Unions, hopefully, are there to protect workers in case of danger — financially as well as safety at the working place. Picture by Gus.

Bob Katter wants to dominate the electoral map, but according to former insiders the maverick federal MP has an abrasive way of carving out his party in his own image.

By dividing, Labor hopes to rule again. But this admission of failure repudiates its most successful period in office.

The theme of the Gillard government's election campaign has now emerged into the light of day. Although no one in Labor has yet stated it clearly as a single coherent idea, it's to be a campaign on "values".

It is a dark underworld of kidnapping and forged passports, of straw companies and assassinations.

A place where young Australians with clean identities become invaluable assets to secretive spy agencies such as the Mossad.

Tony Abbott reminds me of Rimmer in the TV comedy Red Dwarf...

Rimmer is full of self-promoting hubris and as such Rimmer, the Hologram, is the self-appointed captain of a garbage disposal ship lost in space for about 3 million years... The only difference is that Rimmer from time to time realises he's a waste of space, but Abbott never does, though he is the Hollowman... See Tony's latest grand scheme of fiddling with the northern rivers... It's a bit like going from BLUE ALERT to RED ALERT, as the tin-can robot, Kryten, masterly ask Rimmer if that really was what he wanted as all he had to do was change the coloured light bulb in the flashing sign...

My Global Mail colleague Michael Bowers once had the pleasure of talking to one of Kevin Rudd’s primary school teachers, and learned that even back then, Kevin was a little know-it-all.

from PoliticOz ….

a black hole in the budget ….

Former NSW mines minister Ian Macdonald secretly controlled a ­Singapore coal trading company which was set up in May 2008 six days after he asked the mines department for information about coal tenements over a farm owned by Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid.

Mischief by Gus...

Findus UK said Saturday it was taking legal advice after early results from its internal investigation "strongly suggest" that the presence of horsemeat in its frozen beef lasagne meals was "not accidental".

One score years ago and 10, I was in a remote country town waiting patiently for a meeting to finish, then for another meeting to start and finish, so that I could hold a meeting with the people I had come to see. They were, of course, Aborigines of the more conscientious type, which is to say that if they had wanted they could have spent all day, every day, 365 days a year at meetings, mostly with bureaucrats.

Something interesting is happening in Australia.

The Coalition has been telling us for a year or more now that they have all their costed election policies in the can.

''By the end of next week we'll have the policies for an election campaign,'' the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, said last June on the ABC's Q&A.

As a major winter storm made its way up the Atlantic Coast on Thursday, local authorities from New York City to Maine began to make preparations for what forecasters said could be the heaviest snowfall for some cities in the Northeast in a century.