Western Australia's chair-sniffing Opposition leader Troy Buswell has displayed the behaviour of both a fool and dinosaur. Such actions in the workplace nowadays would earn a man the sack. Why has he not been summarily dismissed by his own party. In allowing him to stay incumbent his colleagues expose themselves as fools equal to him.

Today's public do not want numbskulls such as these for their state government. Would visiting female leaders of state feel comfortable about vacating a chair when he was in the room? Honesty and politics may not go hand in hand but decorum and politics must be inseparable.

All reasonable Australians will agree that Aborigines should enjoy equivalent health care and life expectancy with that of other Australians wherever possible. If Kevin Rudd's administration is firmly commited to that, why do they need to sign declarations and guarantees? Those documents are political stunts that could easily backfire.

I seem to recall a previous Labour Prime Minister's guarantee that no Australian child would live in poverty by 1990. That guarantee was foolish because the manifold causes of poverty were never within the power of a federal government to eradicate. They amount mainly to failings and shortcomings within the people themselves. Simply throwing money at those people didn't help because it so often went on booze, smokes and gambling while children went bare-footed and hungry. Furthermore, the Labour party's insistance on lavishing those people with sympathy in order to secure their votes guaranteed that they would resist change, believing instead that increasing amounts of easy money flung their way was an entitlement. Hence, rather than freeing children from poverty, Bob Hawke succeeded only at sentencing far more children to it.

Likewise, it is doubtful whether Aborigines living the lives they do in remote communities can enjoy equivalent health benefits with the rest of Australians simply because their current lifestyles don't appear to allow for it. Dramatic changes need to occur within the people themselves. Do the government's new declarations mandate those changes? Obviously not.

I certainly hope to see dramatic improvement in the living standards, health standards and life expectancies of Aborigines. I agree with the spending of large amounts of money to help them, but I am mindful of the fact that vast amounts of money have already been spent, yet they remain in a dismal state. That suggests that there are roadblocks that cannot be removed by money alone. As with childhood poverty, those roadblocks may not be within the power of a federal government to remove.

Workchoices is dead. It was never popular with the Australian labour force. In the end, neither was it's champion, the former Prime Minister. While it may have been well-intended, everything is manipulable and stories abounded of workers coming off second best. No-one knows how truthful those stories were. I get a feeling that the current government, sniffing political mileage to be made, isn't asking.

While some of the Howard government's legislation may have been unappealing, to their credit they sought to eliminate opposite imbalances introduced by Labor administrations that among other things protected shirkers and made it virtually impossible to sack a worker no matter how they behaved. That ridiculous situation impacted negatively on honest, hard working employees as well as affecting profitability which is the very thing that jobs growth feeds upon. Mr Rudd will need to ensure that those abuses cannot be restored or he will have set Australia back many years.

If my memory serves me correctly, in the 1970's the now defunct Whyalla ship-building plant was once crippled by a demarcation strike over which union the tea-ladies should belong to. Let us not risk a return to those days.

From one extreme to the other! A British man who has been in Australia for 55 years is about to be deported upon his release from prison at the end of a 14 year sentence for pedophilia. Read about it here. What on earth is the federal justice minister thinking of? Here is my answer.

Pedophiles and poms who never became naturalised are two groups of people who rank quite low on the list of lives in Australia. Paul Keating demonstrated admirably that leaders can garner a great deal of support by grabbing members of an unpopular group and beating them up, figuratively speaking. Their unpopularity renders them largely defenceless and the demonstration, which could have got high billing at the Colosseum, appeals to the bloodthirstiness of the crowd who will almost certainly give the thumbs-down sign.

Neither an un-naturalised pedophile nor a spewing British government will win much support in this country. Hence, this man presents a perfect opportunity to get tough - by knocking down hard somebody who already has no legs to stand on. What heroes! What fearless champions! What a hollow victory for justice!

The one time I sat in the gallery of the South Australian lower house of parliament it was to watch Don Dunstan in his sexy shorts dominate the proceedings. He was a star peformer in anyone's language.

Kevin Rudd's declaration that homelessness is dead wrong and his vow to intervene in this growing problem is surely a rerun of done-to-death emotional politics. Granted, there are genuine cases, but the public is well aware by now that many supposedly homeless people have options that they refuse to take. I see these people as akin to the well-to-do housewives who shoplift, apparently as a cry for help. The help they require is so often with internal conditions, not necessarily with external ones. That help if given would empower them to change the external factors. A declaration to that effect by the prime minister would be a sign of true leadership by a statesman who feels that grubby vote-begging exercises are beneath his dignity.

My experience of parliamentarians is vastly different to what the media portrays them as being. The notion that they work only part-time is diametrically opposed to the truth. They are among the hardest-working people in the community.