Wednesday Whimsy
This week’s whimsy is brought to you by a swimming pig. Please share any bits and pieces you have come across recently that have surprised, delighted, intrigued or otherwise positively engaged you.
The mathematics of the Speaker
Rob Oakeshott’s now abandoned candidacy for Speaker [see previous post here] has shone a light on the arcanae of the Speaker’s voting rights, and how they were envisaged to operate under the Parliamentary Reform Agreement the government and opposition both [...]
Peter Mandelson’s The Third Man
Peter Mandelson‘s memoir, The Third Man, was timed for maximum impact, being released just after the British election this year. Mandelson’s musings were condemned as unhelpful by the full gamut of UK Labour figures (including Tony Blair, who was perhaps [...]
The callous cruelty of mandatory detention of asylum seekers
On this day after a detained asylum seeker threw himself off a detention centre roof to his death rather than be deported back to persecution in Fiji, this terrible yet fantastic post from Pamela Curr at the Drum should be required reading for all Australians with a social conscience:
Groan…
Alan Kohler thinks “Australian households and businesses should start preparing for a steep increase in electricity prices starting next year.”, because some kind of carbon price involving the electricity sector will make its way through the Parliament. I hope he’s [...]
“Food security” and GE crops
Claire Parfitt from Greenpeace has a piece on The Drum Unleashed which claims that GE crops are a threat to food security. The broader concept of food security is something we’ve dealt with repeatedly – for instance here. What’s of [...]
The return of the “city-state”?
Maxine McKew’s speech on Sydney’s lost mojo was pretty awful, but it did at least reference an interesting article in Foreign Policy magazine, introducing their 2010 global city rankings. As far as the rankings themselves go, Melburnians will undoubtedly be [...]
Spotlight The Spin
Our weekly look at media spin tactics: let’s dissect the PR that aims to blow one’s own horn, bury one’s errors, resurrect the shambling zombie corpses of well-flogged deceased equines, and ooh look A Big Distracting Thing.
Teacher-librarians: a dying profession?
DR JENSON: Another thing that I am interested in is the trend over time – whether the trend is an increase in the number of teacher-librarians, both in real terms and normalised for population increases or decreases in schools, to [...]
Lazy Sunday!
Since we don’t live by politics alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
Labor wins 2PP, Abbott equivocal on “we wuz robbed”
Curious: WITH more seats and more primary votes than Labor, the Liberal and National parties won the election but couldn’t quite form a government. Even so, ”we wuz robbed” would be precisely the wrong reaction. That’s Tony Abbott in the [...]
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