comes to condemning countries which actually cause a fuck tonne of emissions (and who deliberately skew their data) like Qatar, Saudi, Indonesia, etc. and other countries which are openly destroying the world like China and India.

Somehow Australia is responsible for the hurricanes, not India and Brazil with their 500,000,000 cattle or China with their astronomical levels of perpetual gaseous poison.

By the time you get enough support to go after the evil per capita Australians, Bangladesh and India would have multiplied their population by 100 Australia’s and caused enough pollution to blot our the sun for 1000 years and cook us all to death.

 

[Ruprecht]

lol the link you posted does in no way confirm what you’re saying. It simply states that stationary power accounts for half of emissions and therefore insinuates that somehow the emissions per person must be high via a simplified reduction. Australia is a county which is able to function at a high level and have a positive global impact without contributing substantially to harmful greenhouse effects.

Per capita is arbitrary. How much deeper do you want to magnify it? Per capita rural. Per capita city. Per capita rural farmer. Per capita rural small acreage. Per capita hipster in the city.

Per capita argument is irrelevant. Australia is barely a speck on global emissions as a whole. You can’t chastise individual Australians when you have no empirical data to suggest that each person is somehow majorly responsible.

The sad part about rabid, anti Australian climate loons is that they are completely and shamelessly sackless when it comes to condemning countries which actually cause a fuck tonne of emissions (and who deliberately skew their data) like Qatar, Saudi, Indonesia, etc. and other countries which are openly destroying the world like China and India.

Somehow Australia is responsible for the hurricanes, not India and Brazil with their 500,000,000 cattle or China with their astronomical levels of perpetual gaseous poison.

By the time you get enough support to go after the evil per capita Australians, Bangladesh and India would have multiplied their population by 100 Australia’s and caused enough pollution to blot our the sun for 1000 years and cook us all to death.

I posted 3 links, they describe the total situation of Australia's energy consumption and CO2 output by sector.
As per the figures I quoted, you were simply wrong in asserting our CO2 output is mostly related to mining and manufacturing. It's mostly related to transport and the production of electricity. In terms of electricity, Residential use and Commercial and Services overtook Manufacturing in 2012 and has continued to increase while manufacturing decreased. That's local consumption.

We aren't responsible for India or Brazil, and our responsibility as far as China goes mostly relates to us selling them coal.

Of course the per capita argument isn't irrelevant, how else would you divide up consumption? Some arbitrary boundaries with no regard to the number of people doing the consuming?

You seem to have a problem with taking responsibility. Energy policy in Australia isn't "going after the evil Australians", it's taking responsibility for our own actions.

 

[tkotom]

I posted 3 links, they describe the total situation of Australia's energy consumption and CO2 output by sector.
As per the figures I quoted, you were simply wrong in asserting our CO2 output is mostly related to mining and manufacturing.

We aren't responsible for India or Brazil, and our responsibility as far as China goes mostly relates to us selling them coal.

Of course the per capita argument isn't irrelevant, how else would you divide up consumption? Some arbitrary boundaries with no regard to the number of people doing the consuming?

You seem to have a problem with taking responsibility. Energy policy in Australia isn't "going after the evil Australians", it's taking responsibility for our own actions.

Except the world is all interconnected. Australia isn’t in an Australian bubble. Starving Australians with bullshit emission taxes (or some other restriction or punitive measure) is criminal shit, especially when Chinese and Indian people are not being subjected to such dictatorial and communist theft of hard earned dollars for something that is not measurable. At least income tax kind of makes sense.

You’re just trying to strangle Australians who actually contribute a tiny percentage of emissions while contributing a shit tonne to the global economy (and billions in aid to all of the most destructive countries in the world) and you’re letting astronomically poisonous countries like China and India get away with murder.

When you have the balls to ask for a tax on China and India and Brazil and Russia then try to shit on all of the Australian, because it isn’t the Australians that are killing the reef. It’s the Chinese and the Russians and the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.

