November, 2008

Kevin Rudd has been coming in for a bit of flack for inserting turgid, bureaucratic language into his speeches.  Given all the – somewhat overblown in my view – fuss about plagiarism by politicians, perhaps he feels it is safer for him to write his own speeches rather than relies on words provided by others. [...]

The economic crisis has got most of the political attention in recent months, somewhat obscuring the potential significance of the delayed COAG meeting of the federal and state governments which is taking place this weekend. Even such examination that has occurred of the COAG meetings has tended to focus on how big a pot of money will [...]

If you ever wonder why people get cynical about politicians and the media, look no further than the current debacle regarding the Queensland government’s approach on recycling purified water back into the drinking supply. After The Australian newspaper ran a determined, prolonged fear campaign for a full month recycling all the usual rubbish about ‘toilet [...]

Graham Ring, a columnist with the National Indigenous Times, had a good piece on Online Opinion last week bemoaning the difficulties of having a rational debate on Indigenous issues in Australia. It strikes me that some of the commentary on Indigenous Affairs in this country has become so poisonous – not just among the media, [...]

SBS TV screened a documentary tonight which detailed efforts by Phil Glendenning from the Edmund Rice Centre to track what happened to some of the asylum seekers deported by the Australian government earlier this decade – many after prolonged pressure and imprisonment in detention centres in Nauru and Australia.  Glendenning reckons that they’ve documented the deaths [...]

An article by Barney Zwartz in The Age drew my attention to an interesting and ambitious online project/experiment which aspires to “change the tenor of the conversation around religion.”  It’s a big task, but a worthwhile one. The project seeks to bring together “the voices of people from all religions” from around the world to [...]

Melbourne based blogger Andrew Norton was the first person I saw use the term ‘the real greenhouse denialists’ to describe people who accept the scientific arguments about climate change, but still aren’t prepared to try to make the major changes to their own lifestyles that would be necessary to meet the required emission levels. I think [...]

The widespread derision being heaped on the New South Wales state government has led many people to bemoan the fact that the next election will not be until March 2011. A surprisingly large number of people also make a related complaint that this is due to New South Wales having fixed terms, and somehow if [...]

Barack Obama’s extensive use of the internet and other social media during his campaign has been well canvassed – although no doubt there are plenty more studies still to be done on this. As he makes the shift from candidate to President, attention is now focusing on some of the ways he might use the internet [...]

Not long after the new Senate was sworn in back in August, there was a brief flurry of coverage about the possibility of some significant reforms being made to Question Time, with a few people finally having the honesty to acknowledge it was basically a waste of time as an accountability or information gathering mechanism. [...]