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In short - the boats have stopped but at what cost to the refugees and to our international reputation, the carbon tax and MRRT are gone (despite working and having next to no adverse economic impact) and there is nothing to replace them (or their income stream), and a great deal of funding support to virtually every vulnerable group is either shrinking or has gone entirely. Every minister has shot themselves in the foot repeatedly (with the possible exception of Bishop and Turnbull), their political reputations are in tatters, and the government has eroded all the respect and trust it once had (which wasn't a great deal).
The government haven't been the recipients of good advice, but then they did stack all their investigative committees with people who would give them the answers they wanted (mostly) - so they only have themselves to blame.
Dick Warburton in particular came across as a committee chair who was wedded to his pre-existing ideas and was using information gathered for the report to support .those ideas. In an interview on ABC radio... Dick admitted that the RET was working, but that there were much cheaper ways of getting the same result... he believed that Direct Action was the answer but had no figures to back up his faith. He also admitted that removing the RET was a $9 Billion gift to the coal fired generators, and that the current scheme was seeing a fall in prices for consumers. Still... it had to go (because Tony Dumb Dumb said so).
As Tristan Edis notes... Basically, Warburton is proposing that the government make a drastic change to a policy that his own review acknowledges is unlikely to save energy consumers money, which will undermine the value of several billion dollars in investment and considerable project development effort, and send a large proportion of renewable energy businesses bankrupt, with their staff made redundant.
This is a government who values ideology over over the facts, the evidence, or scientific opinion.
Due to this kind of incompetence...the government doesn't have the trust of the people and they don't have the trust of the cross-bench senators. They are dead in the water, and are being criticised by the likes of Andrew Bolt. They couldn't be in more trouble.
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The coming anniversary seems like a good opportunity to argue against some of the policy positions the Coalition has held with something Team Dumb Dumb likes to steer clear of.... Facts and Evidence.
The Coalition was dragged kicking and screaming to the plain packaging of cigarettes. This was of course due to the large amounts of donations they and the IPA get from tobacco companies. And in turn they relied on arguments from those same tobacco companies to resist changes.
One such argument was that plain packaging would increase consumption as people would move to lower cost brands or the black market. The research shows.... there have been no changes in who people are buying their tobacco from, but there has been a 2-3% reduction in consumption despite News Ltd reporting to the contrary.
And of course the research for the effectiveness of plain packaging is quite extensive.
Some facts about the current system are displayed below.
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Mike Seccombe in the Saturday paper raises a very interesting point about Dog Whistle politics, with parallels between John Howard in 1988 and Tony Abbott in 2014. As Paul Osbourne pointed out (among others) playing the war card has taken attention away from Abbott's disastrous administration and allowed him to appear more like a statesman. It did the same for Howard in 2001 when he was facing electoral defeat for repeated incompetence on domestic policy.
But as Seccombe adds, like Howard in 1988, Abbott has also felt the need to play the race card. The evidence for this... Team Australia and all the minorities who sense Abbott does not think they are a part of the team.
And Abbott has played the Fear card... suggesting that beheadings and mass terrorist events are now a serious risk in Australia despite our risk level remaining at Medium (the same place it has been for over a decade).
So the big question... How to Help Tony Dumb Dumb celebrate his first anniversary? To take a lead from the First Dog on the Moon... perhaps a bucket for Abbott to put over his head. Year one wasn't pretty, and the next two years look like being even uglier.