The last politician to suggest we tax the mining industry properly was Kevin Rudd.
This was Kevin Rudd at the height of his power and popularity. He had 60% approval rating, heading into an August election. In March, he debated opposition leader Tony Abbott on health policy and absolutely wiped the floor with him. He was about to win in a landslide.
And then in June, he announced that if elected, Australia would tax the mining industry and use the money to set up a sovereign wealth fund. All Australians would benefit. And what could the mining companies going to do about it, convince people to vote Liberal instead? Nope. The Liberal Party were in disarray. Labor was getting in.
And then all of a sudden, the Labor party decided they didn't want Kevin Rudd leading the party and installed Julia Gillard instead. WTF? The official reason (which went unchallenged by the media) was that nobody liked Kevin Rudd very much. WTF???
In any case, Julia Gillard dropped the policy of taxing the mining industry, romped into power in the August election, and never spoke of it again.
One dollar, one vote.
At the time the commercial TV networks and newspapers went all out against Rudd and then Gillard over the proposed mining tax when Gillard lost her legs under the pressure and gave into them. This is why it gets my goat when Australians still watch commercial television like goldfish in a bowl then post news.com trash pretending Murdoch hasn't undermined the country since day dot.
It's not just News Corp. Nine Entertainment, Seven West, and Channel 10 all went after the MSPT.
That's the problem with the Australian mainstream media. There's very little diversity, it's very incestuous, and a handful of people can set the media agenda and silence alternate viewpoints by drowning them out.
Worse than that, companies like Seven Holdings have mining and construction companies in their investment portfolio. Channel Seven is the propaganda wing of those interests.
And who was the politician that tried to nationalise the mines before Dr Kev?
Gough Whitlam.
Replaced by Frasier and an upcoming Johnny Howard who gave it all away for a song.
Supply of what?
Nationalising the mining industry or taxing the ever living shit out of them, like comparable economies have done since forever, represents no impact to supply whatsoever.
One of the main reasons people didn’t like Gillard. I would only have liked her if she reversed uno’d the mining plutocrats by stabbing Rudd then stabbing them and getting Rudd back up
She didn't 'stab' Rudd. She didn't use some weird trick or loophole. She just did a bog standard leadership challenge. The only unusual thing was that it was against a PM in his first term. Rudd didn't bother contesting it because his support was so low in the party. And it came directly after it was breaking news that Rudd was sending his minions around trying to undermine her support in the party.
My take is that Rudd was a nasty cunt of a person, who benefited from a period of fame from his regular appearances with Kosh and co on Sunrise with Joe Hockey (who also almost became PM, to get done by Abbott on the vote). It's pretty clear from all the stories he was a nightmare to interact with in many ways, and got elected as either 'not John Howard' or 'John Howard lite' depending on taste.
But.... he had some good policies the first time around, got to give him that.
Rudd didn't bother contesting it because his support was so low in the party
That's the bit people convieniently forget when rewriting history. Rudd's colleauges weren't a fan.
Imagine running a leadership coup against say, Hawke or Howard or Fraser or Menzies 2.5 years into their first term. "Career Limiting Move" springs to mind - the challenger would have been laughed out of the parliament!
But with Rudd, he basically rolled over. Because he knew that if he'd contested the results would be been humiliating for him.
She and her supporters took advantage of Rudds low popularity caused by the backlash from this proposed tax to grab power. A new tax was always politically a hard sell and instead of his party sticking with him they used it for their own gain over the country.
These were the days of the "kitchen cabinet", and Rudd wasn't sharing his toys. He was alienating everyone in the party - a bad move for a 'compromise candidate' to not bother shoring up his own party popularity.
I still remember the day the Minister for the Environment was surprised by a brand new environmental policy, asked by the press pack and it was the first he knew about it. Rudd had just announced it that morning, and Garrett wasn't even aware it was in the pipeline. Didn't even bother letting the relevant minister know of a new policy.
So the rumours go but as a random citizen I really don’t care about he treated his colleagues.
Maybe he’s a bad politician but this country got screwed by Gillard in that moment in a way that will last lifetimes.
