How do confident consumers vote? The Westpac–Melbourne Institute Consumer sentiment index out this morning suggests that Australians are starting to feel quite good again about their financial prospects. The index has risen to its highest level in 13 months, which surprised Westpac’s chief economist Bill Evans. ”We saw a comparable surge in confidence in 2009 when households realised that Australia had avoided recession but at that time the index was recovering from a much lower level.”
The improving sentiment will no doubt increase the confidence of the Labor government about its re-election chances, especially with the economic update to be given by Treasurer Wayne Swan later today providing further good news. The one doubt must be that behind people felling better about their prospects are the two months without any further interest rate rises. Perversely it is good news, rather than bad, that will encourage the Reserve Bank to move rates upwards again.
A beautiful straight bat. It would surely be a travesty of justice if Stephen Smith lost the job of Foreign Minister in the event a Labor government is re-elected. The man has grown into the job wonderfully and now he is free of the shackles imposed by an interfering Prime Minister he will do even better. His task over the next five or six weeks until polling day will not be an easy one as he has to pretend to be keeping the Timor boat people option alive but the calm authority he now exhibits might just be enough to carry the illusion off.
Tourists covered with oil. Well, there aren’t many tourists this year and the oil on the beaches of Alabama is a different kind than featured in the original version back in 1977 but Jimmy Buffet is doing his best to change things. At the weekend he revived his classic Margaritaville at a free seaside concert designed to give holiday makers a reason to visit and keep the gulf economy running despite the destruction caused by the BP oil spill. He even changed a few words for the occasion:
Nibblin’ on sponge cake
Watchin’ the sun bake
All of those tourists covered with oil
Strummin’ my six-string
On my front porch swing
Smell those shrimp they’re beginnin’ to boil
Chorus:
Wastin’ away again in margaritaville
Searching for my lost shaker of salt
Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame
But I know it’s nobody’s fault BP’s fault
The crowd loved it and at least BP paid for the event as part of its $20 billion reparations package!
A symbolic form of r-pe. Having got into a nostalgic mood after finding that Jimmy Buffet news, imagine the excitement when the BBC News website revealed the finding of the long lost The Wardrobe sketch from the Pete & Dud show. Not the original television recording, which has somehow been wiped, but the text that has enabled the sketch by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore to be re-enacted with Dud (played by Adrian Edmondson) waking up screaming from a dream. Pete (played by Jonny Sweet) decides to attempt to decipher Dud’s dream using Freud’s theories and comes out with the immortal line: “Reading the newspaper, in Freudian terms, is a symbolic form of r-pe.”
It was Bono what done it. You could blame him and perhaps now thank him. It was the singer Bono at the 60th Golden Globes in Beverly Hills on January 19, 2003, who prompted the Federal Communications Commission in the United States to adopt a policy under which profanity referring to -ex or excrement was always considered indecent. Bono uttered the phrase “f-cking brilliant” during the awards show and the complaints poured in. But overnight the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan struck down the 2004 Federal Communications Commission policy that resulted. “By prohibiting all ‘patently offensive’ references to s-x, s-xual organs and excretion without giving adequate guidance as to what ‘patently offensive’ means, the FCC effectively chills speech, because broadcasters have no way of knowing what the FCC will find offensive,” the appeals court wrote. “To place any discussion of these vast topics at the broadcaster’s peril has the effect of promoting wide self-censorship of valuable material, which should be completely protected under the First Amendment,” it added.
Rudd – Minister responsible for cleaning up the mess he made.