Australia's retail sector is in all sorts of bother. After almost 20 years of buying up big, and borrowing to pay the bills, Australians are saving again. In most comparable countries, the global financial crisis burst domestic property bubbles.

But here, the housing bubble has remained intact. Property prices in Australia, even at entry level, are outrageously high. Having looked overseas and seen what can happen to families and societies when they are too exposed to debt, Australians are doing the prudent thing - putting some of their earnings away and trying to maximise the value of every dollar they spend.

In the marketing world, people jump ship all the time. The chief executive of such-and-such a firm, having for years demanded unconditional loyalty from his team, will join his company's most hated rival. Struggling brands will poach their competitor's creative director in order to get themselves back into play.

Betrayal? Of course not. It's called ''doing business'' and nobody bats an eyelid. So, is Malcolm Turnbull about to jump ship? Could he do business with Labor?

from Crikey ....

Kevin Andrews rides again in Malaysian solution

Charles Richardson writes:

Behind the political scenery, and on the festering subject of Israel, relations between Riyadh and Washington had recently become unprecedentedly shaky. Crown Prince Abdullah had long fumed about America's apparent complacency over the plight of the Palestinians.

That spring he had pointedly declined an invitation to the White House. Three weeks before 9/11, enraged by television footage of an Israeli soldier putting his boot on the head of a Palestinian woman, he had snapped. Bandar, the crown prince's nephew, was told to deliver an uncompromising message to President Bush.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch proved himself to be "out of touch", banging his hand on the desk and being "monosyllabic" and "cantankerous", relying on his James who proved to be an expert in the art of vague PR.

That was the British pundits' damning assessment of the media mogul's performance during a grilling from British MPs at a parliamentary hearing into the phone hacking scandal engulfing Britain.

"The House of Lords has taken the unprecedented step of publishing a "cease and desist" letter on its website demanding that Lord Christopher Monckton, a prominent climate sceptic and the UK Independence party's head of research, should stop claiming to be a member of the upper house.

When you were editor of the News of the World, were you aware that more than half of your news and feature reporters were paying Whittamore to use his network of blaggers to obtain confidential information?

Were you aware that your news editor, your features editor and your Scottish news editor were among those using this network? Do you remember using him yourself? The paperwork seized from his office by the ICO records you asking him to "convert" a mobile phone number into an owner's name and address.

Were you aware that Whittamore was submitting invoices to the NoW which explicitly requested payment for apparently illegal acts?

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK7SRYp4sBc

Tony Abbott has vowed to fight Labor's carbon tax to his "last breath". But as he takes his campaign on the road, facts are taking the wind out of some of his arguments.

On Monday, touring a Peabody-owned coalmine in the Hunter Valley, he insisted that the Gillard government should apologise for the tax that would "badly damage" the future of coalmining in Australia and "discourage investment" in it.

Just hours later Peabody Energy and ArcelorMittal launched the biggest-yet takeover offer for an Australian coalmine with a $4.7 billion bid for Macarthur Coal. Yesterday share prices rose for most Australian coalminers.

Ian Widdup has the bluntness of the terminally ill. He is counting the cost of his days as a money-launderer: ''I've been punished for my sins in quite a profound way. I'm poor. My wife left me. And my health has left me.''

He has leukaemia, and doctors told him he should expect to die in the first half of this year. Which means he should be dead, not sipping a Dubonnet in the lounge of the Westin Hotel in Martin Place. ''I fertilised corruption for a decade and a half,'' he told me, ''and I sincerely regret that.''

The Tory commentariat has been frothing all week at the thought of the Greens controlling the balance of power in the Senate. The voters have made a frightful mistake in allowing this state of affairs, apparently.

There's particular angst over the new NSW Greens senator, Lee Rhiannon, whose parents, Bill and Freda Brown, were card-carrying members of the Communist Party of Australia yonks ago. She, therefore, must also be a Red.

from Crikey .....

Put it down to another case of the Perpetual Present to which some members of the Press Gallery are so prone: otherwise intelligent Gallery journalists running the Opposition's talking point that the Government is avoiding parliamentary scrutiny by releasing its carbon pricing package on Sunday.

from Crikey .....

Crikey Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes: