That Labor won the 2007 election because of the Liberal Party?s zealous pursuit of the Dickensian Workchoices legislation is fairly widely accepted by political observors. That Labor responded by putting Workchoices at centre stage of their election campaign some might say speaks of a beating Labor heart, but in reality Labor’s position owed more to the anti-workchoices rallies, the ACTU?s advertising campaign, the stories bobbing up daily about the use of workchoices by employers, and the consequent sharp shift in opinion in the electorate than an incandescent Labor politics. What might have been the principled, and publicly articulated, position of Labor many, many moons ago now came to the Labor decision-makers in the form of feedback surveys from focus groups.
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Telstra has told the ACTU and affected unions that they are walking away from current Enterprise Agreement negotiations because the unions are insisting on unlawful side agreements.
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I recently picked up a copy of Overland (issue 190) to read Clive Hamilton’s response to Tom O’Lincoln’s article in issue 189, relating to the nature of modern capitalism. I haven’t read Tom’s article, but it looks like an interesting debate in which Hamilton argues that capitalism has undergone a shift in which consumerism has tended to eclipse production as a basis of identity.
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For those that haven’t already heard, Gary Clark, the husband of Liberal MP Jackie Kelly who holds the seat of Lindsay by a margin of 7.1%, has been caught red-handed, along with other Liberal Party ‘volunteers’, distributing malicious and disgraceful pamphlets, purportedly written by the non-existent ‘Islamic Australia Federation’ and states in part:
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A decade or so ago, Shane Warne complained while on tour to the subcontinent about the food options there. Everything was a bit spicy and not fish and chippy enough for the prodigious Warne. There was a vast paunch to satisfy and sus Indian food wasn’t going to do the trick for Warnie – nothing less than a six piece box from the Colonel could fill the chasm – Aussie, Aussie, Aussie – oi, oi, oi!
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What really astounded and annoyed me in the 2004 election was the total lack of response from Labor to Liberal advertisements that went on about interest rates under Labor and now we have the same theme being carted out again.
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According to a documentary to be aired on the BBC a few days ago, the blueprint for reconstructing Iraq was to be based on nothing less than the 1994 Lonely Planet Iraq guide.

After a US Congressional committee resolution, condeming the genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915, was approved last week, the Turkish government were not impressed. Combine this with killing of 30 Turkish soldiers by the PKK recently – operating within Northern Iraq – and Turkey is poised to rain death on the PKK camps and most probably the Kurdish population.
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They sure are, but luckily not in a way that’s likely to allow John Howard to escape the thrashing and humiliation he so sorely deserves at the polls. Rather than commit ‘regicide’ – a fitting term for a myopic monarchist – the Liberals prefer to sink with King Howard rather than Prince Costello. What Peter Costello lacks in political courage he more than makes up for in smugness, but unfortunately for Prince Peter that particular commodity is not in high demand.
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The number of supporters for the Iraq war are becoming as rare as rocking horse shite these days – what with the fracturing of the coalition; the awarding of contracts to Haliburton; the dubious accounting practices of the CPA; the sham elections; the enormous expense of the war financed in large degree by Iraqi oil money earmarked for reconstruction projects; the failure of the surge to provide meaningful security; the distrust of the occupation forces; the recalcitrant resistance; the spectre of re-energised nationalist and religious aspirations that threaten the stability of the region; the regionalisation of the war – the general Pandora’s boxiness of it all. 
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If there is one issue that ranks close to Workchoices in importance in this election, it is the issue of interest rates, or in other words, housing affordability.
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It wasn’t so long ago that Eddie MaGuire told us that there was nothing wrong with a little socialism in football, so it’s a little disappointing for a Magpie fan to hear coach Mick Malthouse attacking the priority pick concept for the national draft which, in Mick’s words, "rewards mediocrity."
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Paul Keating is undoubtedly one of the masters of political theatre in Australian politics.  Most lefties with a sense of humour would have enjoyed Keating’s tart references to John Howard over the last few months: referring to him variously as ‘the desiccated coconut’, ‘the pre-Copernican obscurantist’ and now Howard the ‘nationalist’ as opposed to the ‘patriot’.   

In the Keating lexicon, to be a nationalist of the Howard hue is to indulge in “jingoism, populism and exclusion of the most calculating kind”.  While Keating referred to Hitler as the exemplar of national chauvinism, he was quick to draw distinctions between the Nazi dictator and Howard, but in broad outline they do share, along with Margaret Thatcher, a trenchant fetish for exclusionary wedge politics. 
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This show might help explain a few things:

"Tonight Dateline reveals how Australian spy agency ASIO manipulated the media in the past and asks: is it still happening today? ASIO files recently declassified and obtained by Dateline’s Thom Cookes show that from the mid 60s to the early 70s, ASIO deliberately blocked the careers of ABC journalists it disliked – with full cooperation from the boss of the ABC. In one instance in 1972, ABC journalist Peter Moore was picked up by an ASIO wiretap when he called a Communist Party official. That resulted in ASIO head Peter Barbour tipping off ABC boss Sir Talbot Duckmanton. The memo reads:
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When Tony Abbott spoke about union leaders visiting people in the middle of the night with hammers and sickles, millions were no doubt angered and bemused by this bizarro mental concoction of young fogie Tony Abbott.
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