If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Victorian with their hand in your pocked – for ever. How do you design a tax system to take from the productive and give to the unproductive and to reward fiscal and regulatory profligacy. Ask a Victorian that’s how.
I am of the opinion that the Liberal Party may actually go backwards in the next Federal election. Unlike the Liberals, the commissars who run Labor understand how the entrails of politics work in Australia. They know which political buttons to push to get votes and have no scruples about doing it from the gutter.
In contrast, the Liberals are run like an old radio ‘Dad & Dave’ comedy show. That is why a former Labor senator once correctly mocked the Liberals as ‘a rabble’ after they lost the 2015 Queensland state election. Labor and its bastard child, The Greens, tightly control the applications for membership in their parties. To be accepted as a member of the Labor Party one has to join a union, which then vets you, and if successful, sponsors you. To get in, one has to demonstrate absolute tribal loyalty as a ‘true believer’ in Labor principles – whatever they may be.
By contrast, the Liberals effectively let anyone in. This then allows ambitious individualists to enter internal party-political race for positions of influence. These come in the form of opportunists, careerists, chancers, jobbers, as well as high-talking individuals that the Labor Party once rejected. I am sure that everyone can name one prominent person in the latter category. Collectively, these individuals make up the Liberal’s political invertebrates – sometimes referred to as ‘the castrati’ – but the legacy media ‘experts’ who claim to know everything, but actually understand nothing, insist on calling them ‘Moderates’. That is a description that was deliberately imported from the U.S. about 20 years ago to mask the Green-Left political leanings of the invertebrates. It was this cohort that ejected Abbott from the prime ministership in favour of one of their own. Up to a half of the Liberal MPs in the various parliaments are made up of such people, and that means that they are the people who control the destiny of the Liberal Party – as it slides further down the slippery slope to political oblivion – which they have induced.
One school of thought suggests that many of the so-called ‘Moderates’ have actually been deliberately infiltrated into the Liberals, starting back during the years of the Howard supremacy when the Green-Left was out of government and in despair. The suggestion has been made that the invertebrates take their instructions from puppet masters residing in the smoke-filled back rooms of the Labor Party. The mission thus assigned to the invertebrates by their controllers is to politically emasculate the Liberals by preventing any vote-winning conservative policy from getting into the Liberal policy platform - and if a good policy did get in, to then run dead on it.
As for the Liberal ‘machine’ – it is a joke! The party is effectively broke and the apparatchiks who run its administration can’t understand why no ordinary Aussies want to donate. Apart from the brutal fact that the Liberals have lost up to half their membership since defenestrating Abbott, one major problem is their failure to understand how to communicate with ‘the common people’ of Australia. In the lead up to the recent by-election in Victoria, I received an email from John Howard pleading for a donation. (I am on the Liberal email list from years past). But the email offered nothing in return - such as a briefing on the state of Australia, or perhaps an iteration of their policy platform, or any other useful news. It was just a plea for money. Any business organisation will tell you that that is not the way to engage your customer base. It is really quite sad that the party that Bob Menzies founded has reached this low point – a low point exemplified by the news received today that the NSW Young Liberals have refused to allow men’s rights advocate Bettina Arndt address a forum at the University of Sydney Conservative Club. They cancelled her!
As a final thought - I know that a lot of people are making remarks about Peter Dutton’s performance as Liberal leader. Peter Dutton is NOT one of the aforementioned invertebrates, but because he does not possess dictatorial powers over his Liberal colleagues, he is pretty much trammelled by the sort of people who do actually make up the invertebrate bloc. I think Peter Dutton is doing a good job in difficult circumstances - but reforming a politically incompetent and badly damaged party is not something that can happen overnight – and may in fact prove to be impossible. Time will tell. Australia desperately needs a competent political force to rescue us from the damage being caused by the Albanese Government.
When the GST was legislated it was to get rid of numerous levels of federal sales tax and state stamp duty and other taxes. In other words, simplify the tax system. The states were supposed to get rid of stamp duty etc and would get a share of GST revenue. What should have happened instead of HFE is that all states should have received a fixed percentage of the GST collected from that state, for example 75%, with the balance going to the federal government to replace the wholesale sales taxes. But no, some smart arse came up with this HFE. Stupid and complex. We still live with state stamp duty and other taxes as well.
The Federal government has tripled in size in the last 50 years turning states into mendicants. The tax burden on individuals is immense, unnecessarily paying for much duplication (eg. education)
This was not what Federation was initially intended, rather competitive states with the freedom to trade across borders.
