Yes! Yes! Someone has seen fit to bring up the ludicrous spectacle of summoning up the walking dead at last; the walking dead being ex politicians who far from covered themselves in glory when they were in government. Of course, it's not just the recent incident with poor old dithering Bob Hawke and the Labor party: it is also the Liberal party with John Howard, who lost his own seat, John Hewson, the dolt who lost the un-loseable election, and Malcolm Fraser, the born again Left lunatic they kept digging up until they would have had to literally dig him up.

The really, really silly thing about these tragic, but dangerous, politicians is that they will wheel in the past leaders, but they do not believe in history and sneer at philosophers from the past and people with experience. They just keep on making the same mistakes, and no political has-been will make any difference to their incompetence.

A new issue to fill-in the news comes from the Shearers' strikes.
The national song. "It has been widely accepted Waltzing Matilda is probably based on the following story:

In September 1894, on Dagworth Station (northwest of Winton), some striking shearers fired their rifles and pistols in the air, setting fire to the woolshed. The owner of Dagworth Homestead and three policemen gave chase to a man named Samuel Hoffmeister – also known as "Frenchy". Rather than be captured, Hoffmeister shot and killed himself at the Combo Waterhole."

He had foreign citizenship , maybe gay and Republican. A greenie and gun-owner . There's years of Q&A and Question Time in him.

Couldn't agree more with both the writer Stephen Cable and the post ttbn but how to get you into parliament and into the newspapers Stephen ?

True signs of desperation indeed, when too clever by half writers resort to risible rubbish as barely veiled anti gay propaganda?

And as with all good, if fundamentally flawed propaganda, contains an element of truth?

However if we are going to exhume Leaders of the past, why stop with Hawke or Howard?

These two old lectern thumping protagonists forever changed the nature of politics, and or, not ever owning your own decisions and the consequences?

The Leaders, also flawed? I would have chosen as role models of the left or right? Would have been centrist Bob Menzies and our last true Labor leader, Ben Chifley.

Why?

Because between them and bipartisan clear eyed pragmatism, they ushered in a period of unprecedented postwar prosperity! And like phoenix rising, from the ashes of a war torn, basket case economy!

And almost solely on the back of publicly owned and operated, AFFORDABLE RELIABLE ENERGY!

And that's all we need now! Along with bipartisan pragmatism, a strong dose of realism. And tried and tested and not found wanting, cooperative capitalism, supported by regional autonomy and direct funding, moneysaving models!

And just by not ruling stuff out based on this or that ideological imperative! Or discarded because it worked too well, economic theory!?

Even if that requires some, so called leaders to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 2st century! And the "cyclical" ice age, we should be having!
Alan B.

Of course we can't lay any responsibility with the voters 'coz that would be taking it too far..... and when you ask anyone the response is, 'they were just walking past when it all happ'n'd

Although it is perhaps unique to the USA perhaps a more obvious and deluded sign of desperation on the part of right-wing or "conservative" propaganda hacks is the adulation and calling up upon the legacy of Ronald Reagan as a possible template for our to make Amerika great (grate) again.
These essays describe his all-the-way-down-the-line toxic legacy.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/RonaldReagan_page.html

I notice that the Liberty Woks outfit combines both a so called libertarian perspective, and a supposedly conservative "catholic" perspective too. Never mind that a genuinely conservative religious perspective/understanding, and a libertarian perspective are mutually exclusive.

There is of course a very big difference as to how politics and culture is now formed and relentlessly driven. Back in the Hawke and Reagan days there was no internet, which is to say that via the internet and the relentless 24/7 "news" cycle everyone and everything is now instantaneously interconnected.
Also in the early 1980's the human population was only about 4 billion. It is now over 7 billion - and that fact alone does literally change everything.