Australia Dumps Howard

[Diuretic]

Fair dinkum indeed. Not once in 218 years has America ever elected a socialist President. Rudd, in 2003: "I am an old fashioned christian socialist." and regarding the free market of goods and labor: (workers will not be left on the) "dung heap of the market." Talk about populist pandering. Then in 2006 while lurching to the right and groveling for potential votes: "I am not a socialist, I have never been a socialist, and never will be a socialist." So, fair dinkum, just what is Rudd? Soon Australians will find out what Rudd's real attitude is toward the free market policy that has increased the Australian GDP more than 42 percent in the past 11 years.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20929284-421,00.html

The Australian Labor Party, of which Rudd is the leader and PM-elect, is not a socialist party. The socialisation clause was dropped from the party's objectives, I think when Bill Hayden was leader, that would take it back to the late 1970s.

Rudd has explained his "Christian socialist" views by pointing out that "Christian socialism" was a particular movement.

Christian socialism was a 19th-century movement applying the principles of Christianity to modern industrial life. Later, the term was more generally applied to attempts to combine the general aims of socialism with the principles of Christianity. James Keir Hardie, British Labor leader in the early 20th century and one of Mr Rudd's heroes, subscribed to Christian socialism.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/natio...ialist/2006/12/14/1165685825218.html?from=rss

As for free markets - the US subsidises its farmers, we don't. Don't go pointing fingers OneD, you may get yourself in the eye

We'll be fine under Rudd's Labor government, I can feel the light in our society now

 

[Diuretic]

Hey diuretic, is this racist crap an example of the Left in Australia? Is this who needs a "fair go?" The stupidity of the above Chinese comments is incandescent. I speak both Mandarin and Shanghanese. Does that make me a communist? Secretary Rice speaks Russian. Does that make her a totalitarian like Putin? Rudd's non-English language ability has zero impact on what Americans think of him. And we hope is daughter is happy.

That's not racist crap, oneD, that's Chips taking the piss

We just got rid of the racist rodent. The Left in Australia is rightfully anti-racist. Personally I love living in a multicultural society, I couldn't think of anything worse than living in a monocultural society.

 

[onedomino]

The Australian Labor Party, of which Rudd is the leader and PM-elect, is not a socialist party. The socialisation clause was dropped from the party's objectives, I think when Bill Hayden was leader, that would take it back to the late 1970s.

That simply is not true. The constitution of the Australian Labor party specifically states that it is a democratic socialist party.

"The Australian Labor Party is a democratic socialist party and has the objective of the democratic socialisation of industry, production,
distribution and exchange..." See page one of the 2004 Constitution of the ALP: http://www.alp.org.au/download/now/national_constitution_2004.pdf.

If the ALP actually behaves as its constitution specifies, Australia would not be a place where either publically traded or privately owned business would choose to invest.

And you know very well that no market is totally free. But the freedom of the US labor market has helped to make it the strongest economy on Earth. The labor market reforms introduced by the Howard Administration helped make Australia one of the best performing economies in the world over the last decade. And to say, as you did earlier in this thread, that such had anything to do with the ALP is false, fair dinkum. The ALP has been out of power for 11 years. Hawke floated the currency, but it was the subsequent commitment to free markets and liberalized labor relations that gave investors confidence in Australia and drove its economy to 42 percent growth over the past decade. Now the ALP seeks to roll back labor reform. If the ALP actually tries to enact the principles of it's constitution it will reproduce the stagnant economies generated by social democrats in Western Europe. Good luck, you'll need it.

 

[Chips Rafferty]

Fair dinkum indeed. Not once in 218 years has America ever elected a socialist President. Rudd, in 2003: "I am an old fashioned christian socialist." and regarding the free market of goods and labor: (workers will not be left on the) "dung heap of the market." Talk about populist pandering. Then in 2006 while lurching to the right and groveling for potential votes: "I am not a socialist, I have never been a socialist, and never will be a socialist." So, fair dinkum, just what is Rudd? Soon Australians will find out what Rudd's real attitude is toward the free market policy that has increased the Australian GDP more than 42 percent in the past 11 years.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20929284-421,00.html

Fair dinkum indeed. Not once in 218 years has America ever elected a socialist President.