 

[pinger]

Looks like we are destined for another fucking labour government again

 

[Ruprecht]

Except the world is all interconnected. Australia isn’t in an Australian bubble. Starving Australians with bullshit emission taxes is criminal shit, especially when Chinese and Indian people are not being subjected to such dictatorial and communist theft of hard earned dollars for something that is not measurable. At least income tax kind of makes sense.

Australians definitely aren't starving. Literally or figuratively.
Yes, the world is interconnected. That's why the situation is a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons, and relies on every group taking responsibility. Just because our actions won't succeed without Indian and Chinese action, doesn't excuse us of responsibility.

You’re just trying to strangle Australians who actually contribute a tiny percentage of emissions while contributing a shit tonne to the global economy (and billions in aid to all of the most destructive countries in the world) and you’re letting astronomically poisonous countries like China and India get away with murder.

When you have the balls to ask for a tax on China and India and Brazil and Russia then try to shit on all of the Australian, because it isn’t the Australians that are killing the reef. It’s the Chinese and the Russians and the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.

Like I've said. You're excusing your own responsibilities by pointing the finger.
Who will "tax" China, India, Brazil or Russia? We can apply sanctions and economic pressure (again, only an effective measure if the nations work together), but ultimately we are responsible for our own political decisions and actions first.
We are the 54th most populous country and the 16th biggest producer of CO2.
As I've pointed out, that's not because of our productivity, it's because of our consumption.
We aren't pulling our weight in this regard.
In fact dragging our feet in regards to this decision was why the energy industry approached the Turnbull government for action. A basis for stability and to plan for the future.

 

[Madmick]

The PM isn’t the executive head, he is the head of the legislative. Big difference.

The last thing Australia needs is a “president”.

So is the second-to-last thing 5 fucking figureheads in 5 years?

 

[Andy Capp]

How to fix the flaw at the heart of Australian politics
By Dave Sharma | 22 August 2018

Peter Dutton and Malcolm Turnbull earlier this year.​

I recently returned from four years serving as Australia’s ambassador to Israel, a country known for its fractious politics and unstable, coalition governments. During my term, I dealt with only one Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. But I served four different Australian prime ministers - Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull.

To lose one prime minister may be misfortune. To lose two may indicate carelessness. But to cycle through four prime ministers in four years, and be on the brink of yet another defenestration of a sitting prime minister, suggests something more profound - a structural flaw at the heart of Australian politics.

There are several easy targets to blame for Australia’s new-found fondness for political instability.

There is the relentless and unforgiving poll-driven media cycle and its class of political journalists: demanding a response to every bad poll, forever fuelling leadership stories, and predisposed to analysing politics as a football match - calling the game without any reference to the substance, merit or contest of competing ideas.

There are the politicians themselves: increasingly careerists for whom politics is a profession, not a public service, and whose instinct for self-preservation readily overrides broader appeals to party unity, party discipline, and the expressed will of the electorate.

Kevin Rudd cries at Parliament House after his removal as prime minister.​

Then there is the voting public: impatient, ephemeral in its loyalty, readily bored with politics, and demanding of the next big talent.

Finally, there are the institutions themselves. A prime minister who is elected by his or her party, not by the public; a system where the party room can depose a prime minister, without reference to the electorate; and a political term that is short (three years) and not fixed in duration.

Each of these factors bears some of the blame for the situation we find ourselves in today. Most are out of our control: the product of changing times and changing norms. But one element stands out as susceptible to reform, and that is the political system itself.

Australia’s current constitutional system did not proceed from any grand design. Constitutional conventions were held to draft it prior to Federation, but on the whole our system of government largely imported the Westminster model. There were not the ferocious arguments about how to construct good government in a republic and avoid a tyranny of the majority, such as those which characterised the debate during the development and adoption of the United States Constitution, for instance. Australia’s constitutional evolution was incremental, rather than revolutionary.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard​

Part of the problem is that the prime minister of the day holds no direct mandate from the Australian public. The public sees the prime minister as its own property, voted into office by it at the election. Hence the outrage when a sitting prime minister is dumped without having faced or lost an election (now the normal means of a transfer of power in Australian politics). But our constitutional system means that the prime minister is simply first among equals, the holder of an office which is bestowed - and can be removed - by his or her political party.

