Friday, March 26, 2010

Update: Don't watch Lateline

Maxine McWho's on... trumpeting how Kevin and the ALP saved Australia from the recession with their well planned, well executed stimulation...

She speaks through gritted teeth, and she always gives the impression that she's talking down to everyone, even her peers...

Can't find a link, the transcripts aren't up yet, and I don't know which part of the program it was on.

Oh, here you are. The link. Here's some of the transcript...

MAXINE MCKEW: OK. Can I just raise someone else we haven't mentioned this week, and that is Senator Nick Minchin's departure from the Parliament. Now he's going to be missed by his party, indeed by a ought lot of people, I would have thought, in the Parliament. A straight shooter. Very much both a social and an economic conservative, but I would think that conservatives like Nick Minchin, even though of course he helped propel Tony Abbott to the leadership, would be in something of two minds.

Clearly there are conservatives like Nick who are in line with Tony Abbott's social views, but will look at his economics, his economic management and be thinking, you know, "Where's he going?" Abbott owes more of his economics to someone like B.A. Santa Maria than, say, a Milton Freedman.

You've got Malcolm sitting there on the backbenches, George, as you know, a free marketeer, believes in a market mechanism for emissions trading. Quite right - I agree with him. But I would have thought there are still big fishes there in the party in terms of, if you like, your liberal wing and the economic dries. Abbott, would say, is an old-style interventionist.

LEIGH SALES: Senator Brandis?

GEORGE BRANDIS: Let me let you in on a secret, Maxine. The only economic management we talk about in the Coalition is your economic management, your disastrous economic management that has taken Australia from the strongest position in the OECD when the Coalition left office to the worst public debt that this country has ever seen in peace time. So, you can be a commentator, Maxine, you can be a commentator, but at the sharp end of politics this is about the Rudd Government's performance, and the Rudd Government's performance in economic management has been lamentable.

MAXINE MCKEW: OK, and I am proud to be part of a government that did not blink when we looked like going into recession and the stimulus, the scale of it and the breadth of it, is what has kept us from recession.

And George, the only figure to look at is the fact that we have 5.3 per cent unemployment. That's the national employment figure. (inaudible) in the United States, it's 10 per cent.

LEIGH SALES: If I can interrupt there, there are some other figures to look at and those are the figures to do with the school buildings program. We've seen some example come out about ridiculous costs for school building projects. How do we know what the extent of that is? Could it be another insulation program where there are - where there is example after example of these price gouging cases taking place?

MAXINE MCKEW: Well, let's just break that down. Example after example. As Julia Gillard has pointed out, we're talking about 20,000 plus projects across something like 9,500 schools and the national hotline has had fewer than 100 complaints.

If we just come to NSW, Education Minister Verity Firth has had an audit underway and where there have been problems - and there's one in the papers today - that has been addressed.
From here it just gets better... er, worse.

1 comment:

Egg said...

Her barrenness who eduma-indoctrinates 3 y.o.s?

Pffft! :)~