Finally?

The Australian economy has kept rumbling forward for the last couple of years like a headless chicken. "Look how it runs around! It's not dead!" But, sooner or later, chickens must come home to rot. The key point of vulnerability and volubility in the Australian economy is the house price bubble. This is now deflating everywhere but Sydney. In conjunction, the economy has just nosedived into recession (though not by the strict definition by which only several quarters of recession is counted as recession). The blame for the latter is being placed on the weather, much as it was in the UK earlier this year. But you put these two things together and one may see the crucial puncture. Of course, given a global situation in which capital has nowhere to go, and with Australian interest rates still so high, mass capital flight is not upon us yet. But we may finally see the adjustment to house prices and dollar that we've been waiting for.

Update The chicken is teetering, woohoo.

David Marr's series on the rights of religions in Australia continues in greater depth: the overall conclusion here must be that the state and churches are not separate in Australia.

Here's an interesting little nugget: private schools in NSW are allowed to exclude students on the grounds of their sexuality. An interesting way to turn this around, it occurs to me, might be to establish a gay-only private school, pending what I think is the almost inevitable abolition of this law.

Soldiers at urban military installations to be armed, given immunity from prosecution in cases of killing civilians.

This story is a little confusing to the capsule narrative I have of Tanya Plibersek, viz. that she's about the most left-wing federal Labor MP in NSW. Here she appears as the right fringe of the Left, demanding action against WikiLeaks. It is hard to imagine how she can be called left-wing at all on this basis. It's an odd thing for her to say, because the ALP strategy for retaining her seat seems to be to compete with the Greens on a left-wing terrain. Perhaps with the precedent being set in Melbourne of the Libs preferencing Labor, a new strategy of wooing Liberal preferences is to be expected in the inner city.

Wikileaks reveals Mark Arbib's contacts with the US embassy.

Workers being forced to work through Christmas? This is surely something that will be generally understood as 'unAustralian', that the Right, with their defence of the family and Christian institutions, will oppose, in short, that finds no support within mainstream political opinion.

A cartoon character that represents Australia meets a kangaroo.