There was a mild buzz of excitement among the Australian commentariat, following Sally Jackson’s piece in the Media Section of Thursday’s Oz. The article was mildly interesting, but, since a healthy ego is an essential prerequisite for an opinion columnist, there was a lot more interest in the sidebar, where the “leading columnists” had their positions briefly summarised (unfortunately the sidebar is not in the Web version as far as I can tell).

I got a fairly straight summary “Left-wing economist, anti-privatisation, anti-GST”. This was slightly inaccurate since I support a GST with food exempt or zero-rated, which is what we have (except for the bizarre limitation to ‘fresh food’, a concession to a combination of Treasury opponents of all exemptions and Democrat health freaks). But the error was understandable given that I recently referred to the GST as an example of ‘second-order trivia’ that distracted attention from more important issues like unemployment. Others, like Michael Baume who was accurately labelled as a ‘Howard apologist’ will be less happy. And I hate to imagine the response of those who were left out altogether.