Kerri Walsh Quotes

The car bumper sticker for the discerning Sydney motorist, ‘Is it true, or did Alan Jones tell you?’, should be letter-boxed around the country.

There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead, but let me be clear: I will be putting a price on carbon and I will move to an emissions trading scheme.’ This is what she announced, but not as far as those in the Opposition and hysterical commentariat were concerned.

constant marking down of her performance is wildly at odds with the reality of the minority government. Despite the government’s wafer-thin margin, the parliament is remarkably stable; but it’s depicted as though we are living through the last days of Rome. Gillard is implementing reforms and the parliament has passed a record amount of legislation—around 180 bills to date—but the press talks endlessly of a government close to collapse. Australia is economically robust compared to faltering international economies, but you’d be forgiven for thinking the Australian economy is on the point of disintegration. The media’s primary focus is on personalities and politics, not policies or the running of the country.

It was only an instant. The look that passed between them was like a flare in the pitch of night. Bright. Hot. Sudden and then gone. Her skin heated as if Walsh had kissed her. As if he had caressed her. As if he had possessed her. And maybe he had with one look. Kerris glanced around, searching each face, certain someone had witnessed the moment. So intimate out in the open. All the things she couldn’t say and shouldn’t feel rose up in her chest, suffocating her from the inside.

offering news grabs or picture opportunities.

Struggling for survival and relevance, we as a profession of political journalists and commentators have collectively debased our craft to the lowest common denominator—writing articles confected out of barrel-scrapings and hectoring. In such stories, the public interest doesn’t figure.

Windsor is contemptuous of the way the media is caught up in personality politics, saying the real story of the government and the revolutionary new workings of a minority parliament are being ignored as the media continues to report as if it’s still a two-horse race.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott also promptly set his tone about her, taunting her as an untrustworthy political assassin—a rich description from a man who had ambushed his own leader, Malcolm Turnbull, and snatched his party’s leadership by just one vote on 1 December 2009.

Tony Windsor puts the economic doomsaying down to the Opposition Leader: ‘Abbott’s behaviour in relation to a lot of this has been absolutely disgraceful.

There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead, but let me be clear: I will be putting a price on carbon and I will move to an emissions trading scheme.’ This is exactly what she announced in February, when she laid out a path to an emissions trading scheme via a fixed carbon price. It was Abbott who labelled it a ‘tax’, and it stuck.

John Howard performed a triple reverse somersault on his promise to never, ever introduce a GST under a government he led, and was met with no such opprobrium. Unlike Gillard, he consistently lied to the Australian people about his intentions.

I see prime ministers and ministers and so on going to see Rupert [Murdoch] every time they go to Washington,’ he tells me. ‘The big problem for them is: who do you see first—the President or Rupert? I’m not in that brigade. I am available; I am here. I am representing a section of the Australian people as a result of their vote. I am not in the game of believing that empire must be paid obeisance—or else.