Blogotariat

I know, I know, all those of you who didn’t already think I was certifiable have just joined the cult.

A little over a year ago I said in multiple fora that I think we’re heading to another hung parliament result in 2013.

I still think that. I am unmoved. 14 billion in additional spending on public education, a national disability insurance scheme, poll after poll saying the Coalition is going to romp it in and I am utterly unmoved.

Sloppy Joe Hockey’s 15 biggest Press Club furphies

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Greiner, a former proud dispenser of the addictive poison tobacco to teenagers (including, I am told, his children), has been removed for corruption, again, or maybe just for being a raging, hubristic pest.

12.40 pm

At the rainswept Sydney Writers’ Festival. I meet in the big theatre foyer Maxine McKew who offers her hand, then, confused at my outstretched arms, kisses me. She is pleased she will be played in the Rudd miniseries by Miranda Otto, not having thought, in her shy, self-diminishing way, that she might be in the narrative at all. I strive to get a cancelled ticket for her session (usually someone dies between booking and performance) but there are none, and I go, as planned, to The Origins Of Sex with the sleek young Anglo-Indian historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala and Richard Glover. More to come

The Lucky Culture
By Nick Cater
HarperCollins | $29.99

As I said a few months ago, tax evasion is the big cliff in terms of the future of the EU project. It was thus fascinating to see the tax evasion games played out at the latest ‘summit’ In Brussels yesterday.

Follow @madwixxy

By now you have probably heard that Craig Thomson was in court in Melbourne yesterday.

You have probably read how there were 19 new charges laid against him, and that this time his wife Zoe was not there to support him. All of these things are true, but there is more that you probably haven’t read in the main stream media.

I’ll try to fill in the gaps.

For starters the 19 new charges, you probably don’t know what they are.

Joe Hockey thinks Treasury's budget figures are 'Wayne Swan’s numbers'. Attacks on public servants are not new but this recent talk about a politicised Treasury is nonsense, writes Ben Eltham

Ford have just announced that it will cease Australian manufacturing operations after 2016.

FORD will cease producing vehicles in Australia from October 2016, in a move that will cost 1200 jobs.

Ford Australia boss Bob Graziano announced the closure of the car-maker’s Broadmeadows and Geelong plants in Victoria while unveiling a $141 million after-tax loss for 2012-13 year, making losses of $600 million over the last five years.

In Asia, high-speed fibre broadband is seen as an enabler, not an expensive drain on the public purse. Gabrielle Jackson compares the top networks in the region

CEO Bob Graziano of Ford Australia announced this morning that they will be closing operations in Geelong and Broadmeadows, resulting in Ford being an import only Australian brand.

“We will cease our manufacturing operations in October 2016,” Graziano said.

“Manufacturing is not viable for Ford in Australia in the long term.”

AN UGLY brawl erupted last Sunday outside a restaurant in Beijing’s Ghost Street entertainment area. Windows were smashed and people bloodied after itinerant pedlars reportedly clashed with the owners of a popular eatery. It was one of the estimated five hundred “mass incidents” across China each day.