Category: Federal
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – The significance of Senator Bernie Sanders
With very good reason, most of the coverage of the US presidential primaries is occupied by billionaire Donald Trump, a New York real estate huckster. Regrettably, however, it has overshadowed the performance of Bernie Sanders, the Democrat senator from Vermont and self-described socialist. The 74-year-old Sanders, born in Brooklyn in 1941, is being outpolled by…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – Abbott’s operational HQ centres on Defence Dept
As predicted, Tony Abbott, aka The Revenant or the Mad Monk, is on a vengeful mission to destabilise Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. As a bonus, he’d also like to reclaim the nation’s top job from which his own party room sacked him six months ago. It’s still early days, but the main elements of his…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – ABC-SBS merger: Turnbull borrows policy from Labor
Keen supporters of the ABC and SBS were up in arms this week when Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition government revealed its clear intention to merge the nation’s two public broadcasters. Those wishful souls who turned to Bill Shorten’s Labor Party for resistance were sorely disappointed. The truth is that an ABC/SBS merger has been on Labor’s…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – UK Referendum on Europe: stay in EU or sink in North Sea?
If you are starting to believe that the United States has gone completely bonkers, then you’ve been watching the US Republican primaries campaign dominated by looney tunes like Donald Trump, the billionaire New York real estate developer and casino owner, and Canadian-born Senator Ted Kruz from Texas. But don’t be obsessed by what’s happening in…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – Sub-prime Australia
Late Traffic News Long overdue road safety signs spotted on a main road near the Bruce Highway in Queensland declare: DON’T SLEEP AND DRIVE Australia’s sub-prime economy is sinking fast In 2008, sub-prime mortgages brought the US banking system and Wall Street to their knees. Thousands of mortgagees were kicked out of their homes, businesses…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – Senior Oz army officers recruited by Arab regimes
Federal governments over the past decade have fed Australians the story that there are no Aussie “boots on the ground” in various parts of the Middle East. Those were lies. For the record, let’s understand that Australian “special forces” and other branches of the ADF are operating either officially or unofficially in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria,…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – Tony Abbott is channelling the Joh for Canberra fiasco
Slipping into Federal Election year, the Liberal Party of Australia is split between two hostile forces. Supporters of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull are on one side and disciples of sacked prime minister Tony Abbott are on the other. In Liberal Party terms the split is a “left” (Turnbull) versus “right” (Abbott] affair. The intensity of…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – Tony Abbott on a mission to wreck Liberals – who’s complaining?
In his farewell speech on 15 September 2015 after Liberal MPs dumped him as prime minister, Tony Abbott said: “My pledge today is to make this change as easy as I can. There will be no wrecking, no undermining and no sniping. “I’ve never leaked or backgrounded against anyone and I certainly won’t start now.…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – Richo threatens to spill the beans on Hawke and Abeles
Graham Richardson, aka “Richo” or “Robespierre”, is in a race against a deadly cancer to complete a second volume of autobiography. The former NSW ALP general secretary, senator and Cabinet minister in the Hawke and Keating Governments plans to reveal information about the financial relationship between Hawke and his patron, TNT boss Sir Peter Abeles,…
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Alex Mitchell’s Weekly Notebook – PM Turnbull’s main danger is not Bill Shorten, it’s Abbott
Remember the grim days when Tony Abbott was Prime Minister? His opponent, Labor Leader Bill Shorten, was miles ahead in the polls as preferred PM. Now that Abbott has been ousted by his own party and Malcolm Turnbull installed as Australia’s 29th PM, the polls have gone into reverse. In this month’s Newspoll, Shorten’s rating…