I don't feel like writing a lot tonight, Too much to do, so just a few things.
This photo from Gordon Smith is simply entitled Red-necked wallabies.
It's not one of his best photos in a technical sense, but i do think that it captures the relationship between mother and child.
Here in Australia, the latest opinion polls suggest that that the fall in support for the PM among men has dragged total ALP support down to close to a new low. To my knowledge, this scale of gender polarisation is unusual in Australian politics. Even my Labor feminist female friends who greeted the now famous misogyny speech with such glee have been generally silent on the latest speech.
In the meantime Kevin, I will come back but only if you ask me nicely, Rudd has been out trying to woo the electorate and his caucus colleagues.
Today he came to 
Seriously Kevin, I know that Therese picks your ties, but what were your thinking?! On a day in Canberra when the colour of men's ties is being so closely scrutinised, couldn't you think?
Talking to eldest tonight, she said (and I paraphrase a little) that she would like to give them all a good spanking. She is not alone in that view.
Perhaps Mummy Wallaby above should be given a broader training role!
Maybe I am getting a little jaundiced at the moment: Labor is imploding over tie colours; the Liberals want to excise Australia from anything that might be perceived as a danger to Australia, even if it means relocating the continent to another planet; the Greens want to ban anything that might offer danger even if the ban creates more dangers; Clive Palmers Palmer United (Australia) Party appears to be wrestling over basic questions such as who will fund the corporate jet; and so it goes on.
Sorry, but in the meantime, a few of us are interested in basic but perhaps trivial question. Like, for example, where you are taking or want to take the country. Get real, that's all I can say. Please tell us, so that we can discuss.
Is that too much to ask? If you don't tell us, we might be forced to think for ourselves. And then where would you be?
4 comments:
That comment was made using my husband's Gmail account up there...I thought you might wonder who "Count Skogg" was...
Anyway, yes, they all need a good spanking, and no it's not too much to ask that they tell us what they hope for this country.
I don't think there is any doubt where the Coalition would like to take the country; it wants to wind back some of the daft, lunatic and ruinous policies of the Rudd / Gillard administrations ... ill-conceived policies that seek to destroy the reformist achievements of the Hawke / Keating / Howard years (e.g. the re-regulation of the labour market). Many of these policies had minimal operational content (e.g. the NBN, asylum seekers) or cannot possibly be fully funded or delivered for years hence (e.g. the NDIS - although the Coalition has been wedged on this). The Coalition wants to give the country half a chance by abandoning an idiotic carbon price that bears no relation to that prevailing in the EU with which we are supposed to be linked in 2015 when we are meant to morph into an ETS. Much of this may be difficult to unscramble, but I'd say it's a pretty clear agenda.
DG
Hi LE aka Count Skogg! I wondered if I was being too jaundiced?
Hi DG. For discussion, not argument.
The IR policy received very mixed reviews. I couldn't work out properly whether or not it was another small target example or a very clever manipulation of what was. I haven't worked my way through the detail to develop a fully formed view. But I would agree that we need more labor market flexibility. The devil here lies in the detail.
On the NBN, I disagreed with some of the elements in Mr Turnbull's formulation, while stop the boats is not a workable policy! On carbon pricing, I'm inclined to think that the better option (I am not convinced by the Coalition's direct action agenda) would be to leave it in place, but modify.
No doubt we will learn more as time proceeds, but I have argued that Canberra is presently something of a policy free zone. Looking at the debate around the budget, I have a strong impression of policy convergence and indeed lock-in a la NDIS.
There are lots of things I don't know about coalition policy including whether they have a working regional development policy and their real attitudes to fixing the now creaking and overloaded Federal system.
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