Excellent article Sparty! We need more discussion on this.
I am of the opinion that the Liberal Party may actually go backwards in the next Federal election. Unlike the Liberals, the commissars who run Labor understand how the entrails of politics work in Australia. They know which political buttons to push to get votes and have no scruples about doing it from the gutter.
In contrast, the Liberals are run like an old radio ‘Dad & Dave’ comedy show. That is why a former Labor senator once correctly mocked the Liberals as ‘a rabble’ after they lost the 2015 Queensland state election. Labor and its bastard child, The Greens, tightly control the applications for membership in their parties. To be accepted as a member of the Labor Party one has to join a union, which then vets you, and if successful, sponsors you. To get in, one has to demonstrate absolute tribal loyalty as a ‘true believer’ in Labor principles – whatever they may be.
By contrast, the Liberals effectively let anyone in. This then allows ambitious individualists to enter internal party-political race for positions of influence. These come in the form of opportunists, careerists, chancers, jobbers, as well as high-talking individuals that the Labor Party once rejected. I am sure that everyone can name one prominent person in the latter category. Collectively, these individuals make up the Liberal’s political invertebrates – sometimes referred to as ‘the castrati’ – but the legacy media ‘experts’ who claim to know everything, but actually understand nothing, insist on calling them ‘Moderates’. That is a description that was deliberately imported from the U.S. about 20 years ago to mask the Green-Left political leanings of the invertebrates. It was this cohort that ejected Abbott from the prime ministership in favour of one of their own. Up to a half of the Liberal MPs in the various parliaments are made up of such people, and that means that they are the people who control the destiny of the Liberal Party – as it slides further down the slippery slope to political oblivion – which they have induced.
One school of thought suggests that many of the so-called ‘Moderates’ have actually been deliberately infiltrated into the Liberals, starting back during the years of the Howard supremacy when the Green-Left was out of government and in despair. The suggestion has been made that the invertebrates take their instructions from puppet masters residing in the smoke-filled back rooms of the Labor Party. The mission thus assigned to the invertebrates by their controllers is to politically emasculate the Liberals by preventing any vote-winning conservative policy from getting into the Liberal policy platform - and if a good policy did get in, to then run dead on it.
As for the Liberal ‘machine’ – it is a joke! The party is effectively broke and the apparatchiks who run its administration can’t understand why no ordinary Aussies want to donate. Apart from the brutal fact that the Liberals have lost up to half their membership since defenestrating Abbott, one major problem is their failure to understand how to communicate with ‘the common people’ of Australia. In the lead up to the recent by-election in Victoria, I received an email from John Howard pleading for a donation. (I am on the Liberal email list from years past). But the email offered nothing in return - such as a briefing on the state of Australia, or perhaps an iteration of their policy platform, or any other useful news. It was just a plea for money. Any business organisation will tell you that that is not the way to engage your customer base. It is really quite sad that the party that Bob Menzies founded has reached this low point – a low point exemplified by the news received today that the NSW Young Liberals have refused to allow men’s rights advocate Bettina Arndt address a forum at the University of Sydney Conservative Club. They cancelled her!
As a final thought - I know that a lot of people are making remarks about Peter Dutton’s performance as Liberal leader. Peter Dutton is NOT one of the aforementioned invertebrates, but because he does not possess dictatorial powers over his Liberal colleagues, he is pretty much trammelled by the sort of people who do actually make up the invertebrate bloc. I think Peter Dutton is doing a good job in difficult circumstances - but reforming a politically incompetent and badly damaged party is not something that can happen overnight – and may in fact prove to be impossible. Time will tell. Australia desperately needs a competent political force to rescue us from the damage being caused by the Albanese Government.
When the GST was legislated it was to get rid of numerous levels of federal sales tax and state stamp duty and other taxes. In other words, simplify the tax system. The states were supposed to get rid of stamp duty etc and would get a share of GST revenue. What should have happened instead of HFE is that all states should have received a fixed percentage of the GST collected from that state, for example 75%, with the balance going to the federal government to replace the wholesale sales taxes. But no, some smart arse came up with this HFE. Stupid and complex. We still live with state stamp duty and other taxes as well.
The Federal government has tripled in size in the last 50 years turning states into mendicants. The tax burden on individuals is immense, unnecessarily paying for much duplication (eg. education)
This was not what Federation was initially intended, rather competitive states with the freedom to trade across borders.
Excellent article Sparty! We need more discussion on this.