Aussie PM dumped by own party

[Magda Hassan]

Some uncovering of the Peter Slipper scam.

The Peter Slipper illusion

Posted by admin in Politics on 6 May, 2012 12:01 am / 6 comments

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With LNP powerbrokers Mal Brough and Christopher Pyne now [B]having been revealed to have met James Ashby at least six times in the immediate lead-up to his civil and criminal claims against Speaker Peter Slipper, Ian Harris asks if the whole affair is just an illusion.[/B]
James Ashby and Peter Slipper

I have been pondering the current state of politics in Australia.
I am a keen reader and recently came across a quote from Galileo:

"Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought : the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new."

It also neatly aligned with my recent re-discovery of the notion of illusion in our lives.
You might recall that George Bush and John Howard went to war in Iraq because they had evidence' that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction' at his disposal. This proved not to be the case.
Financial collapses are often born out of illusion. The figures show one thing but, when you get in behind and understand the reality, another scenario is revealed.
Magicians are working with illusion all the time. They cut people in half and put them back together again. They pull a rabbit from a hat. A coin from behind their ear. Illusion was Harry Houdini's bread and butter.
And politicians work with illusion too!
Many people see the current situation with the Speaker as being a failure of Gillard's judgement in trying to retain some semblance of advantage in a hung parliament.
Others see it as the result of a successful campaign by an Opposition leader who sees it as his divine right to become Prime Minister.
But it is possible that there is a deeper more complex agenda playing out behind these obvious facades which fill our newspapers, TV's, radios and web-pages.



Let me speculate for a moment.
Let's say that you were a purveyor of oil. You have wells, refineries and service stations all over the world. Your turnover might well exceed that of many sovereign nations.
A small nation then passes legislation to introduce their populace to the benefits of clean energy'. They want to wean them off fossil fuels and provide them with potentially cheaper sources of energy. The Sun is one such source. Muon-catalysed fusion is another. Not to mention geothermal. And waves in the ocean.
Your revenues would, in the long term, be decimated. In the short term, they would also take a hit because you are going to have to spend huge amounts on research and development to stay competitive. You will also have to spend huge amounts on public relations to ridicule the need to move to a clean energy future'.
The value of your shares will most likely fall as you face these pressures. The wealth of your shareholders will decline considerably.
Now, let's say your shares were tightly held by only a few families. And let's say that the banks who funded you were also fairly tightly owned by only a few families.
Would you expect that these families would move to protect their positions?



Absolutely!
Where would they start?
Well, with the country who has passed the legislation.
That's because a clean energy future' might catch on. You would have to stop it before it gets on a roll. Other countries might come to see the benefits to their populace of cheaper energy and emulate the initiative.
So what you might do is to start to undermine the parliament of the country that has passed the legislation.
After all, this is not rocket science. This country has managed to get this legislation through a hung parliament. Just imagine how more swiftly it would've occurred had they had a substantial majority. Other nations have such majorities.
So, you devise a cunning plan.
You have the Opposition leader in place. He's a good one because he is a conservative and a Catholic to boot with a strong relationship to a Catholic archbishop!



(Remember that it was the Catholic Church who managed to delay the populace understanding the remarkable discovery that the planets revolved around the sun rather than the other way round. So why would they not move to support their interests given their real estate holdings and their revenues.)
You have some strategic alliances in place too! This government has also had the audacity to suggest that the people of this particular nation should be entitled to a greater share of the non-renewable mineral wealth under its soils. Wealthy miners are lining up to support you.
You could organise something similar to the Charge of the Light Brigade.
But you are more subtle than that!
You start with the institution of government. A simple undermining strategy!
You manage to exploit a situation where a beleaguered female Prime Minister sees an opportunity to get an advantage to pursue her social agenda.
You put in place a debonair, disenchanted Liberal with a slightly exaggerated sense of his role to play and you set him up beautifully.
Firstly, with some simple Cabcharge dockets. And then you raise doubt in the populace's mind as to whether this disenchanted Liberal might be gay. He is the moderator of behaviour in the parliament and he can't possibly do that if he is gay! In the UK maybe but not here where real men are bronzed and muscled.
There are other tricks that you have up your sleeve to scratch this government out of existence too. They are even more subtle!

And in due course, this government is wiped out at the next polls and your Opposition leader becomes PM and repeals the legislation with his huge majority.
The populace of this country are saved from a clean energy future and they have the pleasure of remaining dependent on fossil fuels for the rest of their days.
Your wealth is retained.
All you have to do is to keep on funding the research that says reliance on fossil fuels is not causing our planet to heat up to the extent that it will become uninhabitable. This is a minor impost to your profits. That's because many of your allies are scientists who are funded by the public purse, via universities and government grants.
Boy, these illusions are fun!

On the slippery slope with Slippery Pete

Posted by admin in Politics on 8 May, 2012 2:00 am / no comments

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James Ashby's allegations against Peter Slipper appeared to be the golden goose for the Coalition, but it has turned around to bite them, says Dr Benjamin Thomas Jones.

The three amigos: Mal Brough, James Ashby and Christopher Pyne each met numerous times in the lead-up to Ashby allegations.

