Alp

The first thing the ALP needs to do now Belinda Neal has lost her pre-selection for the seat of Robertson is tell Kevin Rudd that the new candidate likes to be known as Deb O’Neill, not Debbie as he called her yesterday.

The second thing is they need to stick a big picture of Neal on the wall of the state secretary’s office as a reminder that the members of the party are much better at choosing candidates than they are.

It sounds pretty simple, but it’s a lesson that’s been long in the making, and one the Labor heavies in NSW are yet to fully grasp. And it’s not just important for voters and party members, as contrary to what you’d expect, being imposed on one’s constituency is no tea party for a candidate either.

Continue reading "Deb dumps Belinda and sends a signal to the machine" »

The truism goes a politician should wear out a couple of pairs of shoes in the lead up to an election, but for the Labor Member for Robertson Belinda Neal, her best strategy for a last-ditch bid at career salvation would be to stay indoors and put her feet up.

You see Neal has a way of alienating people that’s unique for a back bencher in the Federal Parliament, especially one who took her seat by just 184 votes at the last election.

And now the ALP has a big decision to make. Turf out a sitting member married to one of the most powerful men in the NSW division, or stay with a candidate so deeply unpopular senior party figures think she’ll be annihilated come Federal Election time. It’s more complicated than it sounds.

Continue reading "Belinda Neal: a one-woman political phenomenon" »

Local candidates are the political equivalent of sausages – we might accept they are part of the democratic process, but we don’t really want to know what goes into making them.

And like sausages, local candidates come in all shapes and forms, from the top-shelf gourmet that you would be happy to eat at a Hat restaurant to a sad sack of something that reeks of fat and sawdust.

But in an era of presidential politics, do local candidates really matter? To stretch the sausage metaphor to breaking point, it really depends on what they’re made of, how they’re cooked and what else they are served with.

Continue reading "With local candidates, there’s always a snag" »

WHEN calls came in the lead-up to Australia Day to remove the British ensign from our flag, the idea was slapped down. Australians had fought and competed under this one, the Government said in an argument more often deployed by monarchists.

When the idea of putting the republic back on the agenda came up, this time from Attorney General Robert McClelland no less, it too got short shrift from the leadership when asked publicly. Perhaps this is unsurprising from the socially conservative Rudd Government. But the agent of both of these off the cuff rejections, was not Kevin Rudd, but rather, his deputy, the left-aligned, Julia Gillard.

There is a growing body of evidence that ``Red Julia’’ as some on the Right have derided her, has been busily repositioning herself to be in contention for the Labor leadership should Kevin Rudd’s star fade. I’ll come back to that shortly.

Continue reading "Red head to blue rinse, Gillard’s evolution" »

Bob Hawke - like most public figures - always likes to get his picture in the paper.

But there was one time when I beat him at his own game.

It was the annual cricket match between the ACTU XI and the Press XI in Port Melbourne in the mid-70s.

Continue reading "Yes I love Bob Hawke and long may he reign" »

The introduction of the CPRS Bill or the ETS, whichever you choose to call it, is a mechanism where the Government will collect in excess of $70 billion tax revenue in the first six years and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars thereafter.

The commission earned by bankers and brokers will amount to multiple billions of dollars and the financial imperative for them to support the scheme is overwhelming.

This new tax will not save the Great Barrier Reef; it is not going to end the droughts; it will neither contribute to Greenland freezing nor thawing.

Continue reading "Why I am still voting no to this ridiculous CPRS" »

UPDATE: Nathan Rees has sacked Joe Tripodi and Ian Macdonald from Cabinet.

In political terms the equivalent of a nuclear bomb has just gone off in Sydney. It has immediate ramifications for some of the most hated figures in the deeply unpopular NSW Government.

But it has massive national long-term implications, as it will determine whether Labor leaders have the right to choose their own ministry, rather than have their frontbench foisted upon them by the factions.

