The Dead Roo

I was alerted a few days ago to the existence of new anti-Green attack site GreensWatch. The site tries to be a dossier of shocking information about the Greens, but doesn’t really succeed at that. It is, at its best, a dubious, badly-written polemic against the Greens, and doesn’t succeed at digging up much of […]

As of a few minutes ago, almost all votes have been counted in the by-election for the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly seat of Greatorex. If there’s something to be said about this result, it’s that it wasn’t much of a victory for anyone. The most notable thing appears to be the low turnout, down to […]

I’ve been following developments in the Papua New Guinea legislative elections over the past couple of weeks, and as usual, there’s been some quite interesting results. The election appears to have produced remarkably more stable results than previous parliaments, presumably in large part due to electoral reforms which replaced first-past-the-post with limited preferential voting. This […]

I was a child of the Kennett years. I was just old enough to know what was going on as Kennett slashed and burned pretty much everything much everything that required public funding in the early 1990s. My teacher parents saw several of the schools they had taught at closed, many of their colleagues forced […]

I think we’ve had a tendency to take the old adage about not speaking ill of the dead a little bit far in Australia in recent years. We saw this last year when Steve Irwin was transformed overnight from the nation’s largest prat to a national hero by the simple act of dying. Over the […]

According to this morning’s Northern Territory News, the Labor Party will be directing preferences to the CLP ahead of the Greens in the Greatorex by-election on Saturday. While the decision has little practical effect - there will be an ice age in hell before the Greens win a seat in Alice Springs - it […]

We here at the Dead Roo have done profiles on some dodgy characters in the past, but I dare say that nothing comes close to this one. Michael Towke, the Liberal candidate for the New South Wales seat of Cook, has sparked a string of controversy with his dubious resume and complete refusal to talk […]

The various states have been in the awkward position of having essentially-legal, but technically illegal, abortion for decades now, courtesy of the awkward compromise achieved in the 1969 Menhennitt ruling, principles subsequently adopted by courts in most other states. A couple of jurisdictions have taken steps towards removing the anachronism - the ACT abolished abortion-related […]

I was just alerted to a rather strange article in yesterday’s Australian entitled “Tribunal hit for Wikipedia ruling”. The article claimed that the Refugee Review Tribunal had been criticised by the Federal Magistrates Court for relying on Wikipedia to make a decision. The thing is - as should have been rather obvious - the site […]

It probably isn’t of interest to many people down this way, but there’s an interesting by-election going on in the Northern Territory which I think is worth keeping an eye on.
Dr Richard Lim, one of the four Country Liberal Party members to survive the Labor landslide of 2005, resigned from his Assembly seat of Greatorex […]

It seems Labor has managed to pick up another star candidate (of sorts), and another journalist, with the decision of Mike Bailey, the ABC’s Sydney weatherman since 1984, to resign from his job and run for parliament. It’s always nice to see candidates with a bit of profile and a life outside politics putting their […]

Over the last couple of days, there has been more agreement than usual between the major parties with the Budget and Budget Reply. Amidst this, however, one very major distinction has arisen between the parties, and it’s something which has been largely overlooked by the mainstream media. The 2007 election is going to see an […]

As of about an hour ago, Western Australian Senator Ian Campbell announced his resignation from politics. I can’t say I’m surprised. After four years as Environment Minister, he was badly demoted to Minister for Human Services earlier this year, and then shafted out of the ministry altogether in Howard’s botched attempt to implicate Kevin […]

Senator Bill Heffernan has had a long history of making grossly misogynist, homophobic and racist remarks, but his remarks about Julia Gillard this week are a step too far.
Heffernan has had numerous opportunities to make amends over the years, but keeps making faux-apologies and then unabashedly reoffending. He should have been not just asked to […]

In a new Dead Roo feature, editors Rebecca Leighton and Kieran Bennett will be preparing a weekly profile of a less well known public figure who has featured in the mainstream news over the preceding week.
Our first target is Paul Gibson, the New South Wales state MP who was dumped from the ministry before even […]