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Tuesday, 5 August 2008                                                                                             

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The picture tells the story

Tuesday, 5 August 2008 - Those of you who look at the daily news summary that I put up on the Owl website everyday will have seen this graph taken from the New York Times. It needs little explanation with the message a clear one: the bust in the US housing market with its impact on the international banking system has some way to go yet. Housing Lenders Fear Bigger Wave of Loan Defaults is how the headline put it. And there was further worrying news in a second New York Times story: Higher Prices Outpace June Spending by Consumers . Inflation is taking root in the US and the dreaded stagflation seems to be emerging.

Can Gordon Brown be a Paul Keating?

Tuesday, 5 August 2008 - It has become quite fashionable for the Conservative side of British politics to call on Australians to help them with their election campaigning. The team of Mark Textor and Lynton Crosby were behind the last unsuccessful general election campaign but had more success in helping Boris Johnson become Lord Mayor of London . Perhaps the time is fast approaching when the embattled UK Labour Prime Minister should call on the former Labor Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating for a little guidance in what is clearly a time of need. Gordon Brown, like Keating, succeeded his party's most successful Prime Minister ever having been forced to remain in charge of economic policy for much longer than he considered fair and reasonable and now has the disadvantage of having to overcome a pronounced feeling in the electorate that it is time for a change. Paul Keating could tell him all about that as he was the definite underdog when campaigning got under way for the 1993 election but he proved a master campaigner in winning the unwinnable and did so by staying true to the principles which made him such a reforming Treasurer.

Back to their best

Tuesday, 5 August 2008 - The websites of the Fairfax broadloids were back to their best in this morning's Crikey survey of the most read stories around the nation. Topping the list at the Age was More grisly details emerge in Canadian bus murder with the Sydney Morning Herald opting for Greece where there was Carnage in paradise as boyfriend beheads lover

The vanquished and the victor

Tuesday, 5 August 2008 - Having struggled alone with Maximilian S.Walsh and Robert Haupt for a couple of years doing those Sunday program interviews in the days before Laurie Oakes I hope I will be forgiven for yet another observation on the program's passing. There was only ever one part of the program that actually had an influence on political life and that was not because of that small minority of Australians who sadly found themselves with nothing better to do on a Sunday morning than watch television. It was the coverage given on the television news that night, and in the papers and on radio the next morning, to what the featured politician had said that mattered. And even that was not an original Sunday contribution to Australian journalism. Michael Schildberger and Alan Reid with their Nine Network talking heads program Federal File were the real trail blazers. Their success in generating interest and influence was what encouraged Kerry Packer to have a Sunday program that used more than one camera in the pokey Consolidated Press room in the Parliamentary Press Gallery. And the death of Sunday probably was not just the cost of the posh hour and a half that surrounded the interview but the arrival of a competitor in the ABC's Insiders which resurrected the cheaper Federal File format of an interview and some controversial talking heads. It was only when the monopoly on news making expired and the other networks did not have to give the Sunday night news plug to Nine that the cost became too high.

A foreign divertissement

Tuesday, 5 August 2008 - It is interesting to observe how governments in trouble at home manage to find a little foreign divertissement. That Dustin Hoffman and Robert de Niro movie Wag the Dog is too true to life to be really funny. The latest example is in Thailand where the Government racked by scandal has managed to find a border dispute with its neighbour Cambodia just as the former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (whose allies are still in power) awaits trial and his wife appeals against a jail sentence.