The Senate resumes this week for its first sittings in around 2 months. In order to squeeze in one more night at home, I catch the early morning direct flight to Canberra. This means catching a 5.20am flight. Even though I thankfully live quite close to the airport, it still means getting out of bed…
Continue reading →The first week of Parliament is over. It was a short week, just one day for the ceremonial opening and the Governor-General’s speech, and two days for any business of substance. My speech in response to the Governor-General is here for any that care to read it. There was one piece of legislation passed to…
Continue reading →Whilst its been clear for a while what the end result would be, the official Senate numbers (and names) are now finalised. In amongst all the claims and counter-claims, there are a few straightforward facts. After all the claims about preferences, a few points should be made: Pre-election warnings about the Government’s chances of winning…
Continue reading →It’s always interesting reading post-election analysis, although I imagine it would also be somewhat more enjoyable if you’ve had a good election result rather than a bad one. A recent Bulletin contains some items by Max Walsh. In the space of a page he raises a few different ideas. Firstly, there’s the proposal of changing…
Continue reading →I doubt a day went by during the campaign when the Democrats didn’t warn about the prospect of the Liberals controlling at least half of the seats in the Senate. The Democrats (and clearly some of Labor’s) preferences were aimed at minimising the chances of that happening, by steering some preferences from the conservative side…
Continue reading →Sunday started with a brief 5 minute stint with Laurie Oakes on the Sunday program. I was on straight after Bob Brown. It seemed to me like they were getting the smaller parties out of the way at the start of the campaign so they can focus on the Howard vs Latham contest. I tried…
Continue reading →The 3rd full day of the campaign – or the 1st if you take it from the proroguing – unless you don’t count a Senate Committee hearing as an election campaign (which it isn’t) – in which case it hasn’t really started at all. I certainly didn’t expect to find myself sitting in Committee hearings…
Continue reading →John Howard has said at least one true thing so far – the Government does not control the Senate.I hope we can keep that way, but today showed nobody else controls the Senate either. After the Prime Minister cancelled the House of Reps sittings while leaving the senate to sit for two days, it became…
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