Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd, October 29, 2007:

“It is stunning, after all these years, that Mr Howard – anchored in old thinking, anchored in the past – refuses to accept this challenge of the future,” Mr Rudd said today. “We will frame our interim targets once the Garnaut report is delivered.”

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong. Yesterday.

Professor Garnaut’s review will help to shape government policy, Senator Wong said. “Of course we will also be looking at other inputs such as modelling from the Australian Treasury.”

Glib into Government doesn’t go.


Today is something of a moment in the eight-year history of Crikey … today we farewell Christian Kerr, a man some of you may have first met as Hillary Bray. He’s been somewhere close to the heart and soul of Crikey since it emerged from the rubble of Stephen Mayne’s Jeffed.com in February 2000 (Stephen expands on this shared history in today’s edition). Christian, as you may have read elsewhere, will shortly be joining the Canberra bureau of a leading national broadsheet newspaper. He has presumably been hired in the fond hope that he will be thus flattered into unopinionated meekness, anodyne respectability and straight journalism, free of agenda, ideological loyalty or overt passion. We wish them luck. And we wish him well.

On Monday we’ll introduce you to our new man in Canberra.