An editorial in The Australian--entitled Leadership panic ignores Labor's policy challenges--- says that Labor's only hope is to rediscover the mainstream of Australian politics. It must provide sound, stable and responsible government, just as it did, for the most part, during the Hawke-Keating government.

What then is sound, stable and responsible government? The editorialist is only too happy to say. What voters will want from Rudd, should he return, is a detailed plan of action to to fix Labor's many policy failures and to set a new policy course for a third term. What then is the plan? Well Rudd:

must show how he could stop the boats in order to save lives and to address concerns in the community. He should consider the policy of turning or towing back boats to ports of origin and reinstating temporary protection visas. He should abolish the carbon tax and move to a floating price mechanism that will better align Australia with carbon price mechanisms abroad. He will need to rebuild relations with business. He should revisit the Gonski school education reforms. There is no merit in rushing to implement a flawed plan from which less than half the nation's school students will benefit. Gonski should be more than a financial wedge against the opposition. It could become a significant reform agenda but it needs national support. It must focus more on curriculum, lifting teaching standards and giving schools greater autonomy.

Sadly for the ALP, the current leadership tension, which is fuelled by a hostile media's beatup for click bait and has led to the current disunity within the ALP, is about personalities, not policies. It's about a different face not different policies. Period.

Most of the noise and heat is coming from the toxic, right wing NSW branch of the Labor Party. This is the branch that fostered a hardy and virulent form of political corruption, pioneered the revolving leadership syndrome, and nurtured politicians like Eddie Obeid and Ian MacDonald.

The sad truth is that a majority of the Australian electorate reject the reformist policies of the Rudd/Gillard Government and desire a return to the happy Howard days promised by the conservative restoration.

This is a reasonable interpretation of the Canberra Press Gallery at work:

It's what they do best, other than recycling media release or the relaying the political whisperings when acting in their self-appointed roles as political players. They are, by and large large, hostile to all that policy stuff. It is fear and loathing that sells newspapers these days.

It has taken the Gallery a long time to acknowledge the misogyny and public sexism that is being used by the conservative movement to attack Gillard the person. They've known about it from the beginning but they have deemed it to be unworthy of political consideration. Few have taken a stand against it or even called it for what it is-- a deliberate strategy by the conservatives to use sexism to undermine the legitimacy of Gillard as Prime Minister.

It seems that what began as a peaceful uprising against secular authoritarian rule of the Assad Regime in Syria in 2011 has increasingly become a war between Shia and Sunni that has engulfed much of the surrounding region.

This undercuts the conventional view in the West that Bashar al-Assad’s government would fall any day and that the end was just round the corner, given that Assad’s regime was on its last legs.

Patrick Cockburn in a column in the London Review of Books says that:

Five distinct conflicts have become tangled together in Syria: a popular uprising against a dictatorship which is also a sectarian battle between Sunnis and the Alawite sect; a regional struggle between Shia and Sunni which is also a decades-old conflict between an Iranian-led grouping and Iran’s traditional enemies, notably the US and Saudi Arabia. Finally, at another level, there is a reborn Cold War confrontation: Russia and China v. the West.

Tom Conley in his column Revisiting the banana republic and other familiar destinations at The Conversation highlights how Keating's argument against the resources as saviour view of long-term Australian prosperity was overpowered by the resources boom caused by China's economic development.

Australia has been lucky to be in a position to take advantage of China’s industrialisation and recent Asian economic exceptionalism in the face of a slow American recovery and continuing European crisis. Conley says:

China changed everything. Its voracious appetite for resources pumped up the prices Australia received for its exports – particularly coal and iron ore. Australians promptly forgot the warnings of the past, as resource wealth became the new reality masquerading as a permanent change...This boom has now peaked and Australia must now find new sources of growth.

One of the significant benefits of the Gillard Government's Gonski reforms is that it is a step that begins to address the future of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Young Australians, especially those not from middle-class backgrounds, are having a pretty hard time. The labour market prospects for young people without skills and qualifications is likely to remain bleak, especially with the slowing of economic growth and the decline of manufacturing.

