You can tell a lot about how things are travelling for both political parties by looking at the questions they ask in Question Time, and the number of points of order made in relation to various answers.

Last week the Government announced its policy to take over 60% of hospital funding and to appoint local boards to run them; it also announced a national curriculum for Years K to 10. On Monday, Tony Abbott announced a policy (of sorts) for paid parental leave (PPL) to be funded by adding a 1.7% levy over the company tax rate of certain businesses. So today, on the last Question Time before the weekend – a weekend which will have the Newspoll out in the field and which will no doubt be also seeking the views of the public on the PPL and the hospital funding scheme – what did the Opposition want to ask about? Yes, you guessed it – insulation. Read more »

Today’s Question Time was dominated by Tony Abbott’s announcement yesterday introducing a policy (of sorts) to introduce a maternity leave scheme to be funded by a 1.7% tax on businesses earning over $5 million a year.

It’s one of those policies which that part of me which used to be a callow unthinking young lefty who thought all big business was evil would have rather liked. Unfortunately the part of me that grew up, went to uni, did an economics degree, learned that the government doesn’t grow a big money tree out the back of Parliament House, and who likes well thought out public policy thinks the Abbott maternity leave scheme is complete bollocks. Read more »

Next Monday, Australia time, the 2009 Oscars will be held (Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin are doing the hosting). Now the Oscars are always fun to disparage – after all they very rarely get it right – and I like to write about how they get it wrong as much as the next person, but in the spirit of the season (err Oscars season), let’s try and focus on the good things – let’s look for the best of the Best Picture winners.

A while ago I thought about trying to build up my DVD collection so that it would have every Best Picture winner. The problem though is that there was so much dross that I gave up pretty quickly. But there are some gems among the winners. Now I could try and rank all 81 winners, but bugger that for a joke. Instead I’ll divide the winners into their decades and select the best. It’s hard enough to try and compare films made around the same time, let alone trying to compare say The Godfather with Casablanca. Read more »

Today out came the Newspoll that revealed a couple of interesting things. Firstly it showed a 1% increase in both the ALP’s and Liberal Party’s primary votes, but because of a 3% decline in the Green’s primary, the Two Party Preferred changed from 53-47 to 52-48 – essentially no change at all. But the really interesting thing was how little attention this Newspoll received in the media. Two months ago a 52-48 poll would have seemed like a seismic shift in the political world. Now it is reported as a bit of a ho hum. It makes me suspect that 52-54 is here to stay for the ALP. Read more »

This week’s Flick of the Week takes us with Kevin Spacey in his bit-part role as a Wall Street sleazebag in Working Girl to that of uber Hollywood studio exec, Buddy Ackerman in quite possibly the blackest Hollywood satire ever – George Huang’s Swimming with Sharks.

Wining the Oscar for Best Actor for his work in American Beauty killed Kevin Spacey’s career. The guy was easily one of the top 3-4 actors working in film in the 90s; since his win in 1999, he has become a waste of celluloid. Here are some of his roles prior to winning the Oscar: Read more »

Ask any teacher, and they’ll tell you that teaching a class after lunch on Friday’s is never a period of great productivity, so it is with Question Time on Thursdays before a week off. Read more »

In last night’s 7:30 Report Chris Uhlmann made mention of “a second MinterEllison” risk report provided to the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts, that was apparently not released to the public last Friday. I thought ok, here we go, they’ve found a smoking gun. I waited to see this morning what damage would befall Peter Garrett.

In the morning AM, reported on this second MinterEllison report (actually a risk register):

It raises as potential risks poor quality insulation, possible house and fire damage, an insufficient number of auditors and the capabilities of installers.
It quantifies the cost of the risks in the hundreds of millions of dollars but also spells out the steps being taken to manage those risks. Read more »

This week’s Flick of the Week takes us with Sigourney Weaver in Aliens to her role as Wall Street bitch Katharine Parker in the Mike Nichols’ romantic comedy, Working Girl. Read more »

This is my 400th Blog Post.

