Policies? What policies? It’s more than a month after the Labor love-in, but go to the ALP website and you still get the message “The Platform as adopted at the 44th ALP National Conference (April 27-29 2007) will be posted shortly”.

The other big Liberal Party meeting: Seen in a North Shore watering hole: NSW Liberal Party president Geoff Selig and Mackellar challenger and Bronwyn Bishop foe Don Wormald engrossed in a friendly, private chat over a couple of drinks with smiles all round. So engrossed, in fact, they didn’t notice a couple of fellow Liberal players walk through the bar. Whatever could they have been talking about?

Comrade! “With their ample beer bellies and old-fashioned strongarm tactics, two union hardheads are the people that Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd fears the most,” Luke McIlveen writes in a wonderful stitch-up of Labor and the unions in the Telegraph today. “CFMEU heavyweights Kevin Reynolds and Joe McDonald are being seen as important factors in Prime Minister John Howard’s sudden turnaround in the polls.” He’s right. It was so much easier back in Norm Gallagher’s day. There was plausible denial. The BLF claimed to be Maoists, if you recall.