Staying or going: The conspiracy-minded
will have seen Steve Lewis’s unambiguous message to the prime minister in this
morning’s Australian.
“John Howard should declare his hand. The prime minister
has a responsibility to his Coalition colleagues and, more important, the
electorate to announce whether he plans to pull up stumps in 2006. Obfuscation
should give way to full and frank disclosure. It’s time for the guessing game
to end.” Interesting, with Rupert in the country.

Reshuffle rumours: Is the Father of the
House going to leave home? There’s speculation within the Attorney General’s
Department that secretary Robert Cornall will go – and Philip Ruddock with him.
Or perhaps the Libs will wait to see what happens in Pittwater before risking a
by-election.

More Cheek: By the time you read this, former
Tasmanian Liberal leader Bob Cheek will have launched his memoirs – check out the invite here, the chapter
dealing with current leader Rene Hidding should have appeared on the Tasmanian
Times site and… and…
and… Well, let’s wait and see what tomorrow brings.

Flogging a dead horse: A subscriber writes
– “Did you note that our soon to arrive visitor, the awful Rummy Rumsfeld was a
lover of Greco-Roman wrestling in his youth?”

Workers of the world unite: We shouldn’t be encouraging him, but this comment on this morning’s ACTU rallies by Labor renegade Andrew Landeryou
deserves a wider audience: “Very large crowd have braved a chilly
Melbourne morning seems at the ACTU’s rally against the new industrial
relations laws, some comrades with straight faces claimed two hundred
thousand. Mind you, these are the people that supported the Cain/Kirner
regime with its dodgy accounting.”