Cairns Forum | Ross Parisi - Blog

Queensland Health loose with money while waiting lists lengthen

2012-03-06T08:20:00.002+10:00

Dietician is overpaid $30,000 but Queensland Health says keep it

by: Des Houghton
From: The Courier-Mail
March 06, 2012 12:00AM

QUEENSLAND Health has overpaid Judith Wilcox by more than $30,000. Source: The Courier-Mail

QUEENSLAND Health has overpaid Judith Wilcox by more than $30,000 - and they don't want it back.

"I've been begging them to take it but they won't," said Mrs Wilcox, 68, a dietician, who retired in September last year.

"They told me the computer refuses to take it back, and no, they won't override it because it would make the system vulnerable to fraud. Mrs Wilcox said she complained so often she was appointed a case manager.But the case manager tells her there is nothing she can do.
The bizarre episode highlights the ongoing embarrassment for the State Government in the payroll debacle that left thousands of nurses and doctors without pay in the past two years. The repair bill has so far topped $219 million but Queensland Health acknowledges it is still not perfect.

She believes she may have been paid her final salary and long-service leave twice."I'm a little bit stressed about it to be frank. The state has so much debt it is absurd."In December last year Queensland Health said it was owed $75 million in overpayments. The department said yesterday a case manager would discuss options with Mrs Wilcox."Queensland Health has not sought to recover any overpayment at this stage as the former employee has asked for an audit of her entitlements against her pay, and one is being conducted," said Lyn Rowland, acting deputy Director-General of Human Resource Services.
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Bob Katter wants ballot papers shredded

2012-03-06T08:09:00.000+10:00

Judge describes Bob Katter ballot move as bizarre

AAP Tuesday, March 6, 2012

A Supreme Court judge has described Katter's Australian Party's legal bid to have millions of Queensland ballot papers shredded as "bizarre".

The Queensland Electoral Commission has printed "The Australian Party" on ballot papers for the March 24 state election.

Katter’s Australian Party wants an injunction to have the papers reprinted, a move that could delay the election, because it fears the name "Obscures" the identity of its candidates.

The party founded by federal MP Bob Katter originally wanted to be called The Australian Party, but the Australian Electoral Commission knocked it back because it could be mistaken for an already registered name or abbreviation. The party registered as Katter’s Australian Party and applied for The Australian Party to be recognised as its abbreviated name, the Queensland Supreme Court has heard.

The Queensland Electoral Commission approved the request in January. Now the party wants ballot papers shredded and reprinted with its full name, except on ballots that have already been cast, its lawyer, Sandy Street, told the court. "It has a real potential consequence of masking and obscuring the identity of the party’s endorsed candidates," Mr Street said.

Justice Roslyn Atkinson said the confusion was of the party’s "Own making". "I’m not quite sure how a party that does something on its own volition fully armed with all the information now says what we did is wrong and is seeking a court order," Justice Atkinson said. She later added: "The idea that what your client sought was so bad it should have been refused … And now the electoral papers should be shredded is a rather bizarre argument."

Mr Street also argued the word "The" in the abbreviated form was incorrect. He said it should be just "Australian Party". Mr Street said the electoral commission should have asked if the party wanted the abbreviated name on the ballot papers. But Justice Atkinson said the Queensland Electoral Act made it clear abbreviations could be used. Mr Katter did not appear in court yesterday, but the party’s state leader, Aidan McLindon, was present. The case continues.

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Queensland ALP campaign rocked by allegations of mates deals

2012-03-06T01:02:00.000+10:00

Forestry Plantations Queensland sale complaint alleges secret lobby link to ALP

by: Steven Wardill
From: The Courier-Mail
March 06, 2012 12:00AM

From left, Andrew Fraser, Mike Kaiser,

and Jim Elder

The letter also claims Mr Elder had contact with Treasurer Andrew Fraser in the lead-up to the sale and Mr Elder received a "success fee" paid over a period of time.

The allegations conflict with comments made by Mr Fraser in May 2010 who told Parliament that the government was unaware of any involvement of Mr Elder.

Mr Elder yesterday said he did have contact with the Government about the FPQ sale "in the early days" before the formal bid process began. However, he said he then worked for Hancock as a "strategic adviser" which meant he was not required to list Hancock as a client on the lobbyist register.

"The CMC can come and see me mate but we didn't lobby on behalf of (Hancock)," Mr Elder said.In a statement, a spokesman for Mr Fraser said the treasurer "never met, spoke or otherwise dealt with Mr Elder at all during the transaction". "Nor was he aware of any involvement of Mr Elder in any capacity," he said. Mr Fraser's spokesman said the sale of FPQ's 35,000ha of freehold land as a 99-year-lease was overseen at all times by a probity adviser.

Integrity Commissioner David Solomon confirmed he had received the complaint and that Mr Elder had never listed Hancock as a client. "However, I don't have any investigative powers that would allow me to check the allegations any further," he said.

A spokeswoman for the CMC also confirmed receiving the complaint. She said the watchdog was assessing the whistleblower's allegations before deciding whether to launch a formal investigation.
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Far Northern families feel pinch of high living costs

2012-03-05T07:05:00.001+10:00

Monday, March 5, 2012

© The Cairns Post

What’s in it for us: The Mueller family of Mt Sheridan, (from left) Ellouise, 4, Markus, Aaliyah, 10, Tiarnie, and Isabella, 2, are hoping major political parties can deliver some cost of living cuts. Picture: TOM LEE

FAMILIES feeling the strain of rising living costs could vote with their wallets this state election as the major parties release family-friendly policies in a bid to sway undecided voters.

Cost of living was revealed as a key concern in The Cairns Post’s Your Voice survey, with 88.2 per cent of respondents saying they were watching their expenses more than at the same time last year.

And addressing that worry was a key focus of the official LNP campaign launch yesterday with the party vowing to save Queenslanders up to $330 a year by freezing family car registration for a first term and reforming electricity and water pricing.

For local families like the Muellers of Mt Sheridan, the election is a chance to influence the direction of government policies that could directly affect their financial wellbeing. Mum Tiarnie balances the weekly budget for her family, including husband Markus and three daughters aged 10, 4 and 2, and says it is getting tougher to be able to do the things they want.

"It’s a very tight budget making ends meet with even just the cost of food expenses and living,’’ Mrs Mueller said. Mr Mueller said he was keeping an eye on the election campaigns but his vote had been swayed by the 20 years of Labor that he claimed had "eroded so many of our basic rights".

"It is getting tougher for families to get by, we’ve got three kids and two of them are at a sporting age," he said."You want to encourage them to get involved in sport and recreation but there’s an endless list of expenses that come along,’’ he said.

Of the 1100 people who responded to The Cairns Post and The Weekend Post’s Your Voice survey, 88.2 per cent revealed they were watching expenses more than at the same time last year. Of those, 53.3 per cent blamed the increased cost of living, while 16.5 per cent attributed it to a decrease in their household income.

The survey reflected a growing unease in the community with almost 70 per cent of people "very concerned" about the rising cost of fuel, and 78 per cent citing increases in electricity charges. Expenditures such as eating out, entertainment, clothing, gifts and consumption of water and electricity have all come under fire, with between 70 and 84 per cent of respondents identifying these as areas to cut back on.

And they have good reason. The May 2011 Queensland Council of Social Services Cost of Living Report showed that over the past five years, locals have faced massive increases in everyday costs. While the council’s December figures show a slight improvement, by about $30 a week for a working family, low income earners are still unable to afford a basic standard of living.

The Salvation Army sees first-hand the impact that financial strain can have on families and is recommending that people look closely to see which party is offering the best deal.

David Twivey, north Queensland public relations officer, said the Salvos had seen a significant jump in people seeking to access their financial counselling service since November.

He said that while "big picture" policies were important, it "certainly doesn’t hurt to look at a political party that can actually help people in their own lives". "If it’s an extra tax benefit, or assistance with power, or some state government support that’s going to help the average Joe Blow cope with their life, then that would be well worthwhile," he said.

Labor made its own family friendly pledge yesterday, Premier Anna Bligh announcing that every toddler in Queensland would be eligible for free swimming lessons under a new Labor government.

Ms Bligh said her $77.4 million Water Babies plan would offer 10 free lessons for up to 400,000 Queensland children aged under four over the next three years, with lessons starting by July 1."With this policy we want to give every child a chance at those good foundations in the water,’’ she said.

"We also want to ease the cost of living on young families and encourage further swimming lessons for children." Labor has also promised to make childcare more affordable by delivering free or low-cost kindergarten services to low-income families and expanding support for children with disabilities.

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The Monthly | Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan - Essay

2012-03-02T09:23:00.002+10:00

The 0.01 Per Cent: The Rising Influence of Vested Interests in Australia

Wayne Swan

The Monthly | The Monthly Essays | March 2012

Image Caption: Billionaire activists: Clive Palmer, Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart.
© Philip Norrish/Newspix; Greg Wood/AAP; Tony McDonough/AAP

The rising influence of vested interests is threatening Australia’s egalitarian social contract.

A decade ago, as I waited for my order outside a Maroochydore fish and chip shop, a tall, barefoot young man strolled past wearing a T-shirt that read: ‘Greed is good. Trample the weak. Hurdle the dead.’ Those brutal lines seemed to encapsulate what was then a growing sense of unease in Australia. The world of my Queensland childhood, governed by its implicit assumptions of equality and mutual care, was being driven from sight by a combination of ruthless individualism and unquestioning materialism. Looking out for number one was not only tolerated but encouraged by a government whose agenda, particularly in industrial relations, seemed very far from the social contract, based on a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work with a decent social safety net for the vulnerable, that had served our nation so well for so long.

Today, when a would-be US president, Mitt Romney, is wealthier than 99.9975% of his fellow Americans, and wealthier than the last eight presidents combined, there’s a global conversation raging about the rich, the poor, the gap between them, and the role of vested interests in the significant widening of that gap in advanced economies over the past three decades.

This is a debate Australia too must be part of. We’ve always prided ourselves on being a nation that’s more equal than most – a place where, if you work hard, you can create a better life for yourself and your family. Our egalitarian spirit is the product of our history and our national character, as well as the institutions and safeguards built up over more than a century. This spirit informed our stimulus response to the global financial crisis, and meant we avoided the kinds of immense social dislocation that occurred elsewhere in the developed world.

But Australia’s fair go is today under threat from a new source. To be blunt, the rising power of vested interests is undermining our equality and threatening our democracy. We see this most obviously in the ferocious and highly misleading campaigns waged in recent years against resource taxation reforms and the pricing of carbon pollution. The infamous billionaires’ protest against the mining tax would have been laughed out of town in the Australia I grew up in, and yet it received a wide and favourable reception two years ago. A handful of vested interests that have pocketed a disproportionate share of the nation’s economic success now feel they have a right to shape Australia’s future to satisfy their own self-interest.

So I write this essay to make a simple point: if we don’t grow together economically, our community will grow apart. Of course, rewards should be proportionate to effort, recognising the hard work and entrepreneurship that create wealth and employment. We should not seek pure equality, but we do need to combat the types of disparities in opportunity that damage our society. That’s why providing more people with a good education and a decent job with fair rights and conditions should be an economic as well as a moral goal.

President Obama described rising income inequality as the defining issue of our time. It has always been one of the defining issues of my political life. It was the theme of a book that I wrote back in 2005, Postcode, and like most Labor activists, tackling rising inequality was one of the tasks that called me into politics. It remains today the horizon towards which we always march.

It was also the abiding purpose of those big-hearted and articulate working people and assorted radicals who created Labor in the nineteenth century. Many of them brought with them to Australia a direct experience of the social tumult of the Industrial Revolution in Britain and Europe. One of our earliest leaders, Andrew Fisher, literally worked down the pit as a child. It was an era in which technological advances were increasing average wealth dramatically but giving the benefits overwhelmingly to a fortunate few. Instead of a mutual obligation between rich and poor, this era bred a winner-takes-all mentality that left many even worse off than they had been before industrialisation. To be working class at that time usually meant a life of grinding poverty, which often ended in an early death. There were few provisions for sickness or old age, leaving many with no option but to endure the harsh conditions.

Many of those who journeyed to Australia came here precisely to escape this sort of life.
Here they saw a chance to create a more equal society in which some of the wealth actually made it to the bottom. And they did it by vesting the role of ameliorating poverty not in an aristocracy but in a democratic state. This is the best way to understand the greatest Australian achievements of the last two centuries: a living wage, a welfare system, public health care, mass home ownership, and accessible technical and higher education.

With the American presidential election processes now underway we’re hearing one term a lot: ‘middle-class society’. Americans still aspire to it even as it slips further from their grasp. ‘Middle-class society’ is a better label for Australia than for the United States, where the middle class is shrinking and economic mobility is under threat.

While America’s rich have left so many of their fellow citizens light years behind them, rising incomes in Australia have been spread far more evenly across the community. Incomes for the poorest 10% in Australia have grown at more than double the average for developed economies in recent decades, while growth in the US and the UK has been substantially below average, according to the OECD.

As well as sharing the gains of economic growth, Australia has done better at preserving economic mobility – the idea that success can be determined by effort and enterprise and not simply where you were born or who your parents are. Across 17 OECD economies, Australians in the bottom 20% of income earners are the equal third most likely to lift themselves out of that situation within three years.

Australian lifestyles bear out what these statistics are saying. Though many still find it hard to make ends meet, working Australians are more likely to holiday overseas, drive a recent model car and live in a bigger home than their parents’ generation. This generalised affluence is now shaping our national culture. Today the tradie has more traction in our national psyche than the celebrity because he or she symbolises the idea of economic self-determination and affluence that half a century ago was obtainable only by a fortunate few. By world standards, and particularly by the standards of a generation ago, the Australian working class is now mostly middle class.

Having said that, we’re not an economically equal society by any means. There are sizeable pockets of considerable social disadvantage to be found in every state, especially among Indigenous communities and in older industrial and regional areas. There is a lot left to do to tackle poverty and disadvantage; we have not won a decisive victory.

To help maintain our egalitarianism, policies need to do some heavy lifting. We’ve seen a quiet revolution underway in recent years in our tax and transfer system to ensure the relief goes to those who need it most. Australia’s plans to means-test the private health insurance rebate and treble the tax-free threshold are just the latest examples of the sort of progressive reform that is now next to impossible in the US because of political gridlock. Australia’s egalitarian social contract is also underpinned by a fair and flexible industrial relations system. Over the past century, labour laws have developed which balance the interests of workers and employers, providing both incentives for hard work and protections against exploitation. It was the erosion of these laws, under the guise of WorkChoices, that the Australian people so thoroughly rejected at the 2007 election.

A look at the US shows how well our policies are doing by comparison. Shortly after World War II, Australia and the US were roughly equal in the percentage of total income going to the top 1%. Today the gap between the rich and the rest in the US is around twice the size of ours: in 2008, the top 1% in the US received around 17.7% of all income, while the figure is just 8.6% in Australia.

If President Obama is right about inequality being the defining issue of our time, then it follows that here in Australia we should be doing all we can to maintain our sense of egalitarian fairness. This is what one of the most eloquent defenders of social democracy, historian and philosopher Tony Judt, was getting at when he wrote just before his death in 2010, paralysed from the neck down by the degenerative Lou Gehrig’s disease, that the type of society of generalised middle-class affluence that social democracy had managed to create was worth fighting hard for to retain.

Today, surveying the wreckage of the worst global downturn since the Great Depression, many leading thinkers argue the ideal of the middle-class society is under mortal threat in the West, even as a growing middle class is lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty in the East. One of the most compelling contributions to the debate comes from Francis Fukuyama, who wrote in Foreign Affairs about the dangers of the erosion of the middle-class social base in the developed world. “From the days of Aristotle,” writes Fukuyama, “thinkers have believed that stable democracy rests on a broad middle class and that societies with extremes of wealth and poverty are susceptible either to oligarchic domination or populist revolution.” These are the extremes, but, as he goes on to argue, we are already witnessing “some very troubling economic and social trends … which threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood.”

These trends are all too evident in a recently released and widely discussed report by the OECD, ‘Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising’. It found that starting in the 1970s and through the 1980s, coinciding with the Reagan–Thatcher revolutions, inequality in the West has widened considerably. Across the developed world, the top is accelerating away from the middle much faster than the middle is moving away from the bottom. The catch cry of Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park and the Occupy movement, ‘We are the 99%’, has shone a spotlight on the top 1%. Between 1979 and 2007 in the US, the top 1% saw their after-tax incomes rise 275%, while the middle two thirds saw their after-tax incomes increase by less than 40%.

Investment income is a strong driver of this concentrated privilege, with Forbes finding the top 0.1% net over half of all capital gains in the US. Even as this group’s share of the pie has rapidly increased, their tax rates have been in decline for five decades. This sort of unfairness can’t go on. Statistics like these have fanned public condemnation of the far-right, ‘you’re-on-your-own’ school of economics responsible. Some have argued that it was the reincarnation of these policies in Britain that led to violent riots in London last year. The Archbishop of Canterbury observed many of those involved were people who felt they had nothing to lose in a society where, increasingly, the winners take all.

What makes the increasing inequality in countries like the US and UK so much worse is that basic pay levels have stagnated. Not surprisingly, the beneficiaries have set out to defend and hang on to their gains. In the US in particular this inequality has become self-reinforcing, as immense personal and corporate wealth has created seemingly unstoppable lobbying power which aims to head off any effort to impose reasonable levels of regulation and taxation.

This lobbying effort contributed directly to the worldwide financial collapse of four years ago, from which the world economy has not yet recovered. Some, it seems, never learn. For instance, all remaining Republican candidates have pledged if elected to repeal the Dodd–Frank Act which imposed more and better regulation on the financial sector in response to the 2008 Wall Street collapse. So let’s understand what’s at stake: allowing vested interests to distort the shape of economic growth for their own narrow advantage is not only bad for our democracy and our community, it is bad for our economy.

Thankfully, other voices are calling loudly for change. The chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, Alan Krueger, has warned that the US has “reached the point that inequality in incomes is causing an unhealthy division in opportunities, and is a threat to our economic growth”. Prior to its Davos meeting earlier this year, the World Economic Forum put severe income disparity at the top of its list of global risks over the next ten years. According to the WEF, risks posed by income inequalities or major systemic financial collapse have this year eclipsed climate change.

