This is Mark Bahnisch’s analysis of our focus group last night, a version of which also appears in Crikey! today. Victorian Premier Steve Bracks in an unguarded moment gave the game away – the election has been designed to be boring. Bracks is invoking the ghosts of the Kennett era and running a controlled campaign […]

If the New South Wales Liberals had been on the ball, the Greens would have had their first lower house beach-head in mainland Australia in Port Jackson. If the Liberals had preferenced the Greens’ Jamie Parker ahead of Sandra Nori, Parker would have won the seat. Our polling that election showed that a possible Greens […]

If the coming Victorian election were voluntary it looks to me from our polling that the Liberal Party would be all but wiped out. When we do our online polls we always hear from a disproportionate number of Greens, about two-thirds the number of Labor voters you would expect, and only about half the percentage […]

Various people are portraying it as a victory for their faction, but the only thing that can be said with certainty about last weekend’s Queensland Liberal Party convention is that it was a defeat for Santo Santoro. Whether it will remain a defeat for long remains to be seen. The Anyone But Santo (ABS) grouping […]

You can’t strip a man of citizenship because he thinks that some women “ask for it”. Whatever the merits of Sheik Hilali’s comments, the response by some of his detractors, like Sunshine Coast MP Peter Slipper, is no better. You can’t on the one hand condemn Hilaly for being uncivilised, and then on the other […]

Just as with T2 the federal government is requiring investors to borrow money to get into the stock. Not only is it mandatory but they are targetting the bulk of the sale at small shareholders, and then allowing salesmen to use the gearing to disingenuously claim that the investment will yield a 14% dividend in […]

The Pope may be finding ways to soften his message about Islam, but his frontline is holding firm, according to this report from Yahoo! News. When news of killings in response to Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech arrived in my in-box I didn’t notice that one of the dead was in fact a Muslim. But that […]

Exactly who does the Telstra board think it is accountable to? Corporate theory says that boards are responsible to the equity holders. They are certainly in theory appointed by them, even if shareholder apathy more often than not confers re-election by delivering proxies to the Chairman. So why is the Telstra board recommending against Geoffrey […]

Why does hair feature so much in Queensland elections? First there was Pauline, the incendiary red-head from Ipswich, torching the political landscape. Now we have the blonde Doctor Flegg being stalked for style tips on the campaign trail by journalists. Controversy and couture briefly worked for Pauline. They’re not working for Flegg and Springborg. According […]

When I first moved to Canberra, in the early 1980s, the city was a gem. From the first spring, when the pretty blossoms on the plum tree miraculously turned into an abundance of fruit, I was hooked. What a wonderful place to bring up children (although that didn’t turn out so well), and the low […]