The Punch

Call the RSPCA. Alert PETA. Get the anti-whaling boats to steam north from Antarctica and stop this mindless slaughter.

Cricket is on its last legs. And to think, this shocking butchery of our national sport is no longer even taking place in the name of science.

Before the summer, we suspected the opposition were crap. By mid December, we knew it. Discussion over. Yet here we are in mid February still prodding and poking at the carcasses of West Indian and Pakistani cricket.

Continue reading "Put this summer of cricket out of its misery" »

Who does the ironing at your house, and other big questions of national significance could be on the agenda for today’s Question Time. Kevin Rudd will be glad to be back on familiar ground after his experience last night in another chamber, with another set of questioners altogether. Join us here from 2pm.

The head of the UN’s climate change panel (the IPCC) Rajendra Pachauri has released a novel that combines lessons on climate change with sexy story lines.

The protagonist in Pachauri’s book is eerily similar to Pachauri himself: an environmentalist and former engineer who inexplicably has a lot of sex with women (I can’t say whether the last part as any basis in reality). According to The Times the book: “mingles lectures on climate change with descriptions of Sanjay’s sexual encounters, including frequent references to “voluptuous breasts”.

Following last week’s visit from the Skeptic Dark Lord Mockton (who looks and sounds like an evil mastermind from a new climate themed Bond film) I can’t help but wonder if some of the increasing confusion about climate change stems from the eccentric oddballs who we’re told to believe.

Continue reading "No wonder we’re confused about climate change . . ." »

Ahhh, now we get it. Lindsay Tanner is smarter than that “freak show” Barnaby Joyce.

In case we didn’t get the message in parliament last week (we can be a bit slow sometimes) Mr Tanner spelled it out again on Meet the Press on the weekend. Not only is Senator Joyce “off the planet”, his team mate Joe Hockey is a “lightweight”.

Yesterday in parliament he repeated the lesson again for those who’d wagged the last one or drifted off while doodling on our pencil cases. Mr Hockey is “out to lunch”, and again he filled us in on Barnaby. According to Mr Tanner, Senator Joyce is evidence of “a very big question mark over the leader of the opposition’s judgment for appointing him in the first place.”

For someone who’s so much smarter than his counterpart, Mr Tanner seems to have skipped the chapter in Politics for Dummies called “Australians don’t like smug politicians who reckon they’re smarter than everyone else.”

Continue reading "Political snobs risk turning Barnaby into a martyr" »

Six-year-old Naomi wants to kill herself after being repeatedly sexually abused since the age of two.

Her mother Debbie says the bright and bubbly toddler has become a violent and aggressive girl who wants to throw herself in front of a car to end her suffering.

Last week, I interviewed Debbie on Radio 2UE. It was harrowing. Heartbreaking. But instead of expressing sympathy, talkback callers were angry.

Continue reading "Child protection trumps rights of divorced parents" »

There’s quite a menagerie in the stock market petting zoo. You’ve got your bulls, your bears and the occasional stag. Until now, though, you’ve never had PIGS.

In the past week, the PIGS have run rampant, trampling markets and joining CDO and CDS as acronyms guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of investors. Like collateralised debt obligations and credit default swaps – those complex financial instruments that fuelled the GFC – anyone with shares needs to keep an eye on the PIGS.

Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain – collectively, and unkindly, derided as the PIGS – are in a fair degree of financial pain. All of them have budget deficits of more than 10 per cent of GDP, which experts reckon they will struggle to finance on wary international bond markets.

Continue reading "PIGS - the acronym that might fry your portfolio" »

Barnaby Joyce’s move to clarify he is not in a homoerotic relationship with Tony Abbott is the latest example of politicians taking us somewhere we just don’t want to go – into the bedroom.

Following hot on the heels of Tony Abbott’s foray into the ‘gift’ of virginity, Joyce’s gaffe unnervingly suggests that the Coalition has things other than the management of the national economy on their mind.

For Australians, politicians are a bit like our parents – we innately accept that while they probably have sex, we would rather not confront the fact.

Continue reading "I do not want sexual relations with these people" »

The Rudd Government claims to be superior in economic management. How so?

The real reason Australia did better than most developed countries in the recent financial crisis was that the Coalition had by 2006 repaid the $96 billion debt run up by Labor, left a $5 billion Education fund, a $60 billion Future Fund and a $22 billion surplus!

Add to this a virtually strike free environment, whereby employment grew, wages grew and exports grew.

Continue reading "Who’s the real economic freak show?" »

We’re often keen to highlight the democratic benefits of social media, especially in bringing greater openness to a country such as Iran.

But this week, in Australia, we’ve seen a debate over online political censorship, with the banning of Facebook groups such as “KEVIN RUDD = EPIC FAIL”, that it makes you wonder if we’ve forgotten that the power of social media lies in its ability to embrace dissent and criticism.

In the online world, dissent is not just allowed. It is central to social media’s political power.

Continue reading "Bad week for free speech on social media" »

Having arranged the Newcastle leg of Lord Monckton’s Australian tour and listened to his exposition of the failings of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change [IPCC] science it astounds me that carbon dioxide is still being described as a pollutant by the increasingly shrill advocates of anthropogenic global warming [AGW].

As well as the litany of mistakes, subterfuges and potential corruption by the IPCC two new peer reviewed papers show that the carbon cycle has only negligible sensitivity to temperature change [Frank et al, 2009 Nature 463] and that the human emissions of CO2 have negligible effect on the climate as measured by the fraction of human emissions of CO2 staying in the atmosphere which has not changed since 1850 [Knorr, W; 2009 GRL 36]

Continue reading "Will carbon dioxide really destroy the world?" »