This is like saying, "Not once in 68 years did Soviet Russia ever elect a Christian Premier.

In an effective one party Christian theocracy such as yours, I find your statement most unsurprising. Even if America gets the chance to sack Farmer George and put Republican Lite in power, it will still be governed by a Christian theocracy.

 

[Toro]

As for free markets - the US subsidises its farmers, we don't. Don't go pointing fingers OneD, you may get yourself in the eye

That's very true. America is one of the biggest farmer socialist countries in the world.

 

[Diuretic]

That simply is not true. The constitution of the Australian Labor party specifically states that it is a democratic socialist party.

"The Australian Labor Party is a democratic socialist party and has the objective of the democratic socialisation of industry, production,
distribution and exchange..." See page one of the 2004 Constitution of the ALP: http://www.alp.org.au/download/now/national_constitution_2004.pdf.

If the ALP actually behaves as its constitution specifies, Australia would not be a place where either publically traded or privately owned business would choose to invest.

And you know very well that no market is totally free. But the freedom of the US labor market has helped to make it the strongest economy on Earth. The labor market reforms introduced by the Howard Administration helped make Australia one of the best performing economies in the world over the last decade. And to say, as you did earlier in this thread, that such had anything to do with the ALP is false, fair dinkum. The ALP has been out of power for 11 years. Hawke floated the currency, but it was the subsequent commitment to free markets and liberalized labor relations that gave investors confidence in Australia and drove its economy to 42 percent growth over the past decade. Now the ALP seeks to roll back labor reform. If the ALP actually tries to enact the principles of it's constitution it will reproduce the stagnant economies generated by social democrats in Western Europe. Good luck, you'll need it.

I'll stand corrected on my assertion that the socialisation clause was dropped. You've effectively jogged my memory and now I recall that there was an addition to the constitution of the party instead of a removal of the clause, so I was wrong. The addition is here in bold:

The Australian Labor Party is a democratic socialist party and has the objective of the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields.

I now remember the bit of debate that swirled around at that time. The purists objected to the addendum, the realists/pragmatists insisted on it and obviously won. This gave the party the ability to stop pursuing a socialist economy for its own sake, it looked at socialisation with purpose, ie to the extent necessary, etc.

The US economy is the strongest on Earth not because of the dreadful way you treat your working people, it's the strongest on Earth because of its massive resources and its ability to exploit those resources. Yes, your workers have been exploited as well which means that while some have become incredibly wealthy from the natural resources which gave you a powerful economy, many haven't. You have, in my eyes, an unfair society, but that's for you to affirm or change.

The industrial relations legislation brought in by the Howard government had absolutely nothing to do with the state of the economy today. They were vicious and oppressive and absolutely unnecessary, a triump of ideology over common sense. The labour market was remade in a contemporary form by the Hawke Labor government and the Australian Council of Trades Unions. We began the move from centralised wage fixation to European-style collective bargaining as a result of work done by the ACTU, in it's policy formulation "Australia Reconstructed" -

http://www.australianreview.net/journal/v7/n1/scott.pdf

Howard tried to destroy collective bargaining, he went even further than the US model in that sense.

Howard surfed in on the reforms built by Hawke and Keating and the Australian labour movement. In weeks to come the damage that he has done to our economy will be clear. I'm tipping that underneath the paint the rust will be showing.

Labor will wind back the most vicious of Howard's policies on industrial relations but they will not take us back to before the Hawke/ACTU reforms because those reforms were self-evidently undertaken by the ALP and the labour movement in the full knowledge that in a gobalised economy the old model would not work and would have made us a basket case like Argentina was. The predictions by the right wing Jeremiahs who are wandering around looking like stunned mullets will simply not come true.

 

[onedomino]

That's very true. America is one of the biggest farmer socialist countries in the world.

