Uncategorized | Crispin Hull

Tribute to my mentor

Last week a memorial gathering was held for Michael Travis, who was Chief Sub-Editor of The Canberra Times for 20 years. He was Chief Sub-Editor when I was appointed a cadet journalist in September 1972.

My eulogy follows:

PM: call the Greens’ bluff

The Greens are behaving like the National Party – again. They are threatening to side with the Liberal Party to defeat sensible climate policy in Australia.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese should call the bluff. Electoral arithmetic is on his side.

You’d be nuts to buy new fossil car

The ACT Government this week did a big favour to its citizens, and probably Australians in generally, by announcing that it would not permit the sale of fossil-fuel cars and small trucks after 2035.

Presumably, that means that no new ones bought interstate after that date would be able to be registered in the ACT.

Bad pizza triumph of bad week

The pizza was the triumph of the week. Salami, zucchini, Chinese mushrooms, a best-before-expired can of tomatoes and an assortment of left-over cheeses, none of them parmesan or mozzarella. It was the fifth day of isolation.

The week, as a whole though, was far from a triumph.

God bothering fewer Australians

Christian church leaders, elders, and others have been in damage control since the census figures came out last week showing Christianity falling to 44 per cent and no religion rising to 39 per cent.

They sounded like a whole lot of executives and apologists for the tobacco industry hiding the truth with propaganda, fuzzing the facts to deny that lung cancer was the inevitable consequence of the product. Except this time, it was child abuse and abuse of authority, not lung cancer.

Labor’s Senate danger

Labor and the nation would have been better off with a hung Parliament and minority government. That way, Labor would have been saved from itself.

Last week’s unilateral decision to cut the advisory staff of independents and minor parties from four to one, is an example of a decision a minority government would not have made.

PM’s trouble with corporations behaving badly

Big corporations can so often be relied upon to put their short-term profits over everything else from public good right down to even their long-term survival.

We saw that in spades over the past fortnight with greedy power companies sitting at the roulette or poker table of Australia’s electricity grid, bluffing, raising bids, holding, or speculating on whether another oligopolitical supplier will hold out for the big one or cash in and take the profits now.

The point of a Labor Govt

Paul Keating famously said in 1996, “When you change your Government, you change the country.” John Howard’s Coalition Government sure did that. The question now is whether Labor’s Anthony Albanese can change it again, reversing the worst of the Howard changes which have now have had two decades of making the place worse not better.

Risk of going too early with Voice

The Albanese Government faces some big risks in proposing a referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in its first term. The first risk is that it fails to pass. The second is that even if it passes nothing much changes on the ground for Indigenous people.

For the thing to be a success, a lot of people’s attitudes have to change.

Big Budget reallocation needed

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has a problem. But it has some solutions. The problem is that even his modest agenda comes with costs. Further, Labor’s pre-election predilection to just agree with every spending increase and tax cut proposed by the Coalition makes the job that much harder.

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