Rallying support for party-less Carmel. Labor Marrickville councilors were door knocking this weekend in an attempt to garner support for Carmel Tebbutt in the upcoming NSW state election. The councilors sought comment on council issues and used these as a platform for arguing for “Carmel”. State issues were out of bounds. It seems the NSW ALP is already erasing all memory of its part in the state government in an attempt to hold off the Green vote in Left-leaning electorates.

High admin costs on support for abuse. On December 17, 2007 the former Labor Western Australian government led by premier Alan Carpenter announced the $114 million Redress WA Scheme for those adults who, as children, were abused and/or neglected in WA State care in Western Australia. Of that, $90.2 million was budgeted for ex-gratia payments to eligible applicants. Of the 10,000 applications received, 5,900 were deemed to be eligible for ex-gratia payments. As an applicant, my question simply asks: how does it take $24 million to administer the pay out of $90.2 million?

Dog of a Fairfax app. The Sydney Morning Herald‘s iPad app is really a dog. This makeshift app is not much more than a PDF — no interactivity and no news updates after it is published overnight. When it was launched in July 2010 it was on the promise that a proper interactive app would be launched later in the year. But since then no news of it and no sign of it. To make things worse for subscribers, quality control over editions published in the current makeshift app is poor or non-existent — one day last week, none of the headlines I clicked on connected to the correct article text; they all pointed to some other article, making it impossible to read the paper by clicking on the headlines (the way it is meant to work). Does anyone at Fairfax read it before it’s published?