I don't need to know about that bit.
- Gladys Berejiklian to Daryl Maguire
An earlier version of this post focused on the fact that the budget was announced last week, and right now there are compromises and horse-trading underway to get it passed into law, and that any member of the federal parliamentary press gallery worth their salt should be onto this and what it might mean for our country in these uncertain times.
When one major party is in government in Australia, the most significant figure of the opposing party is usually the opposition leader.
One of the most important pieces on media criticism in recent times is Richard Cooke's NewsCorp: Democracy's greatest threat. Read it if you haven't, see you when you get back.
Regular readers can take comfort in my poor record of prognostication, but for the longest time I had assumed that the NSW election would have something for everyone: a nail-biter, with the Libs losing a few marginals, the Nats losing one or two seats to the Greens and/or ShooFiFa, but basically the government would be returned for its inevitable final term (because the tensions between Liberal moderates and conservatives, now relatively mild, will only intensify as the spoils of office contr
It's not really work
It's just the power to charm
I'm still standing in the wind
But I never wave bye bye
But I try, I try ...- David Bowie Modern love
Having blown his precious first Hundred Days to define himself and his government, Scott Morrison has finally found an issue to make his own.
Our Prime Minister knows the big challenges facing the country in our time are beyond him.
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky ... Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.
- Ernest Hemingway For whom the bell tolls
I look to the future it makes me cry
But it seems too real to tell you whyFreed from the century
With nothing but memory, memoryAnd I just hope that you can forgive us
But everything must goAnd if you need an explanation
Then everything must go- Manic Street Preachers Everything must go
Michaelia Cash has overreached herself in politics, and has nowhere to go but down.
Conservatives within the Coalition should be enjoying their moment of triumph. They have negated a supposedly progressive Prime Minister and tethered him to the unpopular and disastrous policies of his conservative predecessor. They have cast off all but two of those pesky state governments, with their namby-pamby health and education and human services, and have command of the high ground of the federal government.