So we go from one election to another ( Read more... )

Well, well. I am enjoying the new post-Howard reality, watching the Liberal Party implode. When the leader of your party's popularity is at only 9%, surely you can't slide much further and things will soon start to look up, but I'm going to relish this for as long as it lasts. In today's news, some of them want the old guard out. Behind the ( Read more... )

So, Brendan Nelson, leader of the Opposition here in Australia, has an approval rating of 9%. Nine per cent. I'm not kidding! He is the least popular Opposition leader ever, or at least since polls began in 1987. We're missing 86 years of Opposition leaders there, though I doubt many could reasonably challenge Nelson for that shocking figure. ( Read more... )

Well, today's been pretty good on the music front. I bought tickets for Porcupine Tree in both Melbourne and Brisbane - Sydney's still up in the air and dependent on a couple of factors, but tickets aren't exactly flying out the door at a great rate of knots. I also went and got my ticket printed for the Explosions In The Sky tomorrow, and I'm ( Read more... )

Today will surely go down as one of the greatest days in Australian political history. As the first order of business of the 42nd parliament of Australia, Kevin Rudd offered an apology to the Stolen Generations, those thousands of Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their homes and made wards of the state, deprived of contact with ( Read more... )

I am starting to become convinced that the political right wing is perfecting the art of stupidity, and I am disappointed that the Aussie right is importing some language from the US. Australia lacks anything resembling a bill of rights, but today, Victoria became the first state to introduce a human rights charter. You can read it here. Now, I ( Read more... )

Politicians, eh? Vile scum. Labour's Telecommunications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has announced mandatory filtering of online content at the Internet Service Providor level in Australia (Source: the ABC and the BBCAll last year, I took shot after shot at the Liberal government's social policy, and rightly so. It's archaic, out-dated bigotry ( Read more... )

So, it's the last day of 2007. Thank goodness for that. I went into this year with considerable excitement and optimism, as reflected in this entry. To be perfectly honest, this year turned into the worst year of my life. 1998 was the previous worst; I had just moved to Australia from New Zealand, the couple of acquiantances I made in the dying ( Read more... )

When I left off yesterday, I was discussing literature. I've noticed a number of you have been posting lists of books you have read this year, so I figure I shall contribute one of my own. I suspect it will be considerably different to the norm. I naturally cannot remotely recall all the books I have read this year. Here's what I can remember, ( Read more... )

It's early days yet, but the new Rudd Labour government is doing me proud. A start has been made on dismantling the institutionalised latent racism of the John Howard era. In response to the MV Tampa affair, Howard & Co. established their morally repulsive "Pacific Solution". Thousands of islands which were formerly in Australia's migration zone ( Read more... )