Green with a hard heart?
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Oh, that’s brilliant, that is. It really doesn’t take much to figure out who’s running this joint. FFS
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Flake News
Posted on July 6, 2017 [email protected] in Craft Standards, News Corp, Political News
Now Murdoch’s media has abandoned claims of a connection to actual journalism and shark-vaulted into the Trumpian post-truth void, we can set aside conventional media criticism and marvel at the death-throes desperation of its ‘yarn’-spinning.
No longer content to merely feed today’s news through the standard News Corp grinder and pack it together with the usual ideological offal, the Daily Telegraph’s fact butchers are now manufacturing the meat altogether. This new ‘news’, like the cheapest sausage, is injected so full of sodium and carcinogenic chemicals it bears no resemblance to anything close to real life.
With a now soulless Liberal Party in the grip of autophagia, the spectral Abbott haunting Turnbull’s prime ministerial banquet like a bloodied Banquo rattling a set of rosary beads, and the Labor Party, slowly marching Birnam Wood-style upon Dunsinane, the Tele preferred to focus its front page on two years’ hence and predictions of a new, more terrible tyrant in, err, Bill Shorten.
Honestly, you couldn’t make this up, except they just did. Imagine, for a moment, The Washington Post setting aside the Watergate inquiry while they projected three years into the future to a Jimmy Carter-led dystopia, one that threatened the long-suffering American people with a reign of competency and compassion. Oh, the wailing and the gnashing of teeth.
This surely is yet another symbol that News Corporation, the loss-making, fact-shedding news media detritus of Murdoch’s once mighty empire (21st Century Fox being the profitable and much bigger business) is in its final, feeble days.
Just look at it: The octogenarian head of the Family Firm is revelling in his role as the new handbag (alligator skin) of super groupie Jerry Hall (Jerry and the Pacemaker). Son Lachlan here in Australia is purely focused on taking control of the Ten Network in the quite reasonable anticipation that federal parliament will change media ownership laws for his benefit. And the other son James has put that whole unfortunate phone hacking scandal behind him by lobbying Teresa May’s mortally wounded minority government to let Fox take control of the UK’s Sky Television.
Is it any wonder, then, that the old, decaying and increasingly irrelevant print legacy assets are being left to their own murky devices. Over at Times Roman Catholic broadsheet The Australian, battalions of crusty old cranks fulminate about climate conspiracies and pearl-clutching matrons fret that our godlessness will be our destruction (Donald Trump being the exception, of course).
But the tabloids have to work that much harder to convince their supposedly blue-collar market to vote against their own interests. So we hear that Shorten will lift corporate taxes and bring back penalty rates if elected. Golly, what a vote loser that’ll be in Western Sydney (“We’re for the West”).
It used to be infuriating this stuff. But now it seems rather desperate and clearly workshopped (and photoshopped) to within an inch of its life. And the best part is that it isn’t working. The myth that Howard’s blue-collar Tories would stick with having their livelihoods destroyed so long as those in power were brutalising refugees, Aborigines and the unemployed has lost its magic. Victorians and Queenslander’s ignored the tabloid lies in state elections and we saw in the UK the spectacular backfire by The Sun and the other truth-manufacturing UK tabloids to halt Jeremy Corbyn.
So now, they’re resorting to not just spinning today’s news, but faking up the future. It’s low, it’s desperate, it’s tawdry and it has absolutely nothing to do with journalism or the truth.
Which is why the toilet paper that is Murdoch’s tabloids is set to be flushed. And for good this time one would hope.
So to those who understand these things, is the currently advertised “closing loopholes in the overseas company tax avoidance” actually going to be effective? Kudo’s if it is, because its way way overdue.
The keyword in the ad is ‘undisclosed profits’. Whatever that actually means.
The ATO could argue in court that a lot of the company structures and loans to themselves are purely set up for tax avoidance but we never enforce this ruling.
