February, 2010

This afternoon the Prime Minister announced that Peter Garrett has lost control of the home insulation program to Greg Combet, who will oversee the new program as part of Penny Wong’s enhanced Climate Change and Energy Efficiency portfolio.  With Parliament not sitting for a week and media coverage of the affair falling away, Rudd has [...]

The Coalition’s pursuit of Peter Garrett has faded in only the second Question Time this week, with the Minister untroubled by sustained Opposition questioning this afternoon and the Coalition having nowhere to direct its attack after moving a censure motion yesterday. Government MPs are privately astonished at the Opposition’s tactics, after Liberal leader Tony Abbott [...]

This morning I dashed into Medibank in order to (finally) take out private health insurance. But I believe, writes Shakira Hussein, that private health-care is an evil publicly funded leech that plays on people’s middle-of-the-night fears and that if we had any guts we would crush it beneath our heels instead of continuing to invite it to suck our blood.

The Government has moved to end the ongoing damage from its Home Insulation Program and the issue of foil insulation installation by halting the program two years ahead of schedule and replacing it with an overhauled scheme that prevents installers from directly claiming funding. Only in November last year, the Government had brought forward additional [...]

When Tony Abbott was attacking Kevin Rudd yesterday over the Government’s despicable $500m handout to free-to-air television, suggesting “it looks like an election-year bribe”, he neglected to mention his own recent dealings with media moguls. Crikey understands that Abbott had a secret meeting with News Ltd supremo Rupert Murdoch on Sunday morning and had breakfast [...]

If the opposition is going to take full advantage of its new-found competitiveness in Victoria, one thing it will need is a full slate of candidates for November’s state election. It’s still some distance off: a memo yesterday from Liberal Party state director Tony Nutt pointed out that applications for preselection remain open for 29 [...]

I noted around six months ago that the Queensland Premier was refusing to allow a conscience vote on legislation to reform Queensland’s abortion laws and address the situation faced by a young couple in Cairns who were currently facing criminal charges.  The Premier justified this by suggesting that it couldn’t be guaranteed that the Parliament wouldn’t [...]

In the Crikey email edition today I lamented how poorly this Opposition was pursuing two of the biggest scandals in what has been a relatively trouble-free term for the Rudd Government: the outrageous handover of $250m from taxpayers to the free-to-air TV networks under the guise of assisting them to meet the local content obligations, [...]

I wouldn’t trust Tony Abbot to be a serious supporter of policies that would make it easier for us to combine parenting and paid work. He claims to have had a recent conversion, but I suspect it is fairly superficial because his other views seem to have stayed much the same, writes Eva Cox.