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Highlighting the coalition’s hypocrisy by contrasting its response to Hick’s detention at Guantanamo is a good example, but surely Dr Haneef’s case is a better one.

It seems very careless of Rudd to agree to launch a book that has let out one of Labor’s most closely guarded and politically damaging secrets – that they dread the possibility of Costello as leader of the Liberal party.

Howard’s problem was that not only had the union movement clearly had its day but we also had here a Labor Prime Minister to tell everyone the fact.

Blaming Howard for lying for some people became much easier than dealing with their own political weaknesses.

Howard is right in saying that Labor is a friend to terrorism is not part of his campaign. The question is, why not?

The changing politics of the War on Terror and Iraq has created some awkwardness at the APEC conference because it is hosted by a leader who cannot adapt to it.

If Rudd’s principled ‘withdrawal’ from Iraq is a bit of a fraud, it is no less so than Howard’s ‘commitment’.

Having forced the debate away from international issues, Howard is now being forced to turn back to them with the APEC summit.

Rudd’s job now is to stop boring the nation on how drunk he was four years ago.

As the year progresses and commentators start to accept the government is losing, they seem increasingly to want to make it a non-event.

Earlier posts →

• 

• Key Posts of the Summer

  There was an eerie synchronicity in Sydney and Canberra last week as the two most influential political organisations of the latter half of the 20th century, the ALP NSW Right and the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party, went through remarkably similar motions.

  - The not-so-glorious sunset of the old order

  This is all about making the Liberals feel good, not the government feel bad.

  - Self absorbed, and deluded

  For the last decade, the Australian right has been living a lie.

  - No choice

  Rudd had been looking for overseas governments to provide a direction that it has avoided sticking its neck out trying to generate at home.

  - No more Copenhagen to hide behind

  The charge has drifted from sexual abuse to a vague one of neglect, because there was no evidence, neither from the initial report that sparked the intervention, nor from the subsequent thousands of medical checks that followed. So there was no trial; just the punishment and an unproven slur against NT indigenous communities.

  - Rights and wrongs

• Calendar

  March 2010

  M	T	W	T	F	S	S
  « Feb
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  8	9	10	11	12	13	14
  15	16	17	18	19	20	21
  22	23	24	25	26	27	28
  29	30	31

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