Tony Abbott has lost half a million of his followers in a month, at the rate of seventeen thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven a day.
When the figure reaches two million, on August the twenty-third at this rate, or maybe August the twenty-fifth, he should consider his position.
Name:
He surprised you all, for someone billed as “unelectable” didn’t he?
I think Abbott knows how to view advice from a political enemy.
The ALP would be better placed to try and honestly figure out how it all went wrong. But there will be plenty of time for that. The Tarago will be full of woulda-shoulda-coulda conversations.
Abbotts/Murdochs/Reinharts/Palmers fault all. Bastards!!!
No, I picked him as the likely leader in August, 2009, three months before he was. I picked his winning margin that December when all else said Hockey had it sewn up.
And I’m now picking that he’s gone because he’s been fingered as an innumerate crazy-brave bully.
What other information do you have?
Bob this may be added to your (ever growing) list of incorrect predictions me fears. Abbott is rock-solid as leader. Every great leader must have a touch of crazy-brave mustn’t they? Prove that I lie.
You want a thousand dollars on it?
You’re on Bob. And a schooner of Mateus for good measure – winner choses the venue.
Beware, Verily Nostradamus…for I have no doubt that his cheque will bounce higher than yours.
He may pay in installments if need be. I am conscious Bob will now be out of pocket for more petrol money as he makes the long journey from Palm Beach to the city by car.
My name is Verily Nostradamus and I am of sound mind and I cannot name eight policies Labor should be thrown out for. I believe Julie Bishop would be a better Foreign Minister than Bob Carr.
Two party preferred Bobby Boy, that’s all that counts. If an election were held today the ALP would be wiped out. Plain and simple. No sugar coating, or spinning of that one changes the fact.
The Liberals would have to produce their figures. What would those figures be?
And once it was revealed they involved the sacking of eighty thousand government employees, how would that go down?
There will be no election tomorrow. There will be a campaign that takes thirty-four days, in four months’ or fifteen months’ time. When Europe is bankrupt, and we are looking fine.
Discuss.
Seems to be an ever increasing case of hacking on your site Bob.
Anyway if Europe further collapses it will place further pressure on the Australian stock market. The continued ‘class warfare’ of Labor won’t fly and will only add to the woes. The punters will turn to a perceived set of safe hands in the Coalition (Lib/Nat) as opposed to the current Rainbow Coalition presiding. Beyond that the sacking of 800 inefficient public servants who vote Labor anyway will not change the outcome.
My name is Frank and I am of soumd mind and I cannot name eight policies Labor should be thrown out for. I believe Julie Bishop would be a better Foreign Minister than Bob Carr.
I don’t know about the 80,000 sacked public servants but it’s a good start in my humble view.
Here in Queensland we love our Campbell Newman who gets things done right away.
Its what we Libs like in a leader.
He’s sacking 3,500 public servants and getting rid of all that Climate Change nonsense.
Bravo! He has to cut waste.
Thats what LNP people do. Its what Tony Abbott will do as well. That and resurrecting the dreaded WorkChoices Bob.
An extra line you should write for Albo.
“Tony Abbott will bring in Workchoices II”
Bravo!
Paying off Labor debt is what the LNP do.
No doubt Tony Abbott when installed PM will also cut thousands of jobs to pay off the $300 Billion Labor debt that Bob’s people love to squander on trinkets and rubbish.
You see all that money Gillard borrowed to give to the workers – didn’t do her party much good in the polls did it?
Discuss.
She should be streets ahead.
Australians are smarter than they look and they don’t like what they see.
These homo-erotic fixations are holding you back from fulfilling your true potential, Frank. The power lies in you. This is your time. Cut waste, Frank. Cut waste like you’ve never cut it before. Don’t even eat for the next week. Take your pay packet and send it direct to Gina. She’ll know what to do with it. She’s a doer. And it’s not homo-erotic at all because she’s a chick. It’s just smart, commonsense intuition.
Your on Frank! Lets make the next election about industrial relations shall we?
My name is Chris and I am of sound mind (but not body)and I cannot name eight policies that Labor should be thrown out for.
I believe Julie Bishop would make an excellent deputy to whoever wins the imminent ballot to lead the Libs as she is in pursuit
of the world record of swearing her loyalty to yet another leader of the opposition.