Part of the problem is that the term of the federal parliament is both short and not fixed in duration. With only three-year terms, Australia is almost unique amongst liberal democracies. In Canada and Germany they have four-year fixed terms. The UK has five-year fixed terms, as does France. But in Australia, an election is always just around the corner, meaning members of parliament are forever focused on their electoral survival - and less so on the national interest. The steady drip of opinion polls and the relentless media cycle exacerbates the short-termism.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott​

Successfully amending the constitution in Australia is no small feat, and it should not be undertaken lightly. But our politicians, by proving themselves so willing to depose sitting prime ministers without reference to the electorate, have shattered a norm on which much of the stability of the Australian political system rested. Perhaps it is up to us - the voting public - to repair this damage.

Neither a directly elected head of government nor longer parliamentary terms - both options which warrant serious examination - are unusual for liberal democracies. The challenge for Australia would be to conduct this debate above the realm of politics-as-usual. A blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission, involving former senior politicians, from across Australia’s political spectrum - and at both state and federal level - would be a start. While at it, they could address some other anachronisms of our present constitution, including the dual-citizenship prohibitions, the lack of Indigenous Australian recognition, and imbalanced federal-state relations.

If our political system is broke - and it surely is - then we should be prepared to fix it.

https://amp.smh.com.au/politics/fed...t-of-australian-politics-20180822-p4zyyl.html

Unfortunately, since it will take the will of the elected officials there seems little incentive to change.

 

[Andy Capp]

lol the link you posted does in no way confirm what you’re saying. It simply states that stationary power accounts for half of emissions and therefore insinuates that somehow the emissions per person must be high via a simplified reduction. Australia is a county which is able to function at a high level and have a positive global impact without contributing substantially to harmful greenhouse effects.

Per capita is arbitrary. How much deeper do you want to magnify it? Per capita rural. Per capita city. Per capita rural farmer. Per capita rural small acreage. Per capita hipster in the city.

Per capita argument is irrelevant. Australia is barely a speck on global emissions as a whole. You can’t chastise individual Australians when you have no empirical data to suggest that each person is somehow majorly responsible.

The sad part about rabid, anti Australian climate loons is that they are completely and shamelessly sackless when it comes to condemning countries which actually cause a fuck tonne of emissions (and who deliberately skew their data) like Qatar, Saudi, Indonesia, etc. and other countries which are openly destroying the world like China and India.

Somehow Australia is responsible for the hurricanes, not India and Brazil with their 500,000,000 cattle or China with their astronomical levels of perpetual gaseous poison.

By the time you get enough support to go after the evil per capita Australians, Bangladesh and India would have multiplied their population by 100 Australia’s and caused enough pollution to blot our the sun for 1000 years and cook us all to death.

If it makes you feel any better, pretty soon, no one will be able to live in a lot of southern India and Bangladesh because it will be too hot for human habitation. Of course, that also means a population larger than Canada's will be displaced and needing a new place to live. Good luck.

 

[Andy Capp]

Except the world is all interconnected.

That's the source of my problem with Donald Trump.

@Madmick @Ruprecht what do you think are the chances of the politicians finding the political will to fix this? Because, one of the reports posted above makes clear it would be pretty easy to fix, if they can be made to take action.

 

[flashNsmash]

WAIT WAIT WAIT

dutton couldn't name an AC/DC song???

 

[Supereem]

So is the second-to-last thing 5 fucking figureheads in 5 years?

Better than having your God-Emperor Trump.

 

[Arkain2K]

WAIT WAIT WAIT

dutton couldn't name an AC/DC song???

Turnbull couldn't either.

Definitely grounds for dismissal from their Australian public office.