I really don’t have anything to write about, so in the great tradition of bad US sit-coms, I’m going to do a bit of a recap of favourite things.

When I started this back in July 2008 (no, not exactly ancient times, even in the internet age) I had no real idea what I was doing, nor how long I would do it for. I had read that the best way to do a blog was to pick a subject and write only about that – ie be a politics blog, or a sport blog (or better still an AFL or a cricket blog), or a music or a film blog.

Well buggers to that says I, and so I decided I’d write about everything I was interested in. I also told very few people about it. Not sure why; mostly because I wasn’t real sure whether I’d keep doing it and thought I might find I had run out of things to write after a week.

My first post was on the Tour de France, I went with one on a Newspoll which contained this line about the then Shadow Treasurer Turnbull: Read more »

In the past few weeks there has been a bit of a kerfuffle in America over the use of the word “retard”. It started when it was revealed that Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, during a meeting asked of a group of left wing health activists who were planning to advertise against Democratic member of congress “are they fucking retarded?!” Read more »

This morning we awoke to The Australian trumpeting the latest Newspoll with the headline: Rudd Hits a New Low. It is not until the 8th paragraph of the story that we find out the ALP had actually increased its lead from the previous Newspoll – going from 52-48 to 53-47. The story didn’t mention at all that both the ALP and Liberal Party primary votes had dropped 1%.

Now sure, it was not a great poll for Rudd. His net satisfaction rating is dropping – it is now at 10 (50% satisfied; 40% dissatisfied), and Abbott’s net satisfaction rating did hit a new high – 7 (44% satisfied; 37% dissatisfied). So we are at a point where more people are dissatisfied with Rudd than with Abbott. But on the preferred PM rating, it is still Rudd by the length of the straight – 55% to 27%. (And note, at the same time in 2007, the opposition leader, Rudd led Howard 47% to 37%! ) Read more »

When the Winter Olympics were last held in Canada (1988, Calgary), I cared about them. At that stage I was a religious watcher of all things sport – and that included Saturday’s Wide World of Sports, which also showed highlights from the World Cup Alpine events, the ski jumping competitions and also major figure skating events. Read more »

Question Time can in some ways be seen like a tennis match. Each answer by a Minister is an attempt to hold his or her serve as the opposition tries to break them. Unfortunately for the opposition, the Government also gets to serve against its own side, which means, unless a Minister completely stuffs up a response to a Dorothy Dixer, quite often the best the opposition can hope for is to take the set to a tie break, get a few lucky net cords, maybe the odd call by Hawkeye to go their way, and a 7-6 win.

Except today they seemingly had a good chance to break serve and take the set.

Yesterday it was noted by many commentators that the opposition had completely let Peter Garrett off the hook over the ceiling insulation and green loans scheme. Today it looked to be the day that Garrett would have to step on the court and show us what he’s got. 

The problem of course is that whole extra day he has had to prepare. Yesterday he would have been a bit cold and rusty; today he came out having spent the last 24 hours on  the practice court, and no doubt also having had to listen to a thorough explanation of the game strategy from coach Rudd. Read more »

Today in the House of Representatives two speeches were given by the current and former leaders of the opposition. One was forceful, well reasoned, cutting, intelligent and persuasive. The other was given by Tony Abbott. Read more »

Last year the following animated film made it in the top 20 yearly box office in America:
Up came 5th,
Alvin and the Chipmunks the Sqeukquel 9th,
Monsters Vs Aliens 11th, and
Ice Age 3 12th

In 2008 the list in the top 20 was:
Wall E 5th,
Kung Fu Panda 6th,
Madagascar 2 8th, and
Dr Suess’ Horton Hears a Who 10th.

