Tony Abbott yet another successful overseas trip

nero_bolt
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PM Abbott is blowing away all the misconceptions and fantasy of the ALP/ABC/Faifax/Guardian/Laurie Oakes and the rest of the left wing chatterati and is representing Australia with absolute distinction. No one hates like the left and I'm sure the aforementioned will be working overtime to put a negative spin on Abbott's spectacularly successful overseas tour....

 

BARACK Obama’s advice to Tony Abbott after their first meeting in the White House this morning was to take a break and go surfing in Hawaii.

 

“You work too hard,” the US President told him after one of the highest level meetings in the oval office ever afforded an Australian Prime Minister.

 

When Mr Abbott told the President he had to stop by Honolulu to refuel on his way home, the President’s eyes lit up.

“You work too hard Tony,” the President said.

 

“You should try and get a surf in while you are there,” he said.

 

It had been standing room only in the Oval Office this morning when the two met at 11am Thursday.

 

Not only did the US President extend the planned one hour meeting with the PM, he had brought in six of his most senior Cabinet members and several advisors.

 

“It’s not unheard of, but it’s certainly not common,” one official said of the meeting.

 

Sources said that the meeting was one of the most high powered, afforded rarely to world leaders on visits to Washington.

 

The President described Australia as America’s best friend and a nation that “likes a fight”.

 

He praised the PM for restoring defence spending and offering a greater commitment to military partnership with the US.

 

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/us-president-barack-obama-tells-australian-prime-minister-...

 

 

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Tony Abbott yet another successful overseas trip

WHILE OUR PM IS DOING A GREAT JOB OVERSEAS, LABOR'S LEADERS ARE EXPOSED AS THE REAL NATIONAL EMBARRASSMENT.

 

 As Simon Benson correctly points out in today's 'Daily Telegraph' our Prime Minister's trip overseas has been an outstanding success, and the real embarrassment is the whinging, moaning and negativity of Labor's leaders ......

 

 "Even before the Prime Minister had left the shores of Normandy last week, where he marked the commemoration of the D-Day landings, Labor had already labelled his onward trip to the US as a failure and an embarrassment. How is this possible? It is so absurd as to be comical.

 

 The chief protagonist has been Labor’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek. But even Labor leader Bill Shorten, who should know better, has been at it.

 

 "Describing the PM’s meeting with President Obama (a Labor-aligned Democrat) as part of an overseas “sabbatical” and an embarrassing failure, before it had even happened, did not go unnoticed by US officials who get briefed by the embassy in Canberra. The greater embarrassment, of course, was the premise on which Labor’s attacks this week were based.

 

 "It started on the back of claims, now proven wrong, that Abbott had cancelled several meetings with important people in Washington.

 

 Plibersek labelled Abbott an embarrassment because he had apparently ditched a meeting with IMF boss Christine Lagarde and World Bank president Jim Yong Kim.

 

 'Australians have to worry that he’ll be embarrassing us on the world stage' Plibersek said this week.

 

 Well, she was wrong.

 

 In fact, Abbott did meet with Lagarde — last night at an official reception at the Australian Ambassador’s residence in Washington DC.

 

 Abbott was also toweled up for apparently cancelled meetings with the chair of the US Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. Wrong again. He will see them today. The only thing Plibersek got right was her praise of Abbott’s decision to again extend Kim Beazley’s term as Australian Ambassador to the United States.

 

“There would be no better respected Australian in Washington. Kim understands American politics, and he is well connected,” Plibersek said of her former Labor colleague, who many regard as the best Labor PM Australia never had.

 

 When they realised that they were barking up a branchless tree, Plibersek and Shorten quickly switched to climate change to suggest that would be embarrassing for Abbott as well.

 

 But what Plibersek failed to realise is that her political spasms about Abbott’s supposed pot-holed schedule, and some confected nonsense about a potential clash with President Obama over climate change, were actually indirect attacks on Beazley. It was Beazley who organised the PM’s schedule. And an impressive schedule it is. In fact Beazley, during an interview with this columnist in DC on Monday, suggested that in terms of the congressional leaders lining up to meet the PM, it was one of the most substantial he could recall.

 

 Confirming his suitability in the role, Beazley was diplomatic in his response to the criticisms directed at Abbott — probably because the briefs and schedules of meetings for the PM were all Beazley’s work.

 

 He did, however, deliver a hard lesson in Australian-US relations to those critics at home.

 

“For me, the most important thing is this,” Beazley told me. “If you look at the Prime Minister’s timetable … you would have to say for a busy Australian PM, his meetings here are a day too long … and for a proper trip to Washington, his trip is a day too short. That is the impossible position. You see who you can but in the hierarchy of the things to be done, the President comes first then the congressional leadership, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defence, that’s the alliance, foreign policy, then you go into the economic issues … how do you do it in two days?

 

“What is utterly critical is that he sees those congressional people.”