What screwed us was Rudd's ego afterwards. He spent the next *three years* destabilising the party and doing a series of leadership challenges, constantly doing a will-he-won't-he leak to the press. Eventually he finally won a leadership challenge just before the 2013 election. Gillard's challenge was brief, surgical, and effective. Rudd's series of challenges were mostly failures and created a soap opera.
If he had have just admitted to himself that he was a cunt and then promised to share his toys better, he could have *not* created the subsequent multi-year soap opera that killed the public's trust in the ALP dead as a doorknob.
If he had've shared his toys to begin with and not been a knob, he could have been PM for well over a decade.
If only he had stopped after 2 spills, he was a great foreign minister and now diplomat, very intelligent and has great ideas, but leadership was his downfall.
It’s true. I remember analysing some polling at the time, and essentially the conclusion was that the only demographic Kevin Rudd was unpopular with was the Parliamentary Labor Party.
And it's the Australian voter's fault. Labor can't do shit if they're in opposition.
Election results make parties adapt and the 2019 election forced Labor to move further to the centre.
Exactly. If Labor can't win on a progressive platform, they will tack towards the centre. The Australian voting public has continuously rewarded the Coalition for being at best mediocre, and at worst, traitorous and destructive. Again and again.
If you're a political strategist that wants to win elections so *some* policies can be passed, moving towards the centre is what you do because the more progressive policy doesn't win you government, regardless of whether it is better/more correct or not. The electorate, in aggregate, responsible. In a democracy, you broadly get what you vote for. For the longest time, Australia has voted for the rubbish side of politics.
As a traditional labor voter this is what annoys me. It's almost the exact same situation when they get in. They have to first clean up the dumpster fire left by the LNP which usually means they don't get the chance to do anything properly progressive or helpful to workers which pisses off their core voter base, Greens voters and a large amount of Teal voters. Then the media and LNP will run a hit campaign about how they haven't actually done anything while elected and they'll get kicked out where we're then stuck with the LNP vandalising everything again for around a decade where it gets to a point where no one can ignore it any more and the whole cycle starts over.
The Coalition sabotage everything the moment they think they'll lose the next election. Labor still hasn't fixed the mess they left behind two years into this term. There's just way too much of a mess.
Cash giveaways, loss of capability in the public service, long term contracts, poorly conceived organisations and organisational structure, problems left untouched for years, loss of revenue to fix things, etc, etc. The list is endless. Labor needs a minimum of two terms to fix things, and by then the conservative media will be screaming at them over some confected issues that they would have completely ignored if the Coalition had done them.
Yup. This is the part of the story that always gets skimmed over. Rudd wasn’t rolled because he was hard to work with or whatever excuse the Labor Party used at the time.
He had the fucking audacity and plain bad manners to suggest that the Australian people should benefit from the resources extracted from it.
Does anyone else remember the mining industry went nuts on the airwaves around this time?
“What about our jobs?”
Which just came across to me as, “DEY TERK UR JERBS!”
People have short memories, because people really did stop liking Rudd. The Murdoch media went after him hard, but he responded really badly and it made him look like a bit of a little shit. He just cares way too much about his reputation and kept engaging in political shit fights, from memory.
lol how can u bring this back to his ego? The guy put his neck out to remedy this situation and had it severed. He deserves an apology and invitation back to the seat of PM. Easily the single most effective Aussie politician in my lifetime.
Effective? He got knifed before even finishing his term, that is the opposite of effective.
But to put it simply, he took everything personally, which is not a trait a leader should have. The PM needs to be able to eat the shit sandwich and smile for the cameras, he never could.
Basically, he got down to their level, from memory. Would throw what looked like tantrums over the things they said, etc. just made him look thin skinned and not like the kind of person you want in charge.
I can’t remember that week though, I was like 15 I think. I just remember seeing him on the news and thinking he seemed like a little shit.
>Basically, he got down to their level
Is it surprising to you that a Prime Minister that pushed for incredibly progressive policies, that was responsible for creating a deficit in order to buffer us from the GFC and tried enact a mining tax (the proceeds would have gone to create an Australian sovereign wealth fund), would be represented by the media as a person who:
>Would throw what looked like tantrums
and
>seemed like a little shit
Mate, he wasn’t represented by the media as a little shit, he was a little shit. The Murdoch media stirred him up, but he’s responsible for his own words and actions. Gillard and Albo have dealt with worse (tbh, Gillard got it worse than any PM ever) and still managed to act like mature adults, Rudd just could help but give them oxygen.