Similarly, a Pew Research Center survey found that friction between rich and poor in the US is now a greater source of social tension than the issues of race and immigration. Concern about conflict between rich and poor is now higher than it was in 2009, which tells a powerful story about how the financial disaster that began in 2008 continues to shape American life.

I was heartened that the champion of the free market, the Financial Times, recently took up the debate in its ‘Capitalism in Crisis’ series, editorialising that “public confidence in shareholder capitalism can only be restored if owners recognise this responsibility [to society]”. As part of this excellent series, John Plender warned that the excessive greed of those at the top of the economy, most notably those in the finance sector, is now causing a crisis of legitimacy that is eroding business’s social licence and undermining support for open trade. He cites a recent book by economist Stewart Lansley to show that, since 2007, while average households have experienced a “long and deep squeeze”, high finance has become “a cash-cow for a global super-rich elite”. John Maynard Keynes, Plender reminds us, pointed out that the legitimacy of capitalism rests on the existence of an implicit social contract between the rich and the rest. Rampant money-making of the sort witnessed today is dissolving that contract before our very eyes.

Elsewhere in the series, Philip Stephens has written that “in a time of austerity, the gulf between the 1% and the 99% puts a question mark over the legitimacy of the market system”. He quotes a recent poll that shows Americans’ support for free enterprise has fallen dramatically in just ten years, from 80% to 60%. This is worrying because, despite its faults, the market system is still the best mechanism for generating prosperity for more people. We can’t afford to let it be undermined by the excessive greed of a wildly irresponsible few.

As I have mentioned, the idea that the economy exists to serve society was for generations one of the foundational and legitimising pillars of capitalism. Central to this threat is the rising power of vested interests. As President Obama has pointed out, well-funded lobby groups give “an outsized voice to the few” by “selling out our democracy to the highest bidder”. They are not, however, limited to Washington. Australian vested interests too are gathering force.

In the last couple of years, Australia has seen the emergence of our own distributional coalitions willing to use their considerable wealth to oppose good public policy and economic reforms designed to benefit the majority. The combination of industry deep pockets, conservative political support, biased editorial policy and shock-jock ranting has been mobilised in an attempt to protect vested interest. It’s reflected in how the Coalition under Tony Abbott has recently radicalised itself into an Australian version of the Tea Party, more than willing to kneecap Australia’s three-decade reform project for cheap political points.

There are many Australians of great wealth who make important and considered contributions to the national debate. I always welcome that involvement in the discussion of public policy whether I agree with them or not. What characterises the vested interests that I’m concerned about is how they misrepresent their self-interest as the national interest. There has been a perceptible shift in this country in recent years, and it is sadly very much in the American direction of stronger and stronger influence being wielded by a smaller and smaller minority of vested interests. Crucially, much of our media seems more and more inclined to accept that growing influence.

I know that 99% of businesspeople want the best for Australia, and that most people want us to remain the nation of the fair go. I talk to business owners from coast to coast and am constantly impressed by their forward-looking and can-do natures. For every Andrew Forrest who wails about high company taxes and then admits to not paying any, there are a hundred Australian businesspeople who held on to their employees and worked with government to keep the doors of Australian business open during the GFC. Despite the howling of a small minority, the vast bulk of the resources industry is in the cart for more efficient profits-based resource taxation which serves to strengthen our entire economy. The vast majority of our miners accept that they have a social obligation to pay their fair share of tax on the resources Australians own.

But again, it’s that tiny 1%, or even 0.1%, who are trying to drown out the others, who are blind to the national interest, and who pour their considerable personal fortunes into advertising, armies of lobbyists, dodgy modelling and corporate and commercial manoeuvring designed to influence editorial decisions.

The latest example of this is the foray by Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, into Fairfax Media, reportedly in an attempt to wield greater influence on public opinion and further her commercial interests at a time when the overwhelming economic consensus is that it’s critical to use the economic weight of the resources boom to strengthen the entire economy. Without a blush, her friend and fellow media owner John Singleton let the cat out of the bag when he told the Sydney Morning Herald that he and Rinehart had been “able to overtly and covertly attack governments … because we have people employed by us like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones and Ray Hadley who agree with [our] thinking”.

I fear Australia’s extraordinary success has never been in more jeopardy than right now because of the rising power of vested interests. This poison has infected our politics and is seeping into our economy. Though these vested interests have not yet prevailed, every day their demands get louder. Politicians have a choice: between exploiting divisions by promoting fear and appealing to the sense of fairness and decency that is the foundation of our middle-class society; between standing up for workers and kneeling down at the feet of the Gina Rineharts and the Clive Palmers.

Australia’s future in the Asian Century will rely on retaining a strong, united, middle-class society. We will need a nation which calls on everyone’s skills; which is tolerant not resentful; which recognises the need for public investment in skills, infrastructure and education; and which continues to extend a social licence to the market so Australia’s flair for entrepreneurship, innovation and free trade can continue to create more wealth for all of us.
Instead of capitulating to the demands of the vested interests, and allowing the benefits to amass disproportionately to them, we have a chance to bend the extraordinary shift in the global economy from West to East to the advantage of all Australians. This is neither the fierce pro-market capitalism that got us into a global financial fix, nor is it anti-market socialist ideology. It’s simply the best way to keep growing Australia’s economic pie so ultimately we all end up better off. Ensuring the social contract does not erode is vital if we want to avoid a hollowed-out capitalism assured of its own collapse.

To me, the most significant question in politics when I started out in the late ’70s, when I wrote Postcode, and when I go to work tomorrow, is what we use our prosperity for. It’s not just about putting dollars in people’s pockets, but about building a better society; a society that creates wealth and spreads opportunity, a society that lifts up the worst-off and gives everyone a decent shot at a decent life.

When we were confronted with the biggest economic downturn in 75 years, our egalitarian values underpinned our response. Our stimulus package was designed to protect jobs and business. Our unemployment rate is now around half that of Europe and our economy is 7% larger than it was before the GFC, while other developed economies have yet to make up the ground they lost.

We have some big challenges ahead of us, like lifting productivity and managing the effects of the mining boom, the impact of climate change and the stresses of an economy in transition. As part of addressing these economic challenges, we must fight a pitched battle against the influence of vested interests that seek to shape public policy to their own excessive benefit and at the expense of our middle-class society.

Our country cannot afford to let them win out over the broader community. There is simply too much at stake. Australia walks tall in the world for the strength of our economy and our egalitarianism. We can show the way in our politics as well, by ensuring that the voices of the majority are not drowned out by the interests of a well-funded, noisy handful. Success for us will require not the growth of inequality and a shrinking middle class, but shrinking inequality and a growing middle class. This is the heritage and the heartbeat of the Australian Labor Party. This is what I’ve spent my career striving to protect and promote. It is the only way forward if we are to ensure the great mass of good-hearted Australians are winners in the Asian Century, and not just a fortunate few.

The Deputy Prime Minister and Treasurer thanks friends and colleagues for assistance with this piece.

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Flood-proof Bruce Highway 'absurd'?

2012-03-02T07:11:00.002+10:00

Michael Serenc

Friday, March 2, 2012

Rough road: RACQ has launched a campaign to demand at least a $1 billion investment over the next 10 years to upgrade the Bruce Highway.

Politicans have made many promises to Far Northerners over the years to flood-proof and upgrade the Bruce Highway.

But now, the language has changed with both Labor and the LNP, along with the Department of Transport and Main Roads admitting the national link between Cairns and Brisbane will never be flood-proof.

"Any talk of flood-proofing is absurd, because Queensland’s natural disasters and floodplains are very difficult to counter," Labor’s MP for Mulgrave Curtis Pitt said yesterday. "Our plan is to make sure we have as many overtaking lanes as flood immune as possible. "We need to look at those hot spots and do our very best."

The LNP’s candidate for Mulgrave Robyn Quick refused to guarantee the highway could be permanently flood-proofed."No one is ever going to completely flood-proof the highway from beginning to end, but what we will do is identify those areas where we can re-align the highway to avoid some of those really bad areas," she said. "Our objective would be that nothing would be under water for longer than 24 hours."

As it stands, Labor is sticking to its multi-million dollar Bruce Highway Upgrade Strategy, while the LNP would develop a 10-year Bruce Highway Crisis Action Plan within the first six months of forming government. The department labelled the idea of flood-proofing any road as long and complex as the Bruce Highway "extraordinarily difficult".

Improving flood immunity between Cairns and Townsville will reduce the frequency and duration of road closures caused by flooding," a department spokesperson said. The spokesperson added it’s "aiming to achieve an annual average time of closure of no more than 10 hours and a maximum closure of 48 hours".

A hotly-debated issue in the Far North, the Bruce Highway was again in the spotlight this week after the RACQ demanded at least a $1 billion investment over the next 10 years to upgrade the vital link. The campaign comes in the middle of state election with both Labor and the LNP vying to convince voters that they have a workable solution.

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Mick Borzi makes a stand as political clouds gather

2012-03-02T06:57:00.002+10:00

Devolution referendum finds support from Tableland Regional Council

Tony Stickley

Friday, March 2, 2012

Support: Former Mareeba Shire mayor Mick Borzi said there's plenty of support for a referendum on devolution.

The proof of support for a referendum on devolution from the Tableland Regional Council was now clear, former Mareeba Shire mayor Mick Borzi said yesterday.

More than 600 people packed into Mareeba's International Club to discuss a range of issues affecting the town. "We called for a vote for a referendum to de-amalgamate," Mr Borzi said. "There was only one vote against."

Mr Borzi said there might have been two or three abstentions but essentially the voting was 600 to one. He said before Mareeba Shire amalgamated with Atherton, Herberton and Eacham shires four years ago, a poll showed 86 per cent of locals opposed the move.

Mr Borzi said people outlined "frustrations" including developers having to wait long to progress projects and people having communication difficulties. "I will now write to the heads of the political parties and to the Government telling them about the meeting and the outcome and see what happens," Mr Borzi said.

He said it would be a "very courageous" Government that rejected outright a call for a request for a vote on de-amalgamation. Mr Borzi said the cost of de-amalgamating would be $2.3 million, but he expected the Government to pay. "It was forced upon us by the State Government so the people should not have to pay for it…the Government should," he said.

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Julia Gillard has no idea about veracity

2012-03-02T02:04:00.000+10:00

Transcript of doorstop interview, Canberra

WED 29 FEBRUARY 2012

JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, are you considering a new ban on live cattle exports to Indonesia following Lateline last night?

PM: Minister Ludwig is addressing this issue. We’ve obviously worked hard on standards for live animal exports and worked hard on the inspecting of them as well.
So Minister Ludwig will be dealing with the details.

JOURNALIST: Can you clarify the Bob Carr situation, was he offered a job?

PM: The story that’s on the front page of The Australian newspaper today is completely untrue.

JOURNALIST: Were you overruled though?

PM: I’ve just said – completely untrue.

JOURNALIST: In any way?

PM: I’ve just said – completely untrue and let me make this very clear: of course my door is open to talk to people as I work my way through the reshuffle, but the decisions are mine and I’ll make them.

JOURNALIST: What do you make about the sexist remarks about VC winner Ben Roberts-Smith?

PM: Sorry?

JOURNALIST: Someone on The Circle has made some sexist, disrespectful remarks about the-

PM: -I don’t know anything about that, I’m afraid.

http://www.pm.gov.au/press-office/transcript-doorstop-interview-canberra-5

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Julia Gillard 'accident prone' on the ropes again

2012-03-02T01:05:00.000+10:00

Julie Bishop checkmates Julia Gillard in credibility gap

by: Tom Dusevic, National chief reporter
From: The Australian
March 02, 2012 12:00AM

It's open season on Julia Gillard's character, with the opposition trying to wound her credibility through repetition, regurgitation and alliteration.

Parliament has become the house of nasty, not nice, in the wake of the Carr wreck. Julie Bishop successfully showed yesterday she had mastered her seashells and seashore by reprising a cutting line by Laurie Oakes: the Prime Minister was "silly and slippery and slimy and shifty".

The Deputy Opposition Leader took her cudgel from the doors of Parliament House to question time and revelled in the weapon's versatility. "The pattern of behaviour that is emerging borders on the pathological," Bishop said of Gillard, as she sought to suspend normal programming so the PM could be called upon to explain the circumstances of the "botched attempt" to get Bob Carr to Canberra as foreign minister.

"The PM has turned denying the undeniable into an art form," she said. "The PM, when confronted with indisputable facts, manufactures a version of events that invariably turns out to be the opposite of what is true." And on and on it went, from Gillard's East Timor flap, to the dudding of Andrew Wilkie, the Australia Day riot and betrayal of Kevin Rudd.

Peter Slipper asked Bishop to withdraw a remark only once, which seemed an arbitrary call, given the multiple ways Bishop was allowed to suggest her opponent was a liar. Although it was not a censure motion, it sounded awfully like the "slag and bag" the Speaker is hoping to outlaw. Bishop argued she was simply asking Gillard "to explain why she seeks to construct versions of events when the truth will do". "Members will recall the Prime Minister telling us that she was a prize winner in Bible studies," she said in climax. "Perhaps she might remember Matthew 12:37: 'By your words you will be justified; by your words you will be condemned'."

The motion was lost 73-68.
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Julia Gillard could not lie straight in bed!

2012-03-02T00:51:00.001+10:00

Julia Gillard admits talks to lure Bob Carr

by: Matthew Franklin and Sid Maher
From: The Australian
March 02, 2012 12:00A

Julia Gillard has confirmed she held talks with former NSW premier Bob Carr over drafting him to serve in her government, sparking fresh opposition attacks on her honesty and political judgment.

The Prime Minister has backed away from her claim that a report in The Australian on Wednesday revealing her dealings with Mr Carr was "completely untrue", after being challenged by the opposition to repeat her claim in parliament.

The backdown came yesterday as Labor MPs continued to express concern about Ms Gillard's handling of a cabinet reshuffle sparked by the retirement of former foreign minister and beaten leadership candidate Kevin Rudd. The Prime Minister will announce the reshuffle today and is expected to hand Defence Minister Stephen Smith the foreign affairs portfolio and promote former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon back to the frontbench. Sydney MP David Bradbury is tipped for promotion to the ministry, while Housing Minister Robert McClelland is expected to be sacked.
Speculation last night centred on Mr Smith taking an amalgamated foreign affairs and trade portfolio, leaving current Trade Minister Craig Emerson clear to take Defence. On Wednesday, as supporters celebrated Ms Gillard's victory over Mr Rudd in Monday's leadership spill, The Australian revealed that Labor had attempted to draft Mr Carr to become foreign minister. The report said the offer to Mr Carr was withdrawn amid complaints from serving ministers - including Mr Smith, who saw himself as a candidate for the plum post. On Wednesday, when Ms Gillard was asked about The Australian's report, she declared it was "completely untrue" - despite the fact that Mr Carr had confirmed to The Australian in Sydney earlier that day that an offer of the foreign ministry had been made and withdrawn.

Mr Carr later released a statement clarifying his position by saying he had held talks with Labor officials but stating: "Prime Minister Gillard had definitely not made any offer about the Foreign Affairs Ministry nor had anyone on her behalf." But The Australian has confirmed with several senior ministers an offer was made to Mr Carr. Yesterday, as the opposition warned that misleading parliament was "a sackable offence", Ms Gillard was asked whether she stood by her attack on The Australian's reporting of the matter. The Prime Minister said: "Yes, I would repeat that statement, Mr Speaker, and I repeat the words that I said at the doorstop yesterday about this matter. I was asked about the matters in The Australian, I said they were untrue. If the Leader of the Opposition is so interested, yes, I did have a conversation with Bob Carr."

Later Ms Gillard said: "I am the only person who can make offers in relation to ministries."
The opposition seized on the admission to accuse Ms Gillard of dishonesty, noting that she had omitted the word "completely" from her claim that the report of the Carr affair was wrong. "The Prime Minister has turned denying the undeniable into an artform," said Liberal Party deputy leader Julie Bishop. There was a pattern of behaviour emerging that "borders on the pathological". Opposition frontbencher Christopher Pyne joined the attack, declaring Ms Gillard had used "weasel words" rather than repeat her claims about The Australian in parliament.

There was growing anger last night among Labor MPs, including ministers, who asked how Ms Gillard could turn a brilliant victory over Mr Rudd into a "PR disaster" over her cabinet reshuffle. "She's put a lot of her colleagues in uncomfortable positions," one source said. "She has mishandled the media and made herself look shifty again." Another MP said it was clear Ms Gillard had angered colleagues, particularly Mr Smith. "If he gets the foreign ministry it will look like she was bullied into it." the MP said. "But if he doesn't it will look like he was passed over. This is a man who has supported her leadership despite the media writing he could be a third candidate for her job."

The comments came amid continuing speculation about the cabinet reshuffle. It is expected Mr Smith will take on foreign affairs, the portfolio he vacated after the 2010 election to make way for Mr Rudd. In expectation of Mr Smith's move, senior Defence officials have been pushing the Prime Minister to appoint Industry and Climate Change Minister Greg Combet to Mr Smith's current portfolio of defence. Mr Combet impressed Defence officials as minister for defence personnel, materiel and science in the Rudd government, and would bring that experience to the portfolio. But it would be difficult to move him, given the government's carbon tax package is due to take effect from July 1. Mr Fitzgibbon is expected to return to the ministry, but not in the portfolio he left in 2009, and his fellow NSW Right colleague, western Sydney MP David Bradbury, is tipped for promotion.

