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My title may be a bit misleading, given the amount of content The Australian has devoted to concern trolling about the Labor-Greens agreement: Read more »

If the rest of the Australian mainstream media and blogosphere made as many factual errors as journalist Andrew Bolt there would barely be a handful of people left in this country who were using the Internet to read news and current affairs.

Crikey's Pure Poison outed Bolt for his latest blunder in The Herald-Sun on 31 August 2010 set out here:
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Tony Abbott, the conservative politician on the verge of becoming Australia's next Prime Minister has confessed that people should not believe something just because he said it. The only truths of his that are to be believed are those promises that he has actually written down.
And today we learn that the Australian Tony is not the only Tony who feels no guilt about telling porky pies. The long serving British Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, like Mr Abbott a man who calls himself a devout and practising Roman Catholic, has a similar attitude towards the truth. Read more »

Just when it felt safe to get back in the water, along comes this from the abacus of Antony Green over at Australia Votes 2010:

Senate Results - South Australia

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Wait, what? This doesn’t fit the right-wing talking points about independents holding the rest of us to ransom for their local electorates at all:

Mr Wilkie also revealed Opposition Leader Tony Abbott offered him almost three times as much for the Hobart hospital, but he turned it down.

“The ALP best meets my criteria that the government must be stable, competent and ethical,” he said.

As well as the $340 million for Hobart hospital, Ms Gillard has promised to open up a funding round of $1.8 billion for other hospitals.

Mr Wilkie says regional and rural hospitals should be considered as priorities in the applications for funding.

So he turned down extra funding for his local electorate on the basis of a principled stand for hospitals throughout the country? He agreed to support a party for government that wasn’t actually offering his electorate the most money, but instead made his choice on the basis of which is the least unethical option? Read more »

First stop today was Uralla. The town centre's streetscape is highlighted by the New England Highway that runs north-south through the town's business district.

A panoramic view of Uralla can be had from a lookout on Mt Mutton which is to the west of the township.

If one spends any length of time in this small township then one simply has to check out the grave of C19th bushranger Fred Ward alias "Captain Thunderbolt". Read more »

Well, we know why Tony Abbott didn’t want independent costings of his policies before the election, before punters were asked to judge him as a potential PM, or even after the election – because there’s an $11 billion hole in them. (Or $10 billion, if you’re News Ltd and incorrectly round $600 million down.)

Look, there’s some complicated smoke-and-mirrors bullshit justification for how this isn’t really as bad as it looks, but I’m not all that good with economics. Ask Robb or Joe. Read more »

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The European Space Agency has released a series of new images of Orcus Patera, a long crater near Mars's Mons Olympus whose rim rises some 6,000 feet. But the images, taken by the Mars Express craft, only deepen the mystery of the crater's origin. Read more »