A couple of more phone calls and I need to make one correction and inject some more facts into the situation, as well as make some observations on the potential for damage to PNG by ill-informed half-baked reporting. First the correction. The constitution does allow for a vote of no-confidence within 12 months of the […]

Papua New Guinea is in disarray with two prime ministers and two police chiefs according to The Australian. The Governor General is confused and doesn’t know who to accept as PM. But the Oz doesn’t have all the details. The problem arises because former PM Michael Somare was removed by the parliament after he was […]

Hopefully Anna Bligh will call an election mid-way through January and put everyone out of their misery by mid-February. Does anyone seriously believe that she will get to carry out her “plan” to split Queensland Health into two separate bureaucracies – one that runs hospitals and the other that resources them? It won’t happen because […]

Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley is routinely adjectivally referenced as “Brisbane’s multicultural Valley”. It’s the down town area that hit the doldrums after the motor car and the regional shopping centre killed the main street department store and for a while robbed it of its meaning for life. It’s home to China Town, most of Brisbane’s night […]

Peter Martin reveals that Labor is planning to tax any company that makes better returns than average and not tax those companies that make worse returns than average. When I previously suggested that once the government had taxed mining “super profits” they might tax other companies’ “super profits” I thought I was making a debating […]

One of the arguments put in favour of the MRRT (Mining Resource Rent Tax) is that it is fair that we all share in the benefits of the exploitation of our minerals. This assumes that we don’t already share in the benefits of the exploitation of our minerals. This is nonsense, as can be shown […]

No wonder voters are in despair about Federal politics. The Government passes its Minerals Resource Rent Tax, aka the Mining Super Profits Tax, and the Opposition, rather than concentrate on reselling the reasons for why this is a bad tax spends most of its time pursuing the government because it did a “secret” or “dirty […]

Wikileaks might be threatening to go into hibernation because of lack of cash, but it seems that the Internet as a tool for dumping documents that are embarrassing to people in positions of power and influence is only just starting. In fact Wikileaks, quite unfairly in my view, gained a lot of applause for doing what […]

According to Michael Kirby the Commonwealth of Nations faces an existential threat to its existence, which is the reason it needs to adopt the recommendations of its group of eminent persons, of which he is one. I must admit that when I first heard of the proposal, amongst others, to institute a Commonwealth Human Rights […]

Auntie ABC published this article today, wholly sourced apparently from Reuters. It says the IPCC says that extreme weather is set to increase because of global warming. It can’t be squared with this article from The Australian which says that extreme weather won’t be affected for decades, again using an IPCC source. How did these different […]