Merely very popular. So Prime Ministerial approval is at a new low. Kevin Rudd, according to AC Nielsen in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, now has “only” a 57% approval rating. Only 57%! That’s a figure most of the country’s leaders in recent years would be delighted to have attracted.

I don’t have any historical figures for Nielsen but the median approval rating for Prime Ministers on Newspoll since late 1985 is 46% and that has been boosted a fair bit by Rudd’s amazing run of being above the 60% mark.

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A fairly typical Premiers conference preview. They might call it the Council of Australian Governments these days but the huffing and puffing before the meeting between the Commonwealth and the states and territories to consider the financing of health and hospitals is in the grand tradition of Premiers conferences. State leaders have always preached doom and gloom and defended their patch in the lead-up to this kind of gathering. It is part of the grand tradition of extorting a few extra tens of millions of funding and invariably a deal is done when the participants get down to talking behind closed doors.

The forthcoming COAG gathering is unlikely to be any different. Every sensible Premier will end up accepting a proposal that alleviates the constant struggle of states and territories to finance the public hospital system.

My two bob is on a deal being done.

The nanny state keeps growing. Calls for something or other new to be banned to prevent some horrid outcome or other just keep on coming. The latest call for a restriction would see the end of that great culinary institution, the Weber charcoal-fired barbecue.

The British Medical Journal in its current issue reports on a study showing that restricting access to barbecue charcoal is helpful in lowering the number of suicides and has been welcomed by experts on suicide prevention.

It comes at a time when suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning induced by burning charcoal in a sealed room is beginning to occur outside Asia, where it became a popular method of suicide in the late 1990s.

“We know that making access to lethal [methods] more difficult prevents suicides from occurring,” said Lanny Berman, president of the International Association for Suicide Prevention. “The expectation is that as information is readily accessible, suicides by this method will spread. That’s why we are supportive of efforts to stem the tide at an early stage.”

The four most sensible MPs in Australia. This title should surely go to the Liberal-National Party members in Queensland who have failed to take part over the past year in the farce that is question time in the nation’s parliaments. The Sunday Mail reported yesterday that Michael Crandon (Coomera), Peter Dowling (Redlands), Tracy Davis (Aspley) and experienced Ian Rickuss (Lockyer) have kept their mouths firmly shut during question time since the current Parliament opened last April.

The report was slanted to suggest that the four members concerned were somehow being derelict in their duty but in truth this procedure of questioning government ministers long ago became an irrelevance serving absolutely no purpose in the democratic scheme of things. Questions are either Dorothy Dixers from the government side or statements by the Opposition designed to make the news bulletins. Actually getting or giving real information is the last thing on the agenda of the Queensland Parliament or any other for that matter.