A jealous Prime Minister?

A jealous Prime Minister? Very strange timing yesterday by Julia Gillard in making her announcement about plans for a referendum on including a reference to Aborigines into the constitution.

It served to take away publicity from the joint press conference held by Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd and visiting American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And this at a time when the Labor Government surely needs the benefit of all the announcements of substance that it can manufacture.

Looking into the crystal ball. We should not take too seriously the estimates released this morning of what the federal budget deficit will be this year and out until 2012-13. The figures are nothing more than guesstimates and will be revised, probably both up and down, many times before we find out what the true figure will be.

Treasurer Wayne Swan is blaming the expected increase of $1 billion since his July prediction to the higher value of the Australian dollar and that may well be right. But what I do know is that Wayne doesn’t have the faintest foggiest clue what the dollar’s value will be in two and a bit years time.

Silence the best policy. The boss of the Commonwealth Bank is a strange fellow. There he is this morning all over page one of the Sydney Terror having posed smiling for the photographer while the headline “You can Bank of Losing Homes” superimposed on it.

This surely is the most stupid public relations exercise by a banker in years. Ralph Norris should learn that at times like these silence is the best policy. Then again, he is a banker and the industry has an appalling sense of timing as the current lobbying to get a taxation concession from the Federal Government shows.

Defending political lies. The backlash by British MPs against the judicial decision to declare the election of a former Labour Cabinet Minister void because he told lies about his opponent has begun.

The BBC reports that MPs have expressed concerns about a court decision to ban former minister Phil Woolas from politics, saying