Perhaps it is the circles in which I travel, but of late it seemed to me every person who thinks deeply about life had one thing to say about the USA: How is it, in a country of 336 million people, that Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the only candidates for president? * (There’s also a Kennedy offspring, whose name escapes me, who plans to run. Ed) This rhetorical question became academic after President…
On the eve of what was to be Australia’s first time as host of the Quad meeting, let’s reflect on the proposed cost – some $23 million according to Budget papers. It is understood more than 20% of the budget was allocated to the Federal Police, to ensure the security of invited dignitaries. The planned Quad meeting, with the leaders of Australia, India, Japan and the US to be arriving in Sydney, was scrapped after…
My reading of election coverage (such as it is), is that both major parties have shuffled the climate crisis to the back burner. It must be crowded back there, with homeless people and refugees trying to stay warm. What has been widely ridiculed as the ‘shouty’ debate (on Channel Nine) said nothing meaningful about the most important issue of all – the climate crisis. Such has been the pre-occupation with the election here, we haven’t…
Now there’s a headline that could come back to bite me on the bum – election polling being the unreliable artifice it always has been. Polling is a mainstay of Australian electioneering. Various polls take the social temperature of a broad cross-section of the community. From this, they distil the information into numbers which they hope will predict who will win the election. Before we get into that, I consulted my preferred pollster, on-line bookmaker…