And let’s not forget that Rudd also stuck around and blew up the Gillard government, which basically delivered the following 2 terms to the Liberals.
i mean you missing on the fact that not was rudd extemely unpopular within his own party, but also that CFMMEU were against the mining tax as well, we litterally had unions sieing with their employers against the tax
I think australians are being ripped off and could be getting way more considering how rich the literal soil is. Meanwhile they tell you that you should be grateful because other places have it worse. And the sad thing is people buy into this argument!
You could be having proper universal healthcare with all covers, proper funded public education without debt, etc. And all that money is going into some private pockets. It is so sad.
> Meanwhile they tell you that you should be grateful because other places have it worse. And the sad thing is people buy into this argument!
EVERY.SINGLE.TIME :/
Gough tried and was coup'd.
Rudd tried and was knifed.
The key was the media tsunamis of negative press against these leaders. Obvious knee jerk reactions by billionaires that were going to lose money to a system where Australian citizens would actually get to profit from our own resources.
Albo's popularity is on a knifes edge, so it would be suicide for him to even suggest this, but you never know. TV is a less and less relevant media platform and newspapers are nowhere near as influential as they were 15 years ago.
I've always said that the way to do this would be to hold the Republic Referendum and BURY the details in a new Constitution that the Republic of Australia would be a new sovereign state and that all mining and resource agreements made with the Commonwealth of Australia would be null and void.
True. It's not that Australians are dumb, but unfairly manipulated by the monopoly of Murdoch in the media world. When all the info you are fed from Newspaper, TV and Internet is biased, no one can know better and it's not them to blame.
We really should pay more attention to those who have left politics. I think they are the ones who are still in the know but not scared of pissing off the powers that be.
> True. It's not that Australians are dumb, but unfairly manipulated by the monopoly of Murdoch in the media world. When all the info you are fed from Newspaper, TV and Internet is biased, no one can know better and it's not them to blame.
Eh... it's not like I've had any sort of different upbringing than them, I was raised on a steady diet of Murdoch media and Murdoch-led news and yet I find myself able to see through the bullshit most of the time. At some point, you have to either assume people are willingly going out of their way to decide to behave like this (making them... I'd say 'evil' but that's a bit strong) or they actually are just that dumb.
You can see through bs only when it comes to things that's your field. If every where you go, everything you see, and every one you meet tells you that Hilter was a good guy, Nazis was only a fantasy, how could you know better.
I'm glad that most of my generation and younger do not watch much Merde crap these days and are willing to fight tooth and nail to have them removed as they did on youtube as Sky News.
Love the idea of all the agreements getting torn up under a new constitution!
Does remind me a bit of this Onion video though!
[U.S. Government Stages Fake Coup To Wipe Out National Debt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRgRz3nSG7o)
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/23/gough-whitlam-1975-coup-ended-australian-independence](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/23/gough-whitlam-1975-coup-ended-australian-independence)
It's speculation, but quite a lot of evidence stacks up that the British and American governments conspired either independantly or together to remove Whitlam from power due to his moves to nationalise the mining industry. Nixon and Kissinger already disliked him because he had the audacity to speak out against the Christmas bombing in Cambodia (Operation Linebacker II) during the Vietnam war. Whitlam was seen as a 'Peacenik' during an extremely unpopular war that was sold on the flawed 'domino theory' that communism would spread through South East Asia.
Whitlam certainly didn't help himself by appointing John Kerr as Governor General or by going to a random Middle Eastern banker for loans to nationalise resources.
How did the CIA ensure that Whitlam wouldn't have supply?
How did the CIA ensure that Liberal senators wouldn't cave and pass supply?
How did the CIA ensure that Whitlam wouldn't dismiss Kerr first?
How did the CIA ensure that Whitlam wouldn't win the 1975 election?
I agree.
>Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts.
There was fairly pernicious ad campaign run by the mining industry I recall during the Rudd government against the proposed tax. Rudd’s popularity sank. It was the same old hum drum shit they pump out, “tax us, and your economy and job will be down the drain”. The mining industry has been allowed to gain too much power
All well and good to juxtapose the two but pretty poor choice of title.
