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Showing posts from July, 2009

The Labor Party way

We should have realised when Peter Beattie handed over the Premier’s reins in Queensland to Anna Bligh just how crook things had become. It is the established Labor Party way to turn to a woman only when the men have let things get out of control. They gave Joan Kirner the poison chalice in Victoria after the State Government was nearly sent broke under John Cain. In Western Australia Carmen Lawrence inherited the mess discovered by a Royal Commission that sailed into the messy wake of the Brian Burke led corruption. But in normal circumstances the overwhelming majority of men in a Labor Party Caucus tend to choose one of their own. That Clare Martin was given the job as Opposition Leader in the Northern Territory in 1999 was really no different. The men of Labor might not have been trying to rescue a government about to be thrown out, but their attempt to preserve a disastrously small rump in the parliament was just as desperate. The gratitude of Ms Martin’s male colleagues for her am

Hoping for First Dog’s support

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I am a little diffident about approaching First Dog on the Moon with this request out of fear that the Moon bit in his name has something to do with Moonies. I am a bit of a dog fancier and have been persuaded to take up the cause of the dogs of South Korea by joining a worldwide campaign to get dog meat eating banned. First Dog would appear to be a natural ally, but I presume that the Moonies of that North Asian peninsular are as prone as the rest of the nation to chomping on a cooked dogs leg. Perhaps this photo from the Seoul Times will persuade him to join the fight with me: The Stop Killing Dogs petition will be presented to the Korean officials in Seoul by the Korea Animal Rights Advocates when at least or more than 1 million signatures have been collected. And who knows. First Dog on the Moon might even do a little drawing that we can forward to the South Korean Ambassador to apply some real politiical pressure. Unless, of course, he is actually a dog meat eating Moonie.

The national poker machine party

There’s a rough justice really whenever the Anti Pokies Party Senator Nick Xenophon is responsible for thwarting the plans of the Rudd Labor Government for the Labor Party in Canberra is one of the nation’s big beneficiaries from poker machine revenue. Up until now the cash generated from the machines has gone into the coffers of the local Australian Capital Territory Branch but the prospect of a multi tens of million dollar jackpot has seen the Federal Labor authorities start muscling in. The windfall pokies payout will come from taking advantage of a provision in the constitution of clubs trading as a company under a Canberra Labor Clubs banner that makes the Labor Party, rather than the individual club members who put their hard earned through the machines, the beneficiary of any profits that result from a sale. Last year directors of these Labor Clubs determined that the best interest of the company (effectively the local Labor Party branch) would be served by finding a buyer and t

An organic food con brings on MacDonalds

I’m feeling a bit cheated this morning. I have got into the habit of buying organically grown vegetables despite the considerable extra cost over the standard alternative. I had somehow convinced myself that the price was worth paying before of the extra good they would do my ageing body. And what do i find when I do my morning survey of the world’s press. This headline all over the London Daily Telegraph : “Organic food has no added nutritional benefit, says Food Standards Agency - Expensive organic food is no better for you than conventionally-grown farm produce, according to the Government’s food watchdog.” In shock and horror I quickly moved to the quoted academic journal from the story derived in the hope that there was some cruel misinterpretation of the real findings. Alas there was no joy in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition . The authors of “Nutritional quality of organic foods: a systematic review”  — Alan D Dangour, Sakhi K Dodhia, Arabella Hayter, Elizabeth Allen,

Nothing hysterical about Alexander

Quite a fascinating interview in the media yesterday with the former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer which seemed to me to endorse the quiet diplomacy approach that Australia is adopting to the imprisonment in China of Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu. There was certainly no impression from Mr Downer that he thought the current Government should have taken the advice of current Liberal Leader Malcolm Turnbull and been more direct and bluntly critical in dealing with the communist government. On the contrary the Downer verdict was that “just because something’s big in the media, doesn’t really mean anything in Australia.” To his mind the Hu case had not changed anything in the political relationship between the two countries: Australia has a lot of very big interests in China and China has pretty big interests in Australia, so you know to be frank with you I don’t really know enough about this case and the efforts to try and find out. I haven’t made great efforts to find out, but the comp

Keeping Medibank private public

I notice that in the United States one of the four key planks of Barack Obama’s health insurance proposals is that there be a government-run insurance plan competing with private insurers to help hold down costs. Without such a public organisation the belief among Democrats is that the free enterprise way would result in excessive premiums. How strange then that within the Australian Labor Party the push continued until the eve of this week’s national conference to allow the sale of Medibank Private, the government owned insurer that I’m sure has played an important role in keeping premiums down.

