At an early poll I’ll be backing Anna Bligh. I’ve urged an early election or two in my time (and got it right too, if I say so myself). But one thing I can assure you is that I’ve not known a political leader prepared to go to the polls before it was necessary unless he (I am not being sexist — I’ve just n0t been an adviser to a woman leader) thought he would win by doing so. Thus if there is an election in Queensland this year I’ll be backing Anna Bligh to win.

Not that she should be in too much of a hurry like Julia Gillard was federally. Today’s Newspoll is largely irrelevant except for showing us why the Liberal National Party went into a leadership panic. The relevant polling for Labor will be after voters have got used to the idea of an opposition duumvirate and that is a couple of months away. Then the Premier can make a judgment about whether going early is worth the risk of upsetting voters.

Note: Tasmania’s Labor Premier Michael Field was the exception to my rule about leaders calling early elections but he really was forced to go rather than chose to.

A truly selfish lot. One thing we can say about the state parliamentary members of the Liberal Country Party is that they are an extremely selfish lot. There they are, prepared to agree with the Party machine bosses that Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman is the potential ticket into government, and not one of them is prepared to step down to give him a parliamentary seat.

Think first and don’t do it again. The television coverage of yesterday’s anti carbon tax rally outside Canberra’s Parliament House was every bit as bad for Tony Abbott as I predicted. The pictures of crude slogans and the sound of maniacal chanting do not play well in the living rooms of ordinary, sensible people.

Not that too much damage is done by one had night’s telly. It will count for little in the political scheme of things provided the Opposition Leader learns from the experience and thinks before accepting such invitations in future. And learning to apologise gracefully when things do go wrong would be a good idea too.

This morning’s expression of regret that some people “went over the top” with their banners with slogans such as “Ditch the witch” and “Bob Browns bitch”, would have sounded more genuine without the added comment that “But I can understand why people feel very passionate.”

A simple alternative to fixing minimum alcohol prices. There was a bit of flack in Western Australia early this year when a delegation of MPs went off for an 11 day tour of Europe to investigate ways to stop West Australians drinking too much. For the press it was dismissed as an unnecessary junket and there probably was little information to be found that was not available on the internet.

The visits to London, Edinburgh, Geneva, Paris, Brussels and Stockholm, The West Australian reported at the time, was to study anti-drink and anti-drug initiatives, including the effectiveness of restricting alcohol advertising and how to put a minimum price on alcoholic drinks. Before leaving, Alfred Cove MP Janet Woollard, who chairs the standing committee on education and health, said the committee would look at excessive alcohol consumption from the angles of “access, affordability and advertising”.

She wanted a minimum price on alcoholic content to stop aggressive discounting.

The Committee is due to make recommendations to State Parliament by May and its recommendations have taken on a new significance now that the major liquor retailers Woolworths and Coles have stepped up their price war by attempting to sell beer below cost as a loss leader. The calls by health advocates for a fixed minimum price for beer and other forms of alcohol have now been renewed in earnest.

One alternative this WA committee, and other governments, might like to consider is a simpler change in the law that would not go so completely against the spirit of the resale price maintenance provisions of competition law. That would be to insist that retailers not be allowed to give customers discounts for purchases in quantity. The price for a single stubbie would then have to 1/24th the price of a slab, one bottle of wine 1/12th the price of a dozen. The incentive to buy in quantity – something which the research seems to indicate leads to increased consumption – would be removed.

The big retailers would hate such a provision but that’s probably not the point when it comes to selling a drug is it?

On my daily schedule. I like a cheerful start to the day and, because First Dog does not appear until the afternoon, I turn each morning to xkcd.com for wake-up messages like this one:

And this morning I had the bonus of finding that the genius behind xkcd, Randall Munroe, a CNU physics graduate who worked on robots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, had produced a serious chart that has given me a clearer idea of what all those radiation dose figures I keep reading about actually mean.

Click to view in full.

The author, who has placed the image in the public domain so you may republish it anywhere without any sort of restriction, points out:

I’m not an expert in radiation and I’m sure I’ve got a lot of mistakes in here, but there’s so much wild misinformation out there that I figured a broad comparison of different types of dosages might be good anyway. I don’t include too much about the Fukushima reactor because the situation seems to be changing by the hour, but I hope the chart provides some helpful context.