David Rowe, irrepressible cartoonist for the AFR, saw the election this way:
So out with the old and in with the new:
Category Archives: Politics & Government
Australian election enters the home strait?
We are in the home strait now. Which will prevail?
Newspoll (results available on Poll Bludger) shows the yawning gap that has opened up in two party preferred (TPP) terms:
I’ve taken it back to months before the 2019 election, which was on 18 May 2019, to show that the situation now is not like the situation then. With six days to go, incumbent PM Scott Morrison is looking for a miracle. Simon Benson, Political Editor for the Oz, wrote after the penultimate poll:
- According to the latest Newspoll, Labor would not only win government but it would win with a comfortable majority.
Any notion of a hung parliament is extinguished on these numbers, irrespective of whether any Climate 200 independents get elected or not.
Morrison needed the the contest to tighten with only two weeks to run. Newspoll has shown the opposite.
Continue reading Australian election enters the home strait?
Living and dying with COVID-19
We don’t use our own brains on Covid rules in Queensland any more. We just follow whatever NSW and Victoria decide.
So Queensland will ease Covid isolation rules from Thursday, bringing the state’s rules closer in line with NSW and Victoria, where ‘living with Covid’ is the go.
From the ABC monitoring site, Omicron is not kind to oldies, especially males:
Morrison’s path to victory?
Scott Morrison calls federal election for May 21, setting up battle with Labor’s Anthony Albanese
Is it a personal battle between two leaders?
In large part, yes, because they certainly want to talk about each other, and the media do not want to talk about policy, having settled on the notion that neither side has any, although any journalist who is interested can find Labor’s policies here, the Liberal Party’s story book (plan) here. The Nationals’ Plan is much the same, but slightly different. For The Greens, it depends what you click on when you go to their site, but this is headlined as their Election Policy Platform.
All this is happening in an environment where trust in government, politics and politicians has largely been destroyed. Continue reading Morrison’s path to victory?
On fossil fuels, Queensland needs to pause and consider
The Queensland Government has put out for comment a Queensland resources industry development plan, Draft for consultation, November 2021with a consultation deadline of 11 February 2022.
My concern is that the future plans for coal and gas do not sit well the latest science and with what the world must collectively do to prevent the current climate crisis from becoming a tragedy. Within that I have a specific concern about the plans relating to the fracking of gas in the Channel Country. Relevant to these concerns I’ll make four statements with some supporting notes. (Last updated, 27 February 2022) Continue reading On fossil fuels, Queensland needs to pause and consider
Weekly salon 12/1
1. 2021 in graphs
Peter Martin has assembled 10 graphs from articles he has edited in 2021.
Each tells a powerful story. For example, it is clear that sooner or later something will have to be done about JobSeeker when it is forecast to become a mere fraction of the old age pension, which is miserly by international standards. Remember around a third of pensioners already live in poverty. Continue reading Weekly salon 12/1
Weekly salon 7/1: 2022 new year edition
1. Sawatdi bpi mai kap!
That is a Thai new year’s greeting which means means:
- May you find compassion, loving kindness and equanimity along your paths over the next year!
On a personal level that would help. I think most people feel well rid of 2021, and hope for better in 2022.
2. Will humanity survive?
Andrew Leigh, they say, is always the smartest man in the room, and one of the nicest. Since entering parliament in 2008 he has now launched his 8th book. This Saturday Paper article (no doubt pay-walled) is an interview with Andrew Leigh on humanity’s one-in-six chance of ending. Continue reading Weekly salon 7/1: 2022 new year edition
Gladys goes. What does that mean for us?
Michael McGowan and Anne Davies had the story on Friday 1 Oct 2021 NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian resigns after ICAC announces investigation:
(Image from Michelle Grattan’s story at The Conversation.)
I think her greater misdemeanor lies elsewhere. However her demise has further trashed politicians and politics in the public mind, opening opportunities for independents, and minor parties in so far as they present as people who are not politicians.
This is not good for democracy. Continue reading Gladys goes. What does that mean for us?
Weekly salon 3/8
1. Who was best ever PM?
Paul Strangio asked the equestion Who were Australia’s best prime ministers? We asked the experts.
He and colleagues asked 66 political scientists and historians. Here’s the top 10:
COVID crisis in NSW
Lock down hard or you’ll be stuck where you are until Christmas, NSW has been told by the Melbourne Burnet Institute, who did the modelling which helped Victoria escape its long lockdown in 2020.
Let me say at the outset that I agree with Professor Catherine Bennett, Deakin University’s Chair in Epidemiology, who said in an article in The Age that:
- harsh measures like a nightly curfew and kilometre limit might not be required in NSW.
“I do think that the routes of transmission that they’re seeing in NSW should guide the interventions, not just putting things in place because they’ve been used elsewhere,” she said.
Back on June 24 Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant told us Why a snap COVID-19 lockdown won’t work for Sydney’s Bondi outbreak. The Delta variant was already well and truly abroad and could not be reined in by a three-day lockdown like those other states had used.
Less than three weeks later with all of Sydney plus some adjacent areas locked down, harder than before, new cases rose from 11 to over 100. The virus was winning in the community:
Barnaby is back
When Warren Truss was leader of the National Party from 2007 to February 2016, just about no-one in the general public knew who he was. That was one of the reasons why Barnaby Joyce succeeded him.
Now lots of people know a lot about Barnaby for a variety or reasons, and a saw enough of his successor Michael McCormack this week to realise he was simply not up to the job. The numbers that matter are the 21 members of the federal National Party room. More than half prefer Barnaby Joyce, warts and all. So we have Barnaby Joyce victorious in Nationals leadership challenge.
I have to say that his deputy, David Littleproud, looked absolutely miserable next to Barnaby on TV, although he says he was just cold. Word is that Matt Canavan moved the spill motion, and Littleproud’s support made the difference, in the interests of longer term stability.
If so, strange thinking. As Jennifer Hewitt says in the AFR today:
- The public will now have a front row seat at Joyce’s more explosive brand of political fireworks. And he does bear grudges.
Asylum seekers become human
Every-one not living under a rock knows that the Biloela community loves the Tamil family Nades and Priya Murugappan, and their daughters Kopika and Tharunicaa, who were taken from their homes in March 2018 in a dawn raid without warning the day their bridging visa expired, and have now been banged up in Christmas Island for several years.
Biloela wants them back, some Liberal backbenchers want them back, even Tony Abbott, when he was still in parliament in passing on a letter of support to then minister Peter Coleman, annotated the letter saying that the family could have a case “if they have as successfully integrated as it seems, there is a … case for giving them [permanent residency].” Continue reading Asylum seekers become human