When news broke that the Independent Speaker, Peter Slipper, was being investigated by the Australian Federal Police for travel fraud and was facing an allegation of sexual harassment, it appeared to be yet another scandal for Julia Gillard's shaky minority government. In the Machiavellian world of politics, things are rarely as they seem. Independent Australia was the first to suggest something was amiss in the curious case of the speaker and the staffer. Now, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the case has becomecuriouser and curiouser!
It is little wonder that Joe Hockey came out yesterday pleading for an end to "all of this speculation" about Slipper. Problems first arose for the coalition last week when Chris Pyne claimed he could not remember meeting with James Ashby. It has since been revealed that Ashby a former Liberal party member and Slipper staffer, who now claims the former Speaker sexually harassed him not only met with the senior Coalition figure Christopher Pyne in the immediate lead up to Ashby's lawsuit for a two hour late night drinking session, but less than 20 minutes after that rendezvous, Pyne sent an email and text message seeking Ashby's details. Pyne has accepted the evidence, but maintains he doesn't remember asking for the contact details…
It is understandable that Pyne now wants to forget the whole affair like Hockey. Even more damaging for the Coalition is the revelation that former Howard Government minister Mal Brough who is planning to challenge for Mr Slipper's seat of Fisher met with Ashby on numerous occasions and urged him to take action against the Speaker, even meeting Ashby with a lawyer on at least one occasion. It was revealed yesterday that Ashby had contacted deputy opposition leader Julie Bishop's office and that opposition whip Warren Entsch had tried to ring Mr Abbott the night before Mr Ashby's allegations were published. Pyne and Brough's stories seem to change daily.



Opposition MPs, including Abbott, are now using the precise term "no specific knowledge" when asked what they knew beforehand about Ashby's claims implying, in the minds of many, that they certainly knew something. Indeed, Tony Abbott, normally the first man seen in a flouro vest and hardhat for a photo stop, has not been sighted in several days, after abruptly walking out of a press conference after journalists began pestering him about the links between Pyne, Brough and Ashby and what he knew.
More curious still.
It can hardly be disputed that the Opposition was feigning surprise when the story first broke. It is clear that several senior figures were well aware of the impending story and it is difficult to believe Ashby has not been coached by the Liberal Party to gain maximum impact. New foreign minister, Bob Carr, drew afiery response from Hockey for commenting:

This Ashby seems more rehearsed than a Kabuki actor'.

With the numbers in the House of Representatives so precarious, the Opposition had a lot to gain from Slipper's removal which forced Labor to provide another speaker and lose a crucial vote. The man with the most to gain is Brough, who is trying to remove Slipper from a seat he has held for all but three years since 1984. Alarmingly, the press at large has been reluctant to join the dots in the Slipper case. Annabel Crabb, who has returned to Fairfax, even wrote an article mocking supposed conspiracy theorists. She concedes that it is intensely convenient' but ridicules the idea of a sophisticated plot for the Liberal Party'.
It may well be asked, how sophisticated does the plot need to be? When Slipper left the Liberals and took the Speaker's chair, he cost the Coalition one vote and gave Labor one courtesy of Harry Jenkins returning to Labor's backbench. It is natural enough that the Coalition would welcome any tarnishing of Slipper's name, but the accusations made by Ashby are hopelessly unconvincing. Even Coalition senator Barnaby Joyce has dismissed the sexual harassment claim noting that Ashby was "not a boy in his teens but a man in his 30s". The allegations made to the police were made public and they simply raise more questions than they answer. The Coalition is clearly not interested in protecting a vulnerable staffer, but are focussed solely on attacking a vulnerable government.



Should the claims against Slipper prove to be false, the whole slippery affair may come back to bite the Coalition. If this happens, it will be history repeating itself in very short cycles. Just three years ago, Malcolm Turnbull as opposition leader desperately tried to bring down Kevin Rudd's government with theUtegate scandal. With the allegations proving false and a key email having been forged, the Liberals were left with egg on their faces. They had tried to exploit Godwin Grech, a passionate supporter of the Liberal party, to bring down the Government but when your main weapon is so openly partisan, suspicions will inevitably be aroused. Ashby is also known to have made two videos for yet another Liberal pre-selection candidate vying for Slipper's seat along with Brough while he still worked in Slipper's office. Ashby, like Grech, is a current or recent Liberal Party member and is known to have ties to senior Liberal figures. He is also a man with a criminal past and, in Joyce's words, "he seems only slightly less dodgy than Slipper". And there are other, even more unsavoury, allegations surrounding him.
The Opposition have never really recovered from their landslide 2007 defeat. They have been highly effective at criticising the Government, but have failed to construct and sell effective alternative policies. The situation has become even more acute following the hung parliament of 2010. Abbott, like Turnbull before him, is banking on a great scandal to bring down the Government. He is desperately hoping he will not have to wait until the next election and that a vote of no confidence, an Independent crossing the floor, a legal allegation, or an unexpected by-election, will gift him the prime ministership. As with Grech, it is doubtful the Ashby claims will topple the government.
In Australia to promote his new movie, The Dictator, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen demanded to know where Slippery Pete was, so he could add him to the staff of his fictional ministry. It was an appropriate jibe, as the whole affair, frankly, is a joke. The Government, in all likelihood, will survive a full term and it is up to Abbott to prepare strong alternative policies with full costings. For the immediate future at least, it would pay for the Coalition to focus less on stunts and ambitious young staffers, and more on the weighty task of forming the next government. If not, Abbott could well pay the same price as Turnbull for trying to take the easy ride to high office.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012...pery-pete/