No comments in over a week! This suggests that there is hardly any interest in the state Liberals. The longer they are out of office in Victoria the better.

The Oldtimer's disease strikes again! (I think.)

I've been up and down the list of topics regularly over the last fortnight, and I hadn't noticed this article before Saturday 21 April, when it drew its first comment. It is a topic I would have been interested in.

I have gained the impression that the top of the list is not where all articles necessarily enter the Article Discussion Index, but it has never interested me enough to check in detail. Now that I think about it, I don't recall ever seeing any articles in the Article Discussion Index with zero comments.

Are articles posted somewhere else on the site until they draw their first comment? Or is it just the case that I regularly happen not to be online when they are first posted? Does anybody know?

Now to the subject. 'Running dead' is a term I think could be well applied to all State Liberal Party approaches to both parliamentary opposition and campaigning for office.

Could it be that behind the public 'performance' there are bigger fish being fried?

Could it be, for example, that anti-Constitutionalism (closet republicanism) has been the order of the day as a selection criterion for pre-selection and advancement within State (and for that matter, Federal) organizations, notwithstanding deep-seated community reluctance and, indeed, opposition to this policy direction?

Nothing illustrated this light-weight anti-Constitutionalist approach better than the NSW Liberal Party campaign proposal to empower juries to determine sentencing in criminal trials. Sentencing is a judicial function, and if there is genuine community dissatisfaction with inadequacy or inconsistency of sentences, then prescriptive legislation is the answer. It was this fundamental function of government from which the Liberal Party opposition was promising, if elected to government, to abdicate. This was noted by voters.

Longer term, perhaps the over-all strategy (one made possible, I suggest, with the aid of long term electoral impropriety) is to attempt a re-run of the 1942 tactic to circumvent the Constitution, avoiding referenda in what will be represented as being 'exceptional circumstances'.