Sources last night suggested that acting against all five ministers who supported Kevin Rudd in the leadership ballot would be difficult for the Prime Minister. The mining industry has pleaded for Resources Minister Martin Ferguson to be retained, as has the car industry for Manufacturing Minister Kim Carr. While Mr McClelland's position looks extremely shaky, Chris Bowen has the strong support of the NSW Right, and the Prime Minister has already assured Infrastructure Minister and leader of government business Anthony Albanese of his job. Monday's resignation of NSW senator Mark Arbib has added to arguments to keep Senator Carr
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Nonviolent Resistance in the Arab Spring: The Critical Role of Military-Opposition Alliances

2012-03-01T19:55:00.002+10:00

Sharon Erickson Nepstad

Article first published online: 4 NOV 2011

DOI: 10.1111/j.1662-6370.2011.02043.x

In recent decades, we have seen an increase in “people power” movements that use civil resistance to challenge authoritarian regimes. From the 1986 ousting of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos to the recent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, these movements have demonstrated that citizens are able to overturn long-standing dictatorships without violence. While these movements struggle for regime change, they are distinct from the “classic revolutions” of the past, both in terms of their character and strategy. As Timothy Garton Ash put it, classic revolutions are “violent, utopian, professedly class-based, and characterized by a progressive radicalization, culminating in terror” while unarmed revolutions are “nonviolent, anti-utopian, based not on a single class but on broad social coalitions, and characterized by the application of mass social pressure—‘people power’—to bring the current powerholders to negotiate” (2009: 19).

Yet how do nonviolent movements succeed when they rise up against highly repressive rulers? Why are some movements victorious while others are defeated? In this article, I analyze the dynamics of nonviolent resistance in three Arab Spring cases: Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria. While several factors shaped these movements’ abilities to usher in regime change, I focus specifically on the role of the armed forces. I argue that the military’s decision to remain loyal to the regime or to side with civil resisters heavily shaped the outcomes of these Arab Spring uprisings.

Non-violent Civil Resistance

Although nonviolent revolutionary movements are qualitatively different from violent revolutions, they generally arise from the same conditions. Such movements erupt when there are widespread grievances against the state and elites shift their allegiance from the regime to the opposition. Moreover, certain events – such as a brutal crackdown or an assassination of an opposition figure – often transforms longstanding grievances into moral outrage, which may make citizens willing to act. But indignation is not enough. There must also be a culture of resistance that situates this anger within a broader ideological critique of the regime. Moreover, there must be mobilizing organizations that can coordinate and direct the rebellion (Goldstone 2001, 2009).

Once underway, nonviolent revolutions display different dynamics than violent revolutions. The most obvious difference is that they rely on divergent tactics and strategies. The strategy of nonviolent resistance has been well articulated by political theorist Gene Sharp (1973, 2010). Drawing on the ideas of Thoreau and Gandhi, Sharp argues that no government can exist without the obedience and consent of the governed. Therefore, even ruthless dictators can be overthrown nonviolently if an oppressed population withholds cooperation, making it impossible for a regime to function.

How do civil resisters accomplish this? According to Sharp, citizens have six types of power that they can withdraw from a regime. First, citizens can refuse to grant legitimacy to a ruler. This may happen, for example, when a population rejects the results of a fraudulent election, making it difficult for the proclaimed ruler to gain credibility at home and abroad. Second, people can contest ideologies of obedience that encourage submission to the government. This may occur as religious leaders interpret scripture to support resistance, as Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did during the U.S. civil rights movement, or as opposition leaders recast nationalism to encourage rebellion.

Third, citizens can refuse to cooperate with a regime, as the Danish did when Nazi forces ordered them to turn over all Jewish residents. Fourth, citizens can withdraw their material resources from a regime by refusing to pay taxes or purchase government goods and services. Fifth, a population can undermine a regime’s ability to function by withholding its skills and labor through a general strike. Sixth, citizens can subvert a ruler’s sanctioning power – either by undermining the loyalty of the state security forces and encouraging mutiny or by refusing to be deterred by punishments and repression. If a civil resistance movement can systematically withdraw these various forms of support, then the regime can no longer operate and will collapse.

But which of these strategic actions matter most for nonviolent movements? Two recent studies conclude that a key factor is whether regimes’ sanctioning power is depleted through security force defections (Stephan and Chenoweth 2008; Nepstad 2011). While defections have no measureable effect on the outcome of armed struggles, Chenoweth and Stephan found that nonviolent revolutionary movements are 46 times more likely to succeed when security force defections occur. Why? When police are unwilling to attack or arrest protesters, and when mutinous soldiers no longer protect rulers, even the most tyrannical leaders are left powerless and vulnerable.

The Role of the Military in the Arab Spring Uprisings

Building upon the nonviolence literature’s emphasis on security force defections, I examine the role this factor played in several Arab Spring uprisings. Specifically, I emphasize how the military’s decision to side with civil resisters or the state has shaped the struggle in the following three nations: 1) Tunisia and 2) Egypt, where authoritarian rulers were successful deposed; and 3) Syria, where some defections have occurred but the regime has managed to retain power.

Tunisia

The Tunisian uprising emerged because citizens suffered from an ailing economy, a corrupt regime, and lack of political freedoms. Yet there had been little resistance to President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali during his 23-year-rule. What transformed popular discontent into resistance was an atrocity that occurred on December 17, 2010. On this date, a young vegetable vendor had his cart confiscated by police since he did not have a license to operate. When he was unable to recover the cart or appeal to officials, he set himself on fire. A few days later, a couple others committed suicide in response to the bleak economic situation. Protests erupted and escalated, expanding to several cities. By early January 2011, people from various socioeconomic backgrounds joined the protests. Thousands of lawyers and teachers went on strike. In response to the unrest, the regime imposed a curfew but few protesters complied with it. Despite widespread strikes and demonstrations, Ben Ali did not resign. However, when Army Chief Rachid Ammar refused orders to shoot civilians, Ben Ali realized that he had no means of enforcing his rule and thus he fled to Saudia Arabia on January 14 (Kirkpatrick 2011).

Egypt

Inspired by the success of the Tunisian movement, Egyptian civil resisters mobilized in response to deteriorating economic conditions, police brutality, corruption and political repression. Their primary aim, however, was to oust President Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled Egypt for 30 years. Opposition organizers held their first demonstration on January 25, 2011. Widely publicized through social media networks, tens of thousands turned out. The regime responded by blocking the internet and sending out troops. When this failed to stop the demonstrations, Mubarak made several concessions, including a promise to not seek re-election.

Civil resisters were not appeased and protests continued. During this time, the military began siding with the opposition. On January 29, soldiers refused to shoot at civil resisters; a couple days later, the military made a public statement that it would not use force to crush the movement (Black, Shenker, and McGreal 2011). Mubarak tried to retain his dwindling power by making further concessions – such as the replacement of his entire cabinet, the transfer of responsibilities to his Vice President, and a 15 percent increase in state pensions and salaries (McGreal and Tran 2011). It was not enough. Civil resisters wanted Mubarak to leave. When he refused, they launched a labor strike. On February 11, 2011, with several hundred thousand protesters refusing to back down and the military poised to oust him, Mubarak resigned.

Syria

Just as the Egyptian revolt erupted, Syrians began protesting high unemployment rates, declining standards of living, human rights abuses, and nearly 50 years of emergency rule that had severely restricted political freedoms. The Syrian state – which is solely controlled by the Baath Party, headed by President Bashar al-Assad – had kept a lid on protest through its emergency measures.

However, on January 26, a citizen set himself on fire, imitating the immolation that sparked the Tunisian uprising. Subsequently, opposition organizers called upon citizens to attend the “Day of Rage” protest. Over the next weeks, small demonstrations took place but they were quickly crushed by the military. However, by late March 2011, hundreds of thousands protested in cities across Syria. With expanded resistance came expanded repression; the military used tanks and snipers to clear the demonstrations. While President Bashar al-Assad also made concessions, he relied mostly on violence as a tool of control. The result: thousands of civil resisters have been killed since the uprising emerged (Van Dam 2011).

Disturbed by orders to attack unarmed civilians, troops began defecting during the summer of 2011. One base in the northern town of Jisr al-Shughour saw half its soldiers defect (Chulov 2011). What has happened to these soldiers? Some have fled, seeking asylum abroad. Others have been publicly executed by the Syrian state (Owen 2011). And some formed the Free Syrian Army, which aims to overthrow Assad’s rule through an armed struggle (Sly 2011). Yet the overall number of defectors is still quite small, estimated at a few thousand (Oweis 2011; Karam 2011). This is miniscule compared to the 220,000 member Syrian military (Maclean 2011). Because most soldiers have remained loyal to the Assad regime, the uprising has been unable to succeed.

Discussion

In comparing the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria, we see that in all three cases, civil resisters used the standard “weapons” of strategic nonviolence including mass demonstrations, general strikes, non-cooperation, and civil disobedience. But this was not enough. Consistent with other studies of nonviolent revolts (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011; Nepstad 2011), one factor distinguishing the successful movements from the (currently) unsuccessful Syrian case is whether the military as an institution shifted allegiance from the state to the opposition.

In Tunisia and Egypt, long-standing rulers were deposed just days after the armed forces sided with civil resisters. In Syria, the majority of troops have remained loyal, diligently carrying out orders to repress the resistance, and hence the Assad regime has retained power. Yet the situation appears to be shifting: now that some defectors have taken up arms, Syria may be moving toward civil war, as happened in the Libyan struggle against Muammar Gaddafi.

Based on these observations, I propose the following theoretical premises:

1
Nonviolent revolutionary movements that win the support of the regime’s military institution are likely to achieve regime change (e.g. Tunisia, Egypt).
2
Nonviolent revolutionary movements that do not win the support of the regime’s military institution are unlikely to achieve regime change (e.g. Syria).
3
In nonviolent revolutionary struggles, if military personnel are comprised of different ethnic or religious groups that have unequal power relations to the regime, the likelihood that the military as a whole will side with the opposition movement is low (Syria).
4
In nonviolent revolutionary struggles, when military defectors take up armed struggle against the state, the nonviolent aspect of the struggle will dissipate and the nation will likely slide into civil war (Libya and potentially Syria).

I am not suggesting that defections and mutiny are the only significant factors in the outcome of these movements. Clearly, international pressures helped force Ben Ali and Mubarak out of office (Gardener 2011; Ritter, forthcoming in 2013), just as various structural factors contributed to their demise (Goodwin 2011). Moreover, the involvement of the military in these regime change processes can generate new problems as civil resisters work to establish democratic regimes. Thus it is clear that winning over the armed forces is not a panacea that guarantees a happy ending for each nonviolent uprising. Nonetheless, because this factor did play a role in the outcome of the Tunisian, Egyptian and Syrian movements, it merits closer attention.

As we give closer attention to the pivotal role of armed forces in these citizen-based revolutionary movements, one of the main questions that we need to ask is: what leads troops to jump ship? Binnendijk and Marovic (2006) argue that the military is likely to side with an opposition movement when there is a combination of incentives to defect (such as the hope for improved status and material wellbeing under a new regime) and deterrents against carrying out orders to repress (such as global broadcasting of any attacks on civil resisters, which might induce significant political costs to the state). In my own study of nonviolent revolutions in the late 20th century, I proposed that troops may be less reliable and more likely to defect if: a) they share a common ethnic or religious identity with civil resisters but not with regime leaders; b) they know others who are defecting; c) if resisters remain nonviolent, thereby making repression difficult to justify; and d) if troops do not derive any direct benefits from the regime (Nepstad 2011).

Did any of these conditions contribute to mutiny in the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Syrian cases? Current media coverage of Syrian defections indicates that sectarian religious identities may be playing a role. Approximately 11 percent of Syrians are Alawite, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, while an estimated 75 percent are Sunni (Van Dam 2011). Although they are a minority, Alawites hold most political positions and disproportionately fill the ranks of military commanders and security chiefs. In contrast, the military rank-and-file are largely Sunni conscripts. These conscripts are more likely to identify with the mostly Sunni civil resisters rather than with the Alawite-dominated state, which increases their odds of defecting.

Sectarian identities may also explain why the Syrian military as a whole has not jumped ship. The Alawite officers who control the military are unlikely to oppose Assad since their fate is tied to his. If Assad is deposed, Alawite dominance and privilege is likely to be lost, too. Thus the current concern is less about whether the Syrian military will abandon Assad and more about whether the military will split into opposing armed factions (Maclean 2011). If this happens, then Syrians are likely facing a protracted civil war.

The Egyptian case further underscores the premise that the military’s decision of whether to remain loyal to the regime is influenced by what it can potentially gain or lose. In Syria, Alawite officers remain loyal in order to preserve their privilege. In Egypt, military officers may have jumped ship to avoid losing financial assets. Over the past decades, the Egyptian military has not limited its focus to security matters; it has also acquired valuable real estate and numerous industries. By one estimate, the military commands up to 40 percent of the Egyptian economy (Hammer 2011). Before the events of 2011, Egyptian officers expressed concern about President Mubarak’s plan to appoint his son Gamal as his successor. If Gamal took office, many believed that he would implement privatization policies that would dismantle the military’s business holdings. Thus there was a financial incentive for the military to side with civil resisters to force the Mubarak regime out.

We know less about the reasons behind the Tunisian military’s decision to support the revolution. Some speculate that it is because Tunisia’s military is one of the smallest and poorest in the region and, unlike the Syrian military, it is comprised of officers from the entire socio-economic spectrum. Other analysts emphasize that the Tunisian military has an established tradition of being apolitical. That is, the military has been committed to providing stability and security to Tunisian citizens, not supporting a particular political party or agenda (Cook 2011; Kirkpatrick). Thus it appears that the Tunisian military had neither political nor economic interests at stake that would predispose it to uphold Ben Ali’s regime during the uprising.

Conclusion

Further research is needed to fully understand why militaries remain loyal or side with civil resisters during these types of political conflicts. Yet based on the reasons I explore in this article, one might ask if civil resisters have any influence at all on the path the military chooses. Is it merely about what the armed forces have to gain or lose if a regime collapses? Is it only about sectarian identities that may cause individual soldiers to sympathize with protesters?

I argue that civil resisters played a critical role in the following ways. First, it was these activists’ tactics of nonviolent disruption that created national crises, which in turned forced the military to choose sides. Second, the nonviolent discipline that most civil resisters demonstrated increased the likelihood that troops would defect. If resisters had used violence, troops may have accepted the regime’s view that these were radical terrorists. But the fact that most civil resisters were nonviolent made it difficult to justify the use of force. As one Syrian defector stated, he had been told by the regime that they were fighting heavily armed terrorists who were supported by foreign interests.

When he realized that the protesters were unarmed civilians, he felt the regime had deceived him and he could not bring himself to shoot reasonable citizens who had reasonable demands (Chulov 2011). Finally, through their innovative use of technology and social media sources, activists – especially in Egypt – increased the potential political costs that the military would incur if it sided with the regime and violently attacked civil resisters. Since the whole world was watching, this type of crackdown would surely have elicited international condemnation and the potential end to diplomatic relations, trade agreements, and aid. In short, although there were other considerations involved, nonviolent resisters’ actions added new incentives and deterrents that undoubtedly helped the Tunisian and Egyptian militaries decide to support the revolutions.

References

Binnendijk, A. L. and I. Marovic. (2006). Power and Persuasion: Nonviolent Strategies to Influence State Security Forces in Serbia (2000) and Ukraine (2004). Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39(3): 411–429.
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Black, I., J. Shenker, and C. McGreal. (2011). Egypt Set for Mass Protest as Army Rules Out Force. The Guardian, January 31, page 1.
Chulov, M. (2011). Syrian Army Defector Says He Was Told to Shoot Unarmed Protesters. The Guardian, June 27.
Cook, S. A. (2011). The Calculations of Tunisia’s Military. Foreign Policy, 20 January.
Gardener, L. (2011). The Road to Tahrir Square. New York: New Press.
Garton Ash, T. (2009). Velvet Revolutions: The Prospects. New York Review of Books, 3 December.
Goldstone, J. A. (2001). Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory. Annual Review of Political Science 4: 139–187.
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Goldstone, J. A. (2009). Rethinking Revolutions: Integrating Origins, Processes, and Outcomes. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29(1): 18–32.
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Goodwin, J. (2011). Reform and Revolution in the Arab Spring. Unpublished manuscript.
Hammer, J. with A. Ismail. (2011). Egypt: Who Calls the Shots?. The New York Review of Books, July 20.
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Karam, Z. (2011). Syrian Troops Fire at Anti-Regime Protesters. Associated Press, 30 September.
Kirkpatrick, D. D. (2011). Chief of Tunisian Army Pledges Support for the Revolution. The New York Times, January 24.
Maclean, W. (2011). Syrian Army Defections Have Yet to Reach Critical Mass. The Daily Star, Lebanon, 8 September.
McGreal, C. and M. Tran. (2011). Egypt’s New Cabinet Announces 15% Rise in Salaries and Pensions. The Guardian, February 7.
Nepstad, S. E. (2011). Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century. New York: Oxford University Press.
Oweis, K. Y. (2011). Army Storms Rastan as Defections Rise in Syria. The Daily Star, Lebanon, 28 September.
Owen, P. (2011). Syrian Soldiers Executed for Refusing to Target Activists. The Guardian, 9 September.
Ritter, D. Forthcoming in 2013. States and Nonviolent Revolutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sharp, G. (1973). The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Boston: Porter Sargent.
Sharp, G. (2010). From Dictatorship to Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Albert Einstein Institute.
Sly, L. (2011). “Syrian Army Defectors Organize Against Assad. The Seattle Times, 25 September.
Stephan, M. and E. Chenoweth. (2008). “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. International Security 33(1): 7–44.
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Van Dam, N. (2011). The Struggle for Power in Syria: Politics and Society Under Asad and the Ba’th Party. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.

_____________________ | _________________

JCU Cairns Campus | car parking turmoil

2012-03-01T11:15:00.002+10:00

James Cook University Students association and students are up in arms over the decision of the University to remove the free parking in front of Block A4.

It dooes seem obvious that students carparking infrastructure has not keept pace with increases in students numbers. This reflects a lack of proper planning and funding.

The introduction of a permit based parking in front of A4 ( free until this semester ) has created a chaotic parking situation and the purpose of the permit appears to be a revenue raising.

The Student Association has launched a petition to reinstate the free parkingin front of Block A4. If you are frustrated with the new parking arrangements, if you think they create chaos, then why not visit the Association office and sign the petition. It will come down to you. You have the power to say enough is enough.

Below is the Facebook link.

http://www.facebook.com/groups/166170536833580/

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Overkill' of candidate signs in Cairns highlights 'hypocrisy'

2012-02-29T08:15:00.002+10:00

Tarina White

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Speaking volumes: Several signs for Labor candidate Kirsten Lesina line Sheridan St, which has been labelled “overkill” by LNP Cairns candidate Gavin King. Picture: MARC McCORMACK

CAIRNS Labor candidate Kirsten Lesina has been accused of hypocrisy for her volume of posted campaign signs after calling for a limit to be set during her term on council.

