Mark Kenny is the national affairs editor for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based at Parliament House
In a barely noticed respite from last week's hyper-partisan squabbling, Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten actually agreed on a couple of things. It is an enduring curiosity that such moments tend to escape attention.
As the Liberal and Labor bases crumble, the temptation is to chase the strays, writes Mark Kenny
For all the talk of the seven-day working week, employment for most of us not connected with retail, hospitality, and fast food, has stayed largely within the Monday-to-Friday tramlines. Weekends are our own.
All eyes will be on the WA state election next Saturday to see how Labor polls.
All of a sudden, Labor went quiet on Friday, right when it was gearing up to hammer Malcolm Turnbull over slashed penalty rates for hospitality and retail workers.
Descending east from Jerusalem into the Rift Valley, the landscape turns decidedly hostile, and that's just the start of it.
For most of its life, the Turnbull Coalition government has mysteriously underperformed – like a luxury car with persistent mechanical problems.
An inward-looking America could prove to be a blessing in disguise for Australia
The whole double-D drama could have been avoided had the government made the concessions that secured the Australian Building and Construction Commission's passage this week.
How many votes do you reckon Kevin Rudd lost when it was revealed he had gone into a seedy New York strip club known as Scores in a drunken manhattan bar crawl? Or what about Donald J Trump? How many do you imagine he lost from the notorious bus tape where he was recorded boasting of preying on and sexually assaulting women?
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