Saturday December 3, 2005
Humour? You need a licence for that
PLEASE note: persons seeking to perform, publish or broadcast matter of a satirical or similar comic nature must now, by law, apply for a Commonwealth Licence (Satirical Performances) as specified in the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005.
Saturday November 26, 2005
Flexibility of boiled frogs
The Government's nosedive in this week's opinion polls suggests that the voters smell a nasty rat in the Prime Minister's industrial relations reforms.
Saturday November 19, 2005
Ring in a new deja vu
Bursting with bonhomie, Sol Trujillo laid 'em in the aisles with his Telstra vision thing at a seance last Tuesday.
Saturday November 12, 2005
All a-dither on the hill
Ron Boswell, the National Party Senate leader, was bursting to rubbish anyone who had dared to suggest the Government had been ramping up the terrorist threat.
Saturday November 5, 2005
Pull the other one, PM
"I need a diversion, Humphrey," the Prime Minister said. "Yes, Prime Minister. What do you have in mind?"
Saturday October 29, 2005
Sold out for brownie points
If any one of the Bali nine is shot by an Indonesian firing squad, the Australian Federal Police will have blood on its hands.
Saturday October 22, 2005
Big Brother rules the great brown land
John Howard's anti-terrorism bill frogmarches Australia down the road to tyranny, towards an authoritarian state in which the police may arrest people at will, and hold them secretly and indefinitely without charge or trial.
Saturday October 15, 2005
Kleptocracy rules us all
The grinning actors in the Government's WorkChoices television commercials have been on for less than a week, but they grate like a fingernail on a blackboard. The hackles rise.
Saturday October 8, 2005
Years of blood before this
The truly horrifying thing about this new slaughter in Bali was the shrapnel.
Saturday October 1, 2005
You have the right to be locked up
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Saturday September 24, 2005
PM Latham rips stripes off US
Australia's relationship with the United States took a dramatic new turn last night, with the Prime Minister, Mark Latham, forcefully telling President Bush in Washington that it was time for plain speaking between friends.
Saturday September 10, 2005
Showdown at telco corral
All the sound and fury over Telstra this week was because the new American boss, Sol Trujillo, and his now famous three amigos, mentioned the elephant in the room.
Saturday September 3, 2005
Ah, the tears of crocodiles
The way the Liberal family is ripping into itself at the moment you would feel safer picnicking with the Milats in the Belanglo State Forest.
Saturday August 27, 2005
Regard the past, arrogant youth
The new political correctness of the ratbag right decrees that nobody must compare the unhappy result of the Vietnam war to the wonderful march of democracy in Iraq.
Saturday August 20, 2005
Everything must go!
Emboldened by the success of its plans for the full sale of Telstra, the Howard Government is developing a radical scheme to sell other large public assets into private ownership.
Saturday August 13, 2005
To the bulwarks, for the senator has landed
Barnaby Joyce is a pleasingly Dickensian sort of name. It has a David Copperfield sound to it. A Barnaby Joyce in a Charles Dickens novel would be a likeable young articled clerk, poor but respectable, eager to be of service.
Saturday August 6, 2005
Dumped on from within
The happy gathering at Government House on Wednesday looked more like an Italian wedding than the clunking constitutional anachronism of ministers of the State of NSW swearing allegiance to a foreign monarch across the water.
Saturday July 30, 2005
Last laugh to Young Robbie
A few years ago, at the height of his powers and popularity, Bob Carr confessed to me over lunch that he did not feel much like a premier.
Saturday July 23, 2005
Just good ol' boys in the good ol' US
The White House, Washington DC. Office of the Director of Rhetoric. July 20, 2005: "The President wants a word to describe the Australian Prime Minister. We are looking for some majorly impactive creativity here."
Saturday July 16, 2005
More grand delusions
As they piled butchery upon carnage at Ypres and the Somme, the chateau generals of the war to end all wars had but one idea: more of the same. Just one more big push. Surely the next offensive would bring the breakthrough.
Saturday July 9, 2005
Tough city built on stiff upper lips
London can take it. That was what they said as the bombs of the Luftwaffe rained down in the Blitz, and it remains true today.
Saturday July 2, 2005
Latham: my part in his downfall
Not long after the last election, I ran into the Prime Minister at the cricket or a dinner or something. To my alarm, he took me warmly by the arm, beaming broadly.
Saturday June 11, 2005
Chins up, all will be well
Harold Macmillan, asked what had troubled him most as Prime Minister of Britain, memorably replied, "Events, dear boy, events".
Saturday June 4, 2005
All quiet on the Western gulag
It is a travesty of justice that a friendly foreign nation can arrest, try and jail an Australian citizen on flimsy circumstantial evidence produced by a deeply suspect investigation.
Saturday May 28, 2005
A wedgie from his own ranks
John Howard reportedly chucked a right old wobbly last Tuesday on hearing that four Liberal backbenchers will bowl up two private member's bills that would bring decency to his increasingly cruel and chaotic immigration detention regime.
