Julia Gillard was part of the inner sanctum which concocted these 'brilliant' ideas such as the Mining Tax so how can she escape scot free?.

The real issue is this: Labor have wasted huge amounts of money during an economic downturn. They were saved from the GFC more by our Mining Industry and the relentless push of China's development than anything else. They need money urgently. They can only get it in one of two ways 1.Mining Tax or 2. Carbon Tax. Either way, the populace will lose massively.

Gillard or Rudd makes no difference. Labor is after our money and that's all you need to know.

How are your heating bills now? If the Carbon Tax goes through they'll double.

I was just think that at least we are now safe, & that we won't be seeing our Ruddy in a lead position at the united nations.

Then the thought occured to me that it just may make him more attractive to the UN. After all, incompetence comes standard with with all their programs.

"You too...Brutus"?

Good riddance.. and WELCOME instabilty.. = less electoral viability...

Now at least we know about the morality of the Labour leadersip....

*A barren wasteland of base treachorous political opportunism at all costs"

Lindsay Tanner just read the Bible.... Daniel Chapter 5 to be exact.

5 Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote. 6 His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his knees knocked together and his legs gave way.

The words written ?

25 "This is the inscription that was written:

Mene , Mene , Tekel , Parsin

26 "This is what these words mean:
Mene : God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.

27 Tekel : You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.

28 Peres : Your kingdom is divided and given to the "Nationals and Liberals"

Mild artistic licence with the last verse :)

Of course..this is why Lindsay is not going to stand in the seat of Melbourne now.... running for cover. Though in the specific case of "Melbourne" it seems that the Greens might get it. No matter..we will expose their greed, schemes and moral bankruptcy in due course over time.

Brisbane based blogger, Bertrand - I don't think you are giving credit where credit is due. Australia escaped the worst of the GFC for two main reasons;

1. The banks' lending was kept within sensible limits by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.

2. The Australian government's stimulus measures put a floor under retail spending, housing and construction activity.

Those 2 points are recognised professionally and institutionally here and abroad.

To think that mining was our saviour is, what do you say ... spin.

Sure, China's stimulus helped us recover, but only after the worst had passed.

What else could they do?
Rudd made a huge mistake dumping the ETS and an even worse one by trying to take away the trough from the piggy miners before an election. He should have kept banging away at Abbot on carbon and climate change and left shafting the miners for right after winning the election.
No matter which way he jumped rudd was going to fall. The miners were ripping him apart and if he backflipped on the mining tax he would have been seen as a total joke and crucified (even more) by the media.
Now Julia can dump/change/defer the tax and get the miners off labors back and the focus back on phoney Tony and his gang of howardites.

In the end it was the people of Australia that turned on Rudd as evidenced in recent polls.
Pissing off the people who voted for you is not smart and Kevin paid the price. Smokers, teachers, the unemployed, students, internet geeks and the indigenous and their supporters all got shafted while those never likely to vote labor like bankers, financiers, shareholders and big business in general got massive gifts and handouts during the GFC, which they caused in the first place with their greed and fraud.

Kudos to the "faceless backroom men" for making it so clean and quick and to Kevin himself for going gracefully(almost). Less of the mournful hangdog kev and a bit more mongrel, especially if you're gunna stay on.

continued

continued

Julia should call an election immediately and get a mandate from the people and hopefully a better organised senate. Fielding has got to go. The man is a moron. Some new talent on the frontbench might be good too. Give Maxine Mckew something (education maybe) or she will lose Bennelong. Give Rudd foreign affairs. Where he should have been all along and where he will quite probably do extremely well. Get rid of Conroy. Give him defense or something. Bring back Garret and give him proper control over Environment and get him talking to the Greens. If, as seems likely they hold the balance of power in the senate, the the Libs will be in big trouble as they can now be totally ignored and marginalised. Another good reason to get rid of Kev. He never could countenance negotiating with the greens(thats how we got Fielding) and a backflip now would have been one more fatal wound for rudd.

All in all a fun and interesting week. Long may we have many more to come.

The economic stimulus package was almost certainly the main reason Australia escaped the GFC, a system failure caused by a financial market out of control i.e. inadequately regulated (and it still is).
Rudd made the mistake with the school building programme of putting a bucket of money in front of state governments. Even the money ripped out of the schools programme provided stimulus but in secondary markets rather than in the building industry as desired by the Federal Government. Instead of public schools having the full benefits of better educational assets and private homes good insulation, public service employees and private small business rogues have had some of the benefits.
I started pointing out to the Howard Government in 1998 that their policies would cause the younger generation to be priced out of the housing market and in January 2007 wrote to the SMH stating that economies were going to go over a cliff if the then policies continued.
Howard and Costello's policy of letting the financial market "rip" was wrong but they were only following the idiotic financial policies of the Thatcherites from Reagan to George W.

Julia Gillard has the perfect opportunity.

Kevin Rudd can be blamed for the failings of the last two and a half years, either implicitly or explicitly. All she has to do is suggest something different and that will separate her administration from his.

Her promise of an election in 2010 will guarantee a benefit from the honeymoon phase at that poll. She then has three years to consolidate her position.

We'd better get used to the idea of a long period of Labor rule.

The Sage, "We'd better get used to the idea of a long period of Labor rule."

Just as we have to get used to an opposition that is bereft of policies and relies on its tired old rhetoric of fear and jealousy. One of the few significant 'policy' statements by Abbott was that he is going to give disability pensioners a right flogging if he got in.

mikk,

You are wrong when you say, “He never could countenance negotiating with the greens(thats(sic) how we got Fielding)”. Kevin Rudd was not even Opposition Leader when Steve Fielding was elected in 2004.

