If you divided the number of kilometres on the clock of my Landcruiser by ten thousand and called them years it would be just a little bit older than me. So we share a bit of camaraderie that comes with a few more groans in the suspension than we […] Continue Reading…

What makes for those blisteringly hot Australian days isn’t so much climate change as geography. Sunlight that falls on trees and grass tends to be absorbed and used by plants and doesn’t heat the air nearly as much as sunlight that falls on desert.

So when we get an extremely […] Continue Reading…

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 […] Continue Reading…

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 […] Continue Reading…

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 […] Continue Reading…

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 […] Continue Reading…

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 […] Continue Reading…

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 […] Continue Reading…