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BEST:
- No Labor member arrived in Canberra this week expecting the attack on superannuation. On Wednesday Bill stood up straight after question time to defend decent retirement incomes for all Australians.
- The broken promise on super kept dominating debate. Tanya stood up after Bill to keep up the fight on superannuation.
- While Bill and Tanya led the pack, all Labor MPs really hit home the terrible impacts of the Government’s planned changes to higher education and superannuation. These speeches rarely make it through on the media but they show the depth and passion of the Labor team.
- Amanda Rishworth, Shadow Minister for Tertiary Education, took on Christopher Pyne today. She found broken promises on his website: pyneonline – yes it’s really called that – and asked “Why is pyneonline lying online?”
- Finally, this week marks the anniversary of the election of the Abbott Government. What’s this doing in the best? It means we’re one year closer to the end of the Abbott Government.
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- On Tuesday Tony Abbott had a choice on which promise to keep: either the promise to the mining magnate or his promise to 9 million Australians with superannuation. As you know he picked the mining magnate.
- The Government doesn’t like the environment much but it likes to use environmental language. They call privatisation – asset recycling, and refer to budget cuts as sustainability. After telling us they needed to cut the pension to make it sustainable, this week they added massively to future pension bills by cutting super. Does that make sense to you? Me neither.
- As well as losing the SchoolsKids Bonus, Low Income Superannuation contribution and Instant Asset Write Off for Small Business also have dates locked in to be axed.
- This is classic. Tony Abbott moved an amendment to say how wonderful he was but must have decided one of the points prepared by his staff was wrong and crossed it out. He then handed the full document in, complete with the crossing out of any praise for the government of making the tax system fairer.
- This last one was just odd. On Tuesday the Government introduced the new bills to abolish the mining tax without any notice and forced the debate to happen immediately. Problem was, there were no copies of the bill available, and the Liberal who introduced the bill Steve Ciobo, for the first time in living memory, didn’t even make a speech to explain what was in the bill or why we should support it. I then had to launch into a speech on a bill we couldn’t see and the government wouldn’t say what was in it, while Chris Bowen demanded a copy and worked out what they were up to. The word “arrogance” gets thrown around a lot in politics but this really was unbelievable.
This week’s song of the week is dedicated to Tony Abbott & Clive Palmer – Here’s Abba with Money, Money, Money.
I’ll be back in touch in a fortnight.
Tony
A final sad note: There’s a team of people who work with members of parliament who get the title “staffers”. They do the research, handle the calls, help with campaigns, and effectively work flat out with little to no recognition because they know the right political outcomes can change lives. It’s been an awful week for the tight knit group of staffers here in Canberra after one of their own Kurt Steel, only 25 years old, died in a bus crash during a holiday in Bolivia. He was admired all round and had the very rare talent in politics of being without enemies. He’ll be missed. RIP