Bernard Keane offers the Prime Minister a few thoughts on how to resolve the Oceanic Viking stand-off.
Articles by Bernard Keane 
About Bernard Keane
Bernard Keane is Crikey’s Canberra correspondent
The ABC needs a Pacific Solution
Mark Scott is pitching for a dramatic expansion in the ABC’s international presence, but Australia just isn’t enough of a cultural heavyweight to compete with America or the UK. Why not focus on the Pacific region, where we actually have some cultural credibility?
In climate denial: this is not scepticism
We’re losing the battle against climate denialism. Much of the skepticism is fuelled by ideology, but the real driver of denialism is an emotional inability to accept that we’re in serious trouble.
Forget mortgage holders, every rate rise hurts business
Why is the media so fixated on mortgage holders? More concerning is how much power the Big Four banks now hold over the economy, and how SMEs are struggling to get finance.
High fliers at the core of the Telstra shareholder revolt
Telstra’s “shareholder revolt” has nothing to do with mum and dad investors: the criticism over the Telco’s structural separation is all coming from a clique of some of Australia’s wealthiest people and the big banks.
Revealed: The high cost of the CPRS
Yesterday’s MYEFO figures reveal in clear terms just what a policy disaster the current version of the CPRS is. It also gives the lie to the absurd line from ETS opponents that the CPRS is a giant tax.
Kevin Rudd knows nothing, even less than Alan Jones
The Prime Minister has developed a too-cute-by-half strategy of professing ignorance about the handling of events in Indonesia, reflecting his ongoing struggle to find a communications strategy that will enable him to get control of the issue again.
Milne’s show and Tele just a grubby offering
Maybe Glenn Milne thinks he’s the only one who gets emails making allegations about political figures’ personal lives. We all get them. True, false, whatever, they’re of absolutely no public interest. Except in Milne’s grubby world.
Swan: we are “fair dinkum” about sticking to our fiscal strategy
Wayne Swan has unveiled a significant improvement in the Government’s fiscal position from next year, with this morning’s Mid-Year Economic Forecasts showing far higher economic growth and lower unemployment than the Budget forecast back in May.
Throwing the switch to recovery
Today’s new economic forecast means the Federal Government will finally have to stop saying things like we’re “not out of the woods yet” or have “a long way to go” and shift its rhetoric into recovery mode.
Rudd looks like a man who isn’t confident of his own policy
There’s no domestic policy reason why the refuseniks aboard the Oceanic Viking should not be taken to Christmas Island and processed like other boat arrivals.
Caucus debate misses the point, chapter and verse, on books
What’s happening with parallel book imports? The publishing industry is on the cusp of major change driven by online delivery. The most appropriate role for the government is to step aside and let consumers take the lead.
Much to do before PNG LNG project profits the people
Yesterday, the largest resources project in Papua New Guinea’s history moved a step closer, with the PNG government giving environmental approval for the vast PNG LNG project. But will this project help to dent the widespread poverty?
Question Time fun: See Kevin run. See Kevin hide.
The pursuit of the Prime Minister over the Oceanic Viking made, inter alia, for a rather more interesting Question Time yesterday than we’ve had in some months.
ASIO can’t be bothered: less accountable, less productive
Despite ASIO’s endlessly increasing budget, its latest annual report shows an organisation doing less work and being less accountable — even the report itself is lazily cobbled together.
Not clean, not dirty … Turnbull masters inactivity
This Opposition is good at neither the high road nor the low road politics. The scandal over Malcolm Turnbull’s office proposing tactics for getting media attention just demonstrates this further.
Do the Coalition shuffle!
Whatever happened to the Coalition reshuffle? Remember that? But reshuffles create losers and Malcolm Turnbull, who is one major brain explosion away from losing the leadership, has enough enemies as things stand.
I’m a climate currency leakage sceptic
Carbon leakage is all superstition and nonsense, says Bernard Keane — and he can produce the figures to prove it.
ANSTO poll goes radioactive, quietly changes no to yes
The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation has been caught out trying to manipulate a web poll on its own web site about nuclear power, replacing the “I am against it” option with “It is one of the options”.
Canberra: sure it’s boring, but it’s also beautiful
Sure Canberra’s boring if you’re under 30, and it has no beaches and the coffee’s poor, but it has the mountains and it’s beautiful and the epitome of the great place to bring up kids.
Boat people have had the Rudd government lost for words
The Government is clearly rattled. Oddly, though, it hasn’t been rattled by the Coalition, which has its own problems on asylum seekers. It seems more scared by what might happen on the issue rather than what has happened.
When minimal accountability and mind-numbing tedium reign in Canberra
This week, Senators are conducting Supplementary Budget Estimates for the whole week, rather than sitting. For the most part it’s a colossal waste of time and money.
The issue is refugees, not boats
If the Left really wants to re-fight and win the asylum seeker issue, they’ll leave the ranting and rhetoric to reactionaries and stop being so easily goaded into elevating the issue into a test of the national character