Remember it is the Senate that will decide

At the risk of sounding like a broken record I write yet again that the most important truth about this Labor Government is that it is a government without the numbers to actually govern. As we ponder what will end up happening to the Australian health system we have to remember that Labor does not have the numbers in the Senate. Neither Kevin Rudd nor all of his ministers can determine the health or any other legislative outcome. The real decision about what changes we end up with will be made in the party room of the Coalition and then, if the decision is to oppose what Labor proposes, by the Greens, Family First and anti-Pokies parties.

Answering a Royal question

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It seemed a simple enough question at the time, back in last November at the opening of a new building at the London School of Economics: “Why”, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II asked the distinguished economists about the world financial crisis, “did nobody notice it?” Professor Luis Garicano, director of research at the London School of Economics’ management department, did his best. The London Daily Telegraph reported at the time that Prof Garicano told the Queen: “At every stage, someone was relying on somebody else and everyone thought they were doing the right thing.” It was hardly a startling explanation and the Monarch, whose private wealth is estimated at £320million by Forbes magazine, including a personal investment portfolio valued at £100million, appeared unimpressed. Normally not one to express a public opinion about a controversial matter she was heard to describe the turbulence on the markets as “awful”. Portfolio losses tend to affect investors with a churlishness lik

Will it be lawyers over the dining room table?

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There’s nothing like a restaurant review to bring on an entertaining defamation case, so I am following the early stages of what promises to be a lengthy saga between the Adelaide Hilton’s Grange Dining Room and the food editor for the Weekend Australian, John Lethlean, with a real voyeuristic interest. Lethlean set things rolling with a piece in the Weekend Oz that gives this restaurant a rattling good bake which I could not do justice to with just a few extracts. Read the whole thing. It’s criticism of the sharpest, cruelest and wittiest kind. And criticism made all the more upsetting for the hotel because it came on the eve of what was surely meant to be one of its night of nights. The Hilton has long promoted Cheong Liew as the face of The Grange under the slogan “Who’s cooking your dinner tonight”. And last night he accepted a lifetime achievement award from the city’s peak hospitality body, Restaurant and Catering SA. Not that the Malaysian-born celebrity chef is accepting respo

Hiding the bad news

It surely has been a long time since a new Newspoll did not make the front page of The Australian but it was relegated inside today. News so dismal for the Liberal Party, perhaps, that it was deemed too unkind to trouble the readers by giving it any prominence. To give credit though to Dennis Shanahan, the man with the unenviable job of putting a spin on figures to keep hope alive, he declared a fortnight ago that the figures were so bad that Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership was “terminal” and the fortnight before that his conclusion was that the Turnbull political career had been “smashed”. There was absolutely nothing in this latest collection of figures that would want him to change either of those previous opinions.

School league tables and property values

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Want to give your property value a bit of a push along? Then start hoping that you are in an area where your local school does well on the soon to be available student results testing tables. And if your local is down the league ladder then hop in to help the local P&C improve facilities because there’s evidence from the United States to suggest that strong public schools attract home buyers and businesses. The Baltimore Sun carried the story at the weekend of an unusual not-for-profit community organisation called the Greater Homewood Community Corporation whose executive director Karen Stokes uses public school test scores to market her community. “If the school improves, the neighborhood improves,” said Ms Stokes. “And your real estate values will improve. Even if you have no children in the school … what happens in your local school really does matter.” The very thought that the results of standardised tests like those Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard is forcing state

An old fashioned roundsman.

If it’s Monday you can look with confidence for a story featuring in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Melbourne Age breaking news about the federal health system. It has struck me several times recently when preparing the Crikey Breakfast Media Wrap at the start of each week how Mark Metherell in these Fairfax papers always seems to lead the way with health coverage. It happened again this morning with his interesting piece on how errors claim the lives of 4550 Australians a year, according to a report to the Government that urges sweeping reforms to the health system. I thought that perhaps I should prepare a little check list on who are the most reliable and interesting journalists covering some of the specialist subjects and why not start with the environment. I would appreciate the comments of Crikey readers as to who I should be looking out for. You can post a comment below or send an email to richard@politicalowl.com if you would rather your views were kept a kept a little pr

The Rudd diatribes

I wonder if Kevin Rudd really thinks that he is some kind of gifted intellectual whose views merit lengthy discourses or whether he thinks that there is a political advantage in pretending to the people that he is some kind of intellectual by producing lengthy discourses?

