Tag: Malcolm Turnbull

The vote handed the job to Scott Morrison. The upheaval also ended her 11-year tenure as Liberal Party deputy leader. She said it had been an "immense honour" to serve as the Liberal Party's first female deputy leader, as well as her Perth electorate of Curtin for two decades. "I am also proud of the fact that I am the first woman to contest a leadership ballot of the Liberal Party in its 75-year history," she told the parliament on Thursday. High-profile diplomacy As foreign minister for five years, Ms Bishop took a leading role in many prominent matters. AdChoices AdChoices Notably, she was lauded for her handling of Australia's response to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, and for calling on Russia to take responsibility over the downing of MH17. She relinquished her ministerial role in August, after the party turmoil and ouster of Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister. Thank you @JulieBishopMP for your service to our nation and our Party and, above all, your friendship over so many years. Australia MP condemns sexist 'bullying' Last year, Ms Bishop accused parliamentary colleagues of "appalling behaviour" and said political parties had "a problem" with keeping women MPs.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. "It has been an immense honour to be the longest-serving Member for Curtin and also to be the deputy leader of the Liberal Party, the first female to hold the role, [and] for 11 years, over half my entire political career," she told the Parliament. She served in that role in opposition under Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott. After the party won the 2013 election, she became foreign minister and remained in the job until Mr Turnbull lost the Liberal leadership last year. Ms Bishop ran in the ballot to replace Mr Turnbull against Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton but was eliminated in the first round of voting. Mr Morrison, who won the leadership ballot and became the Prime Minister, paid tribute to Ms Bishop and her "tremendous service to her country". "She is an incredibly classy individual. "Her successor will have big shoes to fill, and we know that Julie has the best shoes in Parliament." Opposition Leader Bill Shorten described her as a "trailblazer", even if they had not shared much in common when it came to politics. Ms Bishop had little to say as she left Parliament House for the week after making her announcement.

U.S. military commanders don’t know what strategy to pursue, Administration officials told TIME. “The back and forth is painful.” Trump’s latest pronouncement, Monday on Twitter, suggested that the U.S. military mission in the war-torn country was open-ended. “We will be leaving at a proper pace while at the same time continuing to fight ISIS and doing all else that is prudent and necessary!” he wrote. “The timetable flows from the policy decisions that we need to implement.” Trump’s initial impromptu decision, hastily made during a Dec. 14 phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has become the latest example of Trump’s reliably inconsistent presidency. It was a decision made contrary to the advice of top U.S. generals and national security advisers. We won,” he said in a video posted on Twitter. In May 2017, Trump revealed classified intelligence when he again went off-script and invited Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then-Ambassador Sergey Kislyak into the Oval Office, according to a Post report. In March 2018, Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin to congratulate him on his re-election, despite being specifically warned not to do so by national security adviserd. That same month, the White House suspended the long-held practice of publishing public summaries of the President’s phone calls with world leaders. Trump may not entirely subscribe to past U.S. presidents’ tendency toward strategic predictability, but it’s his prerogative whether or not to heed the advice of advisers, said David Priess, a former CIA analyst and author of “The President’s Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America’s Presidents.” “We elect a president, not a bureaucracy, to execute policy,” he said.

In international terms, Australia is a beacon, a country with a thriving economy and a political system that has not yet turned entirely on itself and succumbed to the populist forces roiling democracies elsewhere. Still, 2018 was a brutal year in national affairs. The defenestration was a panicked response to poor results for the ruling Coalition in byelection contests, and it has damaged the government’s political standing. But Turnbull’s replacement, Scott Morrison, has spent the opening months of his prime ministership in overdrive, trying to build a legacy to campaign on when voters go the polls in the first half of 2019. His objective is to hold an election in May, after first delivering an economic statement projecting a return to surplus, which would be the first positive bottom line delivered by an Australian government since the global financial crisis. Public opinion polls suggest an electoral rout looms for the Coalition. The government has not won a poll since the 2015 election. The major parties have undermined their own stability premium, which has helped fuel the rise of insurgents But the political story in 2019 is more complex and dynamic than a traditional major party contest that will play out in the first six months of the year. Voters are showing interest in political disruptors – mainly non-aligned independents now contesting elections, both state and federal, in growing numbers, and with increasing professionalism. While election cycles can be polarising, particularly at times when there is a national mood to change the government, one of the more fascinating stories of 2019 will be the extent to which political independents continue to disrupt the status quo, and the implications of that for the character of the parliaments that are eventually formed.