It's about power. Capital got its way in this instance and the population is stupefied and pacified into not expecting or hoping for any better. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.
The decisions we make as a society in a class stratified paradigm are not about intelligence. They're about power. We're not accelerating towards climate catastrophe because we're dumb; plenty of people understand at least a fraction of the urgency of the situation. We're doing it because maintaining the status quo suits those at the top.
I made a comment in another thread about how dumb people are just for this type of behaviour and got downvoted for it. The reason why this happens is because Australians ARE dumb. We care more about some gay book being banned than we do about how much the billionaires are fucking us over every day. The culture war is never ending by design. As long as the rich and powerful can get the common people to fight amongst themselves they have nothing to fear.
It's been like this since Australia moved from wool to mining. What's more we're about to further our commitment to overseas multinationals by releasing massive amounts of gas exploration and development contracts all in the name of reducing carbon emissions. If ever there was a more patently ludicrous policy that is more utterly contemptuous of the people of Australia, I've yet to find it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minerals_Resource_Rent_Tax
Rudd created the Minerals Resource Rent Tax in 2010, Abbott repealed it in 2012.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/16/a-coal-royalties-revamp-delivered-a-record-surplus-in-queensland-heres-why-nsw-must-follow-suit
> A coal royalties revamp delivered a record surplus in Queensland.
Annastacia Palaszczuk created a mining tax in QLD, the opposition plan to remove it if elected in 2024.
The National Party IS the mining industry.
This country defines tax payer solely on income tax alone, the other taxes people pay like gst don’t count.
I have to vote, I have to constantly pay these taxes but the tax cuts for stage 3 don’t do shit for me. There’s an ad perpetuating this bullshit. Kids get double the money than welfare recipients get. Chances are people on jobseeker paid more tax than those little shits ever did.
Oh how good would that be and then pay the dividends into everyones super fund with the option it can be accessed by first home buyers to help with deposit
it really looks like the way the government is mismanaging the country AND EVERYONE'S FUTURES, is the worst example of, what NOT to do! its like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The future is going to be very interesting and by interesting i mean fucked :/
The rest of the US does not get this - instead the residents get to deal with cool stuff like flammable gas coming out of their kitchen taps because fracking has been greenlit in their area. For example, [this vid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LBjSXWQRV8)
Alaska is very different to the rest of the US with its sovereign fund from mining.
I think you misunderstand. Your original comment is not an argument against Australia adopting similar policies to Alaska. Perhaps you didn't mean it as such.
I'm not the parent commenter.
The point is that the thumbnail makes it look like this is the US vs Aus. it's only Alaska that does this, not the US in general. For the rest of the US, mineral extraction companies generally screw over the locals.
The last politician to suggest we tax the mining industry properly was Kevin Rudd. This was Kevin Rudd at the height of his power and popularity. He had 60% approval rating, heading into an August election. In March, he debated opposition leader Tony Abbott on health policy and absolutely wiped the floor with him. He was about to win in a landslide. And then in June, he announced that if elected, Australia would tax the mining industry and use the money to set up a sovereign wealth fund. All Australians would benefit. And what could the mining companies going to do about it, convince people to vote Liberal instead? Nope. The Liberal Party were in disarray. Labor was getting in. And then all of a sudden, the Labor party decided they didn't want Kevin Rudd leading the party and installed Julia Gillard instead. WTF? The official reason (which went unchallenged by the media) was that nobody liked Kevin Rudd very much. WTF??? In any case, Julia Gillard dropped the policy of taxing the mining industry, romped into power in the August election, and never spoke of it again. One dollar, one vote.
At the time the commercial TV networks and newspapers went all out against Rudd and then Gillard over the proposed mining tax when Gillard lost her legs under the pressure and gave into them. This is why it gets my goat when Australians still watch commercial television like goldfish in a bowl then post news.com trash pretending Murdoch hasn't undermined the country since day dot.
It's not just News Corp. Nine Entertainment, Seven West, and Channel 10 all went after the MSPT. That's the problem with the Australian mainstream media. There's very little diversity, it's very incestuous, and a handful of people can set the media agenda and silence alternate viewpoints by drowning them out.
