I was getting tired, not to mention angry, at all those economists who said that governments don’t make any difference to interest rate levels, so it was a relief to hear Frank Gelber from BIS Shrapnel on ABC Radio news today. There is no reference to it on the ABC website, so I can’t link […]

I think I’m going to run a series of these. I first applied this phrase to Jenny Macklin in a post over the weekend where she was criticising the government for not implementing a budget promise when in fact they couldn’t because Labor has held the legislation up in the Senate. Now I’m sure that […]

The Liberal Party as the champion of Medicare? It sounds unlikely given decades of opposition to national health since Bill Hayden introduced Medibank, but it is not as unlikely as it looks if you understand the relationship between the medical profession and the Liberal Party. Today Howard effectively trumped Mark Latham’s announcement of a $179 […]

“Expectations management” is something that all good campaign managers do, because if electors perceive that a certain outcome is likely that will influence their vote. As a result, all smart political operators try to position as the underdog. Expectations management I noted the other day that John Howard had slipped up on his positioning when […]

I’m in the federal seat of Paterson at the moment, and as it is such a long drive from Brisbane I’ve been deprived my usual sources of news and had to even rely on commercial radio. That gives me an opportunity to at least hear and read more like a normal voter. So here goes […]

Yesterday Mark Latham signed “Labor’s Low Interest Rate Guarantee”. This was a variation on past themes from both sides of politics, and it was a mistake. In 1993, needing a weapon to blunt the tax cut component of the Hewson Fightback! package, Keating legislated his LAW Tax Cuts. The message was that you can vote […]

What would a federal election in Queensland be like without an expulsion? On my watch it was Pauline Hanson who was despatched. This time around Russell Galt is threatened with the axe. My advice to the Queensland Libs is “Don’t do it.” There were good strategic, tactical and ethical reasons for disciplining Hanson; there are […]

Accusations by Russell Galt, a former Liberal Federal Electorate Committee Chairman that Senator George Brandis called the Prime Minister a “lying rodent” over the children overboard affair shed more light on Howard’s problems with the Queensland Liberal Party than they do on what he knew and when he knew it. The accusations don’t prove that […]

John Howard says that interest rates will be higher under Labor than under him, and so journalists run out and find a bunch of experts to say that governments have little or no effect on interest rates. They could save their time, because governments do have an effect on interest rates, and even if they […]

We’ll be running a dedicated campaign blog later in the election, but for now I’m going to be doing more than my quota of posts on this blog. Election coverage requires you to do a bit more than the occasional “thought piece”, which is what this blog is primarily designed for. One of the things […]