The Punch

Independent MP Tony Windsor has revealed this morning that he has received death threats following the Government’s carbon tax announcement.

This follows yesterday’s decision to ask the media to gather around and listen to an abusive phone message he had received, calling him an “f’n dog” etc, etc.

This is really nasty stuff and despite Windsor’s grizzled rural “she’ll be right” veneer, the member for New England is no doubt personally a bit concerned by his new role as pin cushion for anti-carbon tax hatred.

Continue reading "Windsor’s world of death threats and carbon taxes" »

Join The Punch team here from 2pm for today’s Question Time antics.

News.com.au’s Political Editor, Malcolm Farr will be contributing live updates from inside Parliament House while the rest of the team supply witty banter and exceptional insight into the issues of the day right here.

Continue reading "Question Time Live" »

Yesterday afternoon, Football Federation Australia confirmed the game’s worst kept secret and announced North Queensland Fury would not take part in the A-League next season, the club short of cash and the sport’s ruling body unwilling to stump up its own.

Given we’re one week out from the competition’s grand final, this is a Godsend for the anti-soccer brigade, who will pounce on any opportunity to shove all those “the world game will dominate” arguments back down the deluded roundball fanatics’ throats.

There’s no denying the decision to close the Fury is a body blow for the code but it’s not the death knell for football. In fact, forget the Socceroos – this is the time when football in Australia really comes of age.

Continue reading "Forget the Fury, let’s focus our anger on the future" »

In a climate change debate which so far is exclusively about integrity and conviction there is only one winner - Malcolm Turnbull.

Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott would not even podium if constancy of belief in climate change policy were an Olympic event - they might not even get through the repechages.

There is solid testimony that the Prime Minister, when Kevin Rudd’s deputy, actively lobbied within government last year to have the timetable for an Emissions Trading Scheme dumped because of the unfriendly politics around it.

Continue reading "And the winner is… Malcolm Turnbull!" »

Enough. Unpopular though it may be, it is a time to take a stand.

We have to stop celebrating morons and their attendant antics. We have to stop defending idiots and their self-imposed tragedies.

Whether it be a middle-aged former cricketer with a penchant for romancing equally vacuous bimbos or drug-addled footballers with a natural gift for screwing up every fifth chance offered to them - it’s about time we drew a line in the sand and said “sod off!”.

Continue reading "The Stupid People: They are legion, and dangerous" »

Ask any poor wage slave trapped in rush hour traffic or crammed like a sardine into a sweltering carriage on their hour-long daily commute and my guess is you’ll find no shortage of strong opinions on Australia’s less than terrific track record in urban planning.

As our major cities have grown in population over recent decades the unimaginative response of state governments has largely been to drive new housing towards our metropolitan fringes.

But as many of us experience daily, on the whole they’ve done so without putting in place the economic and social infrastructure to accommodate such expansion – public transport, training and employment opportunities and access to essential community services such as childcare.

Continue reading "Traffic jams? No jobs? Ghettoes? Blame poor planning" »

In his spare time Penbo writes a column for the Australian Womens Weekly each month and this is his latest. It’s a bumper edition featuring an excellent recipe for roast chicken with tarragon, and a great interview with Anna Bligh.

There are men and there are men and then there’s Alby Mangels. Alby, you will recall, is the adventurer and film maker who became an overnight sensation in the 1980s when he travelled the untamed parts of the planet in an old Land Rover with nothing but a blue heeler, a compass, a bag of dried apricots and two dozen Miss Australia finalists.
 

Alby was related to some family friends of ours and, as a teenager, I had the privilege of going to his house to watch the unedited pre-release version of his World Safari film. It went for about 14 hours. I was glued to the screen, marvelling not so much at the adventures he had but the really hot women he got to have them with.

It didn’t seem to matter if he was wearing the loin cloth shorts or the mud-spattered Chinos, Alby was a veritable chick magnet. He famously shed the loin cloth in 1985 for Cleo magazine, saying enigmatically: “We come in with nothing, and go out with nothing, nudity is our truest form.”

Continue reading "Advanced body hair? Yeah yeah." »

With the fate of the proposed flood levy hanging in the balance as we await the outcome of negotiations between Senator Nick Xenophon and the Federal Government, it‘s timely to have a close look at the whole issue of disaster insurance and the insurance industry generally.

A sad reality emerging from this summer’s national disasters is that not only have we been as a nation generally under-insured for natural disasters, but more significantly for consumers the insurance companies are basically a law unto themselves when it comes to paying out on insurance contracts.

As anyone who has tried to take on an insurance company knows all too well, the legal cards are stacked in the company’s favour.

Continue reading "Let’s get medieval on insurance company’s arses" »

I have just returned from spending five weeks in India. The purpose of the trip was to deliver a number of papers and lectures, attending various conferences including the Indian Association for the Study of Australia – a three-day conference looking at the cultural interactions between the two nations.

Leading up to the World Cup, there were obviously discussions about cricket, but the history is a lot more complicated than that, as our nations are intertwined in ways that most of us are ignorant of.

For example, Professor Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay is researching the way our two countries collaborated during the World Fair in the nineteenth century. Researcher Amit Ranjan presented a personal account of his research into the grave of Australian Alice Garden who died of cholera in Calcutta in 1882: Why was she there? What kind of interactions did she represent?

Another issue that is often raised is the experience of Indian students in Australia - not only the attacks of last year, but the more general encounters between Australians and Indians. In the context of a history that includes the mistreatment of indigenous Australians and the infamous ‘White Australia Policy’, I am asked: ‘Is Australia a racist country?’

Continue reading "We’re only as racist as our pollies make us out to be" »

Welcome to Wednesday’s word of the week.

Today’s word is brought to you by Punch reader and tied winner of last week’s round, “Nicole”.

Here’s the clue: “A trip that’s taken that benefits no one but costs everyone.” Take an educated guess or a stab in the dark below.