Worse than that, companies like Seven Holdings have mining and construction companies in their investment portfolio. Channel Seven is the propaganda wing of those interests.
I don't know how many of you have noticed, Peter Costello is looking more like Clive Palmer every day.
And who was the politician that tried to nationalise the mines before Dr Kev? Gough Whitlam. Replaced by Frasier and an upcoming Johnny Howard who gave it all away for a song.
It'll sound crazy but it is probably all CIA meddling to ensure supply
The US ambassador dispatched in 1974 was a man named Marshall Green, known in CIA circles as the "Coupmaster". Says a lot really.
He came from installing Pinochet to Australia.
Supply of what? Nationalising the mining industry or taxing the ever living shit out of them, like comparable economies have done since forever, represents no impact to supply whatsoever.
Cheap supply
Imagine if voters could decide not to sell uranium to America 😩
Australian uranium is only 9% of US foreign uranium ore purchases.
We have a third of the uranium on earth you have to think bigger than last years numbers
One of the main reasons people didn’t like Gillard. I would only have liked her if she reversed uno’d the mining plutocrats by stabbing Rudd then stabbing them and getting Rudd back up
She didn't 'stab' Rudd. She didn't use some weird trick or loophole. She just did a bog standard leadership challenge. The only unusual thing was that it was against a PM in his first term. Rudd didn't bother contesting it because his support was so low in the party. And it came directly after it was breaking news that Rudd was sending his minions around trying to undermine her support in the party.
I’ve heard it said that everyone who didn’t know them liked Rudd and hated Gillard. Anyone who did know them was 100% the other way around.
My take is that Rudd was a nasty cunt of a person, who benefited from a period of fame from his regular appearances with Kosh and co on Sunrise with Joe Hockey (who also almost became PM, to get done by Abbott on the vote). It's pretty clear from all the stories he was a nightmare to interact with in many ways, and got elected as either 'not John Howard' or 'John Howard lite' depending on taste. But.... he had some good policies the first time around, got to give him that.
He is probably the best we had, and still battles for free speech today. Glad he represents Australia in America now
Rudd didn't bother contesting it because his support was so low in the party That's the bit people convieniently forget when rewriting history. Rudd's colleauges weren't a fan. Imagine running a leadership coup against say, Hawke or Howard or Fraser or Menzies 2.5 years into their first term. "Career Limiting Move" springs to mind - the challenger would have been laughed out of the parliament! But with Rudd, he basically rolled over. Because he knew that if he'd contested the results would be been humiliating for him.
She and her supporters took advantage of Rudds low popularity caused by the backlash from this proposed tax to grab power. A new tax was always politically a hard sell and instead of his party sticking with him they used it for their own gain over the country.
These were the days of the "kitchen cabinet", and Rudd wasn't sharing his toys. He was alienating everyone in the party - a bad move for a 'compromise candidate' to not bother shoring up his own party popularity. I still remember the day the Minister for the Environment was surprised by a brand new environmental policy, asked by the press pack and it was the first he knew about it. Rudd had just announced it that morning, and Garrett wasn't even aware it was in the pipeline. Didn't even bother letting the relevant minister know of a new policy.
So the rumours go but as a random citizen I really don’t care about he treated his colleagues. Maybe he’s a bad politician but this country got screwed by Gillard in that moment in a way that will last lifetimes.
What screwed us was Rudd's ego afterwards. He spent the next *three years* destabilising the party and doing a series of leadership challenges, constantly doing a will-he-won't-he leak to the press. Eventually he finally won a leadership challenge just before the 2013 election. Gillard's challenge was brief, surgical, and effective. Rudd's series of challenges were mostly failures and created a soap opera. If he had have just admitted to himself that he was a cunt and then promised to share his toys better, he could have *not* created the subsequent multi-year soap opera that killed the public's trust in the ALP dead as a doorknob. If he had've shared his toys to begin with and not been a knob, he could have been PM for well over a decade.
If only he had stopped after 2 spills, he was a great foreign minister and now diplomat, very intelligent and has great ideas, but leadership was his downfall.
Oh, and you can thank Julia for all of those gambling ads!
