Comments on: Rudd's ratings come down to earth; but he shouldn't worry

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:48:16 +0000

The Government in Australia, (Don’t know if it’s always 100% Labour) has been stuffing with Australians for years, and mostly the one’s living in the countryside, why you ask? Because fewer voters out there, so less able to defend themselves. Big cities pull in the most votes. Here are some simple Examples for you. [Snipped for excessive length. From the LP Comments Policy - Unacceptable Behaviour: "* Excessively long comments, which break up the give and take of discourse. Please post such screeds on your own blog and post a summary in comments with a link to your own post. Rule of thumb: think hard before adding a fourth paragraph to your comment – rewrite it for brevity and clarity." This comment's word-count was 1191 - please rewrite for brevity or else put your content on your own blog. The content is being emailed to you for your reference. - Moderator]

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:37:26 +0000

@28 – Geoff, the answer to that is in the post. State politics is played out over a narrower field of issues with (usually) much less probing media coverage, and then you have the fact that Australia is obviously a more complex entity – demographically and culturally diverse – than any of its 8 state and territory parts. We’ve never seen the sorts of Labor landslides common recently at state level in the Commonwealth parliament, and indeed, let’s not forget that Rudd didn’t win a huge majority in 2007. So the point of partisan normality, if you like, is at a much closer electoral split than in many states.

By: Brett

Brett — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:16:16 +0000

Hey, I’ve got a Schlumberger story too! A Schlumberger tech came on-site to install Geoframe and Oracle and as the IT guy I had to give him access to our system. I remember the date quite clearly: 12 September 2001. He spent the time between swapping CDROMs telling me how he and his girlfriend had spent the previous night cheering as the Twin Towers burned and fell. Now that was special. (To my eternal shame I didn’t tell him off.)

By: Geoff Robinson

Geoff Robinson — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:02:44 +0000

Labor will probably be returned with a slightly increased majority but the Liberals are doing well in the polls currently, it is a much better position to be in than some expected, why aren’t they in the abyss that the state Libs fell into shortly after their defeats of a decade ago? it is foolish for the opponents of the Libs to ignore the facts.

By: David Irving (no relation)

David Irving (no relation) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:02:38 +0000

I met one the sales blokes from Schlumberger, Elise. He was a dick. I didn’t much care for their software, either.

By: Elise

Elise — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 07:52:25 +0000

DI(nr) @23, yep, Schlum were certainly a bit special. Quite possibly still are.

Three decades or so back, our graduating class of engineers were lining up for interviews with potential employers every day towards the end of our last term. Schlum sent 3 guys to form an interview panel in the interview room. Having a surname near the start of the alphabet, I was towards the head of the queue.

“Oh…they didn’t tell us there were girls in the class…”
“Umm…Oh well… I guess we may as well fill in the forms and take a photo anyway.”

You might imagine the effect on my morale. The interview was a joke. If I had had a bit more courage back then, I should have walked out immediately.

Hearing some of the horror stories from the graduates that took jobs with them, it was a blessing in diguise. Army boot camp would have been about as much fun as working in that outfit.

A decade or so later I went to talk with the Schlum R&D guys in Cambridge UK about some R&D project, and they had the mistaken impression I might be interested in a job with them. Times change. Their style had improved somewhat (or maybe it was just that their R&D guys are different to their Ops guys) but still a bit special. A few brave female souls worked in their R&D and training divisions by the 1990′s. Not what I would have called an enlightened employer.

By: David Irving (no relation)

David Irving (no relation) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 03:10:42 +0000

I heard van Onselen on the radio the other morning, Paul N @ 22, contorting furiously around how Abbott wasn’t completely abandoning Liberal principles (that’s a joke) with his Great Big New Motherhood Tax on large companies. Chris Pyne was doing much the same thing this morning, only more so.

We’ll get hours of innocent fun out of this.

By: Paul Burns

Paul Burns — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:54:53 +0000

The GFC hits Rudd’s popularity? I woulda thought it was one of his finest hours.
The insulation stuff up though, is another question entirely.
So far, Abbott’s finest hour is … well, ecouraging us to talk more about sex I suppose.

By: David Irving (no relation)

David Irving (no relation) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:50:57 +0000

Elise @ 12, a bloke I worked for some years ago at Santos reckoned the Schlumberger employment interview technique for female employees was to get them to stand against a wall and ask them if they could see their feet. You’d hope that was no longer the case, but who knows?

By: Paul Norton

Paul Norton — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:40:51 +0000

Peter Van Onselen does his comradely duty in today's OO. I think there's a good case to be made that the next Coalition Prime Minister isn't in Federal Parliament yet.