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The Generator news service publishes articles on sustainable development, agriculture and energy as well as observations on current affairs. The news service is used on the weekly radio show, The Generator, as well as by a number of monthly and quarterly magazines. A podcast of the Generator news is also available.
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  • PM may end up dumped in a ditch

    PM may end up dumped in a ditch

     

    Simon Benson

    Monday, June 07, 2010 at 11:25pm

     

     

    KEVIN Rudd is in serious trouble. And it’s not the electorate he should be worried about.

    It’s a cabal of powerbrokers and his own MPs.

    According to the mathematical principles used to remove Morris Iemma from office in NSW, the PM should already be a goner.

    In 2008, when the NSW Labor powerbrokers Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar (these are the same blokes now shoring up Rudd’s leadership) first came after Iemma, his popularity was in the mid 30s – around where Rudd is now.

    Labor’s primary vote was 35 per cent and Iemma had three years to run to an election.

    Federal Labor’s primary vote is now an appallingly low 33 per cent. And Rudd has not three years, but three months.

    Some suggest there is no precedent for a move on the PM. Nonsense. The only precedent is that it hasn’t happened in a first term.

    The other difference is that Iemma was still popular among his backbench – the majority were personally loyal.

    Rudd has the added problem that the majority of his caucus don’t like him.

    The mood of the caucus last week was described as solemn.

    That was a polite understatement. They are filthy. That many of them stand to lose their seats after just one term is causing many to start talking about alternatives – not after the election – before.

    With a swing of just 1.4 per cent, Labor could lose 14 seats and Government – and that is before we consider the mining seats. Based on yesterday’s figures of a two-party preferred vote of 53/47 in favour of the Coalition, they could lose double that.

    While it is just talk, talk has a way of being put into action.

    Julia Gillard is being spoken of in the corridors for the possibility of a move to her before an election.

    Arbib, the wiley senator and former NSW party boss was the major powerbroker who put Rudd into office. Bitar is the party’s national secretary.

    Both are now Rudd’s closest political advisers. But Arbib, at least, has already started talking up Gillard. Not explicitly but enough to get tongues wagging.

    Just as they have to take responsibility for the abysmal state in NSW, both must take responsibility for where Rudd, and Labor, are in the polls.

    That is something neither will want to do. If there is risk they could wear responsibility for an election loss after one term, they would switch to Gillard in a heartbeat.

    Rudd’s problem is that he is not only running out of time to turn things around, he may soon find he is running out of true friends.

  • Angry voters ready to give Rudd the red card

     

    Rudd’s detractors blame his character. ”We’re not paying a price for anything we’ve done. It’s just character,” said one MP who returned to Canberra yesterday after a week in the electorate.

    Like his colleagues, his ears are ringing with voters venting their anger at Rudd and the government. ”Out there in the community it’s really bad,” he said. ”Rudd isn’t who you told us he was,” he recites.

    Everybody in the government agrees there is a problem. Short of gambling by changing leaders – a move for which there is no consensus – no one is sure how to turn it around.

    Those with their feet firmly on the ground agree it will be a long process, far more complicated than simply shutting down the debate over the mining tax.

    ”If it was one thing like fixing the [mining tax], it would be easy,” a source said.

    Senior operatives say the decay is not the product of any single decision or Rudd’s character but a composite that began in October. Rudd’s inability to resolve the stand-off aboard the Customs vessel the Oceanic Viking exposed the Prime Minister in a crisis but also swung the focus back to that most potent of issues, asylum seekers.

    It began to cost Labor swing voters in marginal seats, the same voters it had lured away from John Howard in 2007.

    Then came the insulation debacle, Tony Abbott’s effective scare campaign about the carbon emissions trading scheme being a ”great big new tax”, and the cost blowouts with school buildings. It took until the health policy release in April and the leaders’ debate to arrest the slide.

    Things began to unravel again, first with with the abolition of the insulation program and the dumping of a promise to build childcare centres, then with the biggest catalyst of all, the decision in late April to shelve the emissions trading scheme for at least two years.

