I saw this technique at work in the minds of some at the end of the Fraser government. The gambit was that you weighed promises not on the basis of whether they were responsible or affordable, but on whether they improved your chances at the next election, which you didn’t expect to win. If you […]

This article is about a staff of 42 that managed to handle just 6 cases in a year. It is also the first in what I hope will be a series of articles looking at specific areas where the Queensland public service could be trimmed without any loss of services. The aim is to base […]

I was taken by surprise when Cameron Dick claimed on our last Friday morning meeting on Steve Austin’s ABC 612 morning program that Labor had produced surpluses for 7 of its last 10 budgets. Could this be true? I disputed the claim, but without conviction. Cameron is a person of substance. I didn’t think he […]

Try to pin this one on solar cycles or conspiracy theories. A wide range of scientists note the high temps in the US. (see link below) The back story includes a meagre corn crop for the US, with implications for food prices globally. It must be heat stress that leads me to link the most […]

A new proxy reconstruction of the last two thousand years of temperature shows that there has been a decline of 0.3 degrees per millennium over the that period. Published in Nature Climate Change the paper finds that orbital forcings (essentially how close the sun and the earth are) are around four times as significant as […]

Malcolm Turnbull made a debating point on refugees which has been taken up by Malcolm Farr, and apparently others like Virginia Trioli (based on Q&A last night), as being a viable strategy for the government to follow. Malcolm T must be laughing. The suggestion is that Labor should just adopt John Howard’s policy and if […]

  If you want to know the future of Australia under the carbon tax, look no further than California. In 2009 Julia Gillard was an unabashed fan of Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his greening of the economy. Yet today that economy is one of the worst performing in the US, with worse to come. […]

In a previous post I pointed out that public service growth has far outstripped population growth. A couple of commenters, one from the trade union Together Queensland, suggested that the growth had been in the service sector, particularly health, education, child protection and police. So I decided to investigate. I don’t have a lot of time […]

Craig Emerson’s Karaoke Kamikaze was insane, but less insane than the argument that he was prosecuting on the carbon tax. He also had the wrong song. When I think of this government it’s Rocky Horror that comes to mind, not Horror Movie.  While the minister’s performance was noteworthy on its own demerits, it is also symptomatic of […]