Cando - Australia's Voice's Posts

You won't believe this. Whether it’s letting queue jumpers come into the country –“intercepting” them as the spin doctors put it - or granting citizenship, the Gillard government is a push over. It seems they are letting anyone in. They don’t even check them properly. Instead of a full ASIO assessment the government has admitted the assessment is” lighter touch” That’s it. Lighter touch. We know nothing about these people except that they entered Indonesia, a safe country. Presumably as tourists. Then most of them seem to "lose" their passports. In other words they come in deceiving the government and the Australian people. After five years most of them are still on welfare. How do we know there are not terrorists among them ? With a lighter touch assessment, which taxpayer funded lawyers are challenging in the High Court, our incompetent government doesn't know. And it seems once you’re in, Australian citizenship – more precious than gold – is virtually assured. Is this about votes for b

Yesterday I was far richer for attending The State of the Nation – a quarterly report delivered by Australia’s largest and only Australian owned pollster – Roy Morgan Research. This quarter’s report had a focus on Rural Australia. I encourage you to read the entire report at roymorgan.com.au, but I want to share with you a nugget from this goldmine of information. Roy Morgan Research places the unemployment rate at an average of 9.3%. That’s 8.6% in our Capital Cities and 10.7% in Rural Australia. This figure is double that of the ABS, which places unemployment at an average of 4.9%. This figure excludes anyone who works even 1 hour per week – even if it was unpaid. The ABS uses an international standard developed at a time when consultancies and part-time work were scarce, and women rarely worked. Roy Morgan Research does the sensible thing. Morgan just asks people whether they are looking for work! The real level is unemployment is roughly twice that declared by the government. The Re

The Craig Thompson affair should be referred to his ultimate judges, the people of his electorate. This case demonstrates the need for a right of recall of any MP. Or indeed the whole government. Wading through the spin about his succes in pork barrelling for his electorate, and unbelievably, imposing financial transparency on his union, his case is that he’s the victim of identity theft. So why didn’t he go to the police? He claims Channel 7 reporters were lurking under his bathroom window while his pregnant wife was taking a shower. Channel 7 that says that's the first time they heard of that. Why didn't he go to the police? Why didn't he complain to the broadcasting regulator? He claimed his defamation case was settled. It wasn’t. He - actually the Labor Party - even had to pay the newspaper’s costs. His defence yesterday was implausible at best. The people should be able to recall him. Now.

The federal government has no greater responsibility than defending the nation. That's what the then defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon declared in 2009. Few would disagree. He was introducing the Rudd government’s Defence White Paper. But the Gillard government has torn up the White Paper. While China is becoming a major military power, and throwing her weight around, Labor has left us defenceless. Just on this failure, the government should go. The people should have the power to recall a government - any government - which fails in its very first duty -defending the nation.

Gag the press. Silence the critics. That was the Gillard government’s agenda when they established the recent press enquiry -the Finkelstein- Ricketson enquiry. Now why do some politicians think that they have any role to play in the regulating press ethics? Don't they realise that this offends a fundamental constitutional principle? These politicians should be looking at their own ethical standards. But the really extraordinary thing is that there are some journalism academics who agree with a government authority regulating the press. Perhaps they’re eyeing jobs on the authority? Rather than supporting government regulating press ethics, it seems some academics should be looking at their own ethical standards. And why did the well paid consultants let the enquiry get it so wrong about the Press Council?

The Australian’s Hedley Thomas has revealed that a leading unionist was paid tens of thousands of dollars by a property development fund and major Labor Party donor, Austcorp. Wally Curran was union secretary for years and then trustee of the Meatworkers Union superannuation fund. The fund invested $30 million in Austcorp. But Austcorp collapsed in2009’ Its liabilities were around $900 million. The meatworkers were one of the biggest losers. So do sign our petition, Stop the Union Bosses Rorts at http://bit.ly/Jocsye

So the man who murdered that great heart surgeon Dr Victor Chang is to be paroled. As was his accomplice.. Unsupervised, he went off to a luxury our island resort with his girlfriend. Why should he ever be released?

Multiculturalism has never worked in Australia. People often mistake multiracialism, a definite success story, with multiculturalism, a dismal failure. Migrants to Australia should integrate with Australian society and culture - as did have many other groups like the Italians. And they were able to achieve this without dropping their heritage and customs.

After almost 10 years it seems as though the Reserve Bank is finally going to do something about the rip-off it created. In 2003 they allowed merchants to charge you for using your credit card. They said was to encourage competition. The only competition seemed to be between merchants to charge you the highest fees, some as high as 10%. Apparently three quarters of a billion dollarsare being gouged from you for this rort. Why has it taken the Reserve Bank almost a decade to move to try to fix up the mess it created? It's time that the people of Australia were empowered to overrule this sort of silly decision. .

What is this presumption of innocence Julia Gillard is going on about? It only applies criminal trials. It means the Crown has to prove its case. Beyond reasonable doubt. It doesn't apply in relation to Fair Work Australia. The onus there is on the employer. And who was responsible for this? Julia Gillard. And it was Julia Gillard’s Fair Work Australia which spent over three years investigating Craig Thomson.. They found 167 breaches. Approximately half $1 million taken from the union. By Craig Thompson, they said Julia Gillard told the ACTU that this distressed her. It dismayed her. It disgusted her. When she came back from Europe she said the line had been crossed. So Craig Thomson was suspended from the ALP. So why is she should talking about a presumption of innocence? A principle which only applies in criminal trials. There was no presumption of innocence against the commandant Of the Australian Defence Forces Academy when Minister Stephen Smith objected to the prosecution