    The budget, just over two weeks later, was supposed to be the circuit breaker with the news the economy would be back in the black within three years.

    That was clouded out by the developing fight over the mining tax, announced the week before.

    ”The message has been completely lost,” one senior figure said. ”Most people still think we’ll be in deficit for years.”

    If Rudd believes he can turn it around, and all leaders do, then the smart money would be on a late election. If he thinks it’s only going to get worse, and the Gillard threat becomes real, he will go early.

     

  • Save our remaining rainforests

     

    A national Galaxy Research poll I commissioned and released this week shows;

    • 90% of Australians are in favour of protecting remaining high conservation value forests in Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales in national parks.

    • 77% agree that the Rudd Government should stop the logging of native forests, which contain large amounts of carbon that would be stored by ending forest clearance

    • 72% are in favour of the Federal Government assisting logging contractors to take redundancies, retrain or move permanently to a plantation based industry.

    This is a unique opportunity with the industry itself crying out for help and looking for a way to stop the logging of high conservation value forests.

    Having turned its back on putting a price on greenhouse pollution, protecting Australia’s native forests is the easiest, simplest way for the Rudd Government to be able to say it has reduced Australia’s greenhouse emissions.

    It’s time for state and federal Governments and all political parties to seize the opportunity.

    Today I launched a new 1 minute television ad that will begin screening this week.

    But you can be first to see it – click here. Please pass it on to your friends so they can spread the word that it is time to seize the day and protect what is left of this precious resource for all Australians to enjoy in the future.

    Thank-you,

    Bob Brown

    P.S. if you are in or near Canberra on June 23 please come to an important public meeting where I, Prue Acton and ACT Greens Senate candidate Lin Hatfield- Dodds will outline the campaign to save the forests. 7pm – Visions Theatre, National Museum, Lawson Crescent, Acton Peninsula, Canberra.

  • Kristina Keneally’s flat plague

     

    More developments can now be made in less-serviced outer suburban areas such as Windsor and Picton. Under the rules, only 10-20 per cent has to be “affordable”.

    Holroyd mayor John Perry said his council already had three development applications before it using the new rules. “The problem we have is the location of them – they’re not near the major transport corridors,” he said.

    Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils president Allison McLaren said the changes meant even quiet low density areas with few bus services were “now vulnerable to large scale high density developments”.

    “The first our councils knew of it was when developers started showing up with applications to build high density apartments in areas that would not have met the former criteria,” she said.

    “It was only when planning officers looked up the SEPP to confirm the terms they discovered this change had gone through last September.”

    Ms McLaren accused the Government of “unfair and sneaky conduct”, and said it opened “all of Sydney up to random and ill-conceived high density development”.

    But a spokesman for the Planning Minister Tony Kelly accused Ms McLaren of “ill-informed scaremongering”, and said the changes would increase the supply of affordable housing which would drive down housing prices.

     

  • Pensioners pay more after pleas ignored

     

    But NSW has refused to follow suit and permanently quarantine the pension increase. This means single aged pensioners will pay an extra $7.50 a week in rent after a one-year moratorium on rent rises ends in 3½⁄ months. Couple aged pensioners will not be affected because their extra $10.14 is paid as a supplement, rather than an increase to the base rate.

    Last year the federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan, warned the states against eroding the pensioners’ hard-won increase by increasing levies and charges.

    ”There is simply no way the Commonwealth will tolerate a clawback of that one-off pension increase by the states for pensioners in public housing,” he said.

    Yesterday the federal government confirmed its position had not changed. ”Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory have all committed not to increase their public housing rents and we would expect other states, including NSW, to do the same,” a spokeswoman for the Minister for Families, Housing and Community Services, Jenny Macklin, said.

    But the NSW government says it needs the increased rent to pay for the maintenance and refurbishment of public housing properties and council costs.