Ms Lesina, the former Division 4 councillor for Cairns Regional Council, put forward a motion last September requesting that a limit of 100 signs per candidate be imposed during a state election campaign.

The proposal was defeated by the majority of her former colleagues on the basis that it would be impractical to monitor and enforce the rule and that it could potentially threaten free speech.

Ms Lesina estimated she had about 110 signs posted throughout the city at any one time, noting that about 70 had been torn down."It just highlights the hypocrisy of it," Katter’s Australian Party Cairns rival Darren Hunt said, adding he has about 150 signs erected across the city.

LNP Cairns candidate Gavin King said many of Ms Lesina’s signs were spaced a short distance apart along Sheridan St. and it was "overkill".

Ms Lesina said she was not breaking any election rules by posting as many signs as she wanted wherever she chose.
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Bonneau misconduct claims dismissed

2012-02-28T17:26:00.000+10:00

Daniel Strudwick | Tuesday, February 28, 2012

© The Cairns Post

CLAIMS of misconduct against Cairns councillor Sno Bonneau have been dismissed as "misconceived and lacking in substance".

The state’s Crime and Misconduct Commission and Department of Local Government and Planning have been investigating the allegations against Cr Bonneau for more than a year.

It was alleged in February last year that Cr Bonneau accepted cash donations for his 2008 election campaign and failed to declare a conflict of interest when voting on council matters that affected his donors.

The panel investigating the claims released their decision today, ordering that the allegations be dismissed.

Cr Bonneau has filed a $300,000 defamation suit against the fellow councillor who raised those claims, Cr Rob Pyne.

He says he will not contest the next council election in April, ending his 17-year career in local government.
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Addendum as per Cairns Post 29.02.2012

Cairns councillor Sno Bonneau will end his political career with a clean record after claims of misconduct raised against him by a fellow councillor were dismissed.

The independent panel assessing the claims released its findings yesterday, calling the accusations against Cr Bonneau "misconceived and lacking in substance" after a year-long investigation.

Cr Bonneau will now consider whether to proceed with a $300,000 defamation lawsuit he filed earlier this month against Cr Rob Pyne, who raised the misconduct claims against him.

"I’ve spoken with lawyers today and we’ve decided to let the dust settle for a little bit and then we’ll look at the options," Cr Bonneau told The Cairns Post. "At this stage, it’s certainly on the agenda."

According to court documents, Cr Bonneau would seek damages for stress and embarrassment caused by the accusations over the past year.

In February 2011, Cr Pyne alleged Cr Bonneau accepted cash donations during the last election campaign and then failed to declare a conflict of interest during several council votes that affected his donors.

Those allegations were handed to the Crime and Misconduct Commission and the matter was later passed on to the Department of Local Government and Planning, which released its findings yesterday.

Cr Pyne said he was disappointed that the ruling cleared Cr Bonneau of any wrongdoing.

"My biggest concern is that this was going to be a precedent that would deter people from taking cash donations during elections. It’s not going to be a deterrent now," he said.

Cr Bonneau, who announced this week he would not contest council elections in April, was relieved about retiring with his reputation intact after 17 years on the council.

But he insists councillors should not have to wait a year for claims of misconduct to be resolved.

"Unfortunately, it’s allowed Cr Pyne to keep raising the matter with the media and bring it to people’s attention to cause maximum political damage for the past year," he said
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A revitalised Prime Minister sets her sights on Tony Abbott.

2012-02-28T00:55:00.000+10:00

Prime Minister Julia Gillard vows to move forward from Australian Labor Party in-fighting

From: AdelaideNow
February 28, 2012 12:00AM

Julia Gillard will name at least two new ministers and announce several other changes in the wake of her crushing defeat of Kevin Rudd in their caucus showdown.

Displaying some of the strain of Labor's worst-ever power struggle, a relieved Prime Minister said she had learnt lessons, promising to sharpen her communications style while also vowing to heal a riven party wracked by 12 months of disastrous polling and infighting.
"At times it's been ugly, I understand that," she said, declaring Labor would now focus all its efforts on regaining the trust of voters in an 18-month campaign to the 2013 election.
"Australians have had a gutful of seeing us focus on ourselves. Through this process, I can say I have learned some things. "I have made some mistakes about how I have been an advocate for our policies and programs, our Labor vision in the community. "I intend to be a stronger and more forceful advocate of what we are doing and what we are achieving for the Australian people."
Mr Rudd told caucus after his defeat that his leadership ambitions were over. "You will have my absolute support in your efforts to bring us to victory," he told Ms Gillard in his concession speech. "I will not under any circumstances mount a challenge against your leadership. "I go one step further. If anyone turns on Julia in the 18 months ahead, of the type I have seen reported in much of the press ... "Julia, you will find me in your corner against them."
Buoyed by the biggest margin in three decades of leadership ballots, with 71 votes to Mr Rudd's paltry 31, the Prime Minister has not only been given more authority than at any time in her prime ministership, but extra room to reshape her frontbench team. That came courtesy of a shock post-ballot resignation by key supporter, Sports Minister Mark Arbib.
The 40-year-old Right faction powerbroker, who helped oust Kevin Rudd in 2010, will leave the ministry and the Senate by the end of next week to spend more time with his young family.
His departure will not affect the Government's numbers in the House of Representatives.
The softly spoken NSW senator was dubbed a "faceless man" by Tony Abbott and had been targeted using the same language by Mr Rudd and his supporters for his role in the 2010 coup. He described the decisions to replace Mr Rudd and elevate Ms Gillard as "necessary and in the interest of the party, the Government and the Australian people". "Most importantly they were correct and I believe saved the party from certain defeat in 2010," Senator Arbib said. "I stand by those decisions."
But he said the difficult task of rebuilding goodwill inside Labor required more than mere words, suggesting his departure from politics would aid the healing process. "I'm sure there's plenty of people who would like to see me out of the party. That's politics," he said. "There's been no pressure from anyone, I've made this decision myself."
Senator Arbib's frontbench vacancy and that of the defeated Mr Rudd, who now heads to the back bench, clears the way for a slew of changes, with Ms Gillard preparing to name a new foreign affairs minister, a new sports minister and an unknown number of other moves. The senior foreign affairs post will inevitably go to an existing cabinet minister.
Current Defence Minister Stephen Smith is the hot favourite, but his return to the post he relinquished for Mr Rudd would mean a new defence minister was needed. Other names mentioned in consideration for the top diplomatic role are Arts Minister Simon Crean and Trade Minister Craig Emerson.
Also tipped for promotion, which Ms Gillard said would be a "merit" based selection, is Melbourne MP Mark Dreyfus, who could jump from outside the ministry into the cabinet post of immigration, if Rudd backer Chris Bowen is moved - possibly into the challenging defence portfolio. Two other Rudd voters are tipped for elevation to a ministry. Former soldier Mike Kelly may be in line for the defence materiel job, and South Australian Nick Champion, who could get the manufacturing portfolio.
Both would allow Ms Gillard to be seen as extending the hand of friendship to former adversaries. However, a small number of ministers who openly backed Mr Rudd in the ballot face being chopped, including Robert McClelland and Kim Carr. A spokeswoman for Ms Gillard listed several priorities for the second half of the term including:

REFORM of school funding.
SKILLS reform that will give blue collar workers access to HECS-style loans.
CONTINUED support for the Australian car industry.
A $1.2 BILLION investment in the new companies and technologies of the clean energy future.
ONGOING rollout of fibre for high speed broadband to over 60 sites across the country.
PLANNED National Disability Insurance Scheme.
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Cr Sno Bonneau not running for re-election

2012-02-27T19:28:00.003+10:00

Monday, February 27, 2012

© The Cairns Post

After 17 years as a councillor, Sno Bonneau has decided not to contest the next Cairns Regional Council elections on April 28.

Cr Bonneau said that he had made the decision along with family members for a number of reasons. "17 years is a good part of your life to give to the community" he said. "During my 17 years representing the community we have seen an amazing transformation and substantial improvements to the northern beaches area."

I am pleased to have been able to serve the community and be re-elected on four occasions, and I thank all those who have supported and worked with me over the years
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Vote a stay of execution for Julia Gillard, says Tony Abbott

2012-02-27T13:34:00.000+10:00

From: AAP
February 27, 2012 1:58PM

TONY Abbott says Julia Gillard's victory in the Labor leadership battle is a stay of execution, rather than a new start for Labor.

Ms Gillard on Monday won the ballot against Kevin Rudd, 71 votes to 31.
Mr Abbott said there were still 31 members of caucus who did not have confidence in Ms Gillard. "What I think today is likely to be is not so much a new start for
this prime minister but merely
a stay of execution," he told
reporters in Canberra.

Mr Abbott said there would still be Labor's carbon tax, "border protection chaos" and not enough focus on the jobs of Australian workers. While Ms Gillard was saying a good government had been dragged down by a wrecker, Mr Abbott said it was more likely people would see a bad government exposed by a whistleblower.

"The public will not quickly forget Kevin Rudd's critique that this was a government that was run by faceless men," he told journalists in Canberra. "That this is a government which is actually damaging our country and that this is a government led by someone who has fundamentally forfeited the trust of the Australian people."
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Labor plans eight more Wild Rivers

2012-02-27T07:31:00.000+10:00

Daniel Strudwick
Monday, February 27, 2011
© The Cairns Post

Labor would expand its controversial Wild Rivers program if re-elected, declaring protections for eight more Cape York wetlands including the state's largest perennial river.

The laws have been criticised by prominent indigenous groups and the Liberal National Party, which has vowed to overturn Wild Rivers declarations on the Cape if elected next month.

On Saturday, Premier Anna Bligh threw a fishing line into the Coleman River at Pormpuraaw, which is one of three Far Northern ecosystems to be protected by Wild Rivers legislation during the next term of government under Labor.

Ms Bligh said she also wanted to start the declaration process for the Jannie, Jacky Jacky, Ducie, Jardine and Holroyd rivers. The environmental controls were introduced by the former Beattie Government to protect Queensland’s unspoilt river systems from the damaging effects of development such as mining and damming.

Thirteen river systems are currently controlled under Wild Rivers laws. "They are some of the most pristine river systems in Australia and all of them are home to very special and, in some cases, very unique flora and fauna," Ms Bligh said.

Campbell Newman’s LNP will scrap Wild Rivers in favour of its own policy to protect sensitive river systems through consultation with locals and stakeholders.
"Unlike Labor, the LNP will not adopt a one size fits all policy," the party’s environment spokesman Andrew Powell said.

But Ms Bligh insists the Government has a "special duty" to protect pristine river systems.
She said Labor would appoint an extra 50 Wild Rivers rangers by 2015, doubling the number of indigenous rangers employed under the program. "We want to make sure that these river systems are looked after by traditional owners and indigenous people through the Wild Rivers program and we want to make sure they’re protected from over-development," she said. "A Wild River declaration doesn’t mean that you can’t do things on this river system, it just means you can’t do things that interfere with the flow of the river."
The announcement was welcomed by the Wilderness Society and Queensland Greens, even though it falls short of Labor’s 2004 commitment to have 19 rivers protected during that term of government.

"It’s five years late, and the target has not yet been met, but at least we’re moving in the right direction," Greens spokesman Adam Scott said.
| __

Fears Julia Gillard win won't end Labor warfare

2012-02-27T00:04:00.001+10:00

by: Matthew Franklin, Chief political correspondent
From: The Australian
February 27, 2012

JULIA Gillard is poised to win today's Labor leadership ballot but faces ongoing political turbulence, with her critics predicting MPs will seek to draft Kevin Rudd to the leadership later this year.

While the Prime Minister has demanded party unity after today's ballot, Mr Rudd has said he fears her supporters will continue a campaign of "character assassination," to make him the scapegoat for future Labor errors.

Mr Rudd hit out at Labor's "faceless men" yesterday as his supporters warned MPs that opinion polls showed Ms Gillard was so unpopular with voters that Labor could lose 30 seats at the next election and spend the next generation in the political wilderness. Arriving at Canberra airport last night, Mr Rudd said today's ballot would be a "very tough race". "I know I'm up against it in terms of the combined horsepower of the factions of the ALP," he said.

He reiterated that if he were unsuccessful in today's ballot, he would not challenge again.
Both camps said they expected Ms Gillard, who ousted Mr Rudd from the prime ministership in June 2010, to win today's 10am (AEDT) ballot in Canberra.

The latest estimates give Ms Gillard about 67 of the 103 caucus votes. Despite Mr Rudd pledging that if he lost, he would be loyal to Ms Gillard until the next election, his supporters predicted that if the Prime Minister failed to lift her party's fortunes in opinion polls, Mr Rudd could be drafted to the leadership in the future. "You can't rule out those options, I think," said political consultant and Rudd supporter Bruce Hawker.

ormer Queensland premier Peter Beattie agreed, arguing that few Labor people expected Mr Rudd to move quietly to the backbench."Most believe he will simply wait to be drafted for another challenge later in the year if the government doesn't improve in the opinion polls," Mr Beattie writes in The Australian today.

Labor has been gripped by open warfare since Mr Rudd quit as foreign minister on Wednesday, while on government business in the US, after a series of attacks over his loyalty from ministers.

He returned to Australia on Friday to declare his candidacy for the leadership, warning colleagues Ms Gillard could not win the next election because she did not have the trust of the Australian people.

Last night, despite a series of opinion polls indicating Mr Rudd was more popular than Ms Gillard, it appeared the majority of the caucus had accepted the Prime Minister's argument that Mr Rudd ran a dysfunctional government while she had been able to deliver policy outcomes.

The Gillard camp put Mr Rudd's level of support at about 30 votes, although Rudd backers insisted the number was higher.

As Attorney-General Nicola Roxon said Mr Rudd should abandon all leadership hopes if he failed to attract 40 votes, Ms Gillard appeared confident of victory, saying she had the strong support of colleagues. "I believe Labor, all of us, will unite after Monday's ballot," the Prime Minister said in Melbourne. "We will unite tomorrow, and we will get our shoulders to the wheel delivering Labor's program and plans.

"The important thing is that tomorrow's ballot ends this, there is a result and following that result everyone accepts it and unites and gets on with the job, and I am absolutely confident that will happen."

Ms Gillard's expected win will relegate Mr Rudd to the backbench, and the Prime Minister will need to fill his vacant foreign affairs post. She is likely to opt for a minimal cabinet reshuffle that could see Defence Minister Stephen Smith return to foreign affairs or Trade Minister Craig Emerson take on a broader role and assume the portfolio.

After refusing to accept the resignation of senior frontbencher Anthony Albanese, the Transport Minister and Leader of the House, Ms Gillard has signalled that she is likely to avoid bloodletting in the interests of unifying the party. The opposition, keen to capitalise on Labor's woes, will immediately step up its attack when the House of Representatives sits for question time this afternoon.

Tony Abbott will renew his call for the independents to force an early election by moving a vote of no confidence . As MPs began arriving in Canberra for today's ballot, the Opposition Leader demanded an election, calling on crossbench independent MPs supporting the government to move a no-confidence motion at today's resumption of parliament.

Mr Hawker, who has been advising Mr Rudd on his campaign, put pressure on marginal seat holders by predicting an electoral rout for Labor under Ms Gillard. "As somebody who has been a member of the Labor Party since 1988, I believe it is unconscionable for anybody in the caucus to do anything other than support Kevin Rudd when this ballot comes on tomorrow," he said.

Labor would be in massive trouble if its primary vote did not rise above the 29 per cent to 32 per cent level being delivered by Ms Gillard, Mr Hawker said before the release of today's Newspoll showing ALP support at a year-high 35 per cent. "If that happens we're not just going to lose a few seats," he said. "We're going to lose 30 seats. That means Labor could be out of government for the best part of a generation."

In his final pitch to colleagues, Mr Rudd said he had changed since his period as prime minister, adding that no minister had ever approached him about concerns over his administration. Mr Rudd told the Nine Network he had been subjected to an unprecedented onslaught from Wayne Swan and senior ministers Tony Burke, Stephen Conroy and Simon Crean.

Urging factional faceless men to "lay down the cudgels" after today's vote, Mr Rudd said he feared their "character assassination" would continue in future, and that he would be blamed if Labor lost the coming Queensland state election or continued to lose in opinion polls at the federal level. "I think it's time people actually accepted responsibility for their own actions," he said.

In comments aimed squarely at Ms Gillard, Mr Rudd said: "I didn't draft that speech to the (Labor) national conference. I didn't go out there and make a promise to (independent MP) Andrew Wilkie. I didn't do a whole lot of those things which were done by others, but I seem to be blamed for the consequence fairly consistently."

School Education Minister Peter Garrett, who as environment minister handled Mr Rudd's controversial home insulation scheme, said that if Mr Rudd won he would not be prepared to serve in a Rudd ministry. Ms Roxon, the former health minister, gave the same commitment last week.

_________________ | _________________

Labor in Crisis

2012-02-26T01:53:00.001+10:00

Anthony Albanese declares support for Rudd

by: Lanai Vasek
From: The Australian

February 25, 2012 12:09PM

Senior cabinet minister Anthony Albanese has confirmed he will be supporting Kevin Rudd in Monday's leadership ballot.

Mr Albanese said he had offered Julia Gillard his resignation as Leader of The House and had rung the Prime Minister this morning to inform her of his decision to back Mr Rudd.

A teary Mr Albanese, who is also Infrastructure Minister, said he had consulted widely before making his decision and that it had not been and easy one. "I make this decision with a heavy heart," Mr Albanese said. "However it this is a judgement call."

Speaking in Cessnock a short time later, Ms Gillard said while she didn't agree with Mr Albanese's decision she believed he was a "great Labor man with a great Labor heart". The Prime Minister said she had not accepted Mr Albanese's resignation because he was a critical part to Labor's fight against the opposition.

"This is not in my self interest, I am doing this because it is right," Mr Albanese said.
He said he had also phoned Treasurer Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd about his decision before making his announcement today.

