"Don't believe the ads you see on television from the union bosses trying to create fear. The unions are now running an almighty campaign against the government and they are trying to create a climate of fear."
Joe Hockey. Howard Minister.
But Group of Eight universities chairman Alan Robson hit back, saying he was disappointed at the Government's "attack on the intellectual honesty of the investigators".
"I think it's appalling that a legitimate study is attacked because one of the founders is the unions," he said. "I have absolute confidence that this is a rigorous study and that, as I understand it, it is an ARC linkage grant, so it was peer-reviewed, and there's no reason whatsoever to assume that the results will be biased … if the funder was a business organisation, would the same matters have arisen?"
The Age.
"The left and the socialists in particular have been absolutely decimated and annihilated over the last 20 years until we realised we are actually on our knees already we are going to make a whole lot of strategic blunders... I didn't read a newspaper for 2 months after the election, I could hardly talk to my friends, I was traumatised and I don't think I was alone there and I think it is really important that we do look for realistic seeds of hope... Call me old fashioned but I am inspired by the Romans, they took the view attack is the best means of defence. You do not accommodate, you don't simply buckle under but you've got to complement that with realism...you've got to be very very careful about the way you inject your lethal force but you've got to think about how you inject the lethal force in the current situation."
Academic John Buchanan, 2005.
He began, reluctantly, almost desultorily, to work his way through a list which had formed automatically in his head.
He took on the record comments first, as a way of re familiarising them with his main stream role, and then switched to that old and dubious concept, "off the record". But off the record didn't get him much further than on. None of the usual lobby groups, small numbers of people with a united grievance, had the vaguest idea of a perpetrator. The remnants of political parties had even less idea, if that was possible.
In the preliminary stage of the succession of interviews he took down critique's of Austin's reign, knowing in his bones, x-rayed as always on the planet surface, that they were unlikely to be published, that nothing would break the mill pond of public perceptions created by the floating media world.
The thought kept occurring to him throughout the day that he should tell someone his implant wasn't working properly. Under the harsh fluorescent lights things would appear perfectly normal one minute; and then make no sense whatsoever the next. And in those moments when they made no visual sense, the already subdued colours of their headquarters de-linked into an abstract, fuzzy grey. And he felt desperate all at once, absolutely desperate and absolutely sad, as if he was suddenly elevated to look across a quagmire of pain. Unrealised voices. Unpublished voices.
The Austin thing wasn't helping; as he dialed and dialed and whips of verbal torment lashed out from his boss.
Critiques from the disaffected was not what she wanted.
As far as he could tell no one else was experiencing the same vicious series of mini-breakdowns. He looked perfectly normal in the bathroom mirrors. He went about the phone calls while attending to his other routine duties - and tried unsuccessfully to avoid his boss - and the fabric of things would open up again and again.
And then, as his fingers flicked across the keyboard and stabbed at the phone, it came to him. He knew who knew.
THE BIGGER STORY;
THE award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the UN's top climate panel on Friday has prompted a fresh chorus of criticism from global warming sceptics -- with one dubbing the award "a political gimmick".
Herald Sun
And it looks like today might be the day John Howard calls the election.
At last.
And then it will be Viva Republic d' Kevin and we shall see.
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