Super-bad policy: Keating attacks government ahead of budget
Paul Keating has dramatically entered the debate over allowing first home buyers access to their superannuation accounts.
Mark Kenny is Fairfax Media's national affairs editor. A director of the National Press Club, he regularly appears on the ABC's Insiders, Sky News Agenda, and Ten's Meet the Press. He has reported from Canberra under three prime ministers and several opposition leaders.
Paul Keating has dramatically entered the debate over allowing first home buyers access to their superannuation accounts.
As the Liberal and Labor bases crumble, the temptation is to chase the strays, writes Mark Kenny
Just as dwindling unions and, by association, their parliamentary champions, were thrown a lifeline by the prospect of a WorkChoices-style campaign to protect weekend penalty rates, a union leader reminds voters what they hated about the old model of industrial relations: strikes, intimidation, and belligerent lawlessness.
A bitter slanging match has erupted on live TV.
Perhaps voters are more awake to it after the bizarre "real Julia" declaration, but when a leader suddenly promises "leadership," it grates.
Greens leader Richard Di Natale believes many Australians would be better off with a four day working week or a six hour working day even if it meant less money. This would allow people to spend more time on the things that make life worth living, such as family, sport, and volunteering.
Forced to act by catastrophic blackouts eliciting little more than ridicule from the federal sphere, the South Australian Labor premier has cast off the threadbare fabric of Australia's patchy national energy nework.
There's a message here for the PM: cut the ideological clap-trap, and get the budget under control.
The widening gap between rich and poor in Australia should be viewed as a new form of "systemic risk" endangering billions of dollars tied up in long term resources projects, the nation's big miners will be told on Friday.
The loudest, clearest, proponents of a reduction in penalty rates take a different view about their own leisure time.
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