While political leaders construct their messages in terms of policies and ideals, elections are most often won at the emotional level. So, despite all the rhetoric yesterday from both sides about security, health, education and interest rates, the pitches were actually to the electorate’s gut-level – you just needed to decode the language. Labor will […]

I have been thinking about a way to illustrate how volatile, untrusting, and “different”, the Australian electorate is today. The opinion polls are volatile, but polls taken before a campaign commences often are. Minor parties – especially Greens and Independents – seem to be doing well, but that is not really new. Perhaps the vest […]

Two days ago, as reported in yesterday’s Courier Mail, John Howard and Mark Latham both seemed to be giving the wrong questions to the right answers. Latham was asked why he had private health insurance if he was opposed to it, and Howard was asked whether he thought he was going to lose the next […]

James Hardie Industries appears to have learnt a lesson that John Howard has yet to learn: when you make a mistake, say you’re sorry. It is the first rule of crisis management, and it is the best one. When Arnold Schwarzennegger was accused of sexual misconduct he fessed up and apologised almost immediately. Bill Clinton […]

ONE of the real evils of society today is the demand for “compensation” for just about everything – compensation if you slip over in the supermarket, compensation if Council takes a metre of your land for public use, compensation if you’re accidentally hit by a cricket ball, compensation if you buy some food that gives […]

THE departure of Richard Butler as Governor of Tasmania has been exactly how I thought it would be – very quick, and at the instigation or insistence of Tasmania’s new Premier, Paul Lennon. Readers may recall that when Paul Lennon became Premier in February I commented on this site that he was a no nonsense […]

Well, as far as I know, if you live in Australia you probably read about it first here on this blog. It took next off the block, the AFR, another 4 days to report it here. I’ve yet to see any other Australian news media cover it at all, but I don’t spend all my […]

I’m not monomaniacal about it, and I think it’s bad politics, but the government should sell Telstra,and Mark Latham should agree to it. Every day the case for doing so gets stronger and stronger, as two recent pieces of evidence show. The first piece of evidence is contained in the Australian Communications Authority March Quarter […]

Consider this – a mild-mannered Australian newspaper editor with a slight US accent says that Palestinians are “vicious thugs” and “cannot be trusted”, and his employer, the Fairfax Group, is found guilty of inciting racial hatred and fined. Two nights ago ABC Four Corners showed a programme on Mamdouh Habib, one of two Australians held […]

I woke this morning to the ABC Radio telling me that “Labor has hung-on to a slim election winning lead, but voter satisfaction with leader Mark Latham’s performance has slipped.” This was a pretty trashy take, even on the basis of the figures that the ABC quoted. There are three polls covering mid-July and on […]