If you’re poor, young and white with low educational qualifications then a future of unemployment and living on welfare beckons. This is especially the case if you happen to live in an area marked by economic decline, poor schools and employers uninterested in developing the skills of young people in low-paid jobs.

Improving school education by making the funding more equitable to improve the skills and qualifications is a better policy approach than that of the those of the “flag, faith and family” social conservatism who point the finger at immigration as the cause of the Australian turning sour for the unskilled, white working class.

They tend to argue that low-skilled immigrants have taken jobs from unskilled natives, leaving them languishing on benefits; and that high-skilled immigration reduces both the incentives and opportunities for ambitious and talented natives (suburban aspirationals) to move up the mobility ladder.

We now live in a world where electronic networking has penetrated into part of people's lives to the extent that we now talk in terms of the physical and virtual worlds. We are just as concerned about our personal identity and privacy in a networked world as we are about the corporate power of the global internet giants.

John Naughton in his column, To the internet giants, you're not a customer. You're just another user in The Guardian, spells out the adage that if the service is free, then its users are its product. He says that when the history of our time comes to be written, people will marvel at the way that billions of people were seduced into the kind of one-sided agreements they have struck with outfits such as Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple.

In the case of Facebook, the historical analogy that comes immediately to mind is sharecropping – the agricultural system in which a landowner allowed tenants to use his land in return for a share of the crops produced on it and which was once a staple of the southern states of the US. Its virtual equivalent is the Facebook system: a billion people till Master Zuckerberg's land, creating all the content that is then harvested by him and his advertiser buddies. The only difference is that on Facebook the sharecroppers don't get any share of the proceeds. They're just croppers.

It's becoming a circus.

It being Rudd's push to become leader of the ALP yet again. And the Canberra Press Gallery go along with the endless undermining of Gillard by Rudd supporters; an undermining that takes the form of public comments and actions directed against Gillard. Rudd's track record is increasingly looking to be that of a white-anter or saboteur.

The ALP ought to realize that the tactic of revolving door of leadership is not a solution to the the party's problems. These are structural not personality based.

In his Ending the Great Australian Complacency in the early 21st Century speech Ross Garnaut addresses the fateful choice that Australians will need to make in the months and years ahead about how to respond to hard times after more than two decades of extraordinary prosperity. It's not the choice at the forthcoming federal election.

The hard times choice is at a time of international financial uncertainty that is still dragged down by the overhang from the global financial crisis and where the causes of the crisis mostly remaining at large. It comes at a time of ideological uncertainty, with doubts growing about whether the political and economic systems of the developed world of which Australia is part still have the capacity to deliver prosperity to most of their citizens.

Garnaut, now at the University of Melbourne, says that we face three big challenges if we're to avoid the end of the long boom leaving us with much to regret:

(1) The first is that our real exchange rate now needs to fall a long way to be consistent with full employment.

(2) The second challenge, he says, is to change entrenched expectations that living standards will rise inexorably over time; that household and business incomes and public services will rise and taxes will fall, as they have done for a generation.

(3) The third challenge we face is that our political culture has to changed. It has changed since the reform era 1983-2000, in ways that make it much more difficult to pursue policy reform in the broad public interest. If we are to succeed, the political culture has to change again.

The city of Adelaide is changing post the Global Financial Crisis. It's not just the laneway revitalization projects in the CBD -i--t's also the high rise development.

The billboards go up. Regeneration is occurring. The billboard or signage says don't worry, this development will respect local charm, traditions, the unique "vibe" of the area and revitalize the precinct to make it more vibrant and connected. The development's regeneration builds on the great "brand" of tradition, history and character of a particular area of the city.

The vehicle for the top-down branding is façadeism: taking a series of old buildings, keeping the frontage and building massive units in the back of it. This way, huge shops can be introduced by stealth. This façade of sensitivity (to community, locality, and history) is a fig-leaf to conceal an development agenda that is purely commercial. This figleaf of façadeism is what allows developers to deny that they are taking a top-down approach.