    A spokesman for the NSW Housing Minister, Frank Terenzini, said the government ”has a great amount of sympathy for those people struggling to make ends meet … however the costs to maintain, refurbish and build more public housing are always increasing”.

    The Council on the Aging (NSW) urged the state government to permanently quarantine the increase. It said single aged pensioners were especially vulnerable to increased costs.

    ”That $7 a week pays for milk and bread,” the council’s policy and communications manager, Anne-Marie Elias, said. ”We know older people will pay their electricity bills and their phone bills before they eat.”

    If not a quarantine, Ms Elias said Housing NSW should adopt a two-step formula to calculate the rent of single pensioners to preserve a greater percentage of the recent increases.

    Lyn, 71, who has lived in public housing in Glebe for 28 years, said she only has $125 a week from her $350 pension after she has paid for rent ($75.70), groceries ($80), electricity ($17), contents insurance ($6), telephone ($20) and medicines ($25).

    ”It’s hard enough to survive on your own as it is, and now they want to take one-quarter of what little we get,” she said.

    Lyn, who did not want her surname published, said the state’s most disadvantaged people should not be slugged to pay for basic government services.

    The Westpac-Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia Retirement Standard indicates the requirements for a modest lifestyle is $373 per week for a single person and $521 a week for a couple.

  • Rudd takes command of mining tax talks

     

    But there remains deep concern inside Labor that the row over the mining tax is preventing the government from talking about its key messages and there has been growing internal pressure on Mr Rudd to shut it down.

    It is understood the Prime Minister has heeded the message and resolved over the weekend to personally negotiate with the miners from now on with a view to reaching a settlement. Mr Rudd has met senior executives over the past week but the industry is still complaining there is no proper negotiation process. Mr Rudd is not prepared to put a timeline on talks but hopes his direct intervention will quieten the issue.

    Today there will be some welcome news for the government with a coalition of lobby groups to support the tax.

    The Australian Council of Social Service, the ACTU, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Consumers’ Federation will say mining tax reform is essential to improve fairness and efficiency in the tax system and strengthen the economy.

    They said it was time the voices of ordinary Australians were heard in a debate dominated so far by ”powerful vested mining interests”. One minister noted drily unless the groups could kick in $50 million for advertisements, it was unlikely the miners would be drowned out.

    Inside Labor, there is no palpable desire to topple Mr Rudd. ”Any suggestions there’s going to be a leadership challenge is bullshit,” one minister said.

    ”This tax thing is sucking the oxygen from us. You get the tax sorted and you can get on with a positive agenda. The voters don’t like [Tony] Abbott, but he’s not being forced to say anything and the mining industry is over-egging its claims.”

    Another minister said it ”would be crazy” to change leaders at this late stage. ”We just have to regain our confidence and plough on.”

    Parliamentary sittings are ripe occasions for leadership challenges, especially in the wake of bad polls. There was some relief in upper circles of government with the realisation that Newspoll, usually published fortnightly, had been postponed until next week because of the long weekend. This will buy Mr Rudd valuable breathing space.

    The Infrastructure Minister, Anthony Albanese, hit back yesterday at Keith De Lacy, a former Queensland Labor treasurer and coalmining executive who demanded Mr Rudd’s ousting. Mr Albanese dismissed Mr De Lacy as an ”alleged treasurer of Queensland sometime last century”.

    ”I mean for goodness sake, people need to get serious,” he told the Ten Network. ”The fact is our Prime Minister is the one leader of the advanced world who negotiated successfully through the global financial crisis.”

    The Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, said Mr Rudd would be the leader at the election.

    The government also hit out at the Greens, the party benefiting directly from Labor’s drop in support. Mr Albanese attacked the Greens for voting with the Liberals to defeat the emissions trading scheme because the Greens felt it was too generous to polluters.

    Mr Albanese said it was like the republicans who voted against the republic because they did not like the model. ”We are still celebrating the Queen’s Birthday this weekend with the Queen of England as our head of state,” he said. ”Purity in politics sometimes leads to very bad outcomes.”