This is absurd:
CLAUSES in the ACT’s civil partnerships bill that would allow gay couples to hold a public ceremony marking their union are unacceptable, Attorney-General Robert McClelland says.
Isn’t this obsession with keeping homosexual love out of sight a bit quaint? Why on earth shouldn’t gays be able to publicly celebrate their unions just like heterosexual […]

It took me a while to get through Judith Ajani’s The Forest Wars (MUP), partly because of my habit of having four books on the go at any one time, and partly because it’s more of an economic history of an industry than a history of conflict. Far from being an exciting account of […]

Problems in democratic governance don’t always arise from the clash between a good idea and a bad idea, a desirable and a undesirable outcome. Those ones are generally pretty easy to negotiate. What makes life tricky is when two good ideas/outcomes/ends clash. Thus, for instance, a right to privacy clashes with a […]

A conservative family member sent me this. Someone went to a bit of trouble to put it together and it’s pretty good…
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Two aspects of a single incident over the last 24 hours provided revealing insights into the the characters of two men, one of whom will almost certainly be the next prime minister of Australia.
The incident began when the ALP shadow foreign affairs minister made a speech in which he *gasp* referred to Labor Party policy.
In […]

If there was a God, when Paul Lennon - the premier of Tasmania at the centre of the rotten-to-the-core relationship between the State government and Gunns Ltd - pronounced piously that the Federal Government was corrupting the approval process for the Tamar Valley pulp mill, he’d have been struck by lightning and reduced to a […]

Kevin Harkins has finally done the obvious thing and withdrawn as an ALP candidate.
I suggested a while back that he was a liability and got a critical comment or two along the lines of ‘why should he withdraw when all he’s done is be a good union official’. I found the logic a bit puzzling; […]

Being a fan of the combination of new media and politics, and having encouraged parties to embrace blogs and other tools rather than shun them, I thought I might be more impressed with Labor’s most recent foray into the field. But I’m not really sure what Kevin07 achieves, other than a immediate novelty value […]

The blogosphere spends an enormous amount of time and energy trying to predict who will win the next election, and micro-analysing the implications of events happening from day to day (and sometimes hour to hour) for the election outcome. It’s politics as spectator sport, with lots of people taking a violently partisan interest in the […]