Mr Albanese said Ms Gillard refused to accept his resignation and expressed her confidence in him that despite his decision to support Mr Rudd in the ballot, she believed he would continue to serve her loyally.

"I was pleased that under the circumstances that it would be perfectly reasonable for her that she accept that resignation that she refused to and on the basis that she had confidence that I would continue, were she to continue as Prime Minister that I would serve her loyally as I have each and every day," Mr Albanese said."It has been very traumatic."

Mr Albanese said he “loved” the Labor party and that he was raised by a single mum who had told him to always stand up for what he believed in. “I hope that when I look back on my career people regard me as a straight forward politician who said what they want not for the interest of myself but only in the interest of the Labor party,” Mr Albanese said.

He said he had “despaired” in recent days over the trashing of the party’s achievements under Kevin Rudd by some of his fellow parliamentary colleagues. Mr Albanese said both Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard were “formidable” politicians and he had respect for them both, however he felt it was necessary to support Mr Rudd to show he disagreed with the events of the 2010 leadership coup. “Monday’s ballot is the only opportunity to show my dissent with the actions of that night and I do so with a heavy heart,” he said.

“All indications are that Julia Gillard will be successful in Monday’s ballot. But my definition is that is something that doesn’t worry me at all.” Mr Albanese said his decision was “not designed to influence anyone” and he was not counting the numbers for Mr Rudd or assisting his campaign in any way.

His decision to back the former prime minister follows a similar move by fellow ministers Kim Carr, Martin Ferguson, Stephen Smith, Robert McClelland and Chris Bowen.
Mr Albanese said Mr Rudd had thanked him for his support when he phoned him earlier today to inform him of his decision. He said he would not be making any further commentary on the matter before Monday’s ballot.

Ms Gillard said following Monday's ballot the party needed to unite and "get on with the job of delivering for working families". "Monday is it, end of it. We vote on it and everybody accepts the result then it is over and done," Ms Gillard said. She brushed off today's poor polling saying good government was about delivery.
"Talk is one thing, delivery is another. I am about delivery," Ms Gillard said.

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Katter's party in $32m pledge for new hospital

2012-02-25T08:18:00.003+10:00

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Health plan: Katter's Australian Party Mulgrave candidate Damian Byrnes and leader Bob Katter announce their plans for a second hospital in Cairns.

Katter's Australian Party has pledged to build a $32 million second hospital at Edmonton by 2014 to ease pressure on Cairns Base Hospital.

Dr Damian Byrnes, the KAP candidate for Mulgrave and former member of the Cairns Health Community Council, said his party would pay for the 22-bed hospital by diverting money from the "makeover" at Cairns Base Hospital. "We would like to start this immediately once the election is over," he said.

The current construction of Block D at Cairns Base Hospital, which is expected to create 168 new beds, would continue as planned under the proposal, Dr Byrnes said. With the support of his party leader Bob Katter, Dr Byrnes said a new hospital in the south was urgently needed because cyclone Yasi showed Cairns Base Hospital was vulnerable to severe weather events. "A fully operational hospital at Edmonton is a non-negotiable item of critical infrastructure, especially as the Cairns Base Hospital is directly in-line for catastrophic cyclonic storm surges," Dr Byrnes said.

Dr Byrnes showed a copy of the 3000 signatures his party had collected in support of the second hospital for Cairns. Mr Katter said one hospital was not enough for Cairns because it took residents in his electorate 40 minutes to drive to Cairns Base Hospital.

"Cairns is a very narrow strip; you really do need two hospitals," Mr Katter said.
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Festival fallout - Holowacz quits over budget cuts and lack of resources

2012-02-24T07:57:00.000+10:00

Jesse Kuch

Friday, February 24, 2012

Cairns Festival producer Eric Holowacz has quit, citing budget cuts, the shutting down of Festival HQ and a lack of management support behind the decision.

The shock move puts a cloud over this year’s event, one of the biggest annual celebrations in the city. Last year’s 17-day festival in August attracted an audience of about 110,000 people with an economic impact of more than $5 million for the region across 106 events.

Mr Holowacz said after such successful 2010 and 2011 events, including last year’s Cairns Festival 50th anniversary celebration, it was a shame Cairns Regional Council had cut support for the city’s flagship community and cultural festival. "Given the decreasing internal council support for the festival and the good work of our small team, it was the right time to move on," Mr Holowacz told The Cairns Post. "I just didn’t have the energy to keep fighting for decent resources, program support, community engagement ideas, and a more co-operative work environment."

The Cairns Festival 2011 Evaluation Report, released last year, shows Cairns Festival’s 2011 event ran $131,760 over its projected budget of $606,313. "Recent budget adjustments have diminished capacity in the current fiscal year, and will impact seasonal staffing, technical production, marketing, and scope of events for the 2012 festival," the report said.

The council’s Community, Sport and Cultural Services general manager Ian Lowth declined to comment on Mr Holowacz’s resignation.

But he said "Cairns Festival has always been a team effort and a combination of internal and contracted staff will work together to ensure the 2012 festival goes ahead without disruption". "The budget for the 2012 Cairns Festival remains in the vicinity of $600,000," Mr Lowth said. "As in all areas of council at the introduction of the last budget, reductions in operating costs have needed to be implemented. "This is not expected to impact on the quality of the festival, as it is more aimed towards increasing efficiencies and streamlining operations throughout council as a whole."

He also addressed the closure of Festival HQ in City Place. "When the botanic gardens visitor centre was completed, the festival team joined their branch colleagues in the new offices," Mr Lowth said.

Mr Holowacz said he planned to stay in the region to "develop a few new projects for Far North Queensland into the near future". Among Mr Holowacz’s accomplishments are the Opening Notes project, the Man vs Fascinator exhibition, free concerts and film events at Fogarty Park.

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Cairns company wins Entertainment Precinct contract

2012-02-23T20:30:00.002+10:00

Author: Grace Uhr Thursday February 23, 2012 © The Cairns Post

On site: Tony Cawte and Richard Field, of Richard Field Constructions, which has just been awarded the first contract for the Cairns Entertainment Precinct. Picture: MIKE WATT

A CAIRNS-based construction company has been awarded the first contract for the Cairns Entertainment Precinct with work to begin within a month.

Richard Field Constructions will begin investigative works on White’s Shed next month with a $351,000 contract that is expected to run for three months and employ 20 people.

Construction manager Richard Field said the work will involve removal of 1500 sq metres of concrete flooring, temporary removal of the timber flooring and examining the structural integrity of the building.

A detailed plan will be drawn up following the work for refurbishment within the requirements of the heritage status of White’s Shed. He said he hoped it would be the first of other successful tenders in relation to the CEP site. "We want to keep working on the site and we’ll be applying for the Tier 1 tender when it comes up," Mr Field said. "We’re very delighted to have secured the work. "This is a big thing for us because it means we go to full employment now, which is great, and we’ll be going from two apprentices to three."

Several councillors have voiced concerns over the potential issue of contaminated soil at the site and have called for further investigations.

Mr Field said he had encountered the issue on other sites, although it was rare. "We’ve done contaminated soil on previous jobs and an engineer does a design solution and a resolution is found," he said.

_________________ | ______________

Mayor slams scare tactics on Cairns Entertainment Precinct

2012-02-23T20:15:00.000+10:00

Nick Dalton

Thursday, February 23, 2012

In the red zone: An artist's impression of the Cairns Entertainment Precinct.

The $155m Cairns Entertainment Precinct would be in the blast zone if there was a major shipping explosion at the Port of Cairns, a new risk analysis report outlines.

The Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland report sent to regional councillors highlights the dangers of the precinct being built alongside a working port, including the potential for an explosion from warships or ammonium nitrate chemicals.

However, last night Cairns Mayor Val Schier lashed out at opponents of the precinct, accusing them of running a scare campaign. She told The Cairns Post that some councillors and community members were running a "fear and emotion" campaign in a belated attempt to stop the development.

The report prepared by Cummings Economics says the precinct was within 200m of container yards and wharves over which explosives are likely to be handled or be on board ships and within the usual "overpressure" zones. The report also raises concerns about dangerous goods, fertilisers, fuel storage, smell nuisances and other hazards.

As well, there are economic concerns with the seaport operations having "a very significant impact on the regional economy many times greater than the economic impact of the proposed new theatre". "It is a major deficiency that councillors in their decision-making on this question appear not to have already been presented with comprehensive analysis of potential hazards and risks... "Council has a duty of care to theatre users over the coming decades and to ratepayers that it invests in a facility that is not burdened by a range of safety and ambience complications that come from being located next to an operating port," the report said.

Chamber chairman Brett Moller said the report had been compiled for councillors so that "impacting issues should be brought to the table so that they can be considered, addressed and dealt with in the decision-making process." Cr Schier said the issue would be discussed at a March 12 workshop.

__________________ | _______________

Comment: Mayor Val Schier.

If visitors to the CEP are going to be in danger then the cruise liner passengers will be in worse danger as will the Convention Centre attendees!! Ports North currently manages risks and ALL the issues raised in the report have been identified and are being analysed and mitigated by the project team.

Comment : Annette Sheppard ( Candidate Division 6 )

Val, These are issues I have brought up previously, as have others. If you look at the maps you will see that the CEP falls well within the radius from the epicentre, the cruise terminal does not, and a small section of the convention centre is also affected. However, this measurement is taken from Wharf 7 - 8. Should an explosion occur at Wharf 4 - 5 - 6, then the CEP would be almost at ground zero and the cruise ship terminal and the convention centre would be well within the blast radius.

Exactly how do you mitigate in these circumstances? Would you propose to have bomb proof walls and glass? Your comments in minimising this risk are seriously flawed and either ignorant or misleading. Anyone who was here at the time of the gasworks explosion will know just how destructive industrial explosions can be. Maybe you also need to investigate exactly what hazardous cargoes are moved within the vicinity of the proposed CEP. It just shows that the State Government has been recalcitrant in its duty of care in not making consideration of these issues in their decision to locate the cruise terminal and the convention centre in this area.

They have further compounded the problem by offering this site for the CEP. The fact is that the site is unsaleable and it was their way of offloading responsibility on to the Local Government. In the risk analysis have you calculated the cost of the insurance, both public liability and property?

______________ | ____________

Enough faceless men to go round

2012-02-23T06:37:00.004+10:00

by: Peter van Onselen, Contributing editor
From: The Australian
February 23, 2012 12:00AM

Cartoon by Jon Kudelka. Source: The Australian

Despite Kevin Rudd's attempt to label Julia Gillard as a product of the scheming of faceless men, both camps are led by their fair share of powerbrokers. Rudd is relying on Kim Carr and Martin Ferguson, out of the Victorian Left - ironic, given that they hail from the factional grouping the Prime Minister is a part of.

Added to this pair are senior right-wing ministers from NSW, such as Chris Bowen and Robert McClelland, not to mention NSW left-wing powerbroker Doug Cameron, who has poured scorn on Simon Crean for his attacks on Rudd. However, for the most part, the Rudd camp is a bottom-up movement. For example, backbenchers who have informed power brokers backing Gillard that they will not be following directions to support her if a ballot is called because they are worried about losing their seats and believe Rudd is Labor's only saviour.

The Gillard camp's strongest defenders are those who imposed her over the top of Rudd in the first place. Bill Shorten, Mark Arbib, David Feeney and Don Farrell have formed a praetorian guard around the Prime Minister, perhaps only to protect themselves from Rudd's revenge. All won promotion after Gillard took over the prime ministership. Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan will also support Gillard, so long as his Australian Workers Union backers (read Paul Howes) oppose Rudd.

The swinging votes that are likely to determine this showdown, whenever it eventuates, are Anthony Albanese and Mark Butler, left-wing powerbrokers in NSW and South Australia respectively. Convince one to shift his support to Rudd and the other will surely follow. If they decide Gillard is finished, they are likely to block any attempt at a third spoiler candidate designed to thwart Rudd, knocking out a Crean or Stephen Smith candidacy. A move to Rudd by Albanese or Butler would give Rudd the momentum he needs to create an inevitability about changing leaders.

The most difficult read in this looming showdown is what senior ministers will do. So far they have largely been supportive of the Prime Minister, which Gillard backers have argued is evidence that the Rudd push is doomed. But as members of the executive it is impossible for ministers to publicly move behind Rudd without resigning. Even Bowen and Carr have been silent on their support for Rudd. His camp will want such backers in the ministerial tent, if only to provide intelligence.

The new dynamic favouring Rudd as a backbencher is one of options. By moving to the backbench he can say what he likes, do what he likes, challenge when he likes. In short, he can begin campaigning for the leadership. If Gillard supporters thought he was campaigning before now, they have seen nothing yet.

_______________ | ______________

ALP | Political suicide been committed in Camberra

2012-02-23T06:21:00.000+10:00

Julia Gillard v Kevin Rudd | Part II

by: Dennis Shanahan and Sid Maher
From: The Australian
February 23, 2012 12:00 AM

The Gillard government faces days of uncertainty until Kevin Rudd declares whether he will challenge Julia Gillard for the Labor leadership, go to the parliamentary backbench or even resign from his Brisbane seat and force a by-election.

As government sources last night revealed the Prime Minister would today call a special caucus meeting for a leadership ballot on Monday, NSW independent Tony Windsor warned it was "more than likely" a change of leader would trigger a return to the polls. And Wayne Swan launched an extraordinary attack on Mr Rudd, saying that "for too long, Kevin Rudd has been putting his own self-interest ahead of the interests of the broader labour movement and the country as a whole, and that needs to stop".

Mr Rudd's dramatic 1am resignation in Washington yesterday threw the parliamentary Labor Party into even more confusion and bitter recrimination as supporters of Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard blamed each other for the damaging events. Mr Rudd said he had no choice but to resign in the middle of a world diplomatic tour because he no longer had the confidence of Ms Gillard and had been accused of betrayal by Regional Affairs Minister Simon Crean. "The truth is I can only serve as foreign minister if I have the confidence of Prime Minister Gillard and her senior ministers," Mr Rudd said."In recent days, Minister Crean and a number of other faceless men have publicly attacked my integrity and therefore my fitness to serve as a minister in government.

When challenged today on these attacks, Prime Minister Gillard chose not to repudiate them."I can only reluctantly conclude that she therefore shares these views. The simple truth is that I cannot continue to serve as foreign minister if I do not have Prime Minister Gillard's support."I therefore believe the only honourable thing and the only honourable course of action is for me to resign."

In his resignation letter to Ms Gillard, Mr Rudd wrote: "In the past two days, at least one senior cabinet minister has called for you to remove me from office. Reports today indicate that there is a number of ministers urging you to take such action. You have been asked repeatedly to confirm or deny whether you propose to do this. Your failure to do so casts the most serious doubts on your confidence in me as a minister. "This is the final wave in a crescendo of attacks on my position by members of your government over many months."

The Prime Minister last night declared she was "disappointed that the concerns Mr Rudd has publicly expressed this evening were never personally raised with me, nor did he contact me to discuss his resignation prior to his decision". It is understood Ms Gillard has appointed Trade Minister Craig Emerson as a stop-gap foreign minister. Mr Rudd's surprise resignation followed the disclosure on The Australian's and other News Limited websites at lunch time yesterday that Ms Gillard was prepared to sack Mr Rudd or demand a leadership ballot, which she expected to win, when he returned to Australia on Sunday.

The Australian reported online: "The Prime Minister's supporters are now so confident they will have the numbers to fend off a leadership challenge she is preparing to remove Mr Rudd from the ministry for 'disloyalty'." A few hours later, Mr Rudd said he would return to Australia immediately and, after consulting his family and Labor colleagues, he would make an announcement about his political future.

In a sign he would continue in parliament and would challenge for the leadership at some time, Mr Rudd added: "I deeply believe that, if the Australian Labor Party, a party of which I have been a proud member for more than 30 years, is to have the best future for our nation, then it must change fundamentally its culture and to end the power of faceless men."

Mr Rudd vowed he would never be party to a "stealth attack on a sitting prime minister elected by the people"."We all know what happened then was wrong and it must never happen again," Mr Rudd said. He added that one question his caucus colleagues should consider was: "Who is best placed to defeat Tony Abbott?"

Dr Emerson last night rejected Mr Rudd's claim that he would never attack a prime minister by stealth, saying Mr Rudd had been briefing journalists last year that there would be a leadership challenge. "For Kevin then to say this bickering and destabilisation must stop . . . well, he started it," Dr Emerson told ABC's Lateline.

Mr Swan said last night he and Ms Gillard had the support of the "overwhelming majority of our colleagues" and had been succeeding despite tremendous political obstacles. "For the sake of the labour movement, the government and the Australians which it represents, we have refrained from criticism to date," Mr Swan said. "However, for too long Kevin Rudd has been putting his own self-interest ahead of the interests of the broader labour movement and the country as a whole, and that needs to stop."

Mr Rudd said in his resignation statement he believed the destabilisation of the federal Labor Party was hurting the electoral chances of Queensland Labor Premier Anna Bligh, who was a "good friend".

Former Labor leader Mark Latham accused Mr Rudd of "inventing alibis" to justify his decision to step down, and said the former prime minister was hoping his colleagues would eventually see the "new Rudd". "He's invented this alibi that, of all things, Gillard was disloyal to him; you'd have to believe in the Easter bunny to swallow that one," Mr Latham said on Sky News's Paul Murray Live. "And the Queensland election -- that's not a bad little alibi that he's doing this for his great mate Anna Bligh."He's just hoping one morning 30 people in the caucus will wake up and think that he is the new Rudd and a changed man and all that garbage."

Mr Rudd could likely now campaign for the leadership from the backbench, freed of cabinet solidarity and able to speak freely about the Gillard government. He will also be able to detail approaches to him from Labor MPs and ministers over the past few months as despair about Ms Gillard's prospects grew.

Soon after Mr Rudd's resignation, Tony Abbott said Mr Rudd had confirmed "that the faceless men are running the Labor Party and that the instability at the top of this government is damaging our country". "Kevin Rudd's statement tonight confirms that this government is unworthy to continue in office," the Opposition Leader said.

Environment Minister Tony Burke launched a scathing attack on Mr Rudd last night, saying his campaign to regain the prime ministership was the "worst-kept secret in Canberra". "Everybody has had enough of the stealth and undermining campaign that has been going on through the caucus and through the media for a very long time," he told the ABC's 7.30.

