• Time to say goodbye
    To me, Ad Astra, “Time to say goodbye” are among the saddest
    words in our language. Yet say them now we must. I chose Ad Astra
    as my moniker because my secondary school’s motto is ‘sic itur ad astra’,
    which can be liberally interpreted as: “Here is the way to the stars”.
    How inspiring these words have always been to me.
  • Have we got a deal for you
    There is a conspiracy theory that suggests that birds (in the USA
    at least) aren’t real. The claim is that all the birds in the USA were
    hunted down by the government between the late 50’s and early
    70s and replaced with bird like drones to spy on you.
  • Get out of the gutter
    You may not have heard of Mike Rinder. A Scientologist for most
    of his life, at the age of 52 he walked out, and as a result lost his
    family, friends, employment and pretty well everything else in his life.
    RInder has written a book on his time in Scientology, runs a
    website that questions Scientology beliefs and practices...
  • Was Amtrak Joe derailed?
    Prior to becoming President, Joe Biden was a US Senator for around
    36 years. He is known as Amtrak Joe as he routinely took the daily 90
    minute each way train trip (on the USA’s national passenger train network
    - Amtrak) from his home in Delaware to Washington DC to represent his state.
  • If employers can measure well-being...
    Last September, you might have seen Qantas CEO Alan Joyce
    received a pay increase of $278,000 per annum. It seems that Joyce
    has met or exceeded the performance goals set by his employers and
    contractually has earned the reward. It does, however, raise a larger question.
  • Coming back to haunt you
    In his recent Budget reply speech, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton
    laboured (pun intended) on the increasingly difficult to achieve promise by
    Prime Minister Albanese that power bills will be $275 less in 2025. While the
    government is claiming the modelling done in 2021 supports the accuracy of
    the promise, 2021 modelling doesn’t account for changes in circumstances since then.

The Political Sword

Get the inside track on the media and government.

A once and future Senate

We now know that the Senate elected at the July election comprises 30 Coalition members, 26 from the ALP, 9 Greens, 4 from One Nation, 3 from the Nick Xenophon Team (NXT) and one each from Family First, the Liberal Democrats, Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party and the Jacqui Lambie Network. Thirty-nine vo...

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Rudd and Abbott: saviour of their parties

Two of the three ex-prime ministers who were deposed by their own political party have been in the news in recent weeks. Kevin Rudd requested backing from the Coalition government to bid for the Secretary-General position at the United Nations and Tony Abbott claimed there are factional divisions in...

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The election in numbers 2: minor parties and independents

A number of commentators made the point after the election that almost a quarter of voters did not vote for the major parties in the House of Representatives. But that is misleading on two counts. It ignores the 5% informal vote and the 10% vote for the Greens who I think are now entitled to be cons...

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Why are Abbott’s conservatives destroying our PM?

To those of you who dispute the assertion embedded in the title, let me provide you with supporting evidence. First some questions for you to answer: Is Malcolm Turnbull the man you thought he was when he rolled Tony Abbott almost a year ago? Has he fulfilled your initial expectations? ...

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The democratisation of opinion

With the rise of the internet and social media almost anyone can express their opinion to an audience in the thousands, even hundreds of thousands, no longer just to a circle of people who are physically present to hear the opinion. While that provides the democratisation of opinion, it also has a m...

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Make laugh – not war

A couple of weeks ago, our esteemed blogmaster Ad Astra published a piece asking ‘Why is there so much anger?’ It’s a good question.  Sociologists will tell us that whatever position a person takes on a particular subject, there will be some who agree, some who disagree and some who don’t ...

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Johno goes to heaven

Johno was (as they say in the classics) a good and decent man. When he dies, he goes to heaven, and St Peter shows him around. They go past one room, and Johno asks: ‘Who are all those people in there?’ ‘They are the Methodists,’ says St Peter. They pass another room, and Johno asks the same questio...

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Why is there so much anger?

No matter when we listen to the news, watch TV, or browse social media, the pervading emotion in so many items is anger, unremitting anger. We see it in the wars in the Middle East and among terrorist organizations. We are told it is what motivates individual terrorists.  Social commenta...

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Someone’s gotta pay

According to the Coalition government, the ALP’s campaign over the privatisation of Medicare was somewhere between dishonest and outright lies. While it is true that the Coalition has frozen some Medicare rebates and eliminated others, attempted to introduce a $7 co-payment to see a doctor in the 20...

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Mr Turnbull, where are your verbs?

It was one of The Political Sword’s regular contributors, Casablanca, who drew my attention to the absence of a verb in the Coalition’s prime slogan ‘Jobs and Growth’. She had been alerted by an article in The Guardian by Van Badham in May: Good slogan, Malcolm Turnbull, but growth in what kind of j...

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The Liberals are dreaming

On Sunday morning 10 July, before Shorten conceded defeat in the election, Arthur Sinodinos appeared on the ABC’s Insiders. He claimed the Coalition had a ‘mandate’ for its 2016 budget and its company tax cuts. Sinodinos’s view takes no account of the reality of the new parliament.  Althoug...

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Just do your job

Fairfax media’s Matthew Knott asked the other day ‘Election 2016: The uncomfortable truth is the media got it wrong. How did we do it’. It’s a good question.  Knott details issues such as the polls showing split results for months prior to the election yet the betting agencies supporting th...

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How has it come to this?

The MSM and blog sites abound with critiques of the election and tentative predictions of the political outcomes. So why bother writing yet another to explain how it has all come to this? You will judge whether this analysis adds anything useful. Far from fulfilling his oft repeated promise of s...

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The Liberal lie continues

In his speech on election night, as reported by The Guardian, Malcolm Turnbull: … accused the Labor party of running “some of the most systematic, well-funded lies ever peddled in Australia” in a campaign in which Labor claimed the Coalition was planning to privatise the government funded health i...

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G’day America

Hi, howyagoin? We hear that you are having a real problem with who is going to be your next president. We’ve done our election and gone back to the beach!  If we understand the issues correctly, there is the choice of a property tycoon who seems to be able to lend his name to a lot of develop...

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Your vote is valuable

Over the past couple of months, Turnbull, Shorten, Di Natalie and others have been attempting to convince you that they are worthy of your first preference vote. The usual claim is that your vote is valuable. Guess what — it is. Every first preference vote cast at the election on 2 July is worth $2....

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Turnbull’s Medicare backflip — or is it?

Turnbull recently announced that his government, if re-elected, will not change any element of Medicare. It came in response to Labor’s campaigning that Medicare was under threat, that it would be privatised under a Liberal government. The general media response was to take Turnbull at his word and ...

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Your call is important

To paraphrase, hell hath no fury like a politician scorned. Dennis Jensen, MP for the seat of Tangney, was not preselected by the Liberal Party to recontest the seat in Parliament. He is running as an independent. Jensen recently claimed Liberal MPs use database software to profile constituents and ...

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The tale of two Daleks

Good Daleks are hard to find. They’re expensive. But for the Treasury and the Department of Finance, no cost is too high. So they spared no expense in their search for reliable Daleks that could repeat their messages tirelessly. They had hoped to find some with a rudimentary knowledge of economics a...

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Time for a new economic model

Late in the 1970s Keynesian economics was largely abandoned when it failed to explain the stagflation that had occurred during that decade. Recently, in my piece ‘What economic plan?’, I quoted an Australian analyst with the CBA who suggested that recent national data released by the ABS was showing...

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