I slept with Big Mining and all I got was this lousy t-shirt

Headline in The Australian this morning:

Gillard's $7.5bn gift to miners

Did the Labor powerbrokers who dumped Rudd really think the media would relent in its attacks if they gave the miners everything they wanted?

Bernie Fraser (former Reserve Bank governor) was on the 7.30 Report last night saying, essentially, how amazed he was that Tony Abbott was not political dead meat for opposing a tax that took a justifiable amount of money from an extraordinarily wealthy group of companies making billions of dollars from selling resources that belong to all Australians; a tax that would bring billions of dollars into services and infrastructure for the people in this country:

[It] amazes me, frankly, how any alternative prime minister, alternative government can put the interests, the vested interests of big mining countries ahead of the national interests of this country. It's just incredible to my way of thinking. Whoever has sort of devised that line really has rocks in his or her head.

He painted a portrait of Julia Gillard that was almost as unflattering:

To my way of thinking in her haste to get a deal done on this matter to end up with a headline rate of 30 per cent of what are pretty generous profits, but when you allow for the 25 per cent extraction allowance which reduces that 30 per cent down to 22.5 per cent, that's a sell out to me.

Tony Abbott opposes the tax even in its overly-reduced form, which is incredible in itself, but even more amazing is that he is able to do so and survive with the support of a significant proportion of the Australian population. Enough to put him in the running to oust Labor and become our next Prime Minister (terrifying thought that it is). He shouldn't even be in the race- what are Australians thinking?


As usual, stupidity reigns supreme in Australia.