That unsubstantiated statement is absolutely false. The EU subsidizes food production at a rate 300 percent higher than the US. China's food production is under complete state control. Japanese food production is subsidized at a higher level than the US. http://impact.typepad.com/articles/2005/03/the_wheat_subsi.html. Furthermore, US food exports face an average tariff barrier of 62 percent, while the US food tariff is about 12 percent. Lower that trade barriers and the US will reduce its farm production subsidizes. http://www.freetrade.org/node/618

Anyway, the discussion between diuretic and I is about the socialist policies of the ALP, not farm subsidizes. But thanks for the false deflection.

 

[onedomino]

Yes, your workers have been exploited as well which means that while some have become incredibly wealthy from the natural resources which gave you a powerful economy, many haven't. You have, in my eyes, an unfair society, but that's for you to affirm or change.

That is false and one wonders where you hear or read such propaganda. The US worker is so oppressed that America has the second highest household income and purchasing power in the world behind Switzerland (which hardly counts). And Australia after suffering so horribly under the yoke of the Howard Administration has the seventh highest income and purchasing power per household in the world. Some have become incredibly wealthy? Good for them. Want more wealth in the US? You are completely free to work for it. Employer has eliminated your job to adapt to economic conditions? Get a new one. Not good enough? Get more or different education with the help of government programs that were, no doubt, designed to exploit workers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living_in_the_United_States

 

[Chips Rafferty]

That is false and one wonders where you hear or read such propaganda. The US worker is so oppressed that America has the second highest household income and purchasing power in the world behind Switzerland (which hardly counts). And Australia after suffering so horribly under the yoke of the Howard Administration has the seventh highest income and purchasing power per household in the world. Some have become incredibly wealthy? Good for them. Want more wealth in the US? You are completely free to work for it. Employer has eliminated your job to adapt to economic conditions? Get a new one. Not good enough? Get more or different education with the help of government programs that were, no doubt, designed to exploit workers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living_in_the_United_States

It is hardly surprising, that in your monochromatic American mind, alleged "atheistic socialism" is s-o-o reprehensible as to be de work of De Debil!

Though not an outright socialist myself, I would much prefer to live under it than the fascistic flow-up, Christian inculcated corporate socialism, that your infinitesimally small, easily programmable mind imagines is democracy.

The sooner we wipe out all Bible believin' bastards, and their abysmally gullible Golems in this world, the better!

 

[Toro]

That unsubstantiated statement is absolutely false. The EU subsidizes food production at a rate 300 percent higher than the US. China's food production is under complete state control. Japanese food production is subsidized at a higher level than the US. http://impact.typepad.com/articles/2005/03/the_wheat_subsi.html. Furthermore, US food exports face an average tariff barrier of 62 percent, while the US food tariff is about 12 percent. Lower that trade barriers and the US will reduce its farm production subsidizes. http://www.freetrade.org/node/618

Anyway, the discussion between diuretic and I is about the socialist policies of the ALP, not farm subsidizes. But thanks for the false deflection.

Hey, thanks for the link.

 

[Diuretic]

That is false and one wonders where you hear or read such propaganda. The US worker is so oppressed that America has the second highest household income and purchasing power in the world behind Switzerland (which hardly counts). And Australia after suffering so horribly under the yoke of the Howard Administration has the seventh highest income and purchasing power per household in the world. Some have become incredibly wealthy? Good for them. Want more wealth in the US? You are completely free to work for it. Employer has eliminated your job to adapt to economic conditions? Get a new one. Not good enough? Get more or different education with the help of government programs that were, no doubt, designed to exploit workers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living_in_the_United_States

This is starting to sound like a propagand war. Let's get it sorted out.

The US worker has 14 days leave a year. The standard in Australia is 28 plus the usual holidays. People who work shifts/ weekends and public holidays get paid for it. Waiting staff don't need to live on tips (just as well, because we don't generally tip anyone). You see it's about perspective. Whereas in the US you have the basic standards for workers in the FLSA you still have "at will" employment states. That's what Howard did to us, he got rid of the laws protecting some employees from unfair dismissal. Good if you're the boss, not good if you're the employee.

Howard's government undid all the training programmes that were in place under the Keating government, so best of luck trying to get retrained if you get retrenched. Just another reason we booted him out.

