Bring in the children. We are governing not campaigning, says the Labor team, but the pursuit of the appropriate picture opportunity goes relentlessly on. Saturday, and the Prime Minister wants to keep Gonskiing, but what kind of reinforcement to the message would a hall full of ALP conference delegates be? So bring in the children and, hey presto:

Brewers have a sense of humour. The new foreign owners Carlton and United breweries brought as sense of humour to Australia as well as their money. Their appeal to the federal government to make beer cheaper by at least freezing taxes — an appeal featured prominently in this morning’s Melbourne Hun — is the most amusing pre-budget submission in years. Especially as it coincided with stories in most other papers of the inevitably soaring budget deficits that will confront governments of all political persuasions over the next decade.

Life insurance on Tony. Taking the $1.09 available on Tony Abbott leading the Liberal Party come election day is a bit like investing in life insurance. Surely only death or serious ailment would stop him being so. Well, I hope he doesn’t go falling off his bike because I’ve added his survival to my portfolio of political bets, where you can check on the accuracy or otherwise of my predictions.

On the Crikey Leadership Indicator there has been an increase in the probability that Julia Gillard will be Labor’s leader at election time, too.

I’m not yet tempted to venture into this market again, preferring to see how the people react to next month’s budget.

As to the probabilities on the election itself, a slight improvement in Labor’s victory chances this week — up to 13.9% from 13.1%

The beard band. The ABC bills Annabel Crabb as its chief online political writer, so if it’s good enough for her it’s good enough for me to follow the lead she provided yesterday with her Fairfax column.

“Sorry, Metros-xual Man, but your smooth-skinned ways are now a relic of the past. This is the age of Beardy Man.”

And so I present, all the way from Adelaide, South Australia, as recently featured on MTV while on a world tour, Got me a beard:

Disclosure of interest:

Your columnist

News and views noted along the way.

  • Beaten but not Gonski: the wait for leadership on schools continues — argues Maxine McKew
  • The debt we shouldn’t pay — “The economic anthropologist David Graeber shows in his encyclopedic survey, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, since antiquity that ‘the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors — of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors’ children into slavery.'”
  • Pre-empting pandemics — an ounce of prevention — “As new viruses emerge in China and the Middle East, the world is poorly prepared for a global pandemic.”
  • The mysterious powers of Microsoft Excel — “The debate has raged — well raged is a strong word, perhaps sulked? — since Monday about the significance of the calculation mistake made by Reinhart and Rogoff in their 2010 paper for the American Economic Review, Growth in a Time of Debt … That debate is meaningless because the last five years of economic prediction have told us one thing: No one knows anything any more and the people who say they know something know even less.”