October 14, 2009 – 12:50 pm
Two or three thousand boat arrivals a year is not an immigration crisis, given an intake of over 130,000. Amnesty figures show that the bulk (96%) of on shore asylum seekers arrive by plane. Australia could easily deal with the relatively small number of extra sea borne applicants, were they allowed to land in Australia [...]
No doubt President Obama will disappoint plenty of people in plenty of areas before his time as President finishes, but one area where he seems keen to make improvements is in the way the USA approaches human rights issues internationally.
Last Friday he “announced his intention to sign the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons [...]
October 20, 2008 – 11:10 am
It is fair enough for the Prime Minister to use the forum of Sunday night commercial television to get his message out to people about his views and actions on the global financial crisis. It is reasonable for any politician to use any means at their disposal to try to inform people about what they are [...]
October 11, 2008 – 12:20 am
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner was “in the early stages of organising a trial government blog. The purpose of the experiment will be to explore the possibilities for government participation in blogging.”
To his credit, Mr Tanner is following through with the same notion of using online forums to encourage participation [...]
September 19, 2008 – 12:06 am
Following on from my previous post on the conflicting message of a merged Liberal National Party in Queensland and a determinedly differentiating National Party at federal level, is another small but rather telling example.
The recently tabled Senate Committee report into legislation amending the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act contained a dissenting report from the Coalition [...]
September 18, 2008 – 11:57 am
There are continuing rumblings in Queensland that all is not going sweetly with the newly merged Liberal National Party. It is a matter for the merged party as to how they want to operate, but I have to say I am getting more and more confused about how it is supposed to work.
With Queenslander Barnaby [...]
