WOULD Prime Minister Kevin Rudd lie to the Australian people? The chief climate negotiator for China and the small African nations at Copenhagen think so.According to Lumumba Di-Aping, an African who lives in New York, the “message Kevin Rudd is giving to his people, his citizens, is a fabrication.
PRIME Minister Julia Gillard seems hell-bent on trashing the Westminster concept of parliamentary democracy before her government’s first sitting day.
ON THE 75th anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, ask yourself one question: would the NSW Government have built it today?The answer is simple. The current Government’s dismal record on infrastructure has almost certainly ensured that it would NOT be able to raise the funds.Investors are running away from the Labor Government following its appalling handling of the Cross City Tunnel and the Lane Cove Tunnel developments, as worthy as they may be in the long term.Further, now that Premier Morris Iemma has cosied up to the Greens with a sleazy preference swap, one can only imagine the myriad objections the power-peddlers in both the ALP and the Greens would have to creating such a bridge.
OPPOSITION Leader Kevin Rudd is an ultra-cautious politician but in claiming heart-rending memories of childhood dispossession, he may have shot himself in the foot.
THE depression Canberra sits in was a sheep station before being approved as the site for the nation’s capital in 1911.The area is now economically, as well as geographically, depressed, and the fact that the left-leaning residents of the People’s Republic of Canberra have twice elected Chief Minister Jon Stanhope’s ALP Government demonstrates that sheep still rule on the banks of the Molonglo.Though Canberrans point to statistics showing they are better educated and better paid than most Australians, their embrace of Stanhope shows they have less commonsense.Canberrans have shown extraordinary tolerance towards Stanhope and the controversy and scandal that have dogged his administration.They are proof that learning and intelligence are distinctly separate and should not be confused.
DESPITE NSW Premier Morris Iemma’s hangdog expression, the ALP are not the underdogs in this month’s state election.
LABOR’S habit of recruiting candidates with no local knowledge is bad news for the constituency.
FEDERAL Opposition leader Kevin Rudd has seized on Sir Rod Eddington to mend the fences with a business community trashed by former leader Mark Latham.
EDDIE McGuire and so-called reality TV shows such as Big Brother may think they’re responsible for creating the idiot-celebrity genre, but politics must own that distinction.
THE Carr-Iemma Government can claim one achievement – it has managed to turn NSW into the punchline for jokes about the Australian states.
THE radical Islamists of Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) who met in Lakemba to cheer speakers calling for a global Islamic state, which somehow did not include Australia, raised a number of issues.
TO the utter chagrin of self-described progressives, Australia Day was celebrated uneventfully around the nation.
Original URL: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/blogs/piers-akerman/page/163