The Greens planning spokesman, David Shoebridge, said there were so many applications in the pipeline that it would be ''business as usual for the development lobby'' for the next two years unless the Coalition returned many of them to councils for determination.

''We must put in place a regime that has these applications assessed in light of all the local, regional and planning laws that apply to all other developments not under the rule-free Part 3A,'' Mr Shoebridge said.

He said that letting the Planning Assessment Commission approve them would make little difference because it operated under the 3A provisions, which ignored the local planning laws that smaller developments complied with.

If ever we wanted a classic example of how damn broken our parliamentary system really is, we had it yesterday.

In one corner we had the rabid budgie smuggler talking-up a 'people's revolt' that turned out to be such a dud, that not even police would take it seriously, & in the other, big red, suitably indignant because her good name & that of her office had been publicly brought into disrepute.

There they both were folks, treating us to another second rate round of parliamentary theatre costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to stage, welded implacably to opposite sides of the stage, mouthing the most offensive language at each other.

This is a repeat of an article posted earlier this morning in response to Barrie Cassidy who for "balance's sake" peddles crap:

Conviction politicians are hard to find in Australia these days.

Ten years ago, the then Liberal Party federal director, Lynton Crosby, said his research turned up two genuine conviction politicians - John Howard and Bob Brown.

Many people were taken aback when France emerged as one of the most pugnacious advocates of military action in Libya, especially Americans who were accustomed to French criticism over Iraq and French foot-dragging over Afghanistan. Without President Nicolas Sarkozy’s early and constant pressure for a United Nations-endorsed no-flight zone, military intervention might have come too late to save Benghazi’s people from the murderous threats of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

You don't expect Australian charities to be winning international design awards. Then again, you mightn't expect the world epicentre of supersize houses to tolerate homelessness for one in 200 of its citizens, either. The obvious design solution to an affordability crisis in one of the world's richest cities is to make houses smaller. Much smaller, in this case, but perfectly formed.

This collection of hundreds of coloured, jagged shards could be a work of abstract art. But the objects in the photograph to the right are the contents of the stomach of a sea turtle that lost its battle with plastic pollution.

Environmentalists examined the stomach of the juvenile turtle found off the coast of Argentina. The bellyful of debris that they found is symptomatic of the increasing threat to the sea turtles from a human addiction to plastic.

Julia Gillard told her caucus on Tuesday that Tony Abbott has made three errors on climate change.

His day one position of declaring the carbon price plan the end of the world ''makes it difficult to say something else on day two''.

The decision to repeal the tax if elected meant he would have to also repeal the compensation that went with it.

And his broad pitch to the sceptics made him hostage to the climate-change deniers, a support base, the views of which, he could not publicly advocate for fear of offending a broader audience.

However, the ''arms and legs'' of his ''people's revolt'' are climate-change deniers and occasionally he has to throw them a bone.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says Julia Gillard could expect a 'royal wedding bounce' in the polls when she returns from London in April.

Ms Gillard and partner Tim Mathieson have accepted an invitation to Prince William and Catherine Middleton's April 29 wedding.

In a scathing critique of the prime minister, Mr Abbott told the Liberal and Nationals party room meeting on Tuesday the Labor leader, whose support rose in the latest Newspoll, could expect a further boost.

'She may not believe in God, the monarchy or marriage but there will be a royal wedding bounce,' Mr Abbott told his MPs.

Capitalism may be to blame for the lack of life on Mars, Venezuela's socialist president Hugo Chavez says.

"I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilisation on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet," Mr Chavez said in a speech to mark World Water Day.

Mr Chavez, who also holds capitalism responsible for many of the world's problems, warned water supplies on Earth were drying up.

I assume that to some, I dare say, to the majority of Western citizens, it must be a relief to see that 'our' force for good has not lost its momentum - that humanitarian benevolence which characterizes the self-portrait we paint of our societies as we ponder on our own exceptionalism, our magnanimity.

There has been hundreds of aftershocks in this region...

Scientists are trying to establish if the Magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake has altered the chances of a major tremor under Tokyo - or increased the risk of another tremor powerful enough to generate a tsunami.

The massive Sumatra quake in 2004 was followed by many others above Magnitude 7.0, including two above Magnitude 8.0 in 2005 and 2007.