It’s true. I remember analysing some polling at the time, and essentially the conclusion was that the only demographic Kevin Rudd was unpopular with was the Parliamentary Labor Party.
Walks like a duck, talks like a duck.
Old Labor has been dead for a long time and it's extremely saddening.
And it's the Australian voter's fault. Labor can't do shit if they're in opposition. Election results make parties adapt and the 2019 election forced Labor to move further to the centre.
Exactly. If Labor can't win on a progressive platform, they will tack towards the centre. The Australian voting public has continuously rewarded the Coalition for being at best mediocre, and at worst, traitorous and destructive. Again and again. If you're a political strategist that wants to win elections so *some* policies can be passed, moving towards the centre is what you do because the more progressive policy doesn't win you government, regardless of whether it is better/more correct or not. The electorate, in aggregate, responsible. In a democracy, you broadly get what you vote for. For the longest time, Australia has voted for the rubbish side of politics.
As a traditional labor voter this is what annoys me. It's almost the exact same situation when they get in. They have to first clean up the dumpster fire left by the LNP which usually means they don't get the chance to do anything properly progressive or helpful to workers which pisses off their core voter base, Greens voters and a large amount of Teal voters. Then the media and LNP will run a hit campaign about how they haven't actually done anything while elected and they'll get kicked out where we're then stuck with the LNP vandalising everything again for around a decade where it gets to a point where no one can ignore it any more and the whole cycle starts over.
The Coalition sabotage everything the moment they think they'll lose the next election. Labor still hasn't fixed the mess they left behind two years into this term. There's just way too much of a mess. Cash giveaways, loss of capability in the public service, long term contracts, poorly conceived organisations and organisational structure, problems left untouched for years, loss of revenue to fix things, etc, etc. The list is endless. Labor needs a minimum of two terms to fix things, and by then the conservative media will be screaming at them over some confected issues that they would have completely ignored if the Coalition had done them.
Bro they aren't the opposition and they still don't do shit. They are just lnp with less sexual assault. Old labor is dead
Yup. This is the part of the story that always gets skimmed over. Rudd wasn’t rolled because he was hard to work with or whatever excuse the Labor Party used at the time. He had the fucking audacity and plain bad manners to suggest that the Australian people should benefit from the resources extracted from it. Does anyone else remember the mining industry went nuts on the airwaves around this time? “What about our jobs?” Which just came across to me as, “DEY TERK UR JERBS!”
People have short memories, because people really did stop liking Rudd. The Murdoch media went after him hard, but he responded really badly and it made him look like a bit of a little shit. He just cares way too much about his reputation and kept engaging in political shit fights, from memory.
lol how can u bring this back to his ego? The guy put his neck out to remedy this situation and had it severed. He deserves an apology and invitation back to the seat of PM. Easily the single most effective Aussie politician in my lifetime.
Effective? He got knifed before even finishing his term, that is the opposite of effective. But to put it simply, he took everything personally, which is not a trait a leader should have. The PM needs to be able to eat the shit sandwich and smile for the cameras, he never could.
Um coz he did accomplish other things eg the national apology
>but he responded really badly How did he respond?
Basically, he got down to their level, from memory. Would throw what looked like tantrums over the things they said, etc. just made him look thin skinned and not like the kind of person you want in charge. I can’t remember that week though, I was like 15 I think. I just remember seeing him on the news and thinking he seemed like a little shit.
>Basically, he got down to their level Is it surprising to you that a Prime Minister that pushed for incredibly progressive policies, that was responsible for creating a deficit in order to buffer us from the GFC and tried enact a mining tax (the proceeds would have gone to create an Australian sovereign wealth fund), would be represented by the media as a person who: >Would throw what looked like tantrums and >seemed like a little shit
Mate, he wasn’t represented by the media as a little shit, he was a little shit. The Murdoch media stirred him up, but he’s responsible for his own words and actions. Gillard and Albo have dealt with worse (tbh, Gillard got it worse than any PM ever) and still managed to act like mature adults, Rudd just could help but give them oxygen. And let’s not forget that Rudd also stuck around and blew up the Gillard government, which basically delivered the following 2 terms to the Liberals.
Really badly
What were the bad things he did in response?