Labor Left faction leader Doug Cameron attacked Mr Crean over his calls this week for Mr Rudd to resign if he could not be part of the team. Senator Cameron told the ABC Ms Gillard had the support of caucus, but there was considerable sympathy for Mr Rudd over his treatment.
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Wayne Swan pulls no punches after Kevin Rudd quits as Foreign Minister

2012-02-22T23:25:00.000+10:00

Wayne Swan has attacked Kevin Rudd as a Laborsaboteur who never understood the party after Mr Rudd dramatically quithis as foreign minister tonight ahead of a likely leadership challenge nextweek.

Mr Rudd stood down from the ministry at a hastilyarranged media conference in the United States tonight, just after 1amWashington time, citing attacks on him by Labor ministers and "facelessmen", and Julia Gillard's failure to repudiate them. He saidthe party had turned into a soap opera, and caucus colleagues should askthemselves who was best placed to take on Tony Abbott.

In a statement released this evening, Ms Gillardsaid the Foreign Minister had not warned her of his plan to quit, nor raised hisconcerns about the direction of the Labor Party."I am disappointed thatthe concerns Mr Rudd has publicly expressed this evening were never personallyraised with me, nor did he contact me to discuss his resignation prior to hisdecision," she said TheTreasurer unleashed on the former prime minister, who was deposed by JuliaGillard in June 2010. He said the Labor Party had given Mr Rudd everyopportunity, but he wasted them with his "dysfunctional decision makingand his deeply demeaning attitude towards other people including our caucuscolleagues".

Mr Swan said Mr Rudd had placed his own interestsahead of those of the broader labour movement "and that needs tostop". "The Labor Party is not about a person, it's about apurpose. That's something Prime Minister Gillard has always known in her heartbut something Kevin Rudd has never understood," Mr Swansaid. "He was the Party's biggest beneficiary then its biggestcritic; but never a loyal or selfless example of its values and objectives. "Forthe interests of the labour movement and of working people, there is too muchat stake in our economy and in the political debate for the interests of thelabour movement and working people to be damaged by somebody who does not holdany Labor values"

Mr Swan said Ms Gillard had the "overwhelmingsupport" of the caucus. "She has a consultative, respectfulrelationship with caucus while Kevin Rudd demeaned them," he said."She'scleaned up a lot of the mess he left her and has established a good, Laboragenda.She's delivering major reforms, and getting things done that herpredecessor could not. Colleagues are sick of Kevin Rudd driving the vote downby sabotaging policy announcements and undermining our substantial economicsuccesses."

According to Sky News, Ms Gillard will tomorrowmake an announcement confirming a leadership ballot will take place in theparty caucus on Monday morning.Mr Rudd made the dramatic announcement he wasresigning as Foreign Minister at a media conference in Washington DC at 1.20amlocal time (5.20pm AEDT), after supporters of the Prime Minister said she wasprepared to sack the Foreign Minister for disloyalty.

Mr Rudd said he would return to Brisbane on Fridayand consult with his party and with his colleagues before making a full statementabout his future by next Monday. He told caucus colleagues that the oneoverriding question they should ask themselves was, who was best placed to takeon Tony Abbott.

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Kevin Rudd quits as Foreign Minister

2012-02-22T17:27:00.003+10:00

by: James Massola
From: The Australian
February 22, 2012 6:17PM

Mr Rudd's decision comes after days of speculation that he was threatening Ms Gillard's leadership. Senior Labor figures had today urged Ms Gillard to bring the issue to a head.

Mr Rudd said the Australian people regarded the speculation as little more than a soap opera. “They are right,” he said. “Under the current circumstances, I won't be a part of it.”

To continue in the job would be distracting for the government, Mr Rudd said. “While I am sad to leave this office I am sadder still that it has come to this.”

He said a number of ministers and “faceless men” had publicly attacked his credibility and he would no longer serve as Foreign Minister while he did not enjoy the Prime Minister's support. “The last time I resigned from a position of public office was when I resigned as prime minister of Australia. Regrettably there have been some similar factors today. “It's time for some plain speaking on this. “The truth is I can only serve as Foreign Minister if I have the confidence of Prime Minister Gillard and her senior ministers.

“In recent days Mr (Simon) Crean and a number of other faceless men have publicly attacked my integrity and therefore my fitness to serve as a minister in the government.
“When challenged today on these attacks Prime Minister Gillard chose not to repudiate them. “I can only reluctantly conclude that she therefore shares these views.” Australia must be governed by the people, not party factions, Mr Rudd said. “I promise you this - there is no way, no way, that I will ever be part of a stealth attack on a sitting prime minister elected by the people,” he said. “We all know that what happened then was wrong and it must never happen again.”

Mr Rudd said it was now up to caucus to decide on the Labor leadership. He said he had few options in announcing his resignation overseas. “The truth is I feel very uncomfortable doing this from Washington and not in Australia,” Mr Rudd said. “But I don't feel like I have a choice given the responsibilities over the days ahead.”

Mr Rudd said the ongoing leadership speculation about the federal party was hurting Labor's prospects in the coming Queensland election. He said the saga was bad for his friend, Queensland Premier Anna Bligh. “I believe the good people of Queensland deserve some clear space over the coming month as they make up their minds on a very important decision on the future of Queensland, my home state,” he said.

Mr Rudd called for sweeping reform of the Australian Labor Party. “I deeply believe that if the Australia Labor Party, a party of which I have been a proud member for more than 30 years, is to have the best future for our nation then it must change fundamentally its culture and to end the power of the faceless men “Australia must be governed by the people, not the factions.”“We all know that what happened then was wrong and it must never happen again.”

Tony Abbott said Mr Rudd had confirmed that the “faceless men” were running the Labor Party and that the instability at the top of the government was damaging the nation. “Kevin Rudd's statement tonight confirms that this government is unworthy to continue in office. “Only the Coalition can provide the strong and stable government that will address the issues facing our country and restore hope, reward and opportunity for all Australians. “ Mr Rudd said he would leave Washington later today.

Meanwhile, other Australian officials would replace him at scheduled international events over the next few days. “Under no circumstances do I want Australia's international reputation brought into disrepute because of this ongoing saga,” Mr Rudd said. “Therefore, Ambassador (Kim) Beazley will discharge my functions here on my behalf in Washington tomorrow and the permanent secretary of my department, Dennis Richardson, will represent me in London and in Tunis.”

Mr Rudd said he was proud of his department's work to re-engage with Europe, Africa and Latin America, which he labelled the “major economic regions of the future”. He also cited the appointment of Australia's first ever ambassador for women and girls and hoped the government would still honour a commitment to appoint its first indigenous Australian as an overseas ambassador.

He thanked his family wife Therese and children Jessica, Nicholas and Marcus. "Chatting to them over the course of the last several hours, I thank them for their encouragement and their support as always,” he said. Mr Rudd said he now had “much, much to do” and ended his press conference without taking questions.

Mr Rudd's daughter Jessica tweeted: “Effing proud of you, Dad xxxx”.
His wife Therese Rein responded: “Me too, Kevin xxxx”.

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Australia Labor Party in turmoil

2012-02-22T17:20:00.000+10:00

Julia Gillard set to take on Kevin Rudd in party room ballot and sack him if she wins

by: Dennis Shanahan
From: The Australian
February 22, 2012 5:10PM

Rudd supporter Doug Cameron said calling a spill would be a “bizarre” course of action.“Why would you be sacking a Foreign Minister who has pledged support to the Prime Minister, who has said he is not challenging the Prime Minister?” he told Sky News. “How can you have a leadership ballot if there is no contenders?”

But while Mr Rudd has been attending the G20 foreign ministers' meeting in Mexico and travelling to Washington, Ms Gillard's supporters have rallied and prepared to counter Mr Rudd's push to become prime minister again. Cabinet sources told The Australian Online that Ms Gillard would now call Mr Rudd's bluff at the scheduled caucus meeting next Tuesday morning and declare her position vacant and invite a ballot. After furiously checking support levels, cabinet ministers have told Ms Gillard she will easily win.

It has been decided that it is untenable for the Labor government to continue to keep both Ms Gillard and Mr Rudd in cabinet and that Mr Rudd should be dumped to the backbench. “Just having him there has been destabilising,” one minister told The Australian Online. “It can't go on,” he said. The Prime Minister has the power to choose her own cabinet - a power Mr Rudd created for the prime minister when he became Labor leader - and can remove Mr Rudd without caucus approval. Cabinet ministers are already suggesting there will be changes on the frontbench and that the Prime Minister will take the opportunity to reduce the size of cabinet - back to 20 after recently expanding it to 21.

While Ms Gillard's supporters are confident of success, Mr Rudd's supporters maintain a change of leader is inevitable. Mr Rudd's supporters have also said that he would be prepared to go to the backbench if a first bid fails, and build support for another challenge in the future.

The Prime Minister's office said Ms Gillard's position had not changed. “She's been quite clear she intends to get on with her job,” her spokeswoman said. The fact that Mr Rudd is overseas representing Australia is understood to have influenced Ms Gillard's ability to respond more directly to questions on the leadership. Earlier, in Adelaide, Ms Gillard refused to respond to questions about a possible leadership spill next week. “I answered all your questions out the other side of town and there's not one word that would be different,” Ms Gillard.

An outraged Rudd supporter predicted that “shafting” Mr Rudd a second time would actually win him more support with the Australian public. “Knifing a prime minister and then knifing him again as Foreign Minister is too much,” the MP said. “This is an act of bastardry, thuggery and downright hijacking of the Labor Party for personal gain. They don't care about the ramifications for the party or the Australian public.”

The MP predicted caucus members would be “leaned on” by factional heavies to ensure Ms Gillard secured victory in a vote. The MP said Australia was in danger of becoming an international joke. Another key Rudd backer said there was no guarantee Mr Rudd would even stand if a leadership ballot was called. “This is a ploy. Why would he play into people's hands?” The source said the Prime Minister's move to assert her authority would backfire. “This will not put it down. We are on 32 per cent of the vote.” Sacking Mr Rudd from the ministry would also be counter productive, the MP said. “Then he's a free agent. Jesus Christ, that's really smart. He can say what he likes then.”

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said it was time the leadership issue was resolved once and for all. “Enough is enough,” Mr Combet said. “I believe the current leadership distraction is seriously hindering the government's ability to sell its message.” He said a “simple conversation” might be all it took to end the leadership brawl.

-With Rebecca Puddy, James Massola and Ben Packham

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LNP pledges up to $40m for Trinity Inlet

2012-02-21T22:58:00.000+10:00

Tarina White

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

IN a bid to lure votes in the Far North, LNP leader Campbell Newman has pledged up to $40 million to dredge the Trinity Inlet to allow larger cruise ships to dock in Cairns.

In Cairns this morning to make the announcement, Mr Newman said dredging the inlet would boost tourism by encouraging more cruise ships to come to the city.

“This policy today on tourism is exactly what this city needs,” he said. “The LNP sees Cairns as an important part of our strong plan to get Queensland back on track.”

Mr Newman said he is responding to the pleas of Cairns tourism operators who have voiced concern that a number of large cruise ships are unable to pull into the Cairns port because the Trinity Inlet is not deep enough.

These vessels are forced to dock at Yorkey’s Knob and tourists are transported to the city and other destinations. Mr Newman said cruise ships deliver around 44,000 tourists to Cairns and inject $4.5 million a year into the local economy, but as cruise ships grew larger the lack of access to Cairns could see the city miss out.

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Labor rifts widen as PM ducks the leadership chaos

2012-02-21T06:14:00.003+10:00

by: Matthew Franklin, Chief political correspondent
From: The Australian
February 21, 2012 12:00AM

The Prime Minister, with School Education Minister Peter Garrett in Canberra yesterday.
Picture: Ray Strange Source: The Australian

Julia Gillard has refused to be baited into a Labor leadership ballot, insisting she has strong caucus support and placing the onus for any spill on Kevin Rudd.

Rejecting advice from colleagues to sack or discipline her rival over his leadership ambitions, the Prime Minister swept the issue aside yesterday, focusing instead on education and boasting of her determination to continue to deliver "nation-changing" policies.Her comments came as her backers, having checked her support levels in caucus, assured Ms Gillard she had the numbers to crush Mr Rudd in any leadership contest.

They also came as angry backbenchers told The Australian they were in despair about the ongoing instability, while Rudd supporters attacked Ms Gillard as an "inside-the-beltway operator" who was becoming increasingly unpopular with voters.

Tension flared on Saturday after Victorian Labor MP Darren Cheeseman called on Ms Gillard to quit for the sake of the Labor Party, and video images of Mr Rudd delivering a foul-mouthed rant when he was prime minister appeared on the internet. On Sunday, Tasmanian independent MP Andrew Wilkie revealed Mr Rudd had discussed his leadership aspirations with him in November. The combination of the events sparked uproar, with angry Gillard supporters calling for a ballot to clear the air when MPs return to Canberra.

Yesterday, Mr Wilkie clarified his comments, saying that he had raised the leadership with Mr Rudd in their November meeting and that the Foreign Minister had not canvassed his support in the event of a leadership change. But as Gillard supporters, including Trade Minister Craig Emerson, appealed to colleagues to stop the public bickering, Regional Australia Minister Simon Crean, a former Labor leader, threw fuel on the fire by demanding Mr Rudd show loyalty or resign.

In three interviews, Mr Crean urged Ms Gillard to confront Mr Rudd and hold out "the option" of dismissal. "The assertion that his forces are building is nonsense," Mr Crean told Sky News. "I do not believe that he has anywhere near significant support to challenge and that's why the campaign by his supporters, presumably with his sanction, is being ramped up."

Speaking to ABC radio, Mr Crean said of Mr Rudd: "He's either got to put up or shut up."
Ms Gillard refused to be drawn on leadership when she briefed reporters in Canberra on the government's Gonski review into school funding. "I've got the strong support of my colleagues and I'm getting on with the job of delivering the big changes and reforms the nation needs," she said.

Asked whether she should sack Mr Rudd for disloyalty, she said the Foreign Minister had denied lobbying Mr Wilkie as well as reports that he had been briefing journalists about plans for a leadership spill. "I'm getting on with the job, with the strong support of my colleagues," she said. "Kevin Rudd is overseas getting on with his job too as Minister for Foreign Affairs."

Ms Gillard said her record showed she had been delivering nation-changing policy outcomes including carbon pricing, the new mining tax and a significant range of reforms across education. "As Prime Minister, I will continue to show my - I think - characteristic determination to get the job done." Special Minister of State Gary Gray backed Ms Gillard, but said it would be "silly" for anyone to assert that Mr Rudd did not want to return to the leadership.

Senior government sources told The Australian it would be a mistake to assume Ms Gillard had ruled out a ballot, particularly given that she believed she would win any contest with ease. But they said the Prime Minister, having appealed to colleagues to stop fuelling leadership stories, had been anxious yesterday not to drive the issue at the expense of discussing the Gonski report.

Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten told ABC's Q&A last night he had no doubt Ms Gillard would "sort out" the leadership issue, but not in a way that detracted from other government issues. Praising her as a strong person, Mr Shorten said she had yesterday focused on education policy rather than leadership.

"We will support her in the way that she chooses to handle these matters," Mr Shorten said in a comment that appeared to leave open the possibility the Prime Minister could take on Mr Rudd at a time of her own choosing.

Pressed on whether he would be prepared to serve under Mr Rudd amid rumours he could be offered the Treasury role, Mr Shorten said Labor MPs served the party, and described the question as hypothetical because Ms Gillard had strong caucus support.

Victorian Labor senator and right-wing figure David Feeney told ABC radio the "frenzied" level of leadership speculation was unsustainable. "Kevin Rudd, I think, has reached something of a crossroads where he must either emphatically present his loyalty to the Prime Minister and put this question behind him and behind all of us, or alternatively he needs to challenge," Senator Feeney said.

Mr Rudd also played down the discord. In Mexico for a meeting of G20 foreign ministers, he said there was no leadership spill in prospect and Mr Crean's "disappointing" comments were based on "an untruth" that had been clarified by Mr Wilkie.

Backbenchers are expressing frustration the leadership issue is paralysing the government. One said Labor supporters were despairing at the damage speculation was doing to the party's support and worried Labor was handing votes to the opposition. While Rudd supporters believe Ms Gillard is refusing to confront the Foreign Minister because she does not have the numbers, the Gillard camp accused the Rudd camp of inflating its support to gain momentum.

A key Rudd supporter last night argued that there was a hard core of MPs who would not make up their mind until the last minute.

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Labor candidate Kirsten Lesina in fight to hold seat

2012-02-21T05:50:00.000+10:00

Tarina White

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Tough task: Former Cairns councillor Kirsten Lesina expects a hard fight to hold the seat of Cairns for Labor.

Resigning from council to officially launch her state election campaign, Cairns Labor candidate Kirsten Lesina conceded she would have to work hard to win the seat that has been a Labor stronghold for more than a century.

With polls showing the LNP is set to trounce Labor in the election, the former Division 4 Cairns Regional councillor faces huge pressure to win the seat. Labor holds Cairns with a margin of 4.2 per cent."No doubt it’s going to be tough and I’m in for the fight of my life," Ms Lesina said.

Long-time Labor MP Desley Boyle held Cairns in the 2009 election scoring 45.8 per cent of the vote compared with LNP candidate Joel Harrop’s 39.8 per cent.Ms Boyle is not standing for re-election this year.

Ms Lesina (pictured) is running against former The Cairns Post journalist and LNP candidate Gavin King, Katter’s Australian Party candidate and police officer Darren Hunt and John Piva of the North Queensland Party.

The 25-year-old, who set a record as the youngest councillor elected in the Cairns region, said her four years of local government experience sets her apart from her competitors."It’s a great training ground because you do have that experience of managing a large budget," said Ms Lesina, who won a seat on the council in the same year she graduated from law school at James Cook University."I’ve had four years of experience on council managing a $330 million business."

The fourth-generation Cairns resident will focus her campaign on health care, job creation and education.

