With all due respect to Bill Glasson, who was a great candidate, the best result for the Liberal Party out of this election was not winning Griffith. They get to win the election in a landslide, and their opponents get mired in the mud of Nightmare on Norman Crescent as Kevin Rudd comes back and […]

Clive Palmer’s tapped into a vein of public discontent showing his abilities in mining go beyond the mineral. But Clive’s skills as a miner are probably as much as a financier as a prospector – he leverages his veins. How does he intend to leverage his political vein? It seems to have escaped most commentators, […]

Apparently the Kevin 2013 version comes with a backbone. Fair enough, but if its going to be his new offensive weapon he should use it on someone other than himself. Kevin’s latest stunt is to say that Labor will block the Liberals from abolishing the carbon tax because it is a core Labor policy. Now, […]

Kevin Rudd announced yesterday that he would build a very fast train between Melbourne and Brisbane by 2035. As the idea first surfaced in 1984, it would be a promise 61 years in the honouring. He must feel very safe from leadership challenges to make such a longterm commitment. Which made me wonder how long it […]

Lily Fontana is currently getting a crash course in public relations and social media. She is the freelance make-up artist whose status update on Facebook has provided the most succinct commentary on last night’s Bronco Leagues Club People’s Forum debate between K Rudd and T Abbott. Here it is in its brief 78 words: Just finished […]

It appears that Kevin Rudd’s industry of the future might very well be shelf-company manufacture in the Northern Territory. Adopting a suggestion from Gina Reinhardt, Rudd has promised to make the NT a special economic zone where companies will pay a third less company tax. Following in the failed decentralisation foot-steps of the Whitlam Government […]

Immediately after last night’s debate I scored it a draw. Rudd was more fluent and less reliable, Abbott more wooden, but more “fair dinkum”. Others scored it a win to Abbott, including even the SMH online poll. But it could have been a narrow victory to Rudd, and still be a loss. This was the […]

If money is the life-blood of the economy interest rates are its blood pressure. And if the analogy holds, which it does this far, rates can both be too high and too low. The risks are also similar. Too high and you risk the economic equivalent of stroke. Just right is somewhere between 4 and […]

K Rudd’s tax raid on smokers is an interesting exercise in smash and grab economics. It affects traditional Labor voters more than anyone else, but is likely to be meekly accepted, or wildly acclaimed, by health and consumer groups across the country. If he beats up on his own like this you have to wonder […]

The ABC has been running alarmist reports from a Nature paper that suggests methane released from the  Arctic permafrost could cause $60 trillion worth of damage to the economy. I’m watching Emma Alberici on Lateline, and surprisingly, she’s actually putting some criticisms of the paper to one of the authors. That’s not the Emma I […]