Besides, who else would want to be associated with that ragged bunch.
I actually laughed at poor old Bobs feeble attempt at silencing his critics by appending a prefix message to their comments. It shows how frightened Bob Ellis is of his contributors. Totalitarian Bob does not enjoy the democratic process at all. And it’s a pity.
Banned for life.
Just kidding.
If you do not think Julie Bishop the superior candidate please say so.
Frank?
…Frank?
You would love DeVere Frank, absolutely love DeVere.
Verily Nostradamus, there was not an election today, there will be one in 15 months time that’s when votes will be counted.
Frank in his contribution above refers to climate change as nonsense.
For his benefit and for the benefit of others similarly simple-minded I wish to present a simple description of the process of global warming that is now happening on our planet, principally caused by human activity.
1. Fossil fuels lay beneath the earth and sea for millions of years in the form of oil, coal and gas. They were formed over millenia by the decomposition of trees and all other forms of vegetation.
2. Some 300 years ago the fuels were discovered and proved to be of immenseuse to humankind, enabling the development of industry and technology and thus the creation of seemingly boundless wealth.
3. Now however we are mining and burning these fuels at vast rates and IT IS A ONE-WAY PROCESS. CO2 that has been sequestered for millions of years is now being released into the atmosphere in huge and increasing quantities and this has never happened before.
4. By the way, volcanoes release very little CO2 into the atmosphere.
5. CO2 changes the atmosphere. It acts as a blanket, helping to trap the sun’s heat.
6. This causes a slow but inexorable increase in the temperatures of the oceans.
7. The oceans drive the weather patterns of the world in a multitude of recordable but unpredictable ways.
8. This is happening now.
Any questions?
2. Some 200 years ago
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/29/science_and_maths_knowledge_makes_you_sceptical/
Climate change trick cyclists
The theory may be sound, but the extent is not clear, not settled and not beyond the realms of debate. You sound like the type of character who would remove fillings from the dead. Shame on you.
On a positive the removal of fillings from the dead could be a job Marilyn could do (keep her honest and may give her a chance for some romance).
What’s all this “I am of sound mind” shit?
I doubt the sanity of anyone who says “I am sane”!
No right wing turds are ever of sound mind, it goes with the turf.
All fucking balmy. Vive la belle France, Vive le revolution.
Right wing? merde.
So remind me again Macabre, your DQ’s bit of rough, right?
Four million years.
Don’t expect an answer allthumbs; she is of the urban guerilla mindset, and not given to conversations! Daddy is rich and she flies in and flies out on a whim; where she is now I know not.
Hey Bob, any chance that your offerings here will ever take more of a theological bent as you shuffle nearer to the end of the coil?
I don’t imagine that I’d agree with much, or that it would be very different to, say, Phillip Adams’ views, but it would prove an interesting and far richer mining material than the dirty/near-exhausted fossil fuels of party politics. And I’d be keen to see your particular style applied to the grand old questions of man – happiness, truth, salvation, eternal justice etc.
Cheerfully yours,
Peter
No. No. No. We die, as my three pekineses did.
And we don’t come back.
You may have a different view. And you well may be an idiot.
Discuss.
Righto, I just thought that you’d have stronger feelings about the matter that perhaps deserved creative expression – like your Anglo-American conservative convert equivalent, Hitchens
It’s a funny old blog sometimes, this one.
Sometimes it’s very interesting indeed, then there’s periods when it resembles two rival bands of apes shitting into their hands and flinging it at each other.
Just like parliament, really…
Agreed, Polybius. When apes attack, the temptation is too great for the rest of us to resist throwing back a little of the ordure thrown at us. Bob’s slack moderation allows the apes too much leeway altogether.
It does not assist civilised discussion to be pelted with ordure by rock apes.
Have you a better solution?
I do not have a better solution, Doug – I wish I did.
I suppose it would help to weed out those whose main interest seems to be finger-painting with their own excrement. But I think the problem is wider than that.
In this blog, we see in miniature the same polarization and rancorousness that we see in Parliament and the wider community. Rather than actually engaging in debate and argument, people are simply playing for their team. There seems to be a lot of point scoring, but not a lot of thinking.
