Marty_d

Firstly you're conflating state and federal politics there. I'm not a Victorian so I know bugger all about your state government. Not sure either how Labor's current immigration policy has anything to do with their election promises, I can't remember immigration being an issue at the last election. And if you get rid of immigrants, who looks after aged care, fruit picking and all the other jobs people born here don't want? Plus, I know it's not a popular statistic for those on the far right, but immigrants are less likely to commit crimes and more entrepreneurial than people born here. Not at all sure either why you think Labor is soft on crime. In terms of PHONey doing a better job than the current government, I hope you're joking. They would be absolutely hopeless, a failed experiment like the Trump one in the USA.

I'd actually argue that the rise of call centres is the cause of bad customer service. Businesses think that the number of calls answered and the wait times are the only KPI that matters. Staff don't have in depth business knowledge because they're hired, trained for a week then told to follow the script. A good employee who knows the business may spend 10 minutes or more sorting out a difficult problem. However if they spend this amount of time on one call they'll be reprimanded. The short sightedness of this is that the 10 minute call may have stopped the client ring back another 5 times, getting progressively more annoyed and then telling everyone they know how bad that business is.

One nation can't even manage their own finances - imagine what they'd do to the budget. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jun/11/one-nation-party-financial-reports-returns-fair-trading-ntwnfb

He seems to have the facts pretty right. But I don't think the people who qualify for a part pension are the richest 20% who make the most out of CGT discounts.

Well I do now.

You do know that "TDS" is not real, don't you? I don't recall hearing about "Hitler Derangement Syndrome" in the last century.

Yep their new president Tony Abbott is guiding them down the path to true irrelevance. They haven't learnt anything from their electoral failures.

The federal government already brought in gun control. What do you want them to do about this? And how would PHONey do it better?

Jerry, you're spending a lot of time defending the indefensible. Saying that it's better to have a massive amount of corrupt behaviour because it's transparently visible rather than a small amount of hidden corruption (which usually comes out anyway) doesn't seem logical to me.

The difference is that Wikipedia can be corrected by anyone. AI can't. If you don't want to get the AI guff, just put -AI after your search. For example: Antonov AN2 -AI

This is what I'm interested in. If people think the country is "going in the wrong direction", what does that even mean? What specific areas are people upset about? Is it economic? Social? Is it a conservative vs progressive thing? Then drilling down into that, is the aggravating factor something that the federal government has control over? All I'm hearing is a very non specific grumble.

Which I don't really understand. I'd be interested to know which policies in particular people are having a problem with. From my perspective they could do better in a few areas, but overall they're doing a good job.

I seem to remember that's why Trump (and brexit) happened. The risk being, of course, that your protest vote leads to an incompetent government, and / or one that doesn't make decisions in the best interest of the people.

That was great. I went past New Norfolk as far as Gretna, fantastic road. Almost tempted to keep going. I was going to go through to Elderslie then back to the highway, but the cross road was gravel so I turned around and came back the same way. Very enjoyable.

It's a beautiful day. I'm going for a ride shortly. Thinking Bothwell way.