Whatever will happen next?

In Tasmania, Kevin Rudd puts the piano accordion vote offside, the PM sprinkles Perth with roads funding and stares down the RBA, while back east the Treasurer, tiring of making menacing lectures to leading bankers, warns of a looming global apocalypse. This may or may not involve bats and molten lava.

The local markets ignore the blowhard mouthings of the Treasurer, China continues to make quiet progress on most macro indices, Rudd sings a Seekers medley and, across the arid breadth of the continent, the public imagination is suddenly seized by a Perth barmaid with a novel approach to beercan recycling.

Meanwhile, readers of the UN’s fourth Global Environment Outlook report will have disocovered that 11 of the 12 last years were the warmest since 1850, that global average temperatures are three quarters of a degree higher than over the past century, that a further rise is already locked in and that rises of two degrees would breach a threshold beyond which there is an unacceptable risk of major and irreversible changes in the earth’s eco-system.

29 days to polling.