New Opposition Leader Speaks Out

I just wanted to be the first person to give this sort of headline to Justice Michael Kirby's new foray into activism -

Those who wanted to abolish the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) were living in a fantasy world, High Court Justice Michael Kirby said today.

Justice Kirby, a former deputy president of the Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, made the comments in a speech at the Australian Industrial Relations Commission Centenary Convention in Melbourne today.

Hitting out at opponents of Australia's present industrial relations system, Justice Kirby said some wished to see the IRC "closed down lock, stock and barrel" or "converted into a mediatory body with no legal powers of arbitration or intervention".

"Persons of such views tend to live in a remote world of fantasy, inflaming themselves by their rhetoric into more and more unreal passions, usually engaging in serious dialogue only with people of like persuasion," Justice Kirby said.

[from The Age]

To suspend judgement slightly, I suppose Kirby might be talking about elements even more radical than the Government...

It's become like an ALP advent calender -

- every day I've been getting up, excited, saying "oh boy oh boy, which shadow minister will be sending himself to the backbench today?!?!?!" Sadly, my monitoring of The Age's breaking news page hasn't revealed a new one yet today, so maybe, fittingly, the very moderately talented Daryl Melham, who went yesterday, will have been the final subtraction in an exciting couple of weeks.

FURTHER (at 1:15pm on Friday 22 Oct) - from an AAP report on The Age breaking news page

The first meeting of the Labor caucus since the party's devastating election defeat wrapped up on Friday after almost three hours.

Shouting could be heard coming from inside the party room in Parliament House where Labor MPs conducted a post-mortem on Labor's fourth consecutive election loss.

Oh boy oh boy!

Could the Christmas Chocolate be about to be revealed?

From a review by Simon Heffer of a new book on the Crimean War, in last week's Spectator -

Lord Cardigan was assaulted by a pair of Cossack lancers during the Light Brigade's manoeuvres. They tried to capture him. One of them speared his thigh with a lance. Cardigan refused even to draw his sword, 'considering it unworthy of a commanding officer to be seen brawling with private soldiers'. A man with such a sense of propriety as that deserved better than to be commemorated by an item of knitwear.


The same issue of the Speccie contains a devastating review of the the third and final volume of Norman Sherry's Life of Graham Greene by an apparently outraged Philip Hensher.

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