Search / 9 posts tagged kevin keating

Well, having opened a thread that perhaps proves that Ute Man is still out there but not actually supporting Emo Man, it behoves me, I guess, to have a bit of a say about the tenure of the Rudd government to date. To some degree all these sorts of anniversaries are somewhat artificial, as you can easily see in the United States with the fetish of the “first hundred days”.

As I’ve commented before, it’s always a bit difficult to keep track of Malcolm Turnbull’s economic narrative du jour. At least with Emo Man Brendan Nelson, we could always rely on undiluted populism with not even a minimal pretense at making any sense.

Just before last year’s federal election, I read Neal Blewett’s Cabinet Diaries. The book is a good read, but I was also interested in reminding myself - in the dying days of the Howard Era - what a Labor government felt like.

Peter Martin notes an important parallel between Keating and Obama, and the contrast with the How/Rudd model: “You can’t micro manage a thing like the Commonwealth. And I noticed the other day that the US presidential candidate Obama was overheard with a microphone on with the British Opposition

Crikey editorialised about Paul Keating yesterday: He’s the Bert Newton of Australian politics: the polished performer whose gift for spontaneous, stiffly splenetic wit was honed in tougher vaudevillian times, times when having a personality meant more than booking an in-store appearance from Sophie Monk.

 SOMETIMES the best way to make voters forget their ills - real and imagined - is to promise them less and prepare them for the worst case. If politicians followed the rule of the possible when talking to the public, they would be better able to sell reforms.

Not so much. Let me digress for a while before I explain that judgement. We’ve been watching it for the last few weeks because we have teenage kids, and it’s a valuable insight into that hyperconsumerist marketing showbiz for them. On the whole we like it, but mainly because it fosters conversations with them about advertising.

This is an opinion piece from today's Jakarta Post. I re-post it here for the reason that the writer is a personal friend and one of the people that provided me with my education on Indonesia. Despite our often differences in opinion, he is one of the few people I trust to give me the low down on why my opinions are wrong or misguided!

Coast to coast Labor governments by Mark Bahnisch on June 2nd, 2008 Glenn Milne must be delighted that Martin Ferguson isn’t a happy camper, as he’s finally able to write a column based on rumblings within Labor rather than play his traditional role as a conduit for Liberal leadership dissent (or