Please, no commenting on tax law unless you are a qualified tax accountant, lest Ye offend daytripper.
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Am I missing something with this Gillespie business. I’m all for transparency, stopping fraud and holding dodgy bastatds to account. But owning a shopping centre which has a lease with Aus Post seems to be clutching at straws. Even if it’s not legal I don’t see anything dodgy with it.
And aren’t a lot of Australia Post outlets these days franchises?
Yeah I think you’re correct.
Also it would all be negotiated through real estate agents etc. I highly doubt Aus Post is going to pay above market rates to influence a politician.
Yeah, it seems a bit lame to be honest. Perhaps the ALP wanting to put the libs through a bit of what they went through with Thompson and Slipper?
Not sure it’s the right long game though. The ALP should be right now pushing policy, policy, policy as loud as they can, as a contrast the the Libs infighting and Abbott-driven looneyness. Pull out big proposals to ensure multinationals pay tax, negative gearing reform, that sort of thing. Hard policy proposals with a tinge of populism that you’d never be able to get away with if the govt was organised and united.
This sort of thing makes it look like you’re trying to sneak your way into govt rather than win it. everryone understood Thompson and Slipper rorting their allowances, but my gut feeling is that this’ll be way too technical for people to worry much about one way or the other. Hell, I don’t, and I’m as partisanly anti-Coalition as they come. The Libs are falling to bits, why interrupt your enemy when he’s busy walking off a cliff?
This could be an opportunity for the ALP to actually win back some genuine primary vote for the first time in a while, given the Greens are also busy punching each other.
There’s private licensed ones (mostly small) and Aus Post owned ones (most of the big ones). Has been the case for decades.
I understand the intention was to sell them off but they sold a few and then it became an unviable business model I believe. So they stopped the franchising.
And yes HM the ALP should be pushing policy instead of worrying about point scoring that most people can’t understand anyway. They seem to have completely lost their way over the past decade. They should be capitalising on the LNP brain fades.
The number of post offices does not always match populations. In my area it is excruciating with queues outside the doors. The pollies are oblivious to community concerns on that score, leading to a suspicion that whoever is running the post office has got an exclusive deal.
So it is OK to bag Pollies when they use their legitimate, and generous, travel expenses, but when an MP allegedly breaks the Law, some think it is OK.
Gillespie owns a shopping centre, and he knows that under the Law he is not allowed to get any gain from any Government contract or lease. But he ignored it.
The High Court will decide, just like they did for Bob Day, which is right and proper.
I don’t think this is right. The licensed outlets were a way to effectively increase the network without a big investment, the big post offices were never going to be sold.
This seems to be a pretty seven-degrees of separation type accusation to me.
His company’s tenant pays a government corp for a franchise. His company’s tenant’s customers pay his tenant who then pay him in turn. I’m aware the law/constitution says indirect, but I’m not sure how indirect it needs to be before it becomes ridiculous. Doctor’s surgeries who claim Medicare, sparkies who claim solar rebates, other tradies who claim the money back for training apprentices - any companies who claim rebates for anything, all have indirect links to government money.
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Is he post office in question a franchise?
Haven’t followed this all that closely to date but, if its state owned, he’s screwed.
If it’s in a smallish country town, I’d be surprised. Pretty sure the Port Fairy one is a franchise, but the Warrnambool one is a biggie and probably still state-owned.
How does someone who is ineligible manage to be there for 10 years?
Good question.
Parliament will be poorer without him.
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And this is why you get people to ruthlessly vet your preselected candidates. Suspect it would have been caught these days, but back in 2006 things in the Greens were a fair bit more lackadaisical.
He had no choice but to resign, but yeah, this sucks. He was the best parliamentary Green by a fair way in my opinion, walked the line between someone like Rhiannon who is all principled outrage and not enough brain, and Di Natale who is the reverse. With any luck he sorts the citizenship thing out and makes a return in some way.
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