I’ve published a piece on the contest in three key seats on Brisbane’s northern outskirts – Petrie, Dickson and Longman – at the ABC’s Campaign Diary blog.

In the post, I also have some observations to make about the Kevin Rudd factor in Queensland, and the Cabinet leaks.

By Mark Bahnisch

Over the weekend, I read Annabel Crabb’s Rise of the Ruddbot.

It’s fascinating to take a trip back to a time when a Liberal leadership team of Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop seemed fanciful. Just as much as it’s weird to go back and read right wing columnists opining in the 2007 election campaign that if we voted for Kevin07, we’d really get Julia Gillard as PM some time in the parliament’s term.

Funny business, politics.

Reading Crabb’s account of Malcolm Turnbull’s fighting press conference as his leadership crumbled, I was struck by how so many of us citizens (and so many Liberals) thought we’d be seeing his warnings that the party he led risked becoming a “right wing fringe outfit” endlessly portrayed in Labor ads. Up until very recently, the default ALP advertising gambit would have been to feature vision of successive Liberal leaders and wannabes and has-beens all trashing each other gleefully. Read more »

Julia Gillard once said that delay on climate change equated to denial.

With Labor’s announcement of a citizen’s assembly and a climate change commission continuing to attract puzzlement at best, it’s worth observing that we already have a price on carbon. Robert Merkel writes:

Well, not quite. We have dozens of different prices on carbon, based on the grab-bag of various energy efficiency incentives, renewable energy targets, and other abatement measures already in place. On top of that, we’ve got businesses making investment decisions based on their best guess on future government policy.

We now have another one – $394 per tonne. Read more »

Was I dreaming last night? I watched the launch of ABC News 24. The beat-up by Chris Uhlmann was predictable. A scoop! Rudd weak on national security! Pity it lacked detail, relied on anonymous sources and the confidentiality of the National Security Committee. The highlight was former Defence Forces Chief Chris Barrie’s confession that the Iraq war was a mistake in that it had distracted us from fighting the real threat in Afghanistan. That should have been headlines today. We were told in the report that John Howard never missed a meeting and that the Deputy PM chaired in his absence.

I can’t find the transcript or video of the rest of Uhlmann’s interview anywhere on the web. If it had been said by a senior British military head, it would lead all today’s bulletins: Failure of Afghan War Liberal Mistake! Howard Dropped Ball on Afghanistan!

If anyone locates it, please let me know. Read more »

Bernard Keane has a good piece in this morning’s Crikey election special edition, reflecting on yesterday’s installment of the so-called population debate. Let’s remember that Julia Gillard linked the asylum seeker issue to infrastructure and sustainability issues in the first place. The logical question that she needs to face is what her policy will be on skilled immigration (and I wonder if several days running of media events on high school and vocational education trade skills stuff is an oblique answer) and whether her government intends to reduce immigration.

If it is the case that residents of Western Sydney and elsewhere are primarily concerned by a lack of infrastructure, it can’t all be plonked in there tomorrow. She’s said we need to pause and take a breath, and Tony Burke is leading a review.

But yesterday, on radio, she sought to deny any link, being confronted by a jingle that interspersed some of her remarks with very similar ones from John Howard. Read more »