You’ve hit on a chronic and very serious defect in both sides of government in Australia: they’re overstuffed with lawyers.

Of course it is good to have accomplished lawyers contribute their experience to the making of legislation …. but do we need so many lawyers in our parliaments that other groups and classes are are d*mned-near excluded and we end up with homogeneous parliaments that come up with homogenous laws?

The last things we need, if we are to survive this Depression and its inevitable aftermath, are homogenous parliaments chock-a-block full of those afflicted with group-think.

Turnbull’s uninspired shadow ministry line-up shows it will just be more of the same. Hardly what would inspire our confidence in Turnbull as an alternative Prime Minister in this time of perilous crises.

So that’s what the politicians, senior public servants and **** Court judges get up to when they know we’re not looking. I’ve always wondered.

No. I was thinking of the real decision-makers, the ones who change our lives and our livlihood over a bowl of spicy gongbaojiding and a plate of the finest jiaozi ever made.

Everyone:

I would like to remind you that both Costello and Nelson are still in this Parliament. As the saying goes “The Devil finds work for idle hands”.

Failing to give top priority to attending skilfully and appropriately to both men – and especially to both their aspirations and their potential – will eventually finish off Turnbull, not today or tomorrow but perhaps even before the Liberal Party itself has collapsed in a heap. It’s too late now for him to do anything about his grave omission.

Yeah, Adrien, but Abbott was one of Turnbull’s biggest boosters – or Nelson’s biggest underminers if you want to put it that way.

Methinks he would be leader sometime. He suffers from the delusion that Howard’s one time popularity had something to do with his reactionary sexism when all the time it was his reactionary racism that was the key. Anyway such a fellow’s akin to badly secured artillery equipment. Best to let him roll around down in the pits with the rest of the plebs.

Gold Coast dude/arts.
Arts/Gold Coast dude.

Go and have another latte. You’re so out of touch with the salted Earth of this country. The Gold Coast is one big work of Art. It’s a 3D version of The Jetsons. It’s of a place a 1000 kilometres closer to equator than they are called: Witeloafer City.
.
Drop acid sometime and go for a walk ’round Surfers: hilarious!

Bishop, Hockey, Dutton, Pyne, Robb, Keenan, Ciobo, Ronaldson. All these persons have been successful in their lives and they know what management is about

With the exception of Dutton (cop) and Robb (economist/interest group boss), all the rest have made careers as political hacks with the obligatory stint as a lawyer, haven’t they? I don’t know about the last three. They’re rather obscure. Hiding their lights under a bushel no doubt.

What did you have in mind, if you’ll pardon the expression ?

Hmmmm. So the chair-shuffling in the House of Rubber Stamps may be a petty distraction from the main power game then?

Mark:

There are a few talented people in the new Shadow Ministry but as for the rest, well ….

If, as I’ve been predicting for ages, the Liberal Party follows the United Australia Party into oblivion, sooner rather than later, …. does that mean it will be the National Party that becomes the actual Opposition and forms the Shadow Ministry from its own members and from the herd of former Liberals on the cross-benches?

Therese quietly shut down the foundation in May, concerned about potential conflicts of interest with her husband’s political career. I guess the foundation’s CEO would have been a bit busy with his new billion dollar day job to concentrate on the philanthropy gig, so it’s a good thing that Therese then shut it down.
My point: Michael Johnson, (and Therese Rein BTW), may very well be Malcolm’s type of people. That forum of Michael’s had China’s richest man on the speakers list, and Clive Palmer, and you’ll find Michael Johnson is the only person from Australia invited to the Fortune Global Forum ( as in Fortune 500) they hold every year in china, so maybe Michael Johnson doesn’t care too much about crappy domestic issues, and doesn’t see himself as a loser for not getting a portfolio. Malcolm will understand, and give him time off.

Well, there you go ….

Given this line-up of talent, Nelson was very wise to deline a seat on the front bench.

Elsewhere, I mischeviously suggested that Rudd might offer Nelson a ministry [highly unlikely but not impossible] …. now that the shadow ministry has been announced, has the remote likelihood of that come an inch or two closer?

Shadow ministry? Why do I keep thinking of Akira Kurosawa’s epic film “Kagemusha” ["Shadow Warrior"]? They have nothing at all in common, do they?

Noticed that Michael Johnson, the MHR for Ryan [in the leafy suburbs on the western side of Brisbane], didn’t score a guernsey as Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration. Next time perhaps?