The most important rule of journalism is trust your source. Even if it's a reptile

It's who she speaks to that gives Laura Tingle an uncanny knack of picking election winners

Laura Tingle in The Australian Financial Review, August 20:

HARRY the psychic giant croc, which yesterday predicted a Gillard victory, has as much chance as anyone of being right about tomorrow's result.

Tingle in the AFR on August 21:

POLLING figures reflected the firming expectations on both sides of politics that Labor would limp over the line in the election.

Tingle in the AFR last Monday:

LABOR is likely to be in a better position than the Coalition to form a minority government. The seat of Brisbane was expected to go to the Coalition, cutting Labor's seats to75 in the 150-seat parliament.

Tingle in the AFR again last Monday:

LABOR must be the immediate beneficiary of the Coalition's failure to capture voters' discontent. It seems likely it could hold one or two seats more than the Coalition, thanks to a very effective postal vote campaign.

Tingle in the AFR on Friday:

THE Coalition, which never really came to terms with the fact it lost power in 2007, thinks it should have won this time. Armed with the support of News Limited, which did everything in its power to get the Coalition back into office this time around and which is now already campaigning for a fresh election, the opposition thinks it would be likely to win another election held in the next six months.

Tingle on ABC1's Insiders yesterday:

I DON'T know where the sort of sense that we've got to sort this out in three days has come from apart from, particularly, the News Limited papers.

Centrebet odds last night:

LABOR, $2.70. Coalition, $1.43.

Tingle, AFR, September 30, 2004:

ONE simple, politically devastating policy idea. Mark Latham's Medicare Gold proposal has shown him to be as wily a tactician as John Howard has ever been. Yesterday suggests Latham can win this election.

Paul Kelly in The March of Patriots:

WHILE [Paul] Keating and Howard fought over many issues, the 1991 to 2007 era saw the growth of a largely bipartisan Australian strategy for success in the globalised age. The proof was the superior position to the rest of the developed world at the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis. The legacy bequeathed to Kevin Rudd was a Keating-Howard product.

Rudd launches The March of Patriots on September 7, last year:

PAUL, I fear we may part company. On the economic reform agenda, we would describe our opponents as indolent, perhaps not always opposing the great transformational reforms engineered by Labor during its 13 years in office, but barely adding to that reform agenda during their 12 years office.

World Bank president Bob Zoellick tells Greg Sheridan in The Weekend Australian on Saturday:

KEVIN Rudd was skilful in taking Australia's performance, which was stronger than that of most countries -- and he recognised that this was partly the legacy of the previous Coalition government -- and leveraging that into considerable influence on the Australian stage.

Bush-latte. David Dale in The Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday:

NIELSEN finds the bushies are more likely to be regular viewers of the ABC and SBS than townsfolk. A more accurate stereotype of Clancy [of the Overflow] in the 21st century might be as a leftie trendy with a passion for news and culture. And surely that means we should be happy to leave control of our governance to him.

Reality check. David Humphries in the SMH on Saturday:

THAT a Galaxy poll for News Limited newspapers this week found voters in [the rural independents'] seats overwhelmingly prefer an Abbott government to more of Labor was a statement of the bleeding obvious.

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