The Craig Thompson affair has highlighted one fundamental problem with the way our system of government has deteriorated. If Australia is a democracy, why are the people powerless between elections? But since Federation the political parties- with smaller and smaller memberships - have gained a stranglehold on the system. They have given themselves privileges and advantages never dreamt of by our founders. Taxpayers even fund their campaign expenses. And far from representing the people who elected them, too many politicians take orders from their party and even their factional bosses. They represent their party bosses. Not the people. Even at elections, the effective choice has been predetermined by a small clique. The Craig Thomson affair is the result. And not the only one. The only way to counter this undemocratic stranglehold is to give the people the right to recall any elected reserved representative or a whole Parliament to an election. This could be effected by a co

Once again the Gillard government is targeting your retirement savings. For the second time they’ve massively reduced the amount you can put towards your retirement. More Australians will be forced onto the pension. Welcome to yet another front in Julia Gillard’s class war. Perhaps the Rudd and Gillard governments don’t think through the consequences of their policies. Is this just incompetence, like the billions they lost on the BER? Perhaps. But they have been cunning enough to exempt top politicians and bureaucrats from the full burden of their latest attack on retirement savings. Class warfare yes. But the top politicians will remain in the top class

A leopard doesn’t change it spots. Julia Gillard’s statement that Tony Abbott should get out of Sydney’s north shore and talk to real working families is designed to create class warfare – Australians vs. Australians. The Prime Minister should be encouraging unity, not creating such divisions. The Marxian concept of segregating the community into groups and playing them off against each other is nothing new to our Prime Minister. The question is, is all of this part of a more sinister agenda? Despite desperately trying to portray herself as a moderate prior to the election, this is difficult to reconcile with her actions in office as well as her long standing alliance with, and even leadership of various extreme-left organisations. Under Ms. Gillard’s Prime Ministership, this Labor government has facilitated the largest redistribution of wealth that this nation has ever experienced. This is class warfare at its peak. Gillard, the class warrior has returned to her roots and must be removed fr

Australians everywhere must understand one simple fact. John Howard inherited $96 billion debt from Labor. He paid it off - and produced a handsome surplus. But the Rudd and Gillard governments have been treating the national debt they created like some trade union boss’s credit card. The result is Tony Abbott will inherit three times as much as John Howard did. $300 billion of debt. And like any debt it will have to be repaid. By you - and your children. The Gillard government is trying to distract Australians from this by preaching class war. But these inner city elites hardly represent the working class. Labor legend Kim Beazley snr. revealed what was happening to that once proud working class party as long ago as 1970: “When I joined the Labor Party, it contained the cream of the working class. But as I look about me now all I see are the dregs of the middle class.”

Labor has given 7 billion for the EU to live beyond its means, 5 billion to buy a temporary seat on the UN Security Council, foreign aid spending as if they were charged to some trade union boss's credit card, 1 billion for queue jumpers which is certain to blow out and 7 billion just for the interest on the massive debt they have incurred since they came to office. There is no plan to pay off the debt. In fact they're planning to borrow more -they've slipped through an authorisation to increase the amount they can borrow to an unbelievable $300 billion. In the meantime, there's a lousy 300 million or so for seriously disabled Australians under the long-awaited National Disability Scheme. Those are the priorities under the Gillard government's 2012 budget.

Labor’s promise of a budget surplus is as honest as Treasurer Wayne Swan’s hand on heart election promise not to bring in a carbon dioxide tax. And they are hiding expenditure they'd have to reveal if they were company directors. That socialist dream, the National Broadband Network, is a 40 billion dollar hole in the budget. As to Australia being the envy of the world, the deterioration in our budgetary position under Wayne Swan is even worse than that under the Whitlam years. The International Monetary Fund has just found the deterioration in our budget balance from 2006-07 was the fifth largest for the advanced economies - up with Greece, Iceland and Spain.

Last night, after and investigation taking longer than the Korean War, Fair Work Australia released its findings on former Secretary of the Health Services Union, Craig Thompson - something CANdo has been consistently campaigning for. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-PVwloHUWs http://www.cando.org.au/campaign-hub/current-campaigns/25-stop-the-union-bosses-rorts How what appears to be essentially an open and shut case took so long is beyond comprehension! When all of this is over, there should be a Royal Commission into FWA. Is our independent umpire playing politics? Has the Gillard government been applying political pressure on FWA to keep a lid on its findings? For someone earning $40000 a year, $600 in union fees is a significant amount of money. To see an official report finally finding massive corruption by union officials and that Craig Thomson MP gave false and misleading information must disturb not only HSU members. All union members must be concerned. No union is subject to proper

There is not a more important function for a government than the defence of the borders. This evening – budget night – we’ll see our national defence being misused cynically. In a sleight of hand exercise, defence will be used just to fiddle the national accounts so that the budget appears in surplus for one year. This won’t impress anybody.

This is the season of deceit when politicians will promise you anything to get your vote. Over the weekend, in what is no doubt only the tip of the iceberg as Labor ramps up for the election, the Gillard government was out spruiking generous payments for parents, including up to $820 per child – in itself a clever accounting trick. Of course the incentives which the government is offering to try and secure our votes will very quickly pass. But you can be rest assured that the world’s largest Carbon Tax won’t be going anywhere soon. How Julia Gillard could claim to be committed to bringing the budget in to surplus, “in a traditional Labor fashion” is beyond comprehension. The only thing this government is committed to is destroying our economy and the redistribution of wealth. Don’t fall for their trap. Beware of politicians bearing gifts!

Is the Gillard government just incompetent or is there an agenda? We are being taken for a ride - there's a whole industry in Pakistan turning locals into Afghans. And with chain immigration, the government is giving us three for one - and most are still on welfare after five years.