Latham's law

In the 1980s classic Ghostbusters, Ray Parker Jr’s theme music gave rise to an enduring catchcry: Who you gonna call? It must be reassuring for the members of the Health Services Union to know, during this time of despair and desperation, they can call on the union’s ombudsman to sort out the mess. Not all trade unions have ombudsmen at their disposal, independent figures of integrity who can arbitrate disputes and guard against the improper use of members’ funds. But clearly, the HSU is one of the lucky ones.
When its boss, Michael Williamson, was thinking about the appointment...

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Happy meals

How long has it been since you opened up your local newspaper, turned to the food section, and read a really awful restaurant review? I don’t mean a review that says, well, the steak was a bit overdone but other than that the meal was lovely. I’m talking about the sort of thing that would make any self-respecting chef hang his head in shame, if not stick it in the oven. If you live in Australia, chances are the answer to the question would be given in years.

Now turn the question around: when was the last time you...

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Whitlam, Nixon and ANZUS

Gough Whitlam’s victory on 2 December 1972, now encrusted with myth for the Left, was traumatic for a Washington tortured by Vietnam. A cool look back at the 1972-73 US-Australia crisis finds both heroes and villains.

Joe Kelly wrote in the Australian on 16 April that Australian ambassador to the US Jim Plimsoll ‘first sounded the alarm on February 9, 1973 in a secret cable to Canberra’. If so, Plimsoll was tardy. On 23 December 1972, waiting in the White House to see Henry Kissinger, I realised he might broach the Whitlam tornado. I occasionally talked with Kissinger (my former...

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Too good to be true? Yep

It was widely expected that when Wayne Swan delivered his fifth Budget, it would be a blatant attempt to pull the wool over Australians’ eyes with a fiscal fiddle and more broken promises. Australians are being asked to believe what the Treasurer told us this week. The problem for the government is there will be very few, if any, who do.

Back in the Howard/Costello era, we never had any doubt that what we were being told on Budget night was true. We were usually astounded by the size of the surpluses and wowed by tax cuts and other benefits...

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They could be heroes

‘Everybody makes their own lunch in this parliament,’ said Tony Windsor the other night in an ABC interview in which he suggested Tony Abbott ‘test the marketplace’ with a no-confidence motion. Admitting that his constituents ‘don’t like what’s happening at the moment’, he notes Labor has ‘put itself in a degree of jeopardy’.

Meanwhile, Rob Oakeshott sees recent goings-on as ‘the darkest days’ of this parliament and says he is ‘frustrated’ and ‘pretty angry’. Although ‘open-minded on a no-confidence motion’, he, like Windsor, is scathing of the Opposition’s reluctance to put one forward. ‘I am keen to move a no-confidence...

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Australian Notes

Even the Canberra Press Gallery can read the signs. Christopher Pearson reminded us in the Australian last weekend how they had queued up to tell us what a government masterstroke it had been to appoint Peter Slipper as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Prime Minister Gillard had sensationally outwitted Tony Abbott, they said. They had been similarly effusive about the appointment of the hapless Bob Carr as Foreign Minister and the error-prone Tim Flannery as Chief Climate Commissioner, among many other brilliant coups over the years going back to Gough Whitlam’s appointment of Vince Gair as Ambassador to Ireland...

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