Kevin Rudd

Abbott, paid parental leave and the ghost of Bob Santamaria

en Passant - March 9, 2010 - 10:38pm

Tony Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme is more generous than Kevin Rudd’s.

Details are scarce but Abbott says it will cost about $3 billion a year to pay for six months’ full replacement of wages up to $150,000.

The Government’s scheme comes into effect on 1 January 2011 and provides the minimum wage (currently around $543) for a maximum of 18 weeks. It will cost $300 million.

At 46 percent women are now almost half of the workforce.

The proportion of women working has doubled since the 50s, with women’s participation rate increasing from 29 percent in 1954 to 46 percent in 1985 to 58 percent today. Men’s participation rate is 72 percent.

While most women work full-time they are more likely than men to work part-time. 38 percent of women work part-time, compared to 14 percent of men. 70 percent of the part time workforce are women. Read more »

Health and hospitals and the polls

Larvatus Prodeo - March 8, 2010 - 12:50pm

We’ve had close to a week of public debate on Kevin Rudd’s health and hospitals plan, and today’s Nielsen poll shows resounding majorities among every demographic and voters of all parties for the proposition that the Commonwealth should take more responsibility for funding hospitals. Over the fold, I’ve borrowed a table from Possum to illustrate the results.

What should be of most concern to the Opposition is the very large number of their own voters who support such a policy. It might, of course, be objected that support is soft, but that ignores the fact that this plan was launched on the basis of reinforcing well entrenched public attitudes about the failures of the states in hospital management; attitudes Tony Abbott would have been well aware of when he frequently proposed a Commonwealth takeover as Health Minister. Read more »

Nielsen Part 2 – Health Plan and Issue Management

Pollytics - March 8, 2010 - 12:21pm

Continuing on from Part 1 where we had a look at the vote estimates and win expectations, we now move on to the additional questions that were asked on greater federal government involvement in the hospital system and a question on which party is best to handle a number of issues.

The hospital question and its results – including cross-tabs – came in like this:

Nielsen Part 1 – The Vote Estimates

Pollytics - March 8, 2010 - 8:02am

Today’s Nielsen via the Fairfax press has the Coalition up 1 on the primaries and Labor steady to come in at 42/42, washing out into a two party preferred of 53/47 to Labor – a one point gain to the Coalition since last month. The Greens are on 9 (down 1) while the broad “Others” are on 5 (down 2). This comes from a sample of 1400, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.6% mark. You can see the full demographic tables here.

We’re going to do something a bit different today and look at approval ratings, preferred PM and win expectations by party vote. To start with, approval ratings for both Rudd and Abbott.

More health reform reaction: Menadue, Duckett and more

Croakey Health Blog - March 5, 2010 - 5:02pm

The SMH has a story featuring Dr Stephen Duckett, who has an interesting perspective as one of the architects of casemix funding in Victoria and a member of the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission. Now running health services in Alberta, he raises several cautions about the Government’s plans, including:
• the huge difficulties of implementing casemix funding on a national scale
• the potential pitfalls of appointing local clinicians and community leaders to the boards of new ‘local hospital networks’
• the potential for the proposed funding mechanism to encourage unnecessary hospital procedures.

And don’t miss this piece at Inside Story by James Gillespie, from the Menzies Centre for Health Policy, who provides some thoughtful context to Rudd’s announcement, incorporating both political and policy perspectives. Read more »

Opposition leader Tony Abbott on prime minister Kevin Rudd, Lateline :"I...

The Orstrahyun - March 9, 2010 - 12:08am

Opposition leader Tony Abbott on prime minister Kevin Rudd, Lateline :

"It is pretty clear he is a guy who is all announcement and no follow through. He is, t coin a phrase, 'All Hat And No Cowboy'."

Abbott didn't coin the phrase. It's been in use in Texas for decades :

"It is not a compliment in West Texas to be referred to as 'All hat and no cowboy'. It is a term of derision used to indicate the person has little real character beneath the very thin veneer of appearance."

It's a good line, but it doesn't sound very Australian.

There is argument that the correct West Texas historical phrase is actually "All Hat, No Cattle", which certainly sounds more local.

Or perhaps Abbott knows this phrase, too, and decided not to use it to attack Rudd, because it was popularly attached to George W. Bush from the late 1990s. Read more »

Abbott’s (grey) army

Larvatus Prodeo - March 8, 2010 - 12:33pm

Via Possum, a couple of interesting charts to ponder.

These graphs below the fold show the movement in the net approval rating of Kevin Rudd and the Opposition Leader (Turnbull, then Abbott) over the last six months. As Possum notes, the youngest demographic is most disinclined to change their positive view of Rudd or their negative view of the Liberal leader, and the oldest demographic most inclined.

So, what’s going on here?

For a start, the ‘Gen Y sees through Kevin Rudd’s spin’ narrative is clearly wrong.

The US–Indonesia–Australia triangle – Weekly editorial

East Asia Forum - March 8, 2010 - 10:30am

Author: Peter Drsydale

The flurry of leaders’ visits — by Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to Canberra this week and American President Barack Obama to Canberra and Jakarta a little over a week later — signals an elevation in the triangular relationship between the United States, Indonesia and Australia, not merely the growing depth of their bilateral relations. Indonesia is one of the world’s newest democracies, a secular state with a predominantly Muslim population, of immense importance to Australia and America in securing Southeast Asian stability and openness. Indonesia and Australia are members of the new G20 group and have deep and common interests in working with America to entrench the G20 as the pre-eminent and enduring forum for global economic governance. Indonesia, with its pivotal role in ASEAN, and Australia, an anchor in trans-Pacific security, are close confidants on America’s re-engagement with Asia under the Obama administration. Read more »

Juli-aaaaaahhhhh By Darryl MasonLiberal Party activists Alan Jones and A...

The Orstrahyun - March 6, 2010 - 10:40am

Juli-aaaaaahhhhh

By Darryl Mason

Liberal Party activists Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt get started on their campaign to sew division in the federal Labor Party vote, by pushing deputy prime minister Julia Gillard as the person who should leading Labor into the next election.

After all, Kevin Rudd is a one term prime minister, or so goes the new chant, even though polls show nothing like the anger and outrage against Rudd that professional Liberal Party activist-columnists, including Miranda Devine, claim is running wild across the land.

You know what's coming next, don't you? A full-blown campaign from the Friends Of The Liberal Party in the opinion pages of, mostly, the Murdoch media claiming that Gillard "has almost got the numbers" and "is set to challenge for the leadership of the Labor Party." Read more »

Government: Don’t feed the trolls

Larvatus Prodeo - March 5, 2010 - 12:48pm

The last couple of weeks have seen a fair bit of furore about those intertubes. Anna Bligh wrote to Facebook about the defacing of a couple of memorial sites for a child and a teenager who’d been murdered in Queensland. Nick Xenophon suggested an Internet Ombudsperson, a suggestion Kevin Rudd applauded. There’ve also been numerous controversies about high school students posting racist groups, or offensive ones (for instance, effectively calling for attacks on sex workers). All this no doubt warrants condemnation – but it’s also worth observing that only a certain subsection of offensive content (usually involving children in one way or other) comes to the attention of the media and politicians. Little outrage is directed to the much larger subset of racist groups on Facebook (which don’t happen to be set up by high school kids), or the everyday misogyny that permeates much of the online space.

There’s no doubt that there are problems with Facebook’s method of dealing with offensive content. But the fundamental errors in this debate are twofold: Read more »