Do you have the intellectual property right to the data you collected? If it belongs to the original university, then I think you would have problems finishing it off anywhere else.

Marcello - are you on good terms with the Italian academic who supervised your MSc work? I wonder whether it might be worth seeing if s/he has any connections to German professors, and would be willing to contact them to say that an excellent former student of his /hers is looking for a PhD place, and could they help at all? It might make you stand out a little. I suspect there are a lot of applicants from Southern Europe at the moment, and Germans can be quite snobbish about non-German universities, so a personal connection might be the way to try. It might be that your age is a bit of an issue, as Germans do seem to have very strict ideas about what age you should have done things by, but I can't see it being insurmountable.

I find it interesting that Kimwipes couldn't imagine coping on a salary that would put you comfortably into the higher earner category in the UK...If born rich maybe not but most of us manage just fine.

You do realise UKIP would be a disaster for British universities and science more broadly? Turkeys don't usually vote for Christmas with the enthusiasm you are showing...

Journal articles sound like the way to go. How about trying to think in terms of target journals and looking at the type of article they publish and then work out which argument (it might not be each chapter as it now stands) might fit best there? Depending on the journal you'll probably find that you end up emphasising a different aspect of the theoretical framework. Did your examiners / supervisor have any suggestions about publishing? If not, it might be worth asking and they will have the outside perspective on your thesis and might be able to see more easily than you are, how best to break it up. Also think strategically - what elements are most likely to be appealing to an employer or get accepted by a better journal? Start with those to get the maximum benefit on the job market.

I think the problem you and other recent PhDs are having is that the publishers need to make money, and monographs from PhD theses don't tend to sell well. Offer to write a textbook and it would be a different matter. The only people I know who got their thesis taken on by good publishers were introduced by their very famous examiner / supervisor and touted as geniuses. I can't see how you can force businesses to publish books they don't think will be profitable.
There are other presses that are receptive to the book of the thesis, but the problem is that they are not the ones with the best reputation - they often operate a print-on-demand service, so their profit model is different, and the copy-editing etc is done by the author, and there's minimal marketing. If a monograph is really the desired outcome though then they are worth considering. Cambridge Scholars Publishing have published the theses of a couple of people I know. Ashgate and Peter Lang also still seem open to theses. Sorry I only know the social sciences ones. Critically though, these were people who didn't want an academic career, so press prestige didn't matter, but they wanted a book out of their PhD experience. If an academic career is the goal then journal articles are probably the way to go. Pick journals that do blind peer review and then the ECR status is irrelevant - mind you you're still going to get knock backs and nasty criticism, but it is a more meritocratic route.

This is actually quite tricky as there are some Development Studies MAs that are really well thought of e.g. Sussex but they seem to prefer people with some development experience. I've always heard that the best way into development work is to save up enough money to survive for 6 months and head off to the regional NGO hub of the continent of your choice and start volunteering to get the in the field experience, you need to have a good chance of later employment. I don't know whether that appeals? I think if not look for a MA with a placement option. I'd also do what Caro said about checking websites for vacancies.
Funded PhDs in politics / development exist but there's not that many. Most are funded through ESRC doctoral training centres. You need a really strong proposal, usually a 1st or a distinction at MA and a great supervisory team fit. There is a massive overproduction of Politics PhDs compared with academic jobs, so you have to be really good and lucky to get a lectureship these days. Definitely not for the faint-hearted.

They're on the Beall list of possibly predatory publishers.

I wonder if arranging an interview with a careers advisor might be a good idea to get an outsider's perspective? I think, as others have already suggested, that you are painting yourself into a corner with your belief that the only thing you can do is to be a research assistant. If you are surrounded by people who only know about academic careers, it's far too easy to get trapped into the thinking that that's all there is. Maybe retraining might be needed, but my gut feeling is that you might be dismissing lots of interesting possibilities unknowingly. I think if I was you, I'd want to get out of the university setting for a bit / for good and prove myself in a different environment to improve my confidence too.

