The Hobart Mercury 8 October 2011

After spending all its money on racetracks, football teams, spin doctors, car racing, various consultants, ex gratia payments, designing new hospitals with water views that were never going to be built, and of course Gunns, the Tasmanian state government no longer has any money to throw away on frivolities like health. The logical federal government response to this is naturally to further cut funding to teach the state government a lesson.

Remember when Kevin was going to take over the health system entirely? What happened to that idea?

The Australian 8 October 2011

The only politicians who aren’t after their leader’s job are either (a) already the leader or (b) not really politicians. They are all power-hungry megalomaniacs in the same way that all political cartoonists are emotionally insecure sociopaths.

The trick is of course to never actually openly acknowledge this (the megalomania that is, cartoonists need as much kindness and understanding as they can get) as then it all gets a bit awkward.

This might seem a bit silly, but as politics is pretty much the science of avoiding directly mentioning the bleeding obvious in order to minimise unpleasantness, it’s actually quite a good test of who should get the top job.