August 23, 2010
A minority government must have the confidence of the House; how many people voted for it or what was their two party preferred vote is constitutionally irrelevant.
Read more...August 19, 2010
Tony is a fine, committed, principled and loyal Australian. While that does not mean Australians should vote for him, their vote should in no way be coloured by any misrepresentation about his character and competence.
August 16, 2010
Only a Royal Commission can get to the bottom of the biggest financial scandal in our history. So why doesn’t Julia Gillard want one?
Read more...August 7, 2010
After an extraordinarily rushed hearing in time for the election on 21 August, the High Court has upheld the GetUp! challenge to changes to the Electoral Act made in 2006 under the previous government.
Read more...August 6, 2010
Julia Gillard has announced she will now campaign as the real Julia Gillard. Her citizen's assembly tells us exactly what she remains, committed to a powerful state and an obedient citizenry who will pay and pay generously for all her plans and programmes.
Read more...August 3, 2010
The publication by WikiLeaks of details of Afghan informers is a serious breach of national security. Julia Gillard is bound to pressure President Obama into taking firm action to prevent further disclosure and to punish this treacherous act.
Read more...August 1, 2010
It seems that 100,000 people, who couldn’t be bothered to get on to the roll in time for an election curiously waited until the rolls closed then rushed the AEC to register, and then meticulously did so before the seven days had expired. This is curious behaviour indeed.
Read more...July 23, 2010
Predictions of a Labor victory on 21 August do not take sufficient account of one factor. Through their mismanagement and impropriety, the Rudd Gillard governments have achieved something worthy – the revival of federalism as a political force.
July 11, 2010
Answering questions like a Radio Moscow announcer, Julia Gillard seems impervious to robust and sceptical media analysis. The gallery could learn from 4BC’s Michael Smith on how to interview the head of the second government in three years to lose its way.
Read more...June 29, 2010
Kevin Rudd unleashed the federalism genie in the mining states, and Julia Gillard's only hope of neutralising this is by abandoning the super profits tax. And Madame $5 Billion will only regain her credibility by agreeing to a Royal Commission into the biggest financial scandal in the nation's history, the BER rort.
Read more...June 8, 2010
If returned, on their record the Russ-Gillard politburo will bring in two great big new taxes, the ETS and the super profits tax, borrow without control and waste the proceeds. They will damage our country in a way no government, even the Whitlam government, has ever achieved before.
Read more...June 2, 2010
Critics of Israel ought to ask themselves this. What would they expect their government to do if thousands of rockets rained down on their cities, with hundreds of suicide bombers unleashing their evil on buses and trains and in crowded streets?
Read more...May 17, 2010
The government managed to hide from most Australians the fact that if the budget does go into surplus in 2012, there will still be a massive debt of around $100 billion. That is why it is eying the mining industry to pay at least the interest.
Read more...May 3, 2010
This government has wasted billions of dollars and put us into debt. Their massive incompetence means taxpayers have to pay billions of dollars in interest each year and somehow repay the capital. And what is there to show for this?
Read more...April 27, 2010
The long awaited release of the Henry Tax Review will reveal Canberra'splans to plunder the wealth of Western Australia and Queensland. Instead Canberra should give the States back their money. A Convention to restore the Federation as the people intended may be the best way to achieve this.
Read more...March 29, 2010
Perhaps the profligacy and lack of control in government programmes was deliberate. Perhaps Rudd and Gillard were only following Keynesian economic policy. After all, they kept us out of recession....didn’t they?
March 11, 2010
The Rudd hospital plan was clearly not shown to constitutional experts before it was announced, which suggests that, like so many others, it is just another poorly conceived back-of-the-envelope proposal.
Read more...February 23, 2010
The danger for the government is that its distinguishing features seem to be captured by the acronym PIP - Profligacy, Incompetence, and Panic. If the Howard battlers agree, a second term is no longer assured.
February 14, 2010
Those in the media who say get rid of Barnarby are out of touch. Barnaby and Tony are just the sort of people the public want.
Read more...January 5, 2010
The Blackwater case will be seen around the world as an imperialist US protecting the killers of innocent Iraqis. In fact it is the result of a criminal justice system more concerned with the perpetrators of crime than its victims.
December 21, 2009
The Victorian Attorney-General’s word changes do not address the real problems of declining law and order and an effectively inaccessible civil law system.
Read more...December 14, 2009
It is bad enough when politicians refer to "the" science, but the Prime Minister of Australia demeaned his high office when he not only called those who question his infallibility “dangerous”, he went on to libel them with a totally unjustified smear.
Read more...December 7, 2009
The commentariat wrote off Tony Abbott but now they have egg on their faces over the weekend by-elections. In just a few days he has changed the debate. And the electors like what they see.
Read more...December 1, 2009
The choice of Tony Abbott as leader is a victory for common sense. He showed that in his first decision, which was to hold a secret ballot. The party then sensibly decided not to accept the government ultimatum to pass the ETS for the sole purpose of allowing Kevin Rudd to boast about it at Copenhagen.