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Bob Katter the spoiler | Will he spoil the party for 'Can Do' Campbell

2012-02-20T08:21:00.001+10:00

No preference deal for Katter's party

AAP

Monday, February 20, 2012

Confident: Katter's Australia Party leader Bob Katter (right) with member for Beaudesert Aidan McLindon at Canungra's Outpost Cafe for the Party's campaign launch. Picture: TIM MARSDEN

Katter's Australian Party predicts Labor incumbent Kate Jones won't need its preferences to retain the crucial seat of Ashgrove in the Queensland election.

Federal leader and Kennedy independent MP Bob Katter and state leader Aidan McLindon announced yesterday the party would not direct preferences to either Labor or the Liberal National Party.

The announcement came after speculation they would do a preference swap deal between Ms Jones in Ashgrove and Mr McLindon in Beaudesert.

But Mr McLindon said in his electorate yesterday he had been friends with Ms Jones for 16 years, and was confident she was "strong" enough to retain Ashgrove herself. She will be battling LNP leader Campbell Newman for the seat, who must win if he is to become premier. Mr McLindon said after studying the policies of both major parties, he could not find any differences. "It’s very, very clear to see the ALP and Liberals have become two heads of the same creature," Mr McLindon said. "We’re not in a position in good conscience to preference either of those parties."

The party would negotiate with minor parties and independents on a seat-by-seat basis, Mr McLindon said. "We will look at the merits or otherwise of their policy positions and what they believe in," he said.

Mr Katter said the decision not to direct preferen-ces came down to principle rather than politics. "We’ve got to do what we consider the right thing to do," he said. "It’s pretty hypocritical if we put, ‘It’s the principle of it’ on our logo and then go out saying, ‘Well, we’ll get two more votes if we go this way than if we go that way’. "If they want preferences, then they should come forward with policies that will say the sort of things that we’re saying."

Mr Katter said his party could not give preferences to the two major parties because of their "flawed" support for the coal seam gas industry and their economic performance, including that of Mr Newman in his time as Brisbane’s lord mayor.

But he said the biggest sticking point was both parties’ refusal to block plans from mining companies to bring in foreign labour to work in the state’s mines. "One of them (Labor) refuses to say that they haven’t discussed bringing in 14,000 workers – in other words, they’ve admitted that they’re bringing in 14,000 foreign workers to take all our jobs off us," he said. "And the other party, the LNP leader (Mr Newman) has steadfastly refused to say he’s going to stop it."

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Cr Rob Pyne will not be deterred and turns up heat

2012-02-20T08:03:00.001+10:00

http://therocknews.com.au/2012/02/20/pyne-turns-up-heat-in-campaign-against-corruption-and-misconduct-following-defamation-threat/

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Is the ALP brand dead in the water?

2012-02-20T00:04:00.001+10:00

Federal caucus must not play into Abbott's hands

by: Steve Bracks
From: The Australian
February 20, 2012 12:00AM

Minority government is hard. Relationships and trust matter. But a good leader can make it work. That was certainly my experience of minority government in Victoria between 1999 and 2002, working with the three independents in the Victorian parliament.

And that is my impression of the Gillard government over the past 18 months. She has made minority government work effectively. Just look at the substantive nation-building reforms. A law to structurally separate Telstra. A law to bring balance in how we pay for health services. A law that spreads the benefits of a mining boom. And a set of laws that puts a price on carbon.

And these are all reforms that can only be stopped by one thing: the election in the short term of an Abbott government.These reforms must be protected at all costs. They are core to our nation being a fair, prosperous and sustainable place to live. And these are reforms that place Julia Gillard as one of Labor's great reformers.

But if the federal caucus doesn't back the Prime Minister to see out her term, it won't just put these reforms at risk, it will hurt a generation of working people and their families.There seems to be an unknown number of federal caucus members who think it is a choice between Gillard and Kevin Rudd. It is not. It's a choice between a Labor government and an Abbott government.

They would undoubtedly know that the Prime Minister's personal relationships and trust with all but one of the crossbenchers is the bedrock of the government. But these crossbenchers have all said their arrangement is with Gillard and not the Labor Party.
They have indicated that if there is a leadership change we would go back to the drawing board and effectively all bets would be off.

Who is the big beneficiary of this? Tony Abbott.

That is because the withdrawal of the crossbench support would result in an election being called by the Governor-General, or Abbott being commissioned as prime minister. But the first minority Abbott government would be a short-run thing with his electoral support being sky high.

He would capitalise on this lead in the polls with an immediate election, resulting in a massive majority and potentially control of the Senate. We can't deny that Labor's public support is low. That is clear. But it is also mid-term, following some serious policy reforms where the right thing hasn't been the popular thing. By the middle of the year, millions of households will be benefiting from tax cuts and extra cash from the government, and small businesses will be getting a tax break. All that would be lost with an early election. And who loses the most? Well, that's a difficult question.

Is it a generation of Australians who deserve the best possible communications system that a completed NBN would deliver.Is it working people who would be forced to subsidise the healthcare of Australia's richest millionaires and billionaires? Is it the generation of young people who would miss out in the profound investment and reform agenda that will transform our nation's education system?

Is it older Australians who would see the largest ever increase in the aged pension clawed back?Or working Australians who would see their future living standards drop as the world-class retirement incomes policy funded by the minerals resource rent tax was wound back so that $4.5 billion could be given back to mining companies? Is it our environment, as our biggest polluters will pay no penalty for the pollution they put into our atmosphere every day? And let's face it, Australia would never have a carbon price; no politician would introduce one again.

Or is it Australian families who want the chance to lay the foundations for a ground breaking National Disability Insurance schemeThey are all too great a price to pay. It's not a risk worth taking.

I know Gillard and Rudd well. They have their respective strengths. Isn't is best to use those strengths to see federal Labor under Prime Minister Gillard serve its full term, thereby implementing key nation-building reforms? The Australian people deserve no less a commitment.

Steve Bracks was Victorian premier from 1999-2007

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Julia Gillard | Death by a thousand cuts!

2012-02-19T23:33:00.000+10:00

Tackle Kevin Rudd now, Julia Gillard urged

by: Matthew Franklin, Chief political correspondent
From: The Australian
February 20, 2012 12:00AM

Kevin Rudd at the international airport in Brisbane. Picture: Annette Dew Source: The Courier-Mail

Julia Gillard is being urged to take on Kevin Rudd in a ballot as early as next week to prevent Labor's leadership wrangling smashing the party's chances in the March 24 Queensland election.

After weeks of playing down the push to restore the Foreign Minister to the Labor leadership, sections of Labor's Right faction moved to a war footing yesterday, urging the Prime Minister to call a caucus ballot they predicted she would win.

Accusing Mr Rudd of gross disloyalty and his supporters of lying about his level of support, a senior Right faction leader told The Australian last night: "This has to stop. She has to take him on."

The push came as Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, on the first day of the formal campaign for the state election, demanded Canberra take the federal Labor leadership "wild card" out of her battle for re-election.

"I don't care how they resolve it, I just want it resolved," said Ms Bligh, refusing to back Mr Rudd or Ms Gillard. There are signs Julia Gillard's closest supporters have started to crab-walk away from her. Ms Bligh's clear frustration came as another senior Queensland Labor source claimed the party's chances would improve with Mr Rudd as prime minister, because Ms Gillard was unpopular in the northern state.

As Ms Gillard rejected leadership questions and declared she wanted to get on with her job, Tasmanian crossbencher Andrew Wilkie inflamed the tensions, revealing that he had discussed the Labor leadership with Mr Rudd in November.

Mr Wilkie's comments, denied by Mr Rudd, were seized on by Gillard supporters as evidence Mr Rudd had been destabilising the Prime Minister for months, despite his claims to the contrary. Ms Gillard ousted Mr Rudd to become the nation's first female prime minister in June 2010. A succession of poor opinion poll results and political misjudgments by the Prime Minister in recent months has worried Labor MPs, with Victorian Darren Cheeseman declaring on Saturday that Ms Gillard should resign for the good of the party.

Within hours, a video clip was posted on YouTube showing Mr Rudd when he was prime minister delivering a foul-mouthed rant about his inability to record a video message. As his supporters accused the Gillard camp of posting the video to discredit the former leader, Mr Rudd gave Sky News a midnight interview to assure colleagues he had mellowed since critics of his prime ministership complained of his dictatorial style, foul mouth and bad temper. "I don't walk away from some of my own failings in the past," Mr Rudd told Sky.

"The bottom line is, I think you do learn, and what I've tried to learn from all that is do less in a given working day, rather than trying to do everything "I think it's also important to delegate more and be sort of happy and contented about that."

Later yesterday, as Mr Rudd left Australia for a meeting of G20 foreign ministers in Mexico, Ms Gillard denied any knowledge of the YouTube posting as she won strong support from ministers including Peter Garrett, Tanya Plibersek and Craig Emerson.

Former Victorian premier Steve Bracks, writing in The Australian today, urges Labor to stick with Ms Gillard, while Victorian backbencher Steve Gibbons attacked Mr Rudd's "chaotic and deeply offensive" leadership.

"Only a psychopath with a giant ego would line up again after being comprehensively rejected by the overwhelming majority of colleagues," Mr Gibbons wrote on social media site Twitter. The Prime Minister, visiting Darwin to commemorate the 70th anniversary of its World War II bombing by the Japanese, did not buy in to the speculation.

"I'm getting on with the job with the strong confidence of my colleagues," she said. "We are delivering for this nation the changes we need to have a prosperous economy for the future, so working Australians can be assured they'll have a place in that economy, and so will their children."

Several Right faction sources said claims Mr Rudd's support in the 103-member caucus was approaching 40 votes were wrong, and his backers were lying. "I think she has to take him on to end this," said one senior Labor figure. "And I think she has the numbers to win."
Another source agreed, saying Mr Wilkie's claim of a discussion with Mr Rudd in November about a leadership tilt "put the lie" to the Foreign Minister's claim he had not been undermining Ms Gillard. "It's proof of disloyalty," the MP said. "This can't just go on and on. They are circulating lists overstating Kevin's support, and I think the only way to end this is to test the numbers."

Another Right faction figure said he was in two minds about the wisdom of bringing on a spill. "I think if a few of us just get on with out job it might help. Kevin isn't passing any loyalty tests out there at the moment."

Caucus is due to meet on Tuesday of next week. The Prime Minister can declare the leadership vacant at any time and any other caucus member can seek an extraordinary caucus meeting with three days notice and with the backing of at least one third of Labor MPs. An early meeting is unlikely because Mr Rudd is not due to return to Australia from international meetings until next weekend.

As Ms Bligh resigned herself to her re-election campaign being overshadowed by the federal brawl, former Queensland premier Peter Beattie took to Twitter to appeal for a resolution of the tensions at the top. "Julia Gillard needs to call a caucus meeting and resolve the leadership question once and for all, or Anna Bligh may as well stay at home," Mr Beattie wrote.

Mr Wilkie, speaking to Sky News, said he held a 90-minute discussion with Mr Rudd in November about the Labor leadership. Mr Wilkie said he had no doubt Mr Rudd wanted to return to The Lodge, and said he would find the Queenslander easier to work with than Ms Gillard, who earlier this year reneged on a promise to introduce compulsory pre-commitment technology to the nation's poker machines.

Mr Wilkie forecast an imminent Labor leadership challenge, and his West Australian crossbench colleague Tony Crook said he had been sounded out by a Rudd supporter before the resumption of parliament.

Queensland crossbencher Bob Katter refused to comment on the Labor leadership, while Greens leader Bob Brown voiced concerns about whether a new leader would show the same commitment to delivering the outcomes in the power-sharing agreement signed with Ms Gillard.

A spokeswoman for Mr Rudd said the meeting with Mr Wilkie covered a range of foreign policy issues, including Mr Wilkie's call for an inquiry into Australia's role in the Iraq war.
"Mr Wilkie raised leadership late in the conversation," the spokeswoman said. "At no point did Mr Rudd indicate he was seeking the leadership, nor request support for it."

Additional reporting: Joe Kelly

________________ | _____________

Kevin Rudd is a Happy Little Vegemite

2012-02-19T12:50:00.000+10:00

The video, showing a furious Kevin Rudd ranting and swearing, was leaked on the internet last night as the Government's leadership feud reached crisis point. The video was posted anonymously on YouTube after Prime Minister Julia Gillard's supporters declared war on Mr Rudd's character.

Posted under the title "Kevin Rudd is a happy little vegemite", the video dramatically raised the stakes in the bitter leadership rift between Ms Gillard and Mr Rude said the video, in which an obviously frustrated Mr Rudd slams the table and uses four-letter curses, was embarrassing but his frustration was directed at himself and no one else.

He said the video was from one of a number of speeches he recorded from time to time for Chinese community occasions, and was probably done in a reception room next to the prime minister's office "a couple of years ago". "You'd sit down and try and get the script right. Obviously I wasn't getting it right on this occasion and was getting pretty frustrated about it."

Mr Rudd said it was no secret that he did often swea "I've never pretended not to swear from time to time. That's been out there for a long, long time. "I wish I'd sweared (sic) less but that's just the truth of it."

His spokeswoman declined to say where the video had come from, saying: "He (Mr Rudd) regrets any offence that might be caused by the release of this selectively edited footage recorded a number of years ago."

The person who anonymously posted the video on YouTube yesterday identified themselves as HappyVegemiteKR - an apparent play on Mr Rudd's repeated descriptions of himself as a "happy little Vegemite" when questioned on his leadership aspirations.

The clip is a compilation of out-takes as an increasingly frustrated Foreign Affairs Minister fluffs his lines struggling to deliver a recorded speech. "Arrrhhh mate this is just impossible," he says, looking off-camer. "Just tell these d---heads in the embassy to just give me simple sentences . . ."

Timing coincides with leadership speculation

The emergence of the video capped a tumultuous day in federal politics in which one of Ms Gillard's MPs publicly urged her to "resign now. The shock tactics designed to blast the Prime Minister out of office in favour of Mr Rudd were led by Victorian Labor MP who holds the marginal seat of Corangamite by just 400 votes.Darren Cheeseman,

As the Prime Minister flew into Darwin last night to mark the 70th anniversary of the Japanese bombing, Mr Cheeseman publicly called for her to stand down as her defiant supporters insisted she would fight on. "There's no doubt about it. Julia Gillard can't take the party forward. The community has made its mind up on her," he told the Sunday Herald Sun. "And I think it's in the best interests of party she should resign."

The extraordinary call was earlier backed by some of the Ms Gillard's ministers. "For the good of the party. For the good of the Government, she should stand down," a senior minister said.

In the event of a leadership vote, the Gillard camp maintained she had more than 60 votes in the 103 ALP caucus, but even her supporters conceded a ballot was high-risk because it would probably show more than a third of MPs wanted her gone.

A Labor powerbroker warned Mr Rudd was destroying the party, driving down the primary vote with relentless destabilisation. "He's taken ALP caucus hostage. His message is, 'I'll shoot the Prime Minister - if you don't give me the job'. "He is lying about his support levels."

As ministers loyal to the Prime Minister yesterday threatened a wave of mass resignations if Mr Rudd regained the leadership, there were predictions Left faction powerbroker and Transport Minister Anthony Albanese or Climate Change Minister Greg Combet would be approached to serve as deputy prime minister if Mr Rudd returned to The Lodge. But angry Labor MPs, including Attorney-General Nicola Roxon, backed Ms Gillard.

Julia Gillard still has support

Ms Roxon said Ms Gillard was "absolutely" the better choice for prime minister over Mr Rudd. "Julia has worked absolute miracles with the hand she has been dealt," she said. Both sides believe Ms Gillard will not resign.

Asked whether he had support for a leadership challenge, Mr Rudd declined to answer. Last night, a senior minister described Mr Cheeseman as "desperate and dateless". "This is a typical cry for relevance from the usual suspects, the desperate and dateless in the caucus who are easily fooled," he said. " If they had anywhere near the numbers they claim, they wouldn't be dropping this sort of rubbish out, as always when Kevin is about to jump on another plane. Mr Rudd flies to Mexico today for a foreign ministers' meeting.

Labor challenge will occur - Wilkie

However, Independent MP Andrew Wilkie has since weighed into the debate, saying he would find it easier to work with Mr Rudd than Ms Gillard if the Foreign Minister regained his former job of prime minister.

Mr Wilkie tore up his agreement to support the Gillard minority government after the Prime Minister broke her promise on gambling reforms in January. The independent member for the Hobart seat of Denison said his relationship with Ms Gillard had taken a "battering" since he pulled his support for the Labor government. "A word has not passed between Julia Gillard and myself since Friday night of January 20," Mr Wilkie told Sky News today. "I would find it easier to work with Kevin Rudd than Julia Gillard at this point of time."

_________________ | _________________

Is Anna Bligh on the ropes?

2012-02-18T11:44:00.002+10:00

Campbell Newman ready to rout Anna Bligh as Newspoll shows big lead

by: Michael McKenna, Queensland political editor
From: The Australian
February 18, 2012 12:00AM

Campbell Newman has extended the Liberal National Party's commanding lead over Labor in Queensland, and enters the state election campaign on track to inflict a savage defeat on the Bligh government.

With Premier Anna Bligh set to see the state Governor tomorrow to dissolve parliament ahead of the March 24 poll, The Weekend Australian's exclusive Newspoll kicks the LNP 16 points clear of the ALP, which faces an electoral bloodbath.

Labor's base vote is pegged at 30 per cent and, when preferences are factored in, it trails the LNP 42 per cent to 58 per cent. On those numbers, Labor would lose more than half of its 51 seats, including ministers touted as future leaders, in the 89-seat parliament.

The Newspoll shows the pre-Christmas momentum Ms Bligh generated has stalled and the LNP is close to regaining the 20-point lead it opened up on Labor after Mr Newman became leader 11 months ago.

A special analysis by Newspoll shows Bob Katter's fledgling party has only 4.8 per cent of the primary vote across the state. This leaves Katter's Australian Party well behind the 23 per cent secured by Pauline Hanson's One Nation in 1998 when it won 11 seats - a feat the federal independent MP has claimed his party could repeat.

KAP picked up a third of those who said they would not vote for the major parties or the Greens. Despite Ms Bligh telling The Weekend Australian this week that she could win back support and regaining the trust of voters who had turned against Labor after 19 of the past 21 years in power, the LNP base appears largely rock-solid.

