• Wayne Swan had a poor run on The 7.30 Report last night. While there wasn’t much he could have done about Kerry O’Brien’s focus on the leak, he gave the issue new momentum by saying bluntly, and truthfully, that there wasn’t anything the Government could do to stop the leaks. Far better to have stuck to some folderol about not being distracted from the real issues of concern to voters, in the same manner he correctly refused to discuss his post-assassination dealings with Kevin Rudd.
  • While this week’s Essential and Newspoll polls suggested the gender gap was closing, the latest Morgan poll shows it’s still relatively strong. Julia Gillard has dropped in approval and Tony Abbott has gained, but male and female voters are still divided over the leaders by up to ten points on measures like leaders’ approval.
  • The strange, yet preternaturally boring, will-she-won’t-she indecision of Belinda Neal as to whether she will stand as an independent in Robertson will finally be ended today. Her running against Labor was held by the media to be potentially damaging to the party but I can’t understand why this would possibly be the case. Given her reputation, what better way to demonstrate that Labor has improved than for her to campaign against them? Or maybe that was the plan all along.
  • At $2.55b, the Liberals’ corporate tax cut is a very expensive political fix in response to Labor’s ‘Coles and Woolies tax’ line — and Labor still gets to go on using it. Only the removal of the PPL levy in full will fix the problem for the Liberals. Joe Hockey prepared the way for that yesterday. It will cause the Liberals some angst over the inevitable “backflip” headlines but it’s worth it to get rid of a levy that Tony Abbott would never have got through shadow Cabinet if he’d bothered to check with them.
  • Meanwhile, in the real world, the remorseless accumulation of evidence about global warming continues. The ANU’s Andrew Glikson points out that, in addition to global temperature data from sources like NASA GISS, the northern hemisphere is steadily racking up temperature records during its summer — hottest temperature on record in Asia (53 degrees in Pakistan in June), hottest day ever recorded in Moscow, hottest day on record in Beijing, hundreds of maximum and minimum temperature records in the US and Canada broken. Meanwhile, here in Australia, we’re rolling out new coal-fired power stations and a man who says “the world’s warming has stopped” and instead there has been “a slight cooling” is a credible candidate for Prime Minister.