But I still come here and will keep coming here. Partly because I enjoy reading Bob Ellis’s writing, even when I disagree with it – sometimes especially when I disagree with it.
And also because I’m like most other people. There’s a part of me that enjoys violence, hatred and rage and finds it gratifying. How else to account for what goes on in some of these columns?
It’s not the only part, but it’s definitely a part.
I think we are at the end of a cycle of political thinking that began in the mid-eighteenth century. After all, both left and right have their roots in precisely the same ideas, but have made different uses of them. Marx learned all his economics from Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
I’m going off on a tangent, and that’s because I’m trying to describe something that’s just out of reach.
The point is: what happens next?
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ emerged out of the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly after the revolution. They do not refer to anything eternal and essential in human nature.
Why behave as if they do?
(I’m not asking you, Doug, I’m asking the air. And this is a very disorganised post, and I’m sure if you wanted to chuck the odd petrified turd at it, you would have every right.)
Polybius, I have come to realise that this Film and Theatre blog is NO Place For Women Young Or Old…
Too much ugly language use by most of the bloggers…
I don’t mind the bad language.
But the ugly language and the ham-fisted abuse gets deeply tedious. And the perfectly circular and repetitive arguments are worse. Makes me think of zombies trying to remember what life was like.
Women don’t use ugly language? Tell that to Marilyn and Macabre!
Reader1 has been less than polite at times, and then there is ‘Tara’ . . .
In my experience young women are keener on equality than the older ones, and that includes use of language.
DQ, I did not say that women don’t use bad language, what I’m saying that maybe this blog does not attract more women because most bloggers here use such crude lingo, I don’t encounter this on any other blog I visit…
Agreed, Helvi.
I’ve come across very few women-young or old – who call others, or who like being called, ‘c…’.
All depends on the quality of people you’re mixing with, of course.
So go utilise some of those non swearing blogs. You’re not so limited in your options if you don’t have the burden of meaning to engage with. Your Barbara Cartland Weak and Delicate Femininity Takeover Bid seems to have failed. Bob keeps churning out the victory missives and I will keep saying cunt and fuck for as long as you keep whinging about it. Cunt.
There’s no “takeover bid”, o foul-mouthed one. That’s just a paranoid fantasy of yours. Rest easy – I know how precious your clubby little sense of ‘ownership’ of this bog is to you. Me, I’m just speaking for the truth. And don’t give me a postmodern Wikilecture on your interpretation of the word ‘truth’, either. Your suggestion that using language like that is a sign of your ‘strength’ only highlights your weakness.
So go on – keep saying it. Wear it as badge of your ‘tough womanhood’. ‘O-I’m-so-tough-I-use-swearwords-even-ones -that-disparage-my-own-sex.’ I’m a cool, tough, postmodern bogan hero!
You really do come across as a crass, pretentious bully of a woman.
You’re speaking in order to advance your own value system the same as anyone, only in this case the system is very limited and you lack the awareness to know that it is just YOUR value system. You need to compare and contrast multiple value systems before declaring yourself a truth seeker or moral principle expert. As it stands, you are merely espousing the values lifted straight from your own background, second hand, unexamined, self serving and above all, coincidental. A product of your time and place. This is exactly how colonialism got started.
You see Doug, it comes down to a matter of perspective. We’re not all looking through the same lens now are we?
You try and paint yourself as the victim, and in some cases you might be, but you just as big a rock ape in my books as those you referring to.
You see, it’s just a matter of perspective.
If you think telling me fuck off round about now is gonna cut it then you better think again. I want nothing to do with your brand of conversation – it’s like fucking elevator music man, every thought that pops into your skull you feel the need to post on this blog.
Fucking incredible man.
I cringe every time I see your name on the comments section, wondering what fart bubble’s coming up now.
But that’s me getting off the track.
Perspective Doug, perspective.
Ah, JG Cole, the memories . . . same old, same old. Are the semantics treating you well? . . . Get help, poor Tara. Or is it Tom O’ Bedlam?
You wasting your time on me if you think that line will get you far.
Just pointing out your hypocrisy man, I’m not here to engage the likes of you.
Same old shit.
Go away and stay away. Forever.
You were never on track. You never accidentally crossed a path. That’s why you were banned.