Mungo MacCallum (Dec’d)

John Howard has been exhumed as the great grey hope and is being paraded among the marginal electorates to enthuse the faithful and woo the undecided – assuming, that is, that they know who he is, or at least was.   (more…)

Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of the quest for untold, unearned wealth. Treasure Island, was also an acute observer of politics. He once declared: “Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.”  (more…)

The enduring image of the week was that of our prime minister bouncing a soccer ball on his head. Or possibly vice versa.   (more…)

For most voters, the issue is both too remote and too complicated – apparently there are different kinds of water, different ways of “harvesting” them (whatever that means), elaborate regulations about selling the stuff, deciding what to do with it and evaluating the outcomes – and all of that before we have to discuss the ethics of paying a large fortune to deliberately anonymous British tax avoiders based in a secretive tax haven half a world away.   (more…)

A short week of campaigning and an even shorter one to come – which is perhaps why the temperature has ramped up to almost febrile levels.   (more…)

The final jobs for the boys and girls have been squared away, the pointless tit for tat over taxpayer advertising and who is closer to the Chinese have been shelved, and Melissa Price has obediently signed off on Adani, as ordered by the Queensland Nats.   (more…)

According to ScoMo , electric cars are for wimps and latte sippers – real Australians want more grunt. Oink oink, vroom vroom! Wheelies, doughnuts, burnouts!   (more…)

A somewhat exasperated Bill Shorten accuses Scott Morrison of playing games over the election date – and so he is. (more…)

There was at least one moment of relief after the election spiel masquerading as a budget; the decision exclude the energy supplement hand out from the New Start allowance was reversed in less than twelve hours. (more…)

Let’s be clear about the Al Jazeera sting against One Nation: the drunken braggarts who fell for it deserved all they got and more. (more…)

On the eve of the crucial budget, the trailing coalition government finally had a shred of hope: New South Wales.  The fairly comfortable re-election of Gladys Berejiklian following nail-biting opinion polls gave them the hope that perhaps their own leader – a fellow Cornstalker, no less – could pull off the same trick. A last minute swing, delivering an improbable victory.  (more…)

Scott Morrison would have been happier and clappier than usual when he went to his Horizon Pentecostalist Church last Sunday. (more…)

It didn’t take long for the cultural warriors of the right to revert to form. (more…)

It is not clear who said it first, but it quickly became a catchcry of the long-lived government of Bob Hawke: the mob will always work you out. (more…)

“When the people smugglers see me, they see a brick wall,” boasted our great war leader.

Well, up to a point; they certainly see someone as thick as a brick and far less transparent and straightforward. But most Australians see him more like a hole in the air – a political vacuum feverishly trying to present himself as authentic  by relying on the constant repetition of the mantra he adopted from Alan Jones, “fair dinkum.” (more…)

I think it was in 1969 I first predicted that the Country Party (as the Nationals were then called) would wither away.   (more…)

Scott Morrison may be shedding minister like the early leaves of autumn, but, as usual, there are distractions – and for once he can be profoundly grateful.   (more…)

The imminent retirement of Christopher Pyne, christened the mincing poodle by Julia Gillard and the most irritating person in Australia by just about everyone else, is not just another deserter from the sinking ship.  (more…)

A slur, a smear, grubby tactics, thundered the outraged ScoMo. Labor is getting down into the mud. (more…)

So that was the great female hope of the Liberal Party that was. Julie Bishop, the only conservative who ever got to a bull’s roar of the Lodge, ( the ambitions of her namesake Bronwyn were nevermore than megalomaniac fantasy) has decided to retire her shoes – which most of the media thought was by far her most important attribute — home to Perth.   (more…)

In the world of marketing, there are no such things as losses – only opportunities; and Scott Morrison, if he is nothing else, is a dedicated marketeer. (more…)

Coalition in new year bounce, screamed The Australian ecstatically. Well, not all that much of a bounce – the latest Newspoll showed that the government’s position had improved from catastrophic to merely awful.  (more…)

If you take half the water out of a river, it will affect the river. (more…)

Warren Mundine is a serious politician. For most of his life he has been a player in the great game, either directly or more often and perhaps more effectively indirectly, through working in and around his community.

His campaigns have not always been successful but he has a solid record of achievement in both advocacy and business. Under normal circumstances he would be seen as a worthy and effective candidate for parliament.   (more…)

Unlike the National Party’s deputy leader. Bridget McKenzie, our Prime Minister presumably knows that James Cook and Arthur Phillip were not the same person.

They may have both been dead white male sailors serving the mad King George III, but they did so in different times and different places. Even Scott Morrison learnt that much at school.

And he probably also knows that Cook did not actually circumnavigate Austraiia. But what the hell, he could have if he’d wanted to – and this close to Australia Day, why waste a marketing opportunity?   (more…)

However strenuously our Prime Minister insists that he is talking quietly and respectively to constituents about the real issues that concern them, the real ScoMo always lurches shoutily into the headlines.

Last week, barely emerging from an estivation all too brief for the weary voters, Morrison the Marketeer flung himself straight into the culture wars, parading what he imagined was his patriotic authenticity but which looked more like just another episode of dog whistling and wedge politics.   (more…)