When I first heard about Kristina Keneally as Premier of NSW, the compaison seemed unavoidable: attractive, 40-ish, religious, conservative, dedicated mother, and although relatively inexperienced, suddenly shot to high attention in a role of great importance by mighty powerbrokers. But having now read a bit about her and spoken to a Green leftie friend from […]

#Higgins and #Bradfield will give Abbott a positive boost in his leadership and should significantly change the terms of the AGW debate. There has been a number of byelections caused by the Opposition since they lost office in 2007. Mayo and Lyne were both similar to this one in that the ALP did not contest. […]

(Cross posted from What the people want) Only 38% of Australians favour passing the government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) before the Copenhagen climate summit, with 46% opposed. 42% of Australians are absolutely opposed to the CPRS, while only 40% support it. This is the quantitative result of our online survey of 1022 Australians […]

(Cross posted from What the people want) If they had a vote in the Liberal Parliamentary Party room Malcolm Turnbull would be the favoured choice of most Australians. Their second choice would be Peter Costello who resigned from parliament yesterday. After preferences Turnbull would have won 59% of the vote. We ran a virtual ballot […]

Memo to Malcolm Turnbull: you can’t do government from opposition. Good opposition leaders know it is not their job to produce comprehensive policy. That is the job of government. Not only does government have the resources to research policy properly, and to turn it into legislation, but it is the entity that needs to be […]

Political parties that lack professionalism can only win by luck. On the evidence from the McPherson preselection, the Liberal Party should hope it has a lot of luck, because it is completely lacking in professionalism. The whole thing was a debacle from start to finish. Here is a list of the basic errors made by […]

The Preventative Health Taskforce has just delivered its report to the government and recommends increasing the price of tobacco. Sounds more or less reasonable to me on economic principles, except that I do know that demand for tobacco is “inelastic”, which is a fancy way of saying it doesn’t respond well to price signals. Then […]

What’s in the movies isn’t always true or pretty, but sometimes it is true and ugly. And you come out kind of reeling with the relief that you don’t have to live in that narrative. So it was with Gomorrah, a fictionalised documentary about the Naples Comorrah mafia. It would be hard to find a […]

The release of Malcolm Turnbull’s “Greener, Cheaper, Smarter ETS” puts the seal on his demise. You can explain Utegate away as a bizarre, once-in-a-lifetime accident, but the idea that you fight the government’s ETS by producing one of your own, is complete incompetence. Apart from anything else, with his credibility, undeservedly, in tatters over a […]

John Pilger has been awarded this year’s Sydney Peace Prize. John is a frequent contributor to On Line Opinion via material that we republish from his website, often at his suggestion. The media release of the announcement says: Examples of his work include an account of the British and American governments’ secret ‘mass kidnappings’ of […]