November 16, 2009 – 2:41 pm
If memory serves (and Google, on this occasion, does not), Paul Keating once said that it was hard to get sentimental about Australia’s relationship with Britain when you had to queue with the Eskimos at Heathrow while EU citizens sailed straight past you.
Gordon Brown’s recent speech on immigration raises many issues, but so far as Australians are [...]
October 7, 2009 – 6:33 pm
The Costello departure now – now, when he could have been useful to Turnbull by simply keeping the seat filled until the election – shows what happens when a party founded on the idea of the individual crashes to the ground.
It simply shatters into a thousand shards, all edge, no weight.
Labor, meanwhile tends to break [...]
If you are only going to read one thing about how Australia’s federal Parliament works – and more importantly how it doesn’t work – read this fabulous piece by the long-standing Clerk of the Senate, Harry Evans.
Among many things, he highlights the fact that the supposed ‘Westminster system’ we are repeatedly told Australia has, is [...]
January 20, 2009 – 10:25 pm
The membership of the South Australian Democrats have made their choice to fill the Upper House vacancy caused by the retirement of the party’s sole remaining MP. The vacancy is being filled by David Winderlich.
November 20, 2008 – 12:14 am
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 of [...]
November 18, 2008 – 12:03 am
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 this [...]
November 17, 2008 – 5:06 pm
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 there [...]
October 23, 2008 – 8:11 pm
There has been a recent run of fairly good results for the Greens in a range of polls at state and territory level, including their best ever result in the ACT where they will determine who forms government (though they have been in that position before).
This has led to a run of commentary pieces – [...]
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 [...]
