Wall St was down 94 overnight, its biggest fall in a month, while the local market is down 66.
Rudd’s brilliant disaster diversion from China donations scandal
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On a day when Chinafile Kevin Rudd should have been under intense political pressure over his connections to colourful Chinese casino tycoon Stanley Ho and donations that even the Labor Party felt were too hot to accept, the PM pulled off a masterful political diversion. By standing up at a press conference and painting the most pessimistic picture possible on the revenue front, the PM skilfully side-tracked the hounds whilst absorbing some collateral damage through a tumbling currency. ABC TV news and The 7.30 Report completely ignored what should be the lead story on 1 February every year — the annual deluge of political party fundraising information. Even ABC Radio’s The World Today failed to get up the yarn three hours after the data was dumped at 9am, although PM merited it to run as the ninth story out of 11 last night. The media was naturally all over Canberra’s “collapsing” revenue, when truth be known, the PM was only unveiling an 8% contraction in revenue on what was predicted last May. It is highly misleading to total up four years of revenue figures in order to come up with a screaming headline about $115 billion. Total Commonwealth revenue was originally predicted to rise from $319 billion in 2008-09 to $367 billion in 2011-12. That’s a total of $1.372 trillion. Take $115 billion off that and you get $1.257 billion — a modest drop of just 8%. Besides, the figures really are half-baked because they ignore the spending side of the equation. Welfare spending was originally forecast to be $103 billion in 2008-09 or 35% of the total $292 billion. Be recklessly splashing $10 billion last December, Rudd simply exacerbated the problem of Australians consuming beyond their means on borrowed money. Woolworths, the nation’s biggest pokies operator, saw revenue from its 12,000 machines jump by 5.2% in the December quarter when it was flat in the September quarter. Thank you very much, Mr Rudd. Funnily enough, our bookish Prime Minister comes across as a nice church-going Christian who declared before the election that he “hates” poker machines. Yet there he is leading a party in the pay of Asia’s most colourful casino mogul, Stanley Ho. Even worse, Rudd has done precisely nothing to end the scourge of the world’s most lethal poker machines which soak up 58% of the $18 billion in annual punting losses in the country with the highest per capita gambling spend in the world. Incredibly, the ALP remains the only major political party in the world that actually runs pokies operations to help finance its campaigns. There it is, this return for Labor’s ACT division — a contribution of $558,128 from the Canberra Labor Club, which runs almost 500 pokies in five different gambling dens in the capital. You don’t hear about the British Tories running grog shops or the Republicans fundraising through brothels, but only The Canberra Times chose to report this uniquely Australian political phenomenon of Labor profiting enormously from directly running mini casinos. Once again, we see the sad situation of an appalling system of disclosure, coupled with a cynical bait-and-switch media management strategy from the PM leading to significant under-reporting of the broader campaign finance debate in Australia. |
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13 Comments
Looks like Kevin Rudd got his stimulus package before the last election Stephen.
A good piece which I have only got yo a couple of days late!
None of our parties should have egg on their face over this political gifting gig. With the inner circle of world investors queued for a piece of national pie fund-raising should be a piece of p*ss. For a gold coin donation the multi-cultural populace turns up to a series of star-studded conventions (glitzed up community cabinets) to nut out how us and them run the country. Aussies will support any event where there’s food fun and mateship and that’s where our sponsors come in. They televise and cater for ‘politics unplugged and down under’ plastering their logos around stadiums and show grounds, handing out sample bags of their products. Royalties for tobacco, pokies, grog etc roll in and tourism sky-rockets with prizes like win a trip to Macau, tour a UK brothel or just hang around the McGauran property for a week. Instead of looking like splinter groups of some Mesopotamia extremist movement our political parties could do it a lot smarter.
What else would you expect from Kevin Rudd who is taking over the mantle of “media tart” from the former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie. Perhaps it runs in the blood in Queensland. Spin doctoring is the order of the day in politics, and lazy journalists just lap it up.