In the US, you would be a visiting assistant professor or VAP. I say this not to be picky but because I think you might find some useful online resources on dealing with the situation you are in, at the Chronicle of Higher Education website if you do a search with the right terms.
Many academics do feel uneasy about the proliferation of one year teaching contracts that have emerged in the UK (I know you are in Australia) because they are often exploitative and publications are what new PhDs need to get permanent jobs, something that's not easy to churn out with a full teaching load. Try not to take what was said at the meeting too personally.
On evaluations - there's good reason why the qualitative remarks are often kept from TAs - students can be vicious and unfair. And unfortunately it's the nasty comments that stick in your memory and the nice ones are forgotten.
I'd put them to one side and wait for the rest from the first semester, and then look at them in the round. See if you can see trends across units, as those are the areas it's worth addressing. Do you have another member of staff you can trust? Someone else might be able to help reassure you and sort the nasty from the useful. You are always going to get some nasty comments sadly, & if it's a big group they will often be contradictory too. And if you are a young-looking woman, your expertise will always be doubted (there's research been done on this). And sometimes you don't click with a class, and you realise you've lost a group of them and can't get them engaged again, which sounds like it might have happened to you here. It happens. But try really hard not to let your feelings about this affect how you teach your next classes - they see it if you hate teaching them & resent it.

I think you've got some good advice already. But if you are in science, and only have the BSc, one thing you may need to think about is that nowadays the science degrees at 'better' universities are almost invariably 4 years (or 5 years with a year in industry) and end in an undergraduate Masters qualification. So you probably have covered less material than some of your competitors even if you are convinced you are better. There is some funding available for science MSc degrees, so (if as I assume you've done you've asked for feedback on why you were unsuccessful) that might be a route worth pursuing if the feedback is always x had a better background.

Nobody gets two separate reports - what you have received will be the agreed joint report of both examiners, so if AFTER you've spoken to your supervisor, there are things that are unclear, it will be ok for more normally your supervisor (or you) to ask the internal for clarification. If you've just received the report, you are probably as your post suggests you are doing, channelling catastrophe scenarios. Hopefully your supervisor will help you to see that if that the requested changes are not as major as you think. Honestly PhD candidates are so paranoid when they get the examiners' report, that almost certainly you are reading things into it that are not intended. Have the weekend off, book an appointment with your supervisor, and try to chill out a bit. It will be a) ok and b) very doable if they've given you minor corrections.

The piece of information that sets alarm bells ringing for me is that you intend to self-fund. For a subject like psychology where there is funding available for good applicants, that sounds like an unnecessary risk. Statistically you are correct - it is unlikely that a psychology PhD will lead to an academic job (as it is for any subject) but at least if it's funded and it doesn't work out, you've had the opportunity to try to follow your dream and haven't taken such big financial losses. I know some psychology PhDs are ESRC funded, and the ESRC doctoral training centre deadlines all seem to be in the next two weeks so it might still be possible to get an application into your nearest centre.
Is an academic career is worth it? Firstly, even for the successful, the first years post PhD are often spent scrambling for any work and moving around a lot - this is not for everyone. Then if you get a job there are pay-offs. If it's a research-intensive place, the students are good, facilities tend to be reasonable and there are resources - the downside is that you are looking at very long hours and often unrealistically high research expectations. If you don't meet them, then your 'permanent contract' isn't worth much. If you are really driven by research, then it can be very satisfying, if not it's miserable. The teaching-intensive places are more like FE colleges, in the ways they operate, and like in FE colleges, it seems more and more difficult to get full-time posts and security of contract can be an issue. Here student recruitment and retention are the primary issue, and the demands are set accordingly. Again it would suit some, not others.
It's certainly not the career it was twenty years ago. And for the hours and the pressure, you could earn better in other fields. I honestly think it's only worth it if you are research-obsessed.

Caro's right to focus on the project in my opinion. If you are hoping for an academic career, look at the supervisor's publication record rather than where s/he got their degrees - is s/he publishing regularly in good journals and have recent / current PhD students published? The other thing to think about is where you hope to work in the long run whether it's academia or industry - if it's Italy, then maybe choose Trento. From what I've heard from Italian friends, it sounds like it can be difficult to break back into the Italian job market from abroad.

Not getting a publication from your first project is very unlikely to be an issue (in fact publishing so early in my subject would be a no-no, as the quality is unlikely to be there yet as you learn new skills, so I wonder if you are being a bit unrealistic). But for goodness sake don't get into the habit of covering up mistakes and being dishonest about the results to try and get a publication - that is the sort of behaviour that really does come back to bite you (google retractionwatch or pubpeer for some examples). I would just accept that you made some errors and that the results aren't strong enough for publication. It happens - you learn from it and you know you won't make the same mistake again. Retracted publications / or lots of doubts about your work on sites like pubpeer are the things that really do end careers.