The fossil fuel industry currently has its back to the wall with declining demand for its coal exports and the electricity produced by coal-fired power stations. The decline in electricity demand is due to the high penetration of solar power wind energy, the success of energy efficiency scheme and the popularity of energy efficient appliances.

The coal based electricity network owners are in a situation where they have overspent on their network infrastructure (they've spent around $40 billion) and they now face difficulties in recouping their investment (plus the regulated return on their investment that is decided by market regulators) due to the declining consumer demand for their coal fired electricity.

Since people are using the inefficient network less (its a system that uses less than 10 per cent of the original energy burned at its end point), the revenue needed to match the regulated returns have to be gained from elsewhere. So electricity prices rise and, as a consequence, consumers use the network less. So we have bigger networks with more spare capacity most of the time. As more people reduce demand, or even leave the grid, this leaves network owners with an increasingly redundant system.

So how does the Australian Coal Association address this issue? Primarily in terms of its pro-development ideology rather than the market's supply and demand. In her May speech to the Sydney Institute Dr Nikki Williams, the Chief Executive of the Australian Coal Association, poses the question: 'Is Australia on an unwitting slippery slope towards the strangulation of the coal industry and all its related rail, road and port infrastructure and diverse supporting services - with all that implies for jobs, investment and prosperity?"

Yes, is her response. Her reason for the industry’s woes was that it is almost entirely due to “environmental extremists”, not falling coal prices due to declining Chinese demand for Australia's thermal coal exports or coal mines losing money.

This week's secret deal between the ALP and Coalition over public funding for their party apparatus highlights their self-interest. They needed $10 million a year to do administration work, apparently.

The self interest is not just their collective hand in the public till (ie., the extra funding for their own parties); but for the way they tried used this to attempt to squeeze out the emergence of minor parties. They did this through the mechanism of doubling electoral nomination fees and by giving back the extra $125,000 in increased electoral fees to the major parties but not to the minors.

The two major political parties have a collective interest in ensuring that they have this massive advantage over anybody else who wants to enter the political field and that they don't want other players in the field. Hence the ant-democratic instincts of both the ALP and the Coalition.

Both the royal commission into child abuse in institutions and the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child abuse are highlighting the Catholic Church's unacceptable response to pedophilia by its priests in Australia. This is to deny there is a culture of abuse; that it adopts the half-baked solution of moving the clergy from parish to parish; destroying records; attacks a hostile media; avoids any systemic investigation into the abuse; places itself above the law; obstructed investigations and protected child molesters.

It's a broken church and it requires the power of the state to force it to confront its own denial about clerical sexual abuse, the lack of pastoral care of its people and the entrenched culture of concealment within the church. There has been a failure of the Church at very senior levels, right up to the present day, to deal adequately with allegations of serious and predatory crimes, including the apparent failure to alert police.

Ford's withdrawal from car manufacturing in Australia in 2016 was bound to happen. It was just a question of time after Detroit excluded the Australian branch from its global production and Ford Australia continued to built big cars when consumer demand had shifted away from gas guzzlers to small cars.

Consequently, its production runs were far too small for the manufacturing plants to be economically viable.

The foreign imports have been able to satisfy the changes in consumer preferences where domestic manufactured cars have not. It does imply that there is a great future for broad-based car manufacturing in Australia. Future Australian governments will face a hollowed-out manufacturing sector as well as declining revenues from resources.

The Coalition talks in terms of smaller government and rolling back the welfare state its policies (paid parental leave, dam construction, and Direct Action for carbon abatement) are those of Big Government. Mark Latham spot it, and he sees the significance----the Liberal Party is in retreat.

Of course the contradiction in the Liberal Party will be covered up by its variously effective tactics that are designed to show that the Gillard Labor Government is both incompetent and dishonest; and by it making global warming its ideological battleground and its loathing of environmentalism.