If you like omens, the New South Wales “under dogs” just lost the first state of origin match to Queensland. Will Kevin Rudd or Wayne Swan rubb it in tomorrow when they face the New South Wales under-dog from Bennelong over the dispatch box? Still, state of origin football goes down to the wire, even […]

That’s a possible conclusion that could be drawn from a new CSIRO report which says that the growth in the rate of CO2 emission in the atmosphere has risen from “1.1 per cent a year in the 1990s to a three per cent increase per year in the 2000s”. (All this in a decade when […]

The Howard government is trying to get Australians to focus on the reality of a Rudd government, but no-one’s paying attention. Howard has even admitted that the public is “considering a change of government”, a necessary precondition to convincing the public that change is in the offing. The problem for him is that the public […]

I don’t know why anyone worries about Howard stacking the ABC board when Auntie can produce agitprop like “The Bastard Boys” in an election year. National Productivity and the inadequacy of our ports to handle the demand for exports have been issues in this election campaign. How much worse would things have been without Chris […]

Galaxy’s latest poll in Bennelong has John Howard losing to Maxine McKew. As the PM says – no big surprise there. If it said anything else you’d say the sample was bad, because it would be completely out of line with everything else the polls currently say about the state of the parties’ votes. Except […]

Kevin Rudd’s response to the budget is not good enough. He’s claiming to be a visionary, but his promises are all variations on themes that the government has already made its own. A major theme under Labor is that John Howard has wasted 10 years of opportunity and that Howard is stuck in the 50s. […]

The standard Labor criticism of last night’s budget is that it is a “clever” ploy by a government which will do and say anything to win the next election. As I noted in my last post, such “search and destroy” rhetoric can have a devastating effect. But Labor wants to be careful. A logical extension […]

The Queensland takeover of the federal ALP campaign is really starting to pay dividends. Consider the budget. My impressions of the media coverage is that whatever Costello and Howard deliver will be regarded as just a gambit to win the next election. It won’t matter whether it is good policy or not, it will be […]

I wish I had, but then, not being German, perhaps I couldn’t have, written it, that is. I’ve just come upon this piece courtesy of a new service called StumbledUpon. “Evil Americans, Poor Mullahs” by Claus Christian Malzahn, Spiegel Online’s Berlin Bureau Chief lays bear some of the stupidities of “intelligent” European thought, specifically German […]

An example of when the “A” list should be given the “Big A” is this gem of an interview with the newly pre-selected Labor Candidate for Boothby, Nicole Cornes. When Mrs Cornes saw the photo of herself from the interview she said ” . . . first thing in the morning when you wake up, […]