Why would one be surprised with the Labor Party profiting from gaming machines? With a long traditions of corruption involving branch stacking, shady underworld relationships including one ex-judge, and pig farms, Labor has a long tradition of dealing with the shady side of the street. Unfortunately the Liberal party is no better in each shady relationships. Perhaps setting up a chain of brothels could be more open and transparent as prostitution is not that different from politics.
Keep going Stephen. The fact the NSW ALP got a similarly large donation from Ho, and Rudd was too worried to accept it suggests an attempt at favours for foreigners and an attempt to subvert our domestic democracy. The USA has banned such donations for good reason.
Personally I would say the timing of Rudd’s package has as much to do with the start of parliament and a new narrative as per the Monthly story, but the smothering of the Ho story surely was a bonus. And Ho may or may not be the principal behind the donation to the ALP - who really knows there in the dictatorship of DRC.
Senator Faulkner sounded particularly lame last night saying he has a Bill before parliament to ban such donations. Horse bolts. Gate closes.
Sundry Labor snouts in a trough feeding frenzy filled by the Black Widow big business gambling parasites who feed Labor titbits for favours from their governments.
“Chinafile”? Eh? Do you mean “sinophile”?
How much kick back from the Libs did you get Stephen to write that load of fertiliser? You are joking? Rudd using the economic package to hide the profits from pokies in Canberra, go to the corner and dont move or talk for the rest of the day, idiot.
A good piece which I have only got yo a couple of days late!
The Government’s stimulus package was promulgated to get people spending money. The fact that some may have chosen to put their payment into slot machines is irrelevant; the money was spent and the wheels of the economy have turned as a result. BTW has no one considered that spending may have increased in December because it is the holiday season and many folk “luv” the pokies?
Stephen, by all means criticise the package for paying $80M to overseas pensioners etc, they are most unlikely to spend the money in Australia! Independently criticise pokies, if that’s what you want to do, but it does seem to be an elitist sport; but to tie the stimulus package, a Hong Kong entrepreneur and the Canberra Labour Club together is a conspiracy theory worthy of the neo conservatives in the Liberal Party, who will no doubt lap it up!
A good piece which I have only got yo a couple of days late!
Stephen, do you seriously expect us to believe that Rudd unveiled a stimulus package to “cover up” a report on political donations. These things can so easily be sidestepped (ie look at what the other side got) and then moved on from. That is even when the lazy media reports it. Yet in your mind Rudd cooked up a financial crisis to divert media attention from this story.
Good grief. The words “long bow” come to mind!
As for the rest of your story - usual Mayne. Hyperbole and ignorance.
Stephen , while I have the greatest respect for you, and have on occasion relied on Crikey.com in the days before it was on sold , to stick my neck out just like you. I am struggling with these numbers of yours. Total Commonwealth revenue was originally predicted to rise from $319 billion in 2008-09 to $367 billion in 2011-12. That’s a total of $1.372 trillion. Take $115 billion off that and you get $1.257 billion — a modest drop of just 8%.
When I subtract 115 billion from 1.372 trillion I expect to have a bit more than 1.370 trillion and change. left over. As Forrest Gump would say. The difference is somewhat more than the price of a box of chocolates. I listened to the grim reaper and clock owner remind us last night that he created the “four pillars” I picked up somewhere on information which allowed me to understand these four main banks had exposure to paper “assets” in the order of several trillions of dollars. I have asked Crikey’s experienced and knowledgeable contributors to help me understand why when there is possibly over five thousand trillion dollars in dodgy paper out there world wide and governments are committing taxpayers potential money to pay still more billions to prop up shonky derivatives which have already sucked more than enough of our collective capacity to pay. It is not possible to stimulate a multi trillions dollar collapse of dodgy brothers credit with forty two billons of dollars. Being nice and not encouraging a panic run on the bankrupt banks, seems to be ignoring the cost of the international credit abuse. Which will belong to the paye wage earners of the world eventually.