Category Archives: The Australian

Rebooting the franchise

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After a two and a bit weeks of frantically moving forward, Julia will now be moving forwards in a slightly different direction, or possibly in the same direction, but doing a silly walk. Or wearing a slightly eccentric hat. Details aren’t clear, but be assured it will be different in some way. More real apparently, if that helps. Maybe the difference is simply that she will be banging on a lot about how she’s doing things differently now. Anyway, expect the unexpected, though the unexpected may well be that things will remain substantially the same, which is actually what I expect, so in fact I don’t, if you follow.

The Australian, 3 August 2010

A lot of gall

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It says a lot about this election campaign that the most interesting player so far has been Kevin Rudd’s gallbladder. Okay, it’s wrong to be doing jokes about people going to hospital, but come on, the metaphorical knifing, the sneaky leaker, a spray from Mr Angry Pancreas Mark Latham, then an operation to remove an organ that stores bile? There’s probably a cartoon or two in that.

The Weekend Australian, 31 July 2010

The Hobart Mercury, 31 July 2010

How about we just stop talking about the boats for a bit?

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One of my all-time favourite cartoons is by Leunig from one of his earlier collections. It’s got two people roasting marshmallows around a campfire and one is saying to the other “What do you mean the acoustics could be better? What the hell are you talking about?” …or words to that effect. It’s funnier when you see it and comes to mind whenever Julia and Tony start banging on about boat people.

Refugees coming here by boat isn’t an ideal situation. I couldn’t agree more. Nonetheless, shit happens, and in the scheme of things, whatever you think about giving refugees a fair go, stopping the boats (or as is more likely, not stopping the boats) is going to have very little effect on our quality of life.

However, as details on stuff like climate change, health, education, industrial relations and the economy are a little abstract for a tasty sound bite, I’m sure we’ll be hearing lots more about boats in the weeks to come. We get the government we deserve, I suppose.

The Australian, 27 July 2010

Hang on, aren’t worms hermaphrodites?

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The most (and possibly only) interesting thing about last night’s debate was the clear preference of the red worm for the chick and the blue worm for the chap. While this is possibly explained by the fact that the only straight answer you could probably get out of either candidate is their gender, the demonstrable love that the electorate is showing for leaders with corresponding XX or XY chromosomes does beg the question of why neither party is openly supporting gay marriage.

The Australian, 26 July 2010

Please number your ballot paper randomly for the sake of democracy

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You have to admire the way Julia has taken the logical next step from having policy entirely driven by focus groups to simply making setting up a focus group the actual policy. While I’m sure that 150 people picked randomly out of the phonebook will definitely be able to sort out climate change in no time, there is in fact a mechanism for gauging the will of the people which we like to call an “election” and it does seem a shame not to use it, considering all the trouble people go to putting up the voting booths.

At least we’re all quite clear that Tony definitely probably might or might not think god will sort climate change out anyway with one of those floods or something depending on the direction the wind’s blowing at the time.

Both sides so far: zero out of ten. Please try harder, some of this stuff is actually quite important.

The Weekend Australian, 24-25 July 2010

The Hobart Mercury, 24 July 2010