Newspoll found two-thirds of LNP supporters had locked in their vote, and would not consider an alternative on polling day, while less than half of Labor's supporters said they would remain loyal to Ms Bligh.

The Bligh government could face a drubbing on March 24, with a further 40 per cent of Labor supporters conceding there was a slight chance they might take their support elsewhere. The Newspoll results will deliver a blow to Labor morale after its rebound in support late last year, and following a heated few days in parliament this week.

Ms Bligh turned up the attack on Mr Newman using the cover of parliament to predict the LNP leader would "end up" in jail over his family's business interests.

In an interview with The Weekend Australian, Ms Bligh was unapologetic about the attack and expressed the belief she could deliver Labor its sixth consecutive election victory in Queensland. "I think this will be a very tight, very hard-fought election, and it will be an election where I will certainly be talking about a big vision for a big moment in Queensland's history," the Premier said.

Ms Bligh promised a refreshed frontbench - with the elevation to cabinet of younger, energised backbenchers - and a plan to harness the resources boom, with heavy emphasis on jobs, education and training.

Mr Newman, who has set a 4 per cent unemployment target for the state over the next six years, told The Weekend Australian that, if elected, he would reform the public service, return ministerial accountability and revive struggling sectors of the economy. "We are promising to get the state back on track after the whole ethos of Queensland has been diminished and dragged down," the LNP leader said.

Mr Newman dismissed the Labor attacks on him as the actions of a "desperate" government. But they continue to take some political skin off Mr Newman's personal standing among voters, with dissatisfaction over his performance increasing to 37 per cent from 33 per cent in the October-December Newspoll. In the last Newspoll, his satisfaction level fell five percentage points to 45 per cent, where it remains.

Ms Bligh's satisfaction levels have increased to 41 per cent, up by two percentage points.
Labor last night turned to former prime minister Paul Keating for a fundraiser in the Brisbane north electorate of Ashgrove, where Mr Newman is trying to take the seat from incumbent Labor MP Kate Jones.

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The Ides of March dawn for Gillard

2012-02-18T11:33:00.002+10:00

Kevin Rudd marches towards Labor leadership challenge

by: Dennis Shanahan and Sid Maher
From: The Australian
February 18, 2012 1:22AM

Kevin Rudd is prepared to challenge Julia Gillard as prime minister next month, before the Queensland election and the federal budget parliamentary session.

The former Labor leader is readying for a strike at regaining the top job in the final March sitting of parliament as Labor MPs fall away from supporting the Prime Minister. Senior cabinet ministers expect a challenge during the Queensland election campaign, despite the potential damage to Anna Bligh's hopes of re-election and claims the Foreign Minister "doesn't have the numbers" or is afraid to "put up or shut up".

The rapid shift of support within the Labor parliamentary caucus in the past two sitting weeks has convinced Mr Rudd's supporters he has 40 of the 52 votes he requires to win a challenge. Gillard supporters estimate the Prime Minister has 45 votes, with the rest of the 103 Labor MPs and senators undecided. The latest episode of the Greek drama that is the Labor leadership appears set to be staged during the Ides of March.

But Rudd supporters believe many MPs counted as Ms Gillard's supporters are "soft" and could shift if there were another blunder by the Prime Minister's office or a ballot was called. In the past 72 hours, there have been claims Labor's influential NSW branch is "running dead" on the leadership, that the Left is demanding a bigger role for its rising star Greg Combet, possibly the deputy leadership, in return for its support, and that ministers have signalled to Mr Rudd's camp they would be prepared to work with him in cabinet."Kevin isn't about being vindictive, and apart from a couple of obvious changes - such as Wayne Swan - there wouldn't be wholesale change," a minister told The Weekend Australian yesterday.

A key Rudd supporter said: "After the Beazley leadership change, all the strongest opponents to the Rudd challenge were given top jobs in the ministry." In recent days, the Prime Minister has recognised the threat to her leadership, and ministers loyal to her, including Nicola Roxon and Craig Emerson, have sounded out MPs about their view on how the government is doing and to work out the numbers.

Some ministers who have been suggesting to MPs it would be "suicide" to return to Mr Rudd as prime minister just 20 months after he was dumped have been bluntly told "She's finished" and Labor has no chance with Ms Gillard as leader. NSW right-wing MPs have been told the influential state branch "supports the leader" but will not interfere or direct NSW MPs on their vote.

"Essentially, they're running dead and will not tell MPs how to vote," a source said. "The NSW Right has been a bloc vote." Ministers supporting Ms Gillard have argued that if Mr Rudd does not challenge before the end of next month, with the last sitting day of parliament being March 22, his campaign will stall during the six-week pre-budget break and give Ms Gillard a chance to improve her dire position in the polls. "If he doesn't go before the end of March, he'll be seen to have nothing," a senior minister told The Weekend Australian.

Other ministers said Mr Rudd was cowardly and would not challenge, and would be seen as a wrecker who was destroying Labor's chances. Ministers said Mr Rudd would be afraid to jeopardise his role as Foreign Minister, which he has enjoyed, by launching a leadership bid that failed.

But MPs backing Mr Rudd said he had showed determination and a willingness to take risks when he challenged Kim Beazley for the leadership in 2006, and any bid would seek to win outright. "The aim is not to go in and set up a close result for a second bid later on, but to win the first time," one minister said. "The idea of going to the backbench after a close result is only a fallback position."

Both Ms Gillard and Mr Rudd continued to parry questions about the leadership yesterday. At the launch of a charity campaign for Caritas in Brisbane, where schoolchildren were calling out for Mr Rudd to become prime minister again, he responded to leadership questions by saying: "Schoolkids are always nice, and they're well-mannered and they're friendly, as are the people of Queensland. "But in answer to your fundamental question, I'm very happy being the Foreign Minister of Australia, and as they say in the classics, I've got to zip."

At the opening of a training centre at a Catholic college in Canberra, Ms Gillard did not respond to questions about a Rudd challenge, but said: "Nothing is more important to me than just getting on with the job we need to do to give these kids the best possible future, and to give our nation the strongest possible economy for the future. "So when they graduate from here and whatever the rest of their education journey brings, they will be young adults in a prosperous economy where they can get an opportunity and get a chance."

MPs spoken to by The Weekend Australian expressed frustration at the government's performance at the end of another week of parliament in which Ms Gillard's leadership was under pressure. "The marginal seat-holders are being worn down," one MP said, expressing frustration that the government was unable to take advantage of an economy that had unemployment down to about 5 per cent. Instead, the government had been bogged down by job losses at Qantas and manufacturers, which were obscuring the benefits of the boom.
"We should be like Black Caviar - we should be streets ahead," one MP said.

Several MPs expressed frustration at the Prime Minister's performance. "All the injuries are self-inflicted," one said. Another said Mr Rudd's replacement by Ms Gillard was a "Greek tragedy - there were no winners".

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Possible manipulation of votes cast in Division 6 CRC Blog poll

2012-02-17T13:44:00.003+10:00

If the CRC Div.6 election was held today who would you vote for?

Has the Queensland electorate stop listening?

2012-02-17T08:49:00.001+10:00

Labor links Newman to FBI crime probe

Thursday, February 16, 2012

On the attack: Premier Anna Bligh raised questions about Campbell Newman's

Premier Anna Bligh launched an extraordinary attack on her opponent's character, alleging the conduct of his family's business could land him behind bars.

The FBI is reportedly investigating Majella Global Technologies, the company of Liberal National Party leader Campbell Newman's brother-in-law Seb Monsour, to determine whether it breached US trade secret laws. The company was formed to sell disaster recovery technology, just nine days after floodwaters receded in Brisbane in 2011.

The FBI is probing the possible theft of US military technology.

Ms Bligh tabled several documents in State Parliament yesterday, saying the paper trail led straight to Mr Newman's door. Under parliamentary privilege, she read out Mr Newman's home address before suggesting he could meet the same fate as disgraced former Labor minister Gordon Nuttall. "When it happens on your side you need to condemn it," she said. "When Gordon Nuttall happened we referred him to the CMC. I gave evidence against him in court. "Those people are behind jail (sic) and Campbell Newman will end up there as well."

Labor has been asking questions about the Newman-Monsour family's interests since Mr Newman announced his plans to contest the premiership from outside of Parliament. Ms Bligh told Parliament the "complex web" of company structures showed Mr Newman's wife, Lisa, helped establish the company in question, and was a financial beneficiary of its parent company. "Lisa Newman's financial interests are her husband's financial interests. That's how it works in this country," Ms Bligh said.

Earlier, Mr Newman tried to distance himself from his in-laws' business interests. "I don't know anything about his business interests," he said. "I'm not involved and neither is my wife." In a statement released after Ms Bligh's tirade, Mr Newman said she had "lost all credibility in her desperate bid to cling to power".

In a statement, Mr Monsour said Labor had engaged in political opportunism.

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Leadership tussle: Rudd circles, Gillard stumbles

2012-02-17T08:21:00.000+10:00

By ABC's Barrie Cassidy

Posted February 17, 2012 08:05:27

Photo: Gillard needs to lift her primary vote. She can't do that while Rudd continues to circle. (AAP: Alan Porritt)

Judas kiss

The pressure must surely be building on Prime Minister Julia Gillard to call a party room ballot and try and stop in its tracks Kevin Rudd's undeclared run for the leadership.

Rudd's numbers now are modest; perhaps a support base of 20 and sometimes approaching 30 depending on the mood of the day. That's from a caucus of 103.

But as every day goes by, the chances are he will build on that support. This week was a case in point. Julia Gillard had one of her worst weeks in politics because essentially trivial matters were badly handled. The damage was significant because it went to the most vulnerable aspects of her leadership – credibility and trust.

It is of no consequence that somebody in her office was preparing a speech in the event that she might win a leadership ballot. It would or should have been obvious to all those around her that that was at least a possibility and it would be prudent to start preparing for it. That she remembered little of it is also unsurprising. She would have been pre-occupied with issues like, should I challenge and will I have the numbers?

Equally unremarkable was the showing of polling unfavourable to Rudd to colleagues. Why wouldn't she? For days, she had been urged by key people to mount a challenge. Surely, armed with relevant material, she would seek to sound out colleagues.

For goodness sake. In the mid-90s, Liberals disenchanted with John Hewson's leadership, showed polling to Kerry O'Brien. And he was never a Liberal MP. All Gillard ever said was that she hadn't made up her mind to finally take the plunge until the day itself. There is nothing in the preparation of a speech or the showing off of polling that is inconsistent with that. But such straight forward and candid explanations were beyond the Prime Minister. By agreeing to a long pre-recorded interview with Four Corners, she allowed herself to be ambushed. She had no time to prepare. In the end she looked shifty and unconvincing.

Her colleagues were gobsmacked. It set back her cause. She can be thankful there is no mood for change across the broader caucus or in the state branches. No mood for change to Rudd, and no mood – yet – for a change to a third candidate, though all that may change if the issue is allowed to drift.

And that mood could start to change as early as next week. It's a non-sitting week and Kevin Rudd has a golden opportunity to declare: "I'm from Queensland, and I'm here to help," as he travels the state drawing crowds and seemingly doing all he can for Labor in the state election.

The speculation that is killing Gillard and the Government will go on no matter what. Nothing else is breaking through. Gillard needs to lift her primary vote. She can't do that while Rudd continues to circle. She needs to act, and sooner rather than later.

The Government is finished if it can't use the May budget and then the tax cuts and pension rises in June to start rebuilding its stocks. If the leadership issue is not dealt with before then, both the May and June exercises will be futile.

The alternative argument is that such a pre-emptive move would be interpreted in parts of the media as a recognition on Gillard's part that the challenge is real and her leadership is threatened. Well knock me down with a feather. Rudd is campaigning. Rudd is talking to journalists about the leadership despite his astonishing denial.

I know the names of some of those he has spoken to. I know where he said it – in his office – on a parliamentary sitting day – and I know what he said. He told them a challenge would happen; he told them he was prepared to lose the first ballot and go to the backbench; and in one conversation he laughed about the prospect of Gillard stumbling again.

Yet the Foreign Minister has categorically denied ever having spoken to any journalist about the leadership. He can deny the approaches only because he believes the journalists involved are bound to both protect their sources and to treat such conversations as confidential. He is protected by the cloak of journalistic ethics.

But when does this become as important or more so than the briefing former treasurer Peter Costello gave journalists at Canberra's Waters Edge Restaurant, on March 5, 2005?
Costello – according to one of the journalists present – the ABC's Michael Brissenden – told them over dinner that he had set a deadline of April the following year for John Howard to retire, or else he would destroy his leadership by launching a challenge.

He told them if the coup failed, he would move to the backbench to "carp" and build numbers for a second challenge. It is fascinating in retrospect to revisit what the journalists said at the time. Brissenden said the three journalists left the dinner with the understanding that the story could be reported as background.

But the next day they received frantic phone calls from Costello's staff pleading that the conversation be treated as off the record. They went along with that, but two years later, had a change of mind. They went on the record and outed Costello because they argued, "The strength of Mr Costello's denials today (April 14, 2007) go to matters of credibility for the man who still holds hopes of one day leading the nation." Indeed.

Barrie Cassidy is the presenter of ABC programs Insiders and Offsiders. View his full profile here.

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Crime and Misconduct Commission and Local Government Tribunal to

2012-02-16T07:24:00.000+10:00

Probe hits Cairns Regional councillor's election hopes

Daniel Strudwick

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Voters will know before the local government election in April whether a Cairns councillor has been found guilty of misconduct after a year-long inquiry into claims he favoured his campaign donors.

Cr Sno Bonneau has been under investigation by the Crime and Misconduct Commission and Department of Local Government and Planning since February, 2011, after fellow councillor Rob Pyne raised misconduct claims against him. Cr Bonneau has criticised the investigation for being unnecessarily drawn out and will consider legal action against the agencies because the case has impacted his chances of re-election at the April 28 poll.

The Cairns Post revealed yesterday Cr Bonneau has already filed a defamation claim for $300,000 in damages against Cr Pyne, who raised the allegations with the council CEO and this newspaper a year ago.

Cr Pyne claims Cr Bonneau accepted election donations from business owners and property developers, and voted on council decisions that impacted his donors without declaring a conflict of interest. Cr Bonneau, who has always maintained his innocence, says he welcomes a decision from the independent tribunal.

But he insists councillors should not be the subject of unresolved investigations so close to an election. "We've been writing to the department and the CMC – everyone we could – since the middle of last year and it’s been very frustrating that we haven’t known when this would be finalised," Cr Bonneau said "I’m going to pursue the fact that they have taken so long because it is really unfair. "I’m concerned that this could happen to other people – it’s a shockingly long time for them (the CMC and Local Government Department) to play around with this." The department has defended the length of its investigation, saying it was standard for misconduct matters to "take a considerable amount of time". "Due to the serious nature of the allegations we want to get all the information to ensure the correct outcome," a department spokesman said.

The department would not say when the outcome of its investigation would be announced, except that it would happen "well before the local government elections".

_____________ | ______________

My Opinion

Investigation of this type should not take as long as it puts tremendous strain on the individual. If Government sets up these bodies then they should be well funded and with guidelines outlining the length of time taken to hand down decisions.

However, to be fair in this case on the Investigating bodies , they do have to deal with a Councillor that whether on Council business of personal matters, is frequently absent from Division 9.

Ross Parisi

16.02.2012

Cr Bonneau should stand aside while the investigation is underway.

2012-02-15T11:35:00.001+10:00

Cairns councillors' rift deepens with $300,000 legal threat

Daniel Strudwick & Melanie Petrinec

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Action: Councillor Sno Bonneau has launched defamation procceedings against fellow Councillor Rob Pyne.

A CAIRNS councillor accused of misconduct has started legal action against the fellow councillor who reported him, lodging a defamation claim for $300,000 in damages.

Court documents filed on behalf of Cr Sno Bonneau say claims raised by Cr Rob Pyne have caused distress and embarrassment. When told of the civil action Cr Pyne said: "When I stood for the council, I promised to act as a watchdog and stand up for transparency and accountability. This will not change." But Cr Bonneau said the matter may never proceed to the courtroom because he was waiting for the outcome of a State Government investigation into the allegations before serving Cr Pyne with the lawsuit.

The investigation by the Crime and Misconduct Commission and Department of Local Government and Planning had lasted a year, and the department could not say when any determination would be made. "The proceedings have been filed to keep my claims within the 12-month limitation period but (they) may never be served or acted upon," Cr Bonneau said, referring to the one-year deadline imposed on defamation action in Queensland courts.

His claim related to a dossier collated and circulated by Cr Pyne in February last year, which included allegations that Cr Bonneau had taken cash donations from developers and business owners and then failed to declare a conflict of interest when the council made decisions relating to the donors.

In the statement of claim, Cr Bonneau alleged Cr Pyne’s accusations, which were also published in The Cairns Post in February last year, painted him as corrupt, unfit to remain as a councillor and unethical.

"General damages are sought to vindicate the reputation of the plaintiff (and) compensate the plaintiff for distress and embarrassment caused to him," the claim stated. Aggravated damages are being sought on the "falsity of the matter complained of", the "maliciousness" of the dossier and Cr Pyne’s alleged "intention to publicly diminish the standing and credibility of the plaintiff".

Cr Pyne said he was disappointed in the length of time it was taking to finalise the investigation, but he stood by the allegations. "I’m sure the outcome of the investigation will vindicate me," he said.

________________ | _________________

My Opinion

In a modern democracy it is so important that the safeguards set up to protect its fragile state operate with efficiency within a reasonable time limit. Allegations made against Bonneau by Pyne were submitted for investigation almost a year ago. As at the time of this posting the investigation is still underway and no time limit has been set for the decision.

This matter must be determined as soon as possible and certainly before nomination for the Cairns Regional Council election are called for. It would be untenable if the decision was handed down after the election at which Bonneau was successful. The electors have a right to know whether Bonneau has breached the Local Government Act and whether he is indeed eligible to stand.

In meantime I believe that transparency is paramount and that justice is not only done but seen to be done. Therefore, I call on the Cairns Regional Council CEO to request Bonneau to stand down while the investigation is underway.

Ross Parisi

15.02.2012