Bill

“Bronwyn Bishop, the shadow minister for seniors, was appointed speaker of the House of Representatives, a well-paid but undemanding job that would gratify her love of state-supplied perks without risking her questionable judgement on a government department.”
― Aaron Patrick, Credlin & Co.: How the Abbott Government Destroyed Itself

“One of the Coalition policies most resented by Nationals backbenchers proposed that companies would be paid to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions. With a budget of $2.55 billion over four years, the ‘Direct Action’ scheme was widely seen as a second-rate compromise that allowed the government to assert that it was fighting global warming while it abolished Labor’s emissions trading scheme. ‘That’s not going to change the temperature of the globe but it’s a lot of money at the moment,’ one Nationals MP said.”
― Aaron Patrick, Credlin & Co.: How the Abbott Government Destroyed Itself

“In 2015 one of the most powerful jobs in the bureaucracy, that of cabinet secretary, went to a public relations executive, Matthew Stafford, who thus had access to cabinet meetings.”
― Aaron Patrick, Credlin & Co.: How the Abbott Government Destroyed Itself

“Dupont had a long history of analysing Australia’s position in the world. He was also a pioneer in the study of links between climate change and international security, an area that few defence experts had explored. In 2006 he asserted in an article, written with Graeme Pearman, that the security implications of climate change had been largely ignored by public policy experts, academics and journalists. ‘Climate change is fast emerging as the security issue of the 21st century,’ he wrote, ‘overshadowing terrorism and even the spread of weapons of mass destruction as the threat most likely to cause mega-death and contribute to state failure, forced population movements, food and water scarcity and the spread of infectious diseases.”
― Aaron Patrick, Credlin & Co.: How the Abbott Government Destroyed Itself