“Labor has hung onto a landslide lead against the Government’s sustained assault and Kevin Rudd is seen as more open to ideas than John Howard, in the latest Age/ACNielsen poll”.

Michelle Grattan continues: “But Mr Howard is strongly outstripping Mr Rudd on leadership and economic credentials and is regarded as having a better grasp of foreign policy, Mr Rudd’s area of expertise.”

Dennis Shanahan has a slightly different interpretation based on the other newspaper-sponsored poll. “John Howard and the Coalition have got a polling breather going into the crucial last week of the parliamentary session, but Labor and Kevin Rudd are still in a clear election-winning position.”

As usual, the Ozpolitics Blog puts both these results into perspective. “All of the polls are now showing both trend-line and moving average returns to the Government since March 2007. Nonetheless, the polls are still showing landslide wins for Labor”.

The inherent dilemmas of all the polls remain broadly unchanged — the economic data could hardly be better, yet the Government is languishing. But the long fightback is at last producing signs of a sniff — like the Carlton Blues, however, there will still be the occasional flogging to go with the signs of improvement.

Chip Goodyear, BHP Billiton’s retiring CEO says: “Scientific argument over global warming has settled, so it’s time to conquer the threat”.

Henry’s wandering geologist, Louis Hissink, dares to differ, so it’s probably just as well he is not looking to work for the Big Australian.

“Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

“Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday — these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

“And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism …” 

Read more at Henry Thornton.