This inflammatory story is currently the lead item on ABC online:

Experienced industry consultant and project manager Malcolm McKenzie has told Radio National’s Background Briefing program the costs of big telecommunication rollouts always blow out.

The claim comes as the Federal Government prepares to announce that more than 300,000 extra premises will be connected to the NBN than originally planned.

“I would say for any project this size, [a cost blowout of] 50 per cent to 100 per cent would not be unrealistic,” Mr McKenzie said.

He says red tape and rain are just two issues that will cause delays.

Read more »

Two polls are out today, both taken on Wednesday night.

Galaxy and Morgan both show the race narrowing, with Labor losing 2% on the two party preferred and 2.5% respectively.

Details are at Possum’s place.

There’s also an earlier Morgan, a face to face poll from last weekend. Possum is waiting for weekend polls before updating his trend analysis:

Suffice to say that there appears to have been a point or two slip in the Labor vote over the last 7 days.

In other news, it’s being reported that Kevin Rudd is being asked to campaign outside his seat of Griffith in other Queensland electorates. All observers appear agreed that Labor has problems in Queensland, where there are a stack of marginals.

For Mark’s take on the state of play in Queensland, see here. Read more »

Please keep the general election campaign talk (breaking news etc) on these Election Open Threads, and keep discussions on the other posts focussed on the topic presented by the author.

N.B. Off topic posts in other threads are liable to be summarily deleted at the discretion of the moderators.

I'm more than a tad tired of all that nonsense about Oz Prime Minister Julia Gillard being an unmarried, childless and godless sheila, so I was glad when Crikey's Bernard Keane took a scalpel to the mainstream media: Read more »

In a post at The ABC’s Drumroll, and in comments on the link thread here, I’ve been critical of the fact that a concentration on the horse race, on internal ALP dramas, and Julia Gillard’s political persona has all allowed the policy positions of the Coalition and Tony Abbott to “fly under the radar”.

So, by request, here’s an open thread where we can discuss what the Coalition would be like in government, report on any notable inconsistencies in their policy framework (and there are lots), scrutinise and analyse both their policy announcements and campaign strategy.

Links are encouraged.