Category: Politics
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When Mr Keating Came to Town
Just a quick note, on current matters. Paul Keating will be feeling pleased with himself. He’s managed to distress a number of luvvies, media and otherwise, with his remarks at the National Press Club in Canberra on Tuesday. He even got a reprimand from the prime minister for daring to say that diplomacy was about…
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Don’t Expect to be Excited
AUSTRALIAN POLITICS | ELECTION 2022 Tuesday, Apr. 5, 2022 Sooner or later, this week or next, Scott Morrison will make his prime ministerial trip out to Yarralumla on the lake in Canberra, to ask the Governor-General to authorise a half-Senate and full House of Representatives election. So runs the form, and such is the constitutional…
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Bursting Balloons and Other Party Tricks
AUSTRALIAN POLITICS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS Tuesday, Mar. 22, 2022 With an extra 2.1 percent in their pockets, courtesy of the biannual indexation of the age pension and payable from Mar. 20, older Australians will have been celebrating, won’t they? Just asking. The increase was eaten up a long time ago, in higher food and petrol…
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A Land of Droughts and Flooding Rains
POLITICS and CURENT AFFAIRS Tuesday, Mar. 8, 2022 Dorothea Mackellar wrote the poem My Country in 1908, from which the lines here – surely the most quoted – are taken: I love a sunburnt country,A land of sweeping plains,Of ragged mountain ranges,Of droughts and flooding rains.I love her far horizons,I love her jewel-sea,Her beauty and…
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Rocking, rolling, riding. Oops!
AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022 Political train wrecks come in many sizes. Some are insignificant, merely foot in mouth derailments or negligent slow collisions with the bumpers at the end of the line. Some are the full catastrophe, ripping up the rails and plunging off the trestle bridge into the ravine far below. Scott…
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Do Yourself a Favour, Gladys
Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2021 I have some sympathy for former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, as, I think, would many people who implicitly understand that no one is perfect, least of all themselves. She did the right thing – eventually – when the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) named her as a person of interest…
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Let Him Eat Cake
RICHARD LAIDLAW Book Review IT must be very difficult being a political satirist these days. So many politicians, to a man and woman, get underfoot with plots that would outdo a Goon Show episode and leave their writers wringing their hands in frustration: Why couldn’t we think of that? So we owe a deep…
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The Bludge Report
HECTOR’S DIARY Titbits from his regular diet of worms VASSE, Western Australia Monday, Jul. 2, 2018 WE are, we’ve told friends, having a bit of a bludge. One of them very kindly said we deserved to do this. Many others, perhaps, just shrugged, Atlas-like or otherwise. Some others among them may have…
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Barely Aware
HECTOR’S DIARY Titbits from his regular diet of worms THE CAGE Bali, Monday, Jun. 4, 2018 THE practice among some western tourists here of going around in their beachwear well away from the beach has caused comment before, among the Balinese themselves though they are polite people and chiefly keep silent, and…
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The Doolally Squad
HECTOR’S DIARY Titbits from his regular diet of worms The Cage, Bali Sunday, May 20, 2018 IT’S hard to know what to write about the Surabaya bombings. Doubtless there are those who would advise against writing anything about them. But that won’t do. Perhaps we could start by saying that at least…
8degreesoflatitude 