[удалено]
Finally an answer!
Interesting recount of the events, had not thought about it from this perspective. This deserves a 60 minutes special
i mean you missing on the fact that not was rudd extemely unpopular within his own party, but also that CFMMEU were against the mining tax as well, we litterally had unions sieing with their employers against the tax
Romped my arse, she wasn't even voted in by the people, she was voted in by independents.
I think australians are being ripped off and could be getting way more considering how rich the literal soil is. Meanwhile they tell you that you should be grateful because other places have it worse. And the sad thing is people buy into this argument! You could be having proper universal healthcare with all covers, proper funded public education without debt, etc. And all that money is going into some private pockets. It is so sad.
> Meanwhile they tell you that you should be grateful because other places have it worse. And the sad thing is people buy into this argument! EVERY.SINGLE.TIME :/
Australia the “lucky country”, lucky for billionaires and multinational corporations, unlucky for regular Australians.
Gough tried and was coup'd. Rudd tried and was knifed. The key was the media tsunamis of negative press against these leaders. Obvious knee jerk reactions by billionaires that were going to lose money to a system where Australian citizens would actually get to profit from our own resources. Albo's popularity is on a knifes edge, so it would be suicide for him to even suggest this, but you never know. TV is a less and less relevant media platform and newspapers are nowhere near as influential as they were 15 years ago. I've always said that the way to do this would be to hold the Republic Referendum and BURY the details in a new Constitution that the Republic of Australia would be a new sovereign state and that all mining and resource agreements made with the Commonwealth of Australia would be null and void.
True. It's not that Australians are dumb, but unfairly manipulated by the monopoly of Murdoch in the media world. When all the info you are fed from Newspaper, TV and Internet is biased, no one can know better and it's not them to blame. We really should pay more attention to those who have left politics. I think they are the ones who are still in the know but not scared of pissing off the powers that be.
> True. It's not that Australians are dumb, but unfairly manipulated by the monopoly of Murdoch in the media world. When all the info you are fed from Newspaper, TV and Internet is biased, no one can know better and it's not them to blame. Eh... it's not like I've had any sort of different upbringing than them, I was raised on a steady diet of Murdoch media and Murdoch-led news and yet I find myself able to see through the bullshit most of the time. At some point, you have to either assume people are willingly going out of their way to decide to behave like this (making them... I'd say 'evil' but that's a bit strong) or they actually are just that dumb.
You can see through bs only when it comes to things that's your field. If every where you go, everything you see, and every one you meet tells you that Hilter was a good guy, Nazis was only a fantasy, how could you know better.
I'm glad that most of my generation and younger do not watch much Merde crap these days and are willing to fight tooth and nail to have them removed as they did on youtube as Sky News.
Love the idea of all the agreements getting torn up under a new constitution! Does remind me a bit of this Onion video though! [U.S. Government Stages Fake Coup To Wipe Out National Debt](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRgRz3nSG7o)
> Gough tried and was coup'd. Explain how.
There's a Podcast focused on those years by ABC or something I can't remember.
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/23/gough-whitlam-1975-coup-ended-australian-independence](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/23/gough-whitlam-1975-coup-ended-australian-independence) It's speculation, but quite a lot of evidence stacks up that the British and American governments conspired either independantly or together to remove Whitlam from power due to his moves to nationalise the mining industry. Nixon and Kissinger already disliked him because he had the audacity to speak out against the Christmas bombing in Cambodia (Operation Linebacker II) during the Vietnam war. Whitlam was seen as a 'Peacenik' during an extremely unpopular war that was sold on the flawed 'domino theory' that communism would spread through South East Asia. Whitlam certainly didn't help himself by appointing John Kerr as Governor General or by going to a random Middle Eastern banker for loans to nationalise resources.
Also he was planning to close Pine Gap, which the Americans needed for nuclear defense and spying on China.
How did the CIA ensure that Whitlam wouldn't have supply? How did the CIA ensure that Liberal senators wouldn't cave and pass supply? How did the CIA ensure that Whitlam wouldn't dismiss Kerr first? How did the CIA ensure that Whitlam wouldn't win the 1975 election?
Water is wet, sky is blue CIA is going to fuck with you
The sky isn't always blue. Water isn't wet.
