When Leigh Sales asked Malcolm Turnbull why Section 18C was getting more attention than things like “out of pocket medical expenses, the fact that suicide rate among teenage girls has gone up 45 per cent in the past year, the fact that the average Australian female worker loses nearly all of her take-home pay in child care”, Turnbull blamed the ABC.

‘The nbn network is Australia’s exciting new landline phone and internet network. It’s designed to give you access to fast, reliable phone and internet services, no matter where you live’. NBN Connect Kit.  

Mr Fraudband you’ve screwed our dream

Made the biggest mess that we’ve ever seen

For the discerning reader the Palazzo Report, the classified internal report on how we got into Iraq and how we fared, prepared by Army Historian Dr Albert Palazzo and now released in redacted form, is a remarkable document. Although heavily redacted in places, it offers a rich store of information about how the Howard Government conducted itself in the lead up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Government’s intent, and the state of the Army it sent to war.  

Tony Abbott came to power on 18 September 2013 and served as PM until 15 September 2015. The two things that stood out to me were firstly, when he appointed Malcolm Turnbull as Commutations Minister, he wanted him to destroy the internet and secondly that he would repeal Labor’s Carbon Tax.

He thought the internet was to access pornography and that Climate Change was a socialist plot to replace communism. Despite his luddite mind the internet survived, albeit a second-rate version.

Raw data sourced from AusTender and APS Statistical Bulletin: Markus Mannheim, Editor, The Public Sector Informant, comment editor Canberra Times.

The countries that have mastered the development of their resources, most notably Norway, worked out long ago that to truly prosper in the long run, the citizens who own these assets are entitled to share in the super profits derived from extracting their finite resource wealth.  

As Centrelink continues its campaign of flawed and inscrutable debt collection, a young man commits suicide.