We don't want to be a mini-me to the US, we want our country to reflect our cultural values. Howard tried to re-make us in to the US and we don't want that. So, he's gone. Anyone else tries it, they're gone too.

 

[Chips Rafferty]

This is starting to sound like a propagand war. Let's get it sorted out.

The US worker has 14 days leave a year. The standard in Australia is 28 plus the usual holidays. People who work shifts/ weekends and public holidays get paid for it. Waiting staff don't need to live on tips (just as well, because we don't generally tip anyone). You see it's about perspective. Whereas in the US you have the basic standards for workers in the FLSA you still have "at will" employment states. That's what Howard did to us, he got rid of the laws protecting some employees from unfair dismissal. Good if you're the boss, not good if you're the employee.

Howard's government undid all the training programmes that were in place under the Keating government, so best of luck trying to get retrained if you get retrenched. Just another reason we booted him out.

We don't want to be a mini-me to the US, we want our country to reflect our cultural values. Howard tried to re-make us in to the US and we don't want that. So, he's gone. Anyone else tries it, they're gone too.

Dee, Dee, Dee! Tovarich, why does a decent, Christ hating Communist, like you, insist on trying to talk sense to a mindless organ grinder’s monkey, such as this biddable imbecile?

Any subhuman cretin, who thinks the puerile level of American political non-thought ought to be the prototype for the entire world, has to be a prime candidate for oxygen-less high altitude survival experiments!

Can you imagine Australians even contemplating voting for that infantile fascist simpleton, The Presidrunk - who personifies the political and academic crème de la crème in The Reich - for one moment? Can you imagine such woefully inferior scholastic stuff even making it to a local council election in, say, Oodnadatta?

Can you imagine for one moment a ANY Jack S. Phogboundish American pollie surviving the intellectual cut and thrust of our political system?

Then why do you bother trying to talk sense into such a monumental meat mauler and centerfold starcher, that admires these morons, and wishes he was brainy enough to be one??

 

[Diuretic]

Jeez Chips, don't knock Oodna, it's not a bad little town (although I must admit to having had a cross word with a few of the inhabitants on a few occasions).

It's just interesting to exchange ideas and views. It just seems to me that how a country was established and developed beds down its basic values. In the adversity that was European settlement in Australia real mateship (not Howard's bloodless version) and the sense of a fair go (aka "justice") were very important and so they are now and they're a couple of the underlying cultural reasons Howard is out on his arse.

Btw how's Fran going in McEwen? Is the seat named after Black Jack? I should check I suppose but I'm election-sited out

 

[Diuretic]

Interesting article by Shaun Carney in The Age:

Excerpt:

The most important outcome of this election — more important than John Howard losing his seat and the powerful blow dealt to the morale of everyone involved on the non-Labor side of politics — is the electorate's repudiation of WorkChoices. It might be that WorkChoices could have got the assent of the people if they had been allowed to discuss and absorb it before it was passed into law. We'll never know, because Howard never gave the legislation or the Australian public that chance.

Instead, he unleashed it six months after being re-elected in late 2004, shortly before the Coalition took control of the Senate. Let's be clear: WorkChoices was the ideological apotheosis of the political careers of John Howard and Peter Costello. It was the purest expression of the free market ideology that took hold in one part of the Liberal Party in the early 1980s and it was the policy area that was the most fiercely contested within the organisation for much of that decade.

The desire to deregulate industrial relations was what first brought Howard and Costello together. And it is what has brought their lives as politicians undone. The Rudd government will obliterate the central tenets of WorkChoices, which were to hand all employers the ability to dictate wages and conditions, and the gradual destruction of the right to bargain collectively. The repercussions of this on the Liberal Party will be profound.

For all the talk of Howard's deep understanding of the average Australian, he never understood the fidelity of the bulk of the Australian public to the practice of fair treatment at work — something that's continued to underpin society's understanding of itself even in an age of rampant technological advancement, greater affluence and higher levels of individualism. What seems to have blinded him to this was the political benefit an assault on unionism offered; kill the unions and the Labor Party could be reduced to a rump.

