daggett, what's it feel like being hosed down, mate? Is the water freezing cold, or seductively warm like that feeling you can get in your pocket if you have to stand in a densely packed crowd for an extended time? "I have just spoken to a staffer of a Federal parliamentarian and learnt that there were no plans in the pipeline to hold a referendum for the fixed four year Parliamentary term." Heaven forbid, daggett, and you believed him/her?

Trust your instincts, mate. The indications are you were a lot closer to the truth in your first assessment if you heard or saw any suggestion that a referendum was proposed in any mainstream media article. Thats how they do things these days: get it on record, however obscurely and even more ideally, unofficially, in the mainstream media, then keep dead quiet about the plan until the last minute (or even three days after the last minute!) and then spring it on the unsuspecting public. Then, if by some oversight or act of insubordination there should ever get to be any public discussion questioning such lack of notice on the issue, the government can then point to the obscure early article and say "This has been publicly discussed. Where were you? Asleep or something?"

"But what about debating it in Parliament and circulating the YES and NO cases to the electors?" you may ask. What about it? They got away without producing a YES and NO case at the 1999 referenda: why could they not use that precedent in conjunction with a guillotine on the referendum Bill debate in the dying hours of this Parliament?

You haven't put my mind at ease at all, daggett. The fact remains that that JSCEM recommendation is on the books in that Report on the 2004 Federal elections. I am worried. I am very worried.

Remember, they only need to HOLD a referendum, not get it passed, to achieve the primary aim of extending the roll close period.

And who needs a pipeline for a referendum, anyway, apart from Malcolm Turnbull?