The Rudd Government has bowed to pressure from the Greens and Independent Senator Nick Xenophon and slashed the proposed income thresholds for the Medicare surcharge to $75,000 for singles, although Health Minister Nicola Roxon wants to leave the proposed new threshold for couples unchanged at $150,000.
Labor’s substitute for WorkChoices, which it calls Forward With Fairness, is no counter-revolution. In a way, it’s more an attempt to make WorkChoices more efficient, the sort of prescription that John Howard might have gone for had he not been overwhelmed by the desire to leave behind a profound ideological mark.
For political fringe-dwellers like the Greens, there was no threat to Australia’s national security to warrant the 2005 anti-terrorism laws. The legislation was, they said, all a ruse to hide the government’s real agenda, ramming the new industrial relations laws through parliament during that first week in November 2005.
With the stench of the Wollongong Council corruption scandal, developer donations and the New South Wales State Government’s radical planning reforms believed to be the main reasons for the Labor Party’s fall from favour, the Premier, Nathan Rees, said voters had sent a clear message to his Government.
The surreal is everywhere. Witness Alan Carpenter, failed Premier from the rivers of gold state Western Australian telling the ABC’s The 7.30 Report on Monday that he wants to start “a completely new era in Western Australian governance” by teaming up with the Nationals. No, it wasn’t Clarke and Dawe. Don’t check your sets, this is supposed to be serious.
88 per cent of those surveyed said Australia should introduce an emissions trading scheme, with 61 per cent saying it should happen regardless of what other countries did. A clear majority, 58 per cent, said they would be prepared to pay more for energy, although only 50 per cent of Coalition voters were prepared to accept price rises.
Amid the train wreck that the Senate became last week there was one consistency - everybody concerned claimed they had a mandate. The highlight was when the Coalition and Family First’s Steve Fielding knocked off the increase to the luxury car tax, worth $555 million over four years.
When historians look back on what has been a week of unprecedented political havoc across the country, perhaps one of the most significant developments will have gone contemporaneously unremarked: the final morphing of Brendan Nelson into Simon Crean. Crean paid the ultimate price. It’s odds-on Nelson will as well.
After the resignation of popular local member and former foreign minister Alexander Downer, the Liberals suffered a 10 per cent swing on the primary vote. Family First candidate Bob Day, who stood as a Liberal in last year’s general election, picked up most of the Liberal vote while the Greens vote was up by more than 11 per cent.
Environmentalists point to the high voter concern about global warming and support for programs that will deliver abatement. However, recent polling shows that while 72 per cent of people supported the introduction of an emissions trading scheme, half of those polled admit they do not know what emissions trading is.