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Canberra Today 14°/16° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Macklin / Big pictures face the nuts and bolts

Simple TWO very different political campaigns kicked into first gear this past week. Yet in each case the incumbents, PM Malcolm Turnbull and CM Andrew Barr, paraded the big picture while their challengers, Bill Shorten and Jeremy Hanson, countered with nuts and bolts.

Robert Macklin
Robert Macklin.

Turnbull’s tax proposal with the states and territories stunned almost everyone, not least his own Treasurer, Scott Morrison. Without the necessary preparation it was not surprising that the premiers pushed it off the political cliff and happily pocketed the new health funding. It was a serious misstep from Turnbull, but at least it ended any idea that he was running on Tony Abbott’s record.

Shorten plugged away with his negative gearing policy which, according to respected former Finance Department secretary Michael Keating, will not be quite the disaster the PM trumpeted. In fact, Keating said, it wouldn’t make much difference either way.

Locally, Barr gave us his vision of Canberra as “a complex ecosystem willing to embrace change”. People around the world, he said, were “flocking to cities where the collision of ideas and talent at the heart of modern business innovation takes place”. He said a lot more of the same – including a big plug for light rail – and sounded more like Malcolm than Malcolm.

Hanson and deputy Alistair Coe responded with a much more conservative plan that would see oodles of buses replace the tram at a fraction of the cost. But whether car-addicted Canberrans would actually use them is the great unknown.

MEANWHILE, Victoria gave the nation a lead in response to its Royal Commission into domestic violence. Premier Daniel Andrews pledged to accept all 227 recommendations.

“We’ll punish the perpetrators of this violence, we’ll listen to the people who survive it and we will change the culture that created it,” he said.

A big call, but one that needs a national program of support, including the ACT.

SPEAKING of social misdeeds, Donald Trump’s idiotic call for “some sort of punishment” for women seeking abortions provided the first crack in the façade of a campaign that has shamed America in the eyes of the world.

Trump recanted soon after, but by then the dam, it seemed, was bursting.

THREE cheers for Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk who publicly nailed the British “invasion” of Australia in 1788. The time had come, she said, for our schools and universities to tell “the full details of Australian history”. Hard to argue with that.

WHILE we were enjoying our seemingly endless summer, the Great Barrier Reef was turning white with anxiety. And new modelling of the Antarctic ice shelf showed that rising sea levels are becoming a real and present danger to Canberra’s beach-house brigade.

SPEAKING of our beloved Tuross, newly-retired champion basketballer Lauren Jackson will now have more time to spend with her folks who live there. While she was understandably sad that a busted knee ended her career at only 34, it could be a blessing – she’s young enough to return to uni, have a family and there’ll be no shortage of lucrative offers to sit on boards… even that fibreglass kind among the ever warmer Turossian waves.

robert@robertmacklin.com

 

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Robert Macklin

Robert Macklin

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