In 2007 the list was:
Shrek the Third 2nd,
Alvin and the Chipmunks 9th,
Ratatouille 11th,
The Simpsons Movie 12th,
(and Bee Movie came 21st). Read more »

The prelude to today’s Question Time started last night when Tony Abbott was interviewed by Kerry O’Brien. To put it mildly, he did not do well. To put it bluntly, he was embarrassing. He admitted the cost to consumers of the Government’s ETS was not really $120 billion as he had been saying, and he could not really bring himself to declare climate change is an actual fact – he used the type of language used by deniers everywhere about needing to recognize that CO2 is an essential trace gas etc etc. 

This performance was followed by Barnaby Joyce on Lateline. Rarely has there been such a bizarre appearance by a person holding such an important position.  Consider his response to a question on interest rates: Read more »

Over the weekend came the great news that Aussie crime flick, Animal Kingdom (which I wrote about last week) was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Drama (for non-US films) at the Sundance Film Festival. This is huge honour, and as far as I can find, the first time an Australian film has ever won anything at Sundance (Harvey Krumpet got an honourable mention).

Today however I saw the “teaser poster” for the film: Read more »

This week’s Flick of the Week takes us with Ron Howard from American Graffiti to the first directorial “big picture film” about “failed” Apollo moon mission, Apollo 13. Read more »

Watching so much tennis this summer has made me realise a couple things.

Firstly, Courtney Cox needs to be surrounded by 5 other friends, for me to really want to watch any TV show she is in. Sure I'll give Cougar Town a go, but I have a suspicion it'll go in the pile with Dirty Sexy Money and Cashmire Mafia of shows plugged without remorse during the Australian Open that turn out to be only so so.

Secondly, I haven't watched Lost in ages. Read more »

Today was the match in the Australian Open I had long been dreading since seeing the draw – the match where Roger Federer was due to play Nikolai Davydenko. The problem was it was a quarter final, and that Davydenko had beaten Federer the last two times they had played – the last time in straight sets.

The reason I had dreaded this game is not that Federer might lose a game, but that he might lose in the quarter finals and thus end the most amazing streak in sport – Federer’s run of 22 straight semi final appearances in Grand Slams. Read more »

This week I was reading an article by UK journalist George Monbiot in which he demolishes line by line an opinion piece written Michigan columnist John Tomlinson in which Monbiot judges there are 38 errors (or one misleading statement per 26 words). Now admittedly the Tomlison piece was from a small paper in Flint, Michigan, but Monbiot correctly asserts it is just the worst example of many, many such articles written in just about every newspaper throughout the world.

Monbiot made this statement:

this astonishing wealth of disinformation means it has probably taken me 100 times longer to respond to his article than he took to write it.

This of course is the precise point of why it is so easy to be a climate change denier, and it is why such views have been making inroads into the public opinion. You see it is incredibly easy to deny climate change is real. Here, come with me I’ll show you how: Read more »

Today the first Newspoll of the year came out. It showed the ALP had “slipped” from 56 to 54, and the LNP had increased from 44 to 46. Interestingly the LNP’s primary vote hadn’t changed a bit, which made some calls by the media that Tony Abbott has invigorated the Liberal Party base somewhat bizarre.

To be honest I thought it a tad weird that Newspoll were even polling at this time of the year – it’s holidays; no one gives a stuff. Heck I’m not even bothering to watch the 7:30 Report and I’m a card carrying politics nerd. Doing well in the polls now is like a footy team doing well in the March - it doesn’t really matter; all teams are really worried about is one of the star players getting injured.

Rudd has been on holidays for a couple weeks, and for the two weeks prior to that it was Christmas etc. Tony Abbott, on the other hand has been a bit of an energiser bunny, so I guess you’d figure that might account for some of the increase in vote, but probably not really – as the LNP primary vote didn’t increase at all. Read more »

When I was growing up I hated the Australian Open.  Up to it being moved to Melbourne Park in 1988 the tournament represented just about everything I hated about Australia. It was old, backward, provincial and boring. Read more »