Common sense from Conroy. Some sensible talk from Communications Minister Stephen Conroy in the wake of the weekend’s Melbourne state byelection when he said he could not imagine the Victorian Labor branch wanting to elect more Liberal senators by putting the coalition ahead of the Greens at a federal poll.

“If we were to put the Liberals ahead of the Greens in the Senate,” the minister said, “then this would mean we would have an extra vote to abandon and destroy the NBN, to repeal the carbon tax and to oppose or repeal all the key Labor reforms.”

Surely it is time for the Labor colleagues to grasp the point.

The good economic news continues. The benign inflationary conditions in Australia are continuing. The producer price index figures out from the Australian Bureau of Statistics this morning show low growth at all stages of the production cycle. In the June quarter 2012, the final (Stage 3) index rose 0.5%, the intermediate (Stage 2) index rose 0.7% and the preliminary (Stage 1) index rose 0.9%. Through the year to the June quarter 2012, the final (Stage 3) index rose 1.1%, the intermediate (Stage 2) index rose 1.4% and the preliminary (Stage 1) index rose 1.4%.

Lest we forget. It’s not just in the gun toting USA that shooting atrocities happen. As the United States mourned the killings in Colorado, in Norway they remembered  the 77 victims of the terror attacks carried out last year by far-Right extremist Anders Behring Breivik. Perhaps it was appropriate under the circumstances for an American to close the Oslo memorial service.

A quote of the day.

“Sometimes there is a stray sentence in a newspaper column you want to cut out and keep to use as a question in a media studies exam. Viz, from the excellent Philip Collins in the Times: ‘So much punditry is the sound of previous mistakes being corrected.’ Discuss.”

— Peter Preston, The Observer

Some news and views noted along the way.