Diary

19 May 2012
Stephen Romei

London
London is in drought: it says so on the side of the buses. When I left Australia, the dams were overflowing. It’s an upside-down world indeed. It’s mid-April and the days are cold and bright, as George Orwell recorded them. But, reassuringly, only the digital clocks strike 13.

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It’s my first visit to the English capital for a decade, so this may be old news, but the streets are teeming with Russians, or at least people who sound like Russians. They can’t all be West End thespians hoping to be cast as the next Bond villain, so...

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Fine dining in Melbourne

19 May 2012

‘Lunch with Peter is an agony; it’s a nightmare,’ complained Michael Kroger on ABC radio the other day. He may well be right, particularly seeing as Michael doesn’t drink, and Peter is happy to have a glass or two. But beyond that revelation, Mr Kroger’s ‘spilling of the beans’ offered very little nourishment and left a bitter, unpleasant taste in the mouth.

The essence of the former Victorian Liberal powerbroker’s spray seemed to be that the former Federal Treasurer bores his dining companions rigid by trashing Howard, Downer, Turnbull, Peacock, Hewson and Abbott over yum cha. (Why Gorton, McMahon...

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No innocence in presumption

12 May 2012
Anthony Morris, QC

…presumption of innocence has nothing to do with what goes on outside the courtroom.
Professor Robert Schuwerk,
University of Houston Law Center

Recent political events involving Peter Slipper and Craig Thomson demonstrate how politicians have appropriated and subverted the legal doctrine of ‘presumption of innocence’, redefining it for their own benefit.

The political version of this presumption is bizarre. When a politician is accused of wrongdoing, everyone must try to imagine the politician is blameless, regardless of the evidence. Were the entire College of Cardinals present to witness the wicked deed, their voices are...

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Australian notes

12 May 2012
Peter Coleman

Bad news from France and Greece. Their new governments will tax and spend, scrap welfare reform, drive out investors and ruin their countries. What they need is a Mrs Thatcher. No sign of that.

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At first it looked as if British Labour had shot itself in the foot. In its loathing of Rupert Murdoch, it used its majority in the House of Commons Culture Committee’s inquiry into phone hacking to settle old scores, from Murdoch’s smashing the corrupt print unions in the 1980s to his role in defeating Labour in 1992 (‘It’s the Sun wot won it’) and...

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Diary

12 May 2012
Alex Mitchell

In the past I’d taken a very jaundiced view of writers’ festivals because I felt they had been captured by Manhattan and Bloomsbury publishing houses, publicists and schlock writers. But having received an invitation to next week’s Sydney Writers’ Festival I have revised my opinion on the rather shameful grounds that ‘it’s only a rort if you are not in it’. The festival’s Texas-born artistic director Chip Rolley has tasked me with three challenging events: a discussion on digital-age journalism with investigative reporter Heather Brooke, who broke the British MPs’ expenses scandal; a debate with Sydney columnist Sam de Brito...

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The European disease

12 May 2012

The way things are heading in Australia, we may soon be eligible for entry into the European Union. Culturally, economically, environmentally and politically, it is clear that our current leadership team is far more comfortable pursuing a European approach to our future than an Asian one.

It’s no wonder that Euromoney magazine lionises Wayne Swan as ‘the World’s Greatest Finance Minister’. His fifth Budget might as well have been delivered in French or Dutch, so comprehensively did it follow the Brussels method. In a nutshell, the Budget (and its two complementary taxes, which barely rated a mention on the...

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