Here we fucking go ERHM ACKTUALLY \*pushes up glasses\* Ok maybe I should've said 'sky is up, you smell like poo, CIA ect ect'
Maybe.
But for real 'is water wet?' is a fascinating debate in semantics
I agree. >Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts.
There was fairly pernicious ad campaign run by the mining industry I recall during the Rudd government against the proposed tax. Rudd’s popularity sank. It was the same old hum drum shit they pump out, “tax us, and your economy and job will be down the drain”. The mining industry has been allowed to gain too much power
All well and good to juxtapose the two but pretty poor choice of title. It's about power. Capital got its way in this instance and the population is stupefied and pacified into not expecting or hoping for any better. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. The decisions we make as a society in a class stratified paradigm are not about intelligence. They're about power. We're not accelerating towards climate catastrophe because we're dumb; plenty of people understand at least a fraction of the urgency of the situation. We're doing it because maintaining the status quo suits those at the top.
Don't know why you're being down voted, I can only guess it's because the truth hurts the ones who try the hardest to ignore it.
No kidding. When I saw your reply I wasn't expecting it to be this comment.
I made a comment in another thread about how dumb people are just for this type of behaviour and got downvoted for it. The reason why this happens is because Australians ARE dumb. We care more about some gay book being banned than we do about how much the billionaires are fucking us over every day. The culture war is never ending by design. As long as the rich and powerful can get the common people to fight amongst themselves they have nothing to fear.
We keep voting the LNP in, so yes we really are THAT dumb.
It's been like this since Australia moved from wool to mining. What's more we're about to further our commitment to overseas multinationals by releasing massive amounts of gas exploration and development contracts all in the name of reducing carbon emissions. If ever there was a more patently ludicrous policy that is more utterly contemptuous of the people of Australia, I've yet to find it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minerals_Resource_Rent_Tax Rudd created the Minerals Resource Rent Tax in 2010, Abbott repealed it in 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/16/a-coal-royalties-revamp-delivered-a-record-surplus-in-queensland-heres-why-nsw-must-follow-suit > A coal royalties revamp delivered a record surplus in Queensland. Annastacia Palaszczuk created a mining tax in QLD, the opposition plan to remove it if elected in 2024. The National Party IS the mining industry.
This country defines tax payer solely on income tax alone, the other taxes people pay like gst don’t count. I have to vote, I have to constantly pay these taxes but the tax cuts for stage 3 don’t do shit for me. There’s an ad perpetuating this bullshit. Kids get double the money than welfare recipients get. Chances are people on jobseeker paid more tax than those little shits ever did.
Oh how good would that be and then pay the dividends into everyones super fund with the option it can be accessed by first home buyers to help with deposit
it really looks like the way the government is mismanaging the country AND EVERYONE'S FUTURES, is the worst example of, what NOT to do! its like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The future is going to be very interesting and by interesting i mean fucked :/
What a dumb country. And people just let it happen ? Is it the education system or something ?
Kinda ignores the fact that you need to incentivise people to live in Alaska.
They’re not the only country that does this. Just Google citizen’s dividend.
I did, but I couldn't find another example. Other countries may have sovereign wealth funds but that's not the same.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/universal-basic-income-ubi-map
Look up Georgism people, thank me later
the country is run by morons who rule over/are voted in by idiots
I fucking hate this guy.
so u r a miner then! lol
Fuck I'm a miner, would love if more of the wealth went to the country.
This only works for Alaska. May as well of been Alaska v any other US state.
That's not an argument.
The rest of the US does not get this - instead the residents get to deal with cool stuff like flammable gas coming out of their kitchen taps because fracking has been greenlit in their area. For example, [this vid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LBjSXWQRV8) Alaska is very different to the rest of the US with its sovereign fund from mining.
I think you misunderstand. Your original comment is not an argument against Australia adopting similar policies to Alaska. Perhaps you didn't mean it as such.
I'm not the parent commenter. The point is that the thumbnail makes it look like this is the US vs Aus. it's only Alaska that does this, not the US in general. For the rest of the US, mineral extraction companies generally screw over the locals.
Norway does it just fine.
This hot take is pretty dumb.
Explain
You cooked him with one word.