Our two main parties have platforms that you could swap.  It is hard to find policies of any real difference.  People pay allegiance to political parties for the same reasons they follow a faith or a footy team.  But on some issues of national and historical moment, party allegiances should be buried.  Two such issues are the treatment of those on this land before Europeans arrived on it, and how best to preserve this land against changes in the environment of the kind that the earth has experienced since it was formed.  Yet here, each has become a party political issue – for no reason that can be divined from the platform of either party.  And in both, the same people are involved in saying ‘No’ to change at least some of which is both desirable and necessary.  The tactic is simple enough.  You just say ‘Boo!’. 

These are real failures in our governance – governors who are too timid to make necessary changes, and the governed timid enough to go along with a dreary minuet of a mediocre nation too scared to stand on its own.

Twiggy says senior people are leaving Fortescue because they are not ‘aligned.’  In other regimes, that pronouncement might be terminal.  ‘It’s my way or the high way.’  He should get Mr Goyder to bring over his team from Qantas.  They will agree to anything.

Mr Goyder looks to suffer from the Andrews syndrome.  He has been in power uncontested for so long that he believes his own bullshit.  He ought to be left with one chairmanship, and I hope it is not the company in which I hold shares.

And that is certainly not Qantas.

And the Prime Minister is learning the hard way that people in his office should not associate with ratbags.  And he did not just associate with them – he fawned on them.  He might reflect on Caesar and his wife, and the notorious capacity of Oz politicians to be duchessed.

Visitors to G20 are greeted at Delhi: ‘Let us work together for a new paradigm of human centric co-operation’.  Unless you are a Muslim.  The PRC was not taking this lying down to excuse the absence the Sphynx.  It was absorbed ‘in thought study to fully implement the new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics to condense the heart and soul to achieve new results.’