 

Beazley also rubbished the suggestion — or, in Labor’s case, the hope — that Abbott and Obama would clash over climate change. In Beazley’s view, while it may be raised, there were far more important issues the two leaders needed to discuss and there would be no ‘‘clash’’.

 

One of those issues that has been troubling the US more deeply is actually a problem created by Labor — or at least, the Rudd-Gillard Labor government. When former secretary of state Richard Armitage was in Australia last year, he took the Gillard government to task over its cuts to defence spending.

 

“Australia is making the assumption that the US will always be there for her, but you are also saying that Australia does not want to pull its fair share when it comes to defence,” he said at the time.

 

 There was a reason Abbott made such a big deal about the restoration of defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP during the election campaign. It was driven purely by serious concerns among Pentagon officials that Australia was no longer prepared to do its share when it came to defence capability in the region.

 

 Far from being an embarrassment, Abbott has already impressed the US administration, particularly with his handling of the complex relationships in South-East and North Asia, and his guarantee that Australia would continue to pull its weight in terms of defence preparedness.

 

 As Beazley said: “They are intrigued with Abbott.”

 

Labor will be hoping Obama and Abbott don’t hit it off during their meeting — a position that, based on a crude left-right political assessment, presents a problem. Again this demonstrates a failure to grasp the true nature of the relationship. The deep relationship between the US and Australia transcends the relationship at the leadership level.

 

 Chemistry and a good relationship between Australian and US leaders can enhance the bond, but a transactional and less visceral one won’t diminish it. And there is plenty of historical evidence to suggest the left-right dynamic can be irrelevant.

 

 Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson and Harold Holt became close friends. Bob Hawke and George Shultz (Republican US Secretary of State) became great mates. Hawke and Ronald Reagan even got on well. All were cut from different cloth.

 

 That’s not to say Abbott and Obama are about to have a bromance. But the word from inside the US State Department is that they already get on well, having spoken several times on the phone.

 

 The Left’s obsession to see Abbott fail abroad are dashed yet again.

 

http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/simonbenson/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/the_left_digs_...

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Tony Abbott yet another successful overseas trip


@am*3 wrote:
How can anyone have more than one 'best' friend?

I suppose it depends on how many faces he has, quite a few so far.

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Tony Abbott yet another successful overseas trip


@boris1gary wrote:

@am*3 wrote:
How can anyone have more than one 'best' friend?

I suppose it depends on how many faces he has, quite a few so far.


 Please refer to my opening post and post 16 as you continue to prove me correct

 

 

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Tony Abbott yet another successful overseas trip

Woman LOL is this the longest?Woman LOLWoman LOLWoman LOL

 

  It's a bit rich for Tony Abbott to lecture the US on fair taxation

 

 

When it comes to the ethics of taxation, Abbott is a world leader with a domestic example that lends him zero credibility

 

Wherever the prime minister travels, he’s still Tony Abbott. That the pomp and solemnity of the D-day commemorations may aid his flailing reputation vanished in his incoherent attempt to somehow compare the Normandy invasion with the partisan politics of carbon price repeal. That's not to mention his clumsy schoolboy French, which, while amusing, somehow lessened any possible positive brand association of Abbott with the centre-right’s poster-boy PM, Canada’s Stephen Harper.

 

At home, he’s besieged by leadership speculation of sufficient intensity to see his conservative allies resort to public verbal knife-fights. “Someone else” and “I don’t know” are outpolling him as preferred Liberal leader. His massively unpopular first budget is not only still being discussed, but still being opposed, and as his own ministers trip over measures they cannot sell, and long politically-dormant populations of students, pensioners and union members amass on the streets.

 

This week, Tony Abbott On Tour has finally reached America. And with the majority of world governments now vindicating the carbon price policies that Abbott has so loudly admonished, the prime minister finds himself facing off against president Obama, who’s just committed to decrease his own nation’s power station emissions by 30% by 2030.

 

Our prime minister’s response? Shame? Strategic silence? Tactical recalibration? No. Abbott’s few remaining apologists in the domestic media have vaingloriously announced today that our prime minister is putting the mighty US “on notice” about tax evasion.

 

I can only suspect that his advisers have been reading Sun-Tzu in political desperation. The ancient Chinese war strategist advises “make a feint to the east while attacking in the west”. Translated, this means demanding just taxation policies from America to divert attention from your wholesale restructure of the Australian economy to protect unjust taxation policies at home.

 

There is, of course, everything right about demanding that the US lead global efforts to stop multinationals dodging tax. Large companies have been licensing intellectual property to their own subsidiaries in lower-taxing countries in these kind of dodges for years. It’s great to hear a statement like “we need global tax rules to ensure businesses pay tax in the countries where they earn revenue” from our prime minister, because the taxation revenue denied to nations by gigantic companies through offshoring mechanisms are vast.