We got Steve Fielding in the same way that we get every other state senator. He won a quota of 14.3 per cent of the vote. That he did it on preferences is neither here nor there. Labor preferenced him above the Greens because Family First preferenced a Labor candidate in return. Had Labor’s votes been higher, FF preferences would have elected an extra Labor senator. It was a perfectly reasonable agreement to come to. Anyone who did not like it was free to vote below the line - something I always do.

Intelligent Labor supporters understand that the Greens are not Labor’s friends but its rivals. Labor does not want to be dependent on the Greens in the Upper House. That is why it is pleased to have one DLP MLC in the Victorian Legislative Council as the two Labor parties voting together can defeat any Greens/Opposition motions.

It is quite extraordinary that many of those disappointed in Kevin Rudd’s deferral of the ETS have shifted their votes to the party that helped defeat it; i.e., the Greens.

Kevin Rudd had a good heart and a good vision for a better Australia. His government was a genuinely reformist one. However, his method of implementation (including all the spin), was a very big problem and this brought him down

Whatever internal conflicts were created, such as fighting the economic stimulus with higher interest rates, or worsening the housing shortage through the insulation program and the builder's early retirement program, it's fortunate Rudd didn't manage to follow through on what would have been his greatest triumph. Fighting the current global cooling with policies to stop global warming would have been the ultimate train wreck for the Australian economy.

Fair enough. I was wrong about Rudd being to blame for foisting Fielding on us. He still refused point blank to deal with the greens over the biggest environmental issue the world has yet seen. Silly silly boy. Labor will soon have no choice but to deal with them and the last three years will have been an exercise in wasted belligerence that cost Kevin his job.

The mining tax is an excuse. The reality is that the big swing in the polls is to the Greens, and the occasional lift of the Coalition in 2-party preferred vote is within margin of error, and not that unusual before serious campaigning starts. If the anti-tax ads were having an impact, it was slight. The latest Morgan poll, probably the last before Rudd was dumped, showed Labor's numbers improving: http://www.roymorgan.com/news/polls/2010/4517/ -- and this one does prefs properly, asking in the survey, not taking last election's prefs flows.

None of this is a losing prospect for Labor: the biggest likely change is a few more Greens senators and the possibility of one or two Greens making it to the lower house.

Have to wonder why anyone would think anything but poorly of all party polotics. The reference to Rudd spin seems strange as it was his inability to sell anything that killed him. Howard and Costello sold the GST to us (only just) and in the end it happened and no one gave a stuff. The mining tax would be little different, if you think that it would really stop them mining in this country then you still believe in the easter bunny. their greed would get the better of them.
There seems to be an inability to see what happened in the GFC. We spent lot's to save our back sides and the inevitable happened when there is that much money going around, the greed of man did its job and the ripoff's began. Don't think that the mining sector saved it, many of my friends in WA lost there wonderful workplace agreements and contracts with the mines. Good old work choices, the job loses started before the whole GFC thing hit the headlines. Our luck was we were so badly short of labour and the chinese didn't fall flat on there faces that we managed to survive.
Look to Europe and smell the roses as the expat's flood back home. Europe is stuffed as is the US because of uncontrolled greed. Private sector greed. If you want to know what we loose by killing off the mining tax and some kind of carbon tax, you loose future infrastructure, the environment, future funding of superannuation and long term sustainable employment. As so many industries burnout under the burden of their own greed we will have nothing. All the remote mining towns will become empty shells with no future. Think of a place like Port Headland, current house prices are 800-1 000 000. What will it be when the mines have finished raping the country.

Rudd ended up as much a victim of media spin as somebody who thought he was using it for his own purposes.

The avalanche of what was more anti-Rudd than anti-Labor sentiment was a lot like that blatantly partisan campaign of the Sydney Morning Herald against the State government.

When there is little news, carry out a poll and that becomes the news.

The fact that Newspoll is actually owned by Murdoch may surprise some people.

According to Morgan Research, Newspoll sometimes fudge their figures and selectively withhold certain results.

I wonder why.

Morgan said, “That pollsters and those that publish the polls have a responsibility to report the facts and the truth”. He went on to say that, “Polls and their publishers should not seek to set the agenda by selectively releasing polling data”, and that, “Polls and their publishers are powerful but with that power comes responsibility”.

I thought the media was supposed to report the news, not create it.

It's easy to see who really decides who should run the country, just as Transnational Mining Companies can "decide how much tax they pay and the manner in which they pay it."

Some people even believe we live in a free and open democracy where everybody has an equal say.

Dance monkeys, dance.

In considering my vote for this Federal election I feel like the man facing the judge and being asked " Would you prefer to be shot, hanged or executed by lethal injection?"

There are four very scary possibilities the upcoming election:

1)
The Greens will pick up a lot of disenchanted Labor voters and become a stronger force in the senate and, possibly, even put a couple of members into the lower house. When are people going to wake up that the greens are not environmentalists, they are rabid wwwaayyy - out - left - wing socialists who will regulate everything to death. The only reason they support Labor is that they hate them a little less than they hate the Libs.

2)
Labor will win and continue to wreck the economy with their hamfisted tax and spend policies.

3)
The Libs will win and we will have a Prime Minister who is a religious nutter controlled by the Pope. Government from Canberra is bad enough but, please, not from Rome.

4)
We will end up like the Brits with a hung parliament which will pretty well ensure that nothing useful gets done for three years.

All up, I think my chances of retiring on my super just went South for at least another term of Government.