Slippery Slipper props up Julia Gillard Government after Andrew Wilkie withdraws support

Slipper is effectively the man holding up the Gillard Government. And the Sunshine Coast turncoat is set to come under renewed pressure from local voters over his move to accept the Speaker's role now that key Independent Andrew Wilkie has abandoned the Labor ship over pokies' reform.

The government faces renewed pressure to announce tough measures on bankers' pay this week as data shows that the average remuneration for 1,265 senior staff was £1.8m in 2010.

The analysis of regulatory disclosures by eight leading banks comes as the business secretary, Vince Cable, prepares to announce on Tuesday how he will tackle the issue of executive pay.

ONE of the state's most senior police officers has been forced to step aside from an investigation into the alleged police beating of a cricket fan after it emerged that the officer involved was his son.

When NSW Assistant Commissioner Mark Murdoch fronted television cameras on Friday, he defended the actions of an officer who was captured on video punching a cricket fan.

What he did not realise at the time was that the officer in question was his 24-year-old son, Thomas.

from Crikey ….. 

Civil liberties groups to A-G: ASIO refugee assessments unjust

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy.

JULIA Gillard says Tony Abbott's pledge to "turn back the boats" can't be done because the Navy has warned it will put at risk the lives of Australian sailors.

But the Opposition Leader says the option will remain a key plank of his asylum seeker policy.

"No one ever said that it was going to be easy, no one ever said that it was going to be possible in every circumstance," Mr Abbott said, as he campaigned in the PM's western suburbs seat of Lalor.

"What we've said, though, is that it should be an option to turn the boats around where it is safe to do so. The Navy's done it before, it can do it again."

From Mike Carlton

One of my new year's resolutions was to ignore the Republican primaries in the United States, but I have broken it already.

They have a horrible, irresistible fascination, not unlike watching a funnel web spider crawling across your lounge-room carpet. All those spray-on tans, those spray-on first names - Mitt, Newt, Rick, Ron - and worse, those spray-on opinions confected out there on the lunar right. These people have spun so far off any rational policy axis that they make George W. Bush look like a Roosevelt liberal.

The benefits of being rich are numerous, and probably don't need a great deal of explanation from me. The ability to travel the world at the drop of a hat is, I imagine, one of the many advantages great wealth brings, as is the possibility of doing away with a number of the banal inconveniences that plague everyday life. Not having to get out of bed at the crack of dawn for work has its appeal, as does eating the best food and never having to cook any of the damn stuff.

Miranda Gibson is today sitting on a small platform 60 metres high in a Eucalyptus regnans beneath Mt Mueller in central Tasmania. She has been on the platform for more than four weeks and intends to stay until the tree is cut down or governments keep their word that the tree, its wildlife and the mountainside forest in which it sits are protected.

Just over the ridge from Miranda are the Styx River and its Valley of the Giants, named after the kings and queens of the eucalypts, which tower up to 100 metres high - that is, as high as a soccer field is long.

Courage is a virtue and heroism is admirable, but do we have a right to demand them? Which of us cannot look back on his or her own life and remember decisions, or compromises made, or silences kept because of cowardice, even when the penalties for courage were negligible?

If we are cowardly in small things, shall we be brave in large? Have we the right to point the finger until we have been tested ourselves? When we read of the seemingly lamentable conduct of the captain of the Costa Concordia, Francesco Schettino, who left his passengers to their fate, do we say, ''There but for the grace of God go I''?

The Gillard government has conceded for the first time that poker machine reform agreed to with the independent Andrew Wilkie in 2010 will struggle to pass the Parliament.

Mr Wilkie last night met the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to discuss the reforms and will meet her again today in Melbourne.

He reiterated his threat to withdraw support for Ms Gillard if reform was not legislated by May 8 but failed to detail what that would mean inside the Parliament.

''I'm not going to mince my words ... if the government fails to honour its agreement with me then I may well walk away,'' he said.

"The spy rock was embarrassing," he said in the BBC2 documentary series, Putin, Russia and the West. "They had us bang to rights. Clearly they had known about it for some time and had been saving it up for a political purpose."

A diplomatic row was sparked six years ago after Russian state television broadcast a film claiming British agents had hidden a sophisticated transmitter inside a fake rock left on a Moscow street. It accused embassy officials of allegedly downloading classified data from the transmitter using palm-top computers.

In recent weeks Mitt Romney has become the poster child for unchecked capitalism, a role he seems to embrace with relish. Concerns about economic equality, he told Matt Lauer of NBC, were really about class warfare.

“When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus 1 percent,” he said, “you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”

Mr. Romney was on to something, though perhaps not what he intended.

As a result, the legislative battle over two once-obscure bills to combat the looting of American movies, music, books and writing on the World Wide Web may prove to be a turning point for the way business is done in Washington. It represented a moment when the new economy rose up against the old.

“I think it is an important moment in the Capitol,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and an important opponent of the antipiracy legislation. “Too often, legislation is about competing business interests. This is way beyond that. This is individual citizens rising up.”

David Cameron will spell out his vision of "moral markets" today, as he enters the intense political debate over how to create a more "responsible capitalism".

In a long-awaited speech in London, the Prime Minister is expected to call for reforms to create a new "popular capitalism" and say the Government is prepared to intervene to make it happen. However, he is also likely to stress the benefits of free markets and to reject what he regards as the heavy-handed, statist approach favoured by Ed Miliband, the Labour leader.