 

The political problem is that when it comes to the ethics of taxation, Abbott is a world leader with a domestic example that lends him zero credibility. The Tony Abbott lecturing the American president on taxation fairness is, of course, the one who as Australian prime minister is presiding over policies of taxation amnesty for the richest Australians who have themselves offshored their hidden wealth, capping their taxable liability to merely the last four years. The Tony Abbott lecturing the US president on tax is the one claiming a “budget crisis” in Australia, where government revenue could be restored to surplus if tax rates were restored to the tax brackets of 2006. The Tony Abbott lecturing the American president on taxation fairness is the same one whose Coalition government perpetuates one of the greatest inequities in the Australian economy – namely, the tax concessions for superannuation contributions, which flow disproportionately to the richest 20% of Australians.

 

If the prime minister wants to have a discussion with anyone about taxation fairness, talking through the specifics of unfair superannuation provision in his own economy are a really good place to start.

 

Presently, the taxation rates that apply to income tax do not apply to superannuation; these tax concessions allow wealthy Australians to offset their surplus income into their super at far lower taxation rate than they would pay on the money as income. The impact of these concessions on revenue are dire; while tax concessions were introduced to superannuation to incentivise Australians to invest in super rather than rely on the pension, economists predict in only two years the cost of the tax concessions will actually supersede that of the cost to the public purse of the entire pension itself.

 

Realising this, former treasurer Wayne Swan pursued a legislative path with a low-income super supplement the Coalition quashed outright in their first six months of government. At the same time that Australia’s richest are gouging benefits from super’s tax iniquity, Abbott’s budget is stripping the welfare safety net out of the post-war Australian social contract with scaremongering, justificatory rhetoric of debt, crisis and emergency. But rather than looking increasing taxation revenue beyond the tokenistic, nominal and easily avoidable “budget repair levy” applied to a tiny percentage of high-income earners, Abbott is instead infamously furnishing the “repair” of his own manufactured crisis with policies to cut spending – the slashing of services, medical co-payments and uncapped fee introductions, asset sales and privatisations.

 

After marches, protests and public outrage, Abbott has grasped that “there’s been a political cost” to the budget, but he remains so enamoured of the small government, low-taxation ideology espoused by the North American centre right that he may fatally not understand why.

 

In this regard, reading the results of a recent study may help. While Abbott lectures counterparts in the United States who govern a nation famously hostile to both taxation and government spending, Abbott’s budget actions are actually in opposition to the taxation ideology of his own electorate. On 6 June, progressive think-tank Per Capita released the findings of its annual tax survey, completed in advance of this year’s federal budget and drawn from a representative sample of Australians.

 

In what may explain why the first budget of the Abbott government is still dominating public conversation five weeks after its announcement, Per Capita’s findings reveal that 70% of Australians support an increase of government spending on public services. Less than a quarter support Abbott’s Commission of Audit recommendations of privatising services, or outsourcing them. In what should concern the Coalition, only a tiny 8% of Australians actively endorse the government’s policy commitment to spending less.

 

Unlike our American cousins, a clear majority of Australians (53%) believe that they are paying the right amount of tax, with an overwhelming majority (72%) believing high income earners pay too little. For budget redress, survey respondents suggested not only increasing taxation on the richest 5% of Australians, but a combined 69% supported removals of tax concessions on housing – and on superannuation, wouldn’t you know.

 

So if Abbott wishes to influence president Obama by example, he’d do well, perhaps, to heed the leadership of his own electorate on the subject of taxation fairness. Until he does, one can’t really imagine the American president particularly swayed by remarks that conform to the pattern of Abbott’s international trip – of yet more empty rhetoric, more inelegant diplomacy and yet another awkward moment for a burgeoning national cringe.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/12/its-a-bit-rich-for-tony-abbott-to-lecture-the-u...

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Tony Abbott yet another successful overseas trip

I find this thread confusing. Why is it such a surprise that the PM has a successful trip OS?

Why the gleeful fawning over the PM for doing his job?

 

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Tony Abbott yet another successful overseas trip


@cherples wrote:

I find this thread confusing. Why is it such a surprise that the PM has a successful trip OS?

Why the gleeful fawning over the PM for doing his job?

 


mmmm....so by "successful" do you mean that he has managed to arrive on time and depart on time? If this is a measure of his "success" then yes he has been "successful".

Message 26 of 40
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Tony Abbott yet another successful overseas trip

Yeah.  Real successful.

 

Tony Abbott won't rule out following US military into Iraq as civil war threatens

Message 27 of 40
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Tony Abbott yet another successful overseas trip

I see it as you do polksa

 

 

Message 28 of 40
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Tony Abbott yet another successful overseas trip

I wonder how howard, blair, bush and now abbott feel about the events in Iraq.  Do they sleep well?

Message 29 of 40
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Tony Abbott yet another successful overseas trip

I won't say what I think here. but it's a mess!

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