Gair, Adermann, Bjelke-Peterson and Killen rejected

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The dead poet has beaten the dead politicians for the honour of being given the name of Queensland’s new House of Representatives electoral division. For a second time a committee charged with drawing up the State’s electoral boundaries has recommended that the distinguished poet, Judith Arundell Wright (1915-2000) be given the nod. Back in 2006 the then-redistribution committee recommended Ms Wright’s name to the Australian Electoral Commission for a new division located in central and western Queensland. In its report out today the committee notes that following public objections, as a result of local issues at the time, the then-augmented Electoral Commission decided to change the name of the proposed new division while indicating that were it not for those local issues, there would have been no reason to change the name. The Committee says it considered the circumstances surrounding that decision “and observed that the reason for not adopting the name of “Wright” in 2006 does not a
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B an the gnome . There’s a new Nazi crime trial heading for Nuremburg and the gnome is to blame. The city’s public prosecutor’s office is conducting an investigation into the legality of German artist Ottmar Hörl displaying a garden gnome in the window of his home. An anonymous letter complained about the golden little fellow giving a Hitleresque salute. Der Spiegel quotes spokesperson Wolfgang Träg as explaining to the German press agency DPA that the display of the symbols of organisations which are banned under Germany’s constitution — such as the Nazi party — is only lawful if the organisation is being overtly criticised. “We are currently deciding whether the case of the garden gnomes is as clear cut as placards with crossed-out swastikas.”

Young doctors

A little reminder this morning that Senator Bob Brown had a life before becoming an environmental activist in Tasmania. The good Greens Leader bobbed up on Radio 2UE in Sydney to give an expert opinion, as it were, on the death of Jimi Hendrix. On that fateful day some 39 years ago, the young medical graduate from Sydney University was working as a locum in the emergency department of St Mary Abbotts Hospital in South Kensington when the body of a well-and-truly dead Hendrix was wheeled in after a drug overdose. The reason for this walk down memory lane is the publication of a new book suggesting that Hendrix was in fact murdered but Dr Brown could cast no light on this allegation. But he did confirm that the story about him disrupting a scene in a Richard Burton movie set at the same hospital was not an urban myth.

Who did he work for?

Kevin Rudd and his paid-for travels made the news this morning with details of a connection with a Taiwanese born Chinese sure to raise a few eyebrows and not just in Australia. Those nasty fellows in Beijing are also bound to be wondering even more than before about how helpful it is for them to have a Mandarin speaking Australian Prime Minister. The Rudd-Taiwan connection when he was out of political life briefly in the 1990s is surely what the press will be examining next. Who exactly did he work for as a China consultant?

WA Premier not a Sheridan believer

The West Australian Premier Colin Barnett is clearly not a Greg Sheridan disciple. In China this week on a trade mission Mr Barnett has very conspicuously shied away from making any public protest about the imprisonment of Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu. On the day when the foreign editor of the national daily writes of how galling is “the needless and sterile pro-appeasement attitude taken by those quasi-academic commentators who dominate debate about China”, Premier Barnett has said raising the case of Mr Hu with his Chinese hosts was not appropriate. It is difficult to think of anything more pro-appeasement than that. I look forward to the serve he gets tomorrow! Mr Barnett says Australia needs to continue encouraging Chinese investment in Australian projects and is banking his reputation on getting the multi-billion-dollar Oakajee Port and Rail project in the Mid West up as one of them. “ I was encouraged with meetings with Oakajee Port and Rail that understandings have been reached

The real reason now apparent

The real reason why Queensland had an early election is now apparent. The report into the Queensland police service by the Crime and Misconduct Commission would surely have been enough to turn Labor’s narrow victory into defeat coming so quickly after the criminal conviction of a senior minister for his own fund raising activities. The time has surely come for fixed term parliaments to put a stop to governments manipulating the elctoral timetable to their own advantage.

End the developer donations

As frank an admission this morning as you will ever read about the link between “paid favours in politics” and development approvals. Tucked away in The Australian was a first rate piece by Michael Owen quoting a prominent South Australian identity with almost 30 years’ experience in property development, warning of the influence of lobbyists within the Rann government, saying it is “the price you pay for getting developments through”, while lamenting the national trend of “paid favours in politics”. The time has surely come to dramatically reduce the amount spent on election campaigns in this country and hence the need for this grubby fund raising business.

Quiet diplomacy gets its chance

The quietly diplomatic method of dealing with the Chinese Government about the accusations that Rio Tinto is a briber and corrupter persists because press and politicians alike can find out nothing new to talk and write about. Not that this should be taken as indicating that the Chinese Government is any less concerned about goings on in its iron and steel industry. The People’s Daily , the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, this week wrote of several Chinese government departments, including the Ministry of Commerce and General Customs, launching investigations into the flow of imported iron ore on the market. The People’s Daily said: Industrial insiders have been urging the government to take strong action to rectify the iron ore market after the Rio Tinto “spy” case was exposed. China’s steel prices have been at low levels since they plunged in the fourth quarter of last year. Profits of iron and steel companies are under great pressure because of shrinking profits. It is