Graham’s blog entry on the extreme weather is clearly right in terms of the facts, but I think there are valuable lessons we should take from it anyway. We seem to get the weather here in Perth before it heads east, at least in the summer, so we enjoyed the heat and humidity for a […]

According to Dad, in 1925 my grandmother sat on the back stairs of the workers cottage in East Brisbane where he still lives and said to my great grandmother – “Maybe they should just leave this land to the blacks.”

I’ve been enjoying the new doco ‘Wild Australasia” on the ABC. The commentary is pretty banal and Matt Day’s reading is ordinary, and of course it is loaded with the usual stupid terms designed, I assume, to pander to overseas assumptions about Oz. But it does a good job in emphasising the absolute uniqueness of […]

Once front runner Howard Dean is out of the race for Democrat candidate in the next US presidential elections. He somehow squandered a healthy lead and some $50,000,000 (whew! a lot of money for nothing). Now it looks like a shoot out between Kerry and Edwards, with Kerry the big favourite. What does it all […]

Watching the ‘Four Corners’ report on the destruction of Tasmania’s old growth forests gave me a real sense of déjà vu. The slippery government dealing, the dodgy forest management agency, the huge private firm with tentacles everywhere, and the various passionate people appearing on either side all reminded me of the long and strong debate […]

This whole debate about politicians’ pay and superannuation is a classic example of self-interest being peddled as economic logic or public interest. There is enough hypocrisy flooding the airwaves on this to make even the most cynical politics watcher want to spew. So let me say this: most politicians would do the job for free. […]

The other night I watched on SBS (where else?) as a mother buried her child. It was in Sudan. She and the child had been chased for weeks around the burning deserts of Sudan by the Sudanese army searching for its elusive enemy. The child, a six-year-old boy, had died of exhaustion and malnutrition. The […]

The Liberals are pulling out some of the oldest tricks in the book to hammer newly resurgent Labor. One of them is to accuse anyone who questions a whole range of developments of being anti-American. There are two basic problems with this critique. The first is that we are suffering the most right wing and […]

“The end of the beginning.” J M Barrie’s clever twisting of the more common phrase seems an appropriate place to start a post about John Howard’s pirouette on Parliamentary super. The political dual between Latham and Howard is getting a Peter Pan feel about it.

Yes, it’s the old ‘Pay peanuts, get monkeys’ argument as certain pollies (like Peter Costello) defend the incredible benefits ex-pollies get, such as very generous superannuation. Well, my response is that right now we pay our pollies big bananas, and we mostly get monkeys anyway. There is no way that it can be argued that […]