Government is in the solution business, which means to be rated a success a government needs problems – no problems, nothing to solve. Rudd’s ambitious, so he’s adding problems to the list of those he inherited like inflation, but are some of the problems real? One of his first moves was to send Labor members […]

I don’t have a problem with saying sorry for the “Stolen Generation”, although the HREOC report “Bringing them home” appears to have exaggerated the actual facts of the matter. But to limit an apology to such a problematic and minor part of the whole story of injustice to Australia’s indigenous inhabitants seems to me to […]

The Courier Mail reports today that Brendan Nelson’s agreement to an apology to Aborigines for the stolen generation will “split” the Liberal Party (although the only splinter they can find to quote is Wilson Tuckey). The state governments have all made their apologies, and today The Australian has a run down on when they made […]

Labor won the last election by convincing enough people that it would be little different to John Howard while convincing enough other people it would be completely different. One group was always going to be crying into its beer, and that group was always going to be the “progressives”. Early signs of it have started […]

Mark Bahnisch has taken to calling Lawrence Springborg “the Borg” which brings to my mind images of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Terminators. Queensland non-Labor politics seems to be caught in a continuous “B” Grade loop with a script they can’t change, which doesn’t make any sense, and which always leads to the same unsatisfactory conclusion. Springborg […]

Why is Kevin Rudd set on running a budget surplus of somewhere around $17 billion? The conventional economic theory is that governments should run surpluses in good times so that they can spend them in bad times as a way of stabilising swings in the economy. But after 15 years of expansion and with negligible […]

Wayne Swan’s copped a lot of criticism for his attempt to stop banks raising interest rates, but mostly for the wrong reasons. Swan’s only powers over bank interest rates are persuasive, not real. He heavied the banks and was ignored, stripping bare any perception of power. Next time he tries to talk the banks into […]