8 thoughts on “Sandpit”

1. I wish to state the obvious which I made at my place. If the electorate are not arch hypocrites then a landslide win to the ALP in the next election is surely odds on given the divided Libs

2. Trust neither their intelligence or their ethics.

3. Labor currently at $1.27, which is highly odds-on.

   But you never know, ScoMo, the Everyman from the Shire, might persuade the electorate to give him more than the nine months remaining this term (“the job has just begun”).

4. Why is it, or so it seems, that every time the media want a quote from a right wing professor of law they go to to the University of Queensland law school? Is UQ law school really a hot bed of legal conservatism?

5. One of the consequences of the dispatching of Malcolm Turnbull that I do not see in the press is; what message does this send to other businessmen who have not come up through the political ranks but are considering running. The message seems to be, from within the liberal party anyway, don’t bother.

   Consider this, Turnbull, for all his faults, represented the very class the liberals claim as their roots: strong business background, wealthy, successful, etc. Yet the cabal who cut him down was mostly made up of people who have rarely, if ever, been off the public teat. They spend their careers using public funds to play political games, and have no vision other than gaining the next perk of office.

6. Brenton Woods

   No need to speculate about how business people will react. Two Turnbull-supporting Liberal MPs who entered parliament after careers in business, Craig Laundy and Julia Banks have both pulled the plug; Laundy from the ministry and Banks from parliament.

   You make an excellent point. If it’s one thing successful business people can’t abide, it’s people in their organisations who muck around playing games to the detriment of the business. Game-players who have no other talents are usually quickly shown the door. The pursuit of profit might not be a noble objective, but at least it is a rational objective.

   But if you’ve spent your entire adult life, first in student politics then as a political staffer, playing political games, doing people in for no reason other than as an act of vengeance or spite or the sport of it, then that is all you know.

7. I’ve had experience with a few volunteer groups that basically collapsed acct they hit a vicious circle… turns out that giving a difficult-to-deal-with person a position of responsibility makes your staffing situation worse, not better.

8. I’m listening to Peter Harris of the Productivity Commission talk about their new inequality report. His tone implies: ‘We don’t want to talk about this inequality stuff, but you idiots out there seem to think it’s important. So we’ve done a report that redefines inequality into something we feel comfortable talking about – “extreme” poverty that you can “target” while leaving all our favourite policy settings in place’.