I think the convulsions we are seeing in Australian politics right now — in fact , since John Howard was defeated in 2007 — are a culmination of decades-long trends that center on the slow decline of our two big political parties. There’s a void at the center of our politics because the public and the political class have both retreated. Again, this is happening in all Western democracies: people have stopped joining political parties and civic organizations with a political voice, and the parties have responded by making politics more elite and professional. At the last federal election, nearly 25 percent of voters gave their primary vote to an independent or small party, and that figure is on a slow upward trend as the primary vote of the two major parties declines. In fact, minority government might be the new norm in Australian federal politics. Unfortunately, however, I don’t think the cynicism about politicians actually motivates the public to get involved. In fact, it may just reinforce the retreat I talked about. Now, for the most part, that has not been terribly damaging — O.K., politics is hollowed out and Australians are deeply cynical, but by global standards the place is still pretty well run, and economically we are in enviable shape. What might that look like in Australia? Readers from all over the world, including Australia, have been sharing questions all week with the climate scientist Kate Marvel, who has already started answering some of them.

CANBERRA, Australia — The chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corp. resigned on Thursday over allegations that he pressured the independent national broadcaster to fire two political journalists because the ruling conservative government disliked them. The scandal has damaged the credibility of both the governing coalition and the ABC, which is government-funded but is required by law to operate independently of party politics. Media reports have since alleged that Milne, who is responsible for maintaining ABC independence, had unsuccessfully pressured Guthrie to fire political editor Andrew Probyn and chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici to prevent potential cuts in government funding. “There was absolutely no interference in the independence of the ABC by the government. Nobody ever told me to hire anybody, fire anybody or do anything else,” Milne said. Fairfax Media has reported that Milne wrote an email to Guthrie calling for Alberici be fired on May 8, a day after Turnbull complained to the ABC’s news director about an Alberici report on government spending. News Corp., citing ABC board documents, reported Milne told Guthrie in a June 15 telephone conversation that Turnbull “hates” Probyn and: “You have to shoot him.” Turnbull, who has lived in New York since he was ousted as prime minister on Aug. 24, said on Thursday that while he had complained about the two reporters’ journalism, he had never asked for them to be fired. My concern has been on the accuracy and impartiality of reporting,” Turnbull told reporters. The minor Greens Party has called for a Senate inquiry into the entire ABC board, not trusting a government inquiry into the government’s potential involvement in the scandal. Prime Minister Scott Morrison tweeted that Milne’s resignation was the right decision.

Read more: If the Liberals have any hope of rebuilding, they might take lessons from Robert Menzies It also accords with what modern psychology and social science would lead us to expect in circumstances where a person or group experiences what they perceive to be unjust treatment at the hands of an adversary. The emotional basis of revenge The predisposition to harm those who are perceived to have harmed us – the essence of revenge – is a fundamental human desire. Psychologically, this helps the avenger restore an ego deflated by their previous humiliations. Revenge, to put it bluntly, helps the humiliated person feel better about themselves. Inflicting harm on those who have previously harmed us arouses feelings of pleasure in those parts of the brain regulating emotion. The more we think about revenge, the more we reinforce neural pathways that trigger those thoughts and release those chemicals. Such a character trait typically manifests itself when the person feels themselves, or persons and groups with whom they identify, to be the victim of an injustice. More often than not, they end up being hugely destructive acts. On the one hand, the victim and perpetrator of revenge can both be damaged. On the other hand, revenge can be hugely destructive because it unleashes cycles of further revenge and counter revenge.