Read more...November 28, 2009
Opinion is never set in aspic, as Fightback, Cheryl Kernot’s defection and the initial reaction to referendum proposals demonstrate. Scientific fraud, predictions not coming true and a strong and principled Liberal leader- not Joe Hockey - will see to this.
Read more...November 27, 2009
With the collapse of the Rudd-Turnbull coalition, the Liberal Party must choose a new leader from Liberals of principle, not another deputy to Kevin Rudd.
Read more...November 23, 2009
Voters are crying out for a leader to expose the useless and damaging Rudd-Wong ETS and to provide strong border protection. Tony Abbott’s time is coming.
Read more...November 13, 2009
Terry McCrann points out the Rudd government is on the way to, or has already become, worse than Whitlam’s. For more than 30 years he says, the Whitlam government has been “the -- unsurpassable -- benchmark for bad government in Australia.”
Read more...November 3, 2009
Unless Mr. Turnbull turns his back on the doctors’ wives of Wentworth, he will remain Mr. Rudd’s principal defence.
Read more...October 13, 2009
The Liberal leadership should stop being afraid and welcome a double dissolution, using the opportunity to expose the global warming fundamentalists.
Read more...September 29, 2009
But for John Howard, East Timor would not be free. So why was the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Kofi Annan and the UN? Was it because of Howard’s refusal to go along with the hijacking of the Tampa?
Read more...September 22, 2009
Mr Rudd’s honeymoon has survived that of even President Obama – why? It is surely not a question of superior charisma.
Read more...August 25, 2009
The Liberals should welcome a double dissolution and turn it into a referendum on the ETS, which has absolutely nothing to do with halting global warming and everything to do with damaging the living standards of the Australian people.
Read more...July 16, 2009
Why do the elites so fervently pray for an ETS? What happened to common sense?
Read more...July 6, 2009
Isn’t it time the gallery got over its love affair with Kevin Rudd? “Working families” will eventually realise they have been fed a diet of spin, and that will not be good for the future of a free press.
Read more...June 22, 2009
President Obama was using an autocue in Cairo, but the media tried to hide it. This is testimony of a wider malaise.
Read more...May 25, 2009
Kevin Rudd has only a short window for a double dissolution election early next year – and the result is not guaranteed.
Read more...May 18, 2009
The retention of military commission trials at Guantanamo Bay shows how unrealistic much of the Democrat campaign was. George W Bush and John Howard are vindicated.
Read more...May 15, 2009
A model in economic management eighteen months ago, Australia seems to be on the way to becoming a banana republic. What went wrong?
Read more...May 4, 2009
When the ACCC pursued Richard Pratt to the end, were they acting as a model litigant as the government requires? Was the criminal prosecution harsh and oppressive? How was it related to their campaign to have Parliament criminalise cartel offences? Only an independent judicial inquiry can answer these and other questions.
Read more...April 20, 2009
Kevin Rudd should follow the example of the Chifley government and take full control of our refugee intake. The government should stop queue jumping - the risk to people’s lives, including our sailors’, is too great.
Read more...April 17, 2009
The government and its advisors do not know what to do about the financial crisis, but feel they must do something, however foolish. This is a tragedy; a tragedy for which we and our children will pay.
Read more...March 30, 2009
Is the Prime Minister’s wish to strut the world stage damaging to our national interest? Is Australia paying too high a price for Prime Minister’s thespian ambitions?
Read more...March 6, 2009
With increasing welfare dependency, the obliteration of memory and rule by judges, the elites are seriously damaging our way of life.
Read more...February 24, 2009
The socialisation of dentistry will be as much a disaster as the socialisation of medical practice, hospitals and universities has been. The elites know it, but this will give them wealth, more power, and the votes of a growing client class.
Read more...February 16, 2009
From bushfires to shark attacks and with an aversion to spending on economic infrastructure, why do our politicians follow the agenda set by our green inner city elites?
Are they gullible, corrupt or just afraid?
Read more...February 9, 2009
Not since Whitlam has a government been so profligate. The latest, a massive $42 billion package with a $200 billion line of credit, is demonstrably the worst thing a government could do. It is elementary that it will do little to counter the recession, but every cent will have to be repaid – not by the Rudd government, but by the Australian people.
Read more...February 3, 2009
Kevin Rudd, a fiscal conservative for the election campaign, has revealed himself to be an unreconstructed Whitlamite. When he could not go to Davos, Ms. Gillard implicitly heaped praise on the one man who probably knows what to do, Peter Costello.
As Kevin Rudd fritters away the surplus, and even plans to borrow against the future to continue this folly, it is time for Peter Costello to go to the front bench.
Read more...February 1, 2009
While the Prime Minister accuses free market capitalism of being an emperor without clothes. But that is how the former NSW Labor Treasurer seems to see the prime minister. The government does not know what to do about the economic crisis. Its answer is just to spend. Already next year’s budget deficit is predicted to be $40 billion- approaching one half of Keating’s debt which Howard and Costello took years to pay off.
Read more...January 29, 2009
It is surely time for so many in the media to stop campaigning for the governments they were so determined to put into office. They should go back to their duty which is, as The Times declared so long ago, to obtain the best intelligence of the time and make it the common property of the nation.
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