The smashing of orderly wage-setting processes and the role of the unions has been a central organising principle of the two key figures of the Liberal Party, Howard and Costello, for more than 20 years. Now that WorkChoices is headed for the knackery and the two men who acted as the wellsprings for it are headed for the exits, the Liberal Party nationally must formulate a new set of key ideas. This is not to suggest that industrial relations will or should become a sort of no-go zone for the Liberals. Too much is at stake for the interests that will continue to group themselves around the party. And in any event as the pace of economic change picks up, which it was bound to do whichever side won on Saturday, the need for regular IR reforms will continue.

But the harsh lesson for the party is that the great polemical and ideological adventure that began with the ascendancy of the neo-liberals and the formation of bodies such as the pressure group the H. R. Nicholls Society in the '80s has drawn to a close. That particular dream is over; it's exhausted. The vision of an Australian worker who, as Tony Abbott proposed during the campaign, accepts that if the boss doesn't like him for no good reason he should just draw stumps and get a job somewhere else, comes from a fantasy to which far too many Liberal MPs have clung for way too long.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opini...1195975866024.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

 

[RetiredGySgt]

Jeez Chips, don't knock Oodna, it's not a bad little town (although I must admit to having had a cross word with a few of the inhabitants on a few occasions).

It's just interesting to exchange ideas and views. It just seems to me that how a country was established and developed beds down its basic values. In the adversity that was European settlement in Australia real mateship (not Howard's bloodless version) and the sense of a fair go (aka "justice") were very important and so they are now and they're a couple of the underlying cultural reasons Howard is out on his arse.

Btw how's Fran going in McEwen? Is the seat named after Black Jack? I should check I suppose but I'm election-sited out

Yup Howard was SOO bad he is the second longest serving leader in your Country's History. so BAD it took 11 YEARS to KICK him out.In a Parlimentary system with no fixed elections that sure was a feat of renowned importance. 11 YEARS. Your absolutely right, he was so bad you blokes kept him around for OVER a DECADE. 4 of those years while in a war I might add, that you claim everyone hated. A war that the new leader is not abandoning at all.

 

[Diuretic]

Yup Howard was SOO bad he is the second longest serving leader in your Country's History. so BAD it took 11 YEARS to KICK him out.In a Parlimentary system with no fixed elections that sure was a feat of renowned importance. 11 YEARS. Your absolutely right, he was so bad you blokes kept him around for OVER a DECADE. 4 of those years while in a war I might add, that you claim everyone hated. A war that the new leader is not abandoning at all.

The federal government has three year terms. An analysis of every election Howard won during his government's period will show that the electorate voted for him but held its collective nose. In the 2004 election the Opposition Leader blew it completely, a more reasonable, less nutty Opposition leader may have won it.

His hubris eventually did him in. He has effectively destroyed his party, they're falling apart right now. They have to rebuild themselves from the ashes of Howard's pyromaniac acts, they're already talking about repudiating everything he stood for. They have to, they have absolutely no hope of getting into government if they hold onto the policies that we have trampled underfoot.

Rudd, our new PM, is going to take all but a very small number of our troops out of Iraq. Afghanistan is okay and strangely enough that accords with what most of us think.

As i said before, after 11 long years we've regained our values and we'll never lose them again. The neo-liberal experiment is over forever.

 

[Chips Rafferty]

Jeez Chips, don't knock Oodna, it's not a bad little town (although I must admit to having had a cross word with a few of the inhabitants on a few occasions).

It's just interesting to exchange ideas and views. It just seems to me that how a country was established and developed beds down its basic values. In the adversity that was European settlement in Australia real mateship (not Howard's bloodless version) and the sense of a fair go (aka "justice") were very important and so they are now and they're a couple of the underlying cultural reasons Howard is out on his arse.

Btw how's Fran going in McEwen? Is the seat named after Black Jack? I should check I suppose but I'm election-sited out

Thank Christ we got the convicts and they got the Chrsitians. eh?

Last I heard the filthy old whore was relying on postal votes to keep her fat well fucked arse in office.

Yes, McEwen WAS named after Black Jack.