I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas and New Year and had a great start to 2010.
While many Australians were taking a break, the Rudd Government’s spin doctors were hard at work ‘taking out the trash’, releasing as much bad news as possible while Australians and the media were more pleasantly occupied. (Grand Final and Melbourne Cup eve have also been Labor favourites for this).
Labor’s new workplace relations legislation came into effect on January 1. Labor now has to take responsibility for every job loss and every union strike under their regime. Already, in the two years since Labor took office, over 1,000,000 working days have been lost due to strike action.
Prior to Christmas, Labor transferred a asylum seekers from the overflowing Christmas Island detention facility to the mainland. The Rudd Government’s border protection policy is a mess. For the six weeks leading up to Christmas there were, on average, 100 arrivals a week and more boats arrived over summer.
On Boxing Day, Kim Carr floated the possibility of mergers of rural and regional university campuses.
We also found out about disturbing problems surrounding the long-promised white paper on counter-terrorism.
On 30 December we found out that federal bureaucrats received $36 million in performance bonuses, with one public servant receiving $50,000.
We learned that only a quarter of the 21 million vaccines bought by the Government have actually been used and taxpayers are going to have to foot the multi-million dollar bill.
In spite of Kevin Rudd’s election commitment to increase transparency, we found that his government refused more Freedom of Information requests than the Howard Government.
Finally, over the Australia Day weekend, we got the results from the internal Defence inquiry into the explosion of an asylum seeker vessel off the coast of Northern Australia.
At the state level, we are in the middle of another summer of public transport meltdown. Yet the new Transport Minister made the ludicrous claim that he used the ‘park and ride’ facility to catch the train – while his ministerial car was waiting for him at the station.
With a state and federal election likely to be within months of each other, this will be a challenging year. But despite their efforts at spin and media manipulation, Labor cannot run and hide from their failures and mismanagement. I look forward to working with you to see the end of the Brumby and Rudd Labor Governments in 2010.
In my newsletter last year I recalled the 60th anniversary of the first Liberal election win – Robert Menzies beating Ben Chifley in 1949. While there was not much media focus on it, I had a piece published about it a few days later.