politicalowl

Giving advice to Peter Costello is clearly a soul destroying task. His words and actions this week are those of a man acting on a whim of the moment rather than being part of a considered strategy. As his Irish ancestors might say, if I wanted to get to the Prime Ministership I would not be starting from here. Yet describing John Howard as a welshing liar is where the Treasurer is at and he now must make the best of it. On his way into this morning’s Cabinet meeting, Costello invoked the childhood advice of his parents that if you have done nothing wrong there is no harm in telling the truth. Peter, you should keep plugging away with these suggestions that Howard is an untrustworthy liar while you are an honourable and honest man. Damaging Honest John’s reputation is now a pre-requisite to getting rid of him. Most of your Coalition colleagues are angry with you this morning because they think their seats are safer with Howard as leader. Once they fear he is a loser, the anger will...

Thursday, 9th March, 2006 The gap between political-speak and the truth has grown so great that there is always surprise when a politician actually says something both unscripted and interesting. There is an immediate assumption that there has been a blunder and the minders start running around suggesting that the uttered words do not really mean what they seem to say and if they do then it was a personal view that counts for nothing. So it was yesterday as Canberra reacted to the unauthorised release of a tape recording of Government Senate Leader and Finance Minister  Nick Minchin  addressing the  HR Nicholls Society  at a private meeting on Friday night. The fragments of the speech played on ABC radio that I heard surely were not all that remarkable. Senator Minchin foreshadowed that more changes would be made to industrial relations law if the Coalition Government won again. It would seek a mandate for those changes at the next election. He expressed some ne...

Friday, 3rd March, 2006 Experts. They bob up on the television news and talk shows every night. Without the talking heads, ABC radio would find it impossible to fill in the hours. We watch them endlessly and hear them pontificate on what will happen to interest rates, to growth, to John Howard and George Bush, the likely developments in Iraq, China and Timbuctoo. On thousands upon thousands of websites around the world - including this one - people with more (and sometimes less) knowledge than me set out to explain what is happening and predict what will happen. And what is all this expert opinion worth? Well, according to a recently published book by by Philip Tetlock, the Mitchell Professor of Leadership at the University of California, Berkeley, the answer is not much. After years of research, during which he worked with almost 300 experts known for commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends, Prof Tetlock concluded: when you compare the aggregate accuracy of ex...

Thursday, 2nd February, 2006 Measuring political spin is the latest tool for followers of politics. Professor David Skillicorn of Canada's Queens University used a new computer algorithm to study speeches during the country's recent election campaign. Prof Skillicorn found that defeated Prime Minister Paul Martin, of the Liberal Party, spun the subject matter of his speeches dramatically more than Conservative Party leader, Stephen Harper, and the New Democratic Party leader, Jack Layton. According to a report on the New Scientists website, "spin", in this case, is defined as “text or speech where the apparent meaning is not the true belief of the person saying or writing it”. Prof Skillington and his team analysed the usage patterns of 88 deception-linked words within the text of recent campaign speeches from the political leaders. They then determined the frequency of these patterns in each speech, and averaged that number over all of that candidate’s speeches....

Monday, 24th October, 2005 Free drinks distributed by politicians seeking votes in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh killed 19 people in two days because the alcohol was laced with insecticides and other potent chemicals. Government spokesman Narendra Sinha described the scenes in Gorakhpur, 155 miles south-east of Lucknow, as "a free for all" in which five people died with 20 more made seriously ill. "Villagers came in hordes to have free alcohol and food." said Mr Sinha. "Within hours, people started vomiting. Before they could be shifted to hospital five persons died." Two days earlier 14 people had similarly died in two separate villages after being served spurious alcohol.

Monday, 1st August 2005    - Richard Farmer   With the Senate about to meet for the first time with its new members, a little reminder about the piece we wrote back in December entitled  Blackmailers in the Ranks  where we described blackmailers outside the Coalition being replaced with blackmailers within it. What we will see in the coming years, we argued then, is not a Senate where the executive can ride roughshod over democracy but a Senate where the power has shifted from third forces like the Greens and the Democrats to backbench Government Senators. Prime Minister John Howard clearly understands what the "new" Senate regime will be like because his political memory goes back to those days of his boyhood when Senators Reg Wright and Ian Wood crossed the floor regularly on points of principle. That is why Mr Howard is taking the trouble to be extremely cooperative towards the new representative of the Family First Party even though that newcome...

Monday, 27th June, 2005    - Richard Farmer   Politicians retiring voluntarily while at the top are a rare breed but National Party Leader and Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson joined their ranks this week. The timing of his decision to return to the farm at Gunnedah might have caught the members of the fourth estate napping but the decision itself came as no surprise. It was in fact very well previewed. Which reminded us of the last such high ranking minister who really did surprise the pundits of the press when he handed in his badge without even a whisper before hand. The only reason we mention John Dawkins and his retirement as Paul Keating's Treasurer is that he has since become an Eden Valley grape grower and it was a pleasure to sample the other day a chardonnay which St Hallett's largely made from his 2003 crop. So impressed were we that 2006 will see grapes from the very same vineyard turned in to one of our very own single vineyard wines. ...