The Hobart Mercury 7 June 2011
The state government has insisted that no funds will be allocated to the North Melbourne games from the budget, so it will be interesting to see what sort of deal has been done. Football, it’s a funny old game.
The Sunday Telegraph 5 June 2011
…and you thought the Oceanic Viking was awkward. The tantalising prospect of humane slaughter would be the ultimate pull-factor for those queue-jumping illegal cow immigrants. Ban live cattle exporting to Indonesia and you just watch the bovine hordes flocking, er, herding to our shores. Stop the cows!
The Hobart Mercury, 4 June 2011
The main trouble with the Labor Party is that they retain the lingering impression that they’re meant to be the good guys. However, when you’re seriously contemplating sending child refugees to Malaysia (and let’s recall that Malaysia, like, hmmmm… Nauru, aren’t signatories to the UNHCR convention) it’s time to let that particular illusion go.
Punishing human beings who are seeking help does not fit into my personal understanding of top-shelf “Australian” behaviour. Perhaps it’s just me and my bleeding heart, but any “solution” which involves bullying vulnerable people isn’t good enough, especially when we all know the real reason is to appease the focus groups.
Yes, seeking asylum via leaky fishing boats is bloody dangerous, but the real solution is not to stop the boats by deterrence, but to stop people from needing the boats in the first place, and until that rather unlikely goal is achieved, you deal with the fact that the world can be a shitty place and do your best not to make it any shittier. A bit more complicated, granted, but that’s justice for you.
The Australian 3 June 2011
Perhaps I’m old and jaded, but the insults in Parliament these days are rubbish and nothing I’ll be reading to my kiddies.
The Australian 2 June 2011
Most of the grownups now seem to be at least publicly on the same page that climate change actually exists, so apart from the argument that nobody should do anything until somebody else does, which of course means never doing anything ever, the actual point of contention seems to be how much the carbon price per tonne should be.
If memory serves, the Greens want something around $40 and Tony of course is plumping for $0, or less if at all possible. Using the scientific principle of splitting the difference between Tony and Bob, somewhere in the vicinity of $20 looks like a fair bet, maybe a few dollars on either side depending on whether the wind’s blowing in a La Nina or El Nino direction at the time.
Politics aside, if Tony and Julia do turn out to be the last breeding pair of the human race, it’s probably best to just give another species a crack at it.