In a gutsy gamble, NSW Premier Nathan Rees has gone for the doomsday scenario revealed on The Punch some weeks ago by taking on the factions and winning rank-and-file party approval to form his own Cabinet by dumping unpopular or treacherous ministers. And Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has just strongly backed Rees in her speech to the NSW ALP, and Kevin Rudd has done so in a press conference at APEC.

Continue reading "Rees’ gutsy gamble rewrites the rules of Labor politics" »

Sitting in front of a blank computer screen is confronting, but strangely quite liberating.

There is a glimmer of anticipation, of unknown opportunity. There is a sense of freedom – now that is a strange coincidence. It is actually a sudden, unexpected challenge to my freedom that crowds my thoughts.

Who would have thought that in 2009, I would be sitting at my desk in the Australian Parliament, earnestly searching the internet for quotations about censorship?

Continue reading "Censoring our collective right to criticise the government" »

If you ever suspected that our major political parties got their leaders mixed up on the way to Question Time, this week’s Essential Report will come as no surprise.

In a sign of life catching up with the punch-line, half the nation now thinks that our political parties are becoming closer ­ and the majority of them think it’s no bad thing.

The convergence of our major parties has not happened overnight, the rise of centrist politics around the world has been a hallmark of the post-Cold War consensus. But in Australia it has reached its zenith, where the last two leaders of the Liberal Party both openly flirted with their political opponents.

Continue reading "Pepsi v Coke - How to tell Labor from Liberal" »

The present political consensus among the major parties against permitting and recognising same sex marriages is so obviously an intellectual surrender to the religious right that one looks for a single phrase rhetorical demolition of this anti-gay pretence of a position that would show it in all of its hypocrisy.

I do not, for a moment, believe that those politicians (including speakers at the recent Labor Party National Conference) who go on about protecting the “sanctity of marriage” believe the nonsense they espouse. I also fail to believe that they believe that a majority of the Australian people support the continued refusal to recognise single sex marriages.

I believe that the political imperative is to avoid the anger of that noisy minority, the religious right, which, itself, is hardly representative of most people of a religious persuasion in Australia. The political imperative also concerns the possible swing vote of the Family First in the Senate.

Continue reading "The ‘sanctity of marriage’ argument is nonsense" »

There’s been a lot of talk recently about so-called “green shoots” springing up in our ravaged economy.

Some commentators have grasped a recent bounce in the stock market, a few surprisingly strong profit results overseas, and a benign sense of business confidence as evidence that the economy is on the path to recovery.

Well, it is time for a reality check.

Continue reading "Why unions will remain the voice of workers in Labor" »

OK, so I know the drill is that we’re meant to dust off our LPs and find the angriest Midnight Oil lyric about uranium mining or nuclear war, present it as a damning tearsheet, and then use a photograph such as the one below - taken at the Sydney protests against French nuclear tests in the Pacific in 1995 - to declare that Environment Minister Peter Garrett is the mother of all hypocrites.

It was certainly the position Malcolm Turnbull took last night after Garrett signed off on the Four Mile Uranium Mine in South Australia. Turnbull might be our alternative, conservative prime minister but he sounded for all the world like some campus Trotskyist as he led the sell-out charge against the former Oils frontman.

“What this approval just shows today is that Mr Garrett is as big a phoney as the Prime Minister,” Turnbull said, happily side-stepping the fact that, in endorsing Australia’s fifth uranium mine, Garrett has done the exact thing the Liberal Party has been urging him to do.

Continue reading "Oils ain’t oils, but it’s the Liberals who are hypocrites" »

The biggest fib Kevin Rudd told today, after he’d lavished insincere praise upon Joel Fitzgibbon for his work as Defence Minister, was to declare the young Hunter Valley MP could return to the ministry at some stage.

As long as Kevin Rudd’s backside points to the ground, Joel Fitzgibbon has a better chance of becoming the next Pope than making a ministerial comeback.

And most people in the ALP will be pretty happy about that, as Fitzgibbon, for all his affable, knockabout charm, has long been regarded by many colleagues with suspicion and ambivalence on account of what was a long-standing and especially close friendship with disastrous former leader Mark Latham.

Continue reading "Latham’s little mate won’t return to frontbench" »