Australians the world’s wealth leaders. In my pursuit for those news and views items that appear at the end of this column this morning I stumbled across a report by Credit Suisse that quite surprised me.

According to those bankers Australia tops the list of countries ranked by the median wealth of its adult population. And we are close to the top too if you want to measure adult wealth by the mean average. The Swiss might beat us on that measure, but only because a greater share of their wealth is in the hands of the richest few.

No female quitters. Odd that there were no women quitters from the Labor ministry after the departure of Julia Gillard as prime minister.

It can be done. Perhaps the best guide to what we can expect in this election campaign is what happened in 1983 when Labor changed its leader on the day an election was called. Back then the popular man overwhelmed the unpopular one and it can happen again. Tony Abbott now is far from being a certainty.

News and views noted along the way.

  • Americans love dogs, are frightened by snakes, underestimate evil of cats – “The results of a recent survey show that Americans prefer dogs over cats—but they still do not understand the gravity of the feline threat.”
  • Snowden still at airport, Ecuador asylum decision may take weeks
  • The Wendy Davis rocket ride — “The Texas lawmaker whose filibuster helped block passage of sweeping abortion restrictions became a national political star overnight. It’s an impressive ride for a single mom who once lived in a trailer park.”
  • S-x after Christianity — Gay marriage is not just a social revolution but a cosmological one. “Conservative Christians have lost the fight over gay marriage and, as we have seen, did so decades before anyone even thought same-s-x marriage was a possibility. Gay-marriage proponents succeeded so quickly because they showed the public that what they were fighting for was consonant with what most post-1960s Americans already believed about the meaning of s-x and marriage. The question Western Christians face now is whether or not they are going to lose Christianity altogether in this new dispensation.”