“The story of my journey is that I am an ordinary person and not someone who hails from the political rich or privileged elite,” said Julia Banks in her first speech to federal parliament in September 2016. I am a daughter of parents who were denied an education but who worked hard with optimism and faith in this country at two, and sometimes three, jobs so they could hope to provide their children with schools of their choice.” Banks is a rational and accomplished woman, who came to politics from life outside, after a 25-year business career, with a clear set of values and objectives, motivated to make a contribution to public service. To cut a long story short, the recruitment of people like Julia Banks is exactly what Australian politics needs, particularly the Liberal and National parties – modern political movements hampered by a reflexive stone-age sensibility when it comes to respecting the talents of women. Hard-right columnists with no mass audience cause enough turmoil to ruin leaders | Jason Wilson Read more Give yourself a moment to take that in. But the chaos and destruction of the last week proved to be “the last straw”. She notes that voters in her Victorian seat of Chisholm were very clear about what they wanted. Chisholm was the only seat captured from Labor in 2016. “The tragedy of what has been happening, the madness of what has taken hold of a number of my colleagues is this has been a very good government, and a government is always more than a leader, and the leader is only ever the sum of those he or she serves with,” Reynolds said. Be disturbed. Australian politics needs to be something more than the committed agent of its own destruction.

The Senate president, Scott Ryan, has lamented the lost art of compromise in Australian politics, pointing out that meeting in the middle on contentious policy does not equate to “abandoning the base”. With the Liberal party still processing the corrosive civil war of the past fortnight, Ryan used a speech in Melbourne on Wednesday night to argue the greatest successes of Australian politics had come from “compromise and negotiation” and the use of parliamentary process to resolve competing points of view. In an implicit rebuke to the death match character of politics that fuelled Malcolm Turnbull’s demise as prime minister, the Victorian Liberal warned Australian voters not to reward politicians projecting uncompromising stances to the community. Australian politics needs women like Julia Banks – but it is hostile territory Read more Ryan invoked a number of examples from the Howard era to illustrate his point – the passage of the GST and labour market deregulation with the support of the Australian Democrats in the Senate, and the passage of gun controls that were contentious with the Coalition’s rural supporters. Or that we would be better off still arguing about it?” “Peter Reith’s reforms to workplace relations, the product of compromise with the Democrats, no natural fans of labour market deregulation and now sadly wound back, were a driving force in our economic boom that saw record low unemployment, productivity growth and substantial real income growth for the first time in more than a decade”. “But they weren’t relentlessly attacked as abandoning the base simply by virtue of challenging supporters, even on such a difficult issue”. The Senate president argued the tonal shift in Australian politics has been accompanied by a change in the dynamic of the chamber he currently presides over. He said the Australian Senate was drifting in the direction of the American system which manifests “entrenched positions, or explicit unrelated trade-offs” when legislation moves through the chamber. “Governments need to be able to legislate the agenda they take to elections, otherwise we will see frustration at democracy increase. Ryan said adopting the convention would require senators to acknowledge the difference between supporting a program of an elected government, and acquiescing to it.

(@Kieran_Gilbert) Warren Entsch is apparently getting stuck into Tony Abbott right now in the party room, met with some claps #auspol This isn’t the first time Entsch has got stuck into Tony Abbott over his “no wrecking, no sniping” promise – and has repeated it back to him. Back in Queensland – and Peter Dutton’s seat of Dickson – Ben Smee tells us there is not a lot of awareness their local member has challenged for the leadership: Dutton will, of course, now have more time to campaign in his marginal electorate of Dickson, also considered to be one of the least engaged in the country. “I know a lot of people don’t like him, so that’s probably a good thing he’s not prime minister then.” Peter Dutton came within seven votes of toppling Malcolm Turnbull – without a proper lobbying campaign. So he didn’t have his house in order, while Turnbull knew he had at least enough to keep the leadership. Which is why Turnbull’s leadership is now untenable. “If he went to the high court, yes, he would be in strife,” constitutional expert Prof George Williams says, on the story broken by Hugh Riminton and researcher Kate Doak yesterday, over the conflict of interest Peter Dutton may have over his family’s childcare centre interests. Riminton was also the journalist who looked into Barry O’Sullivan’s possible conflicts, which Williams has backed. But Williams says he doesn’t think that family trusts will protect MPs from the constitutional conflicts, given how the high court has been ruling. This brings a whole heap more MPs into the section 44 quagmire. It’s being billed as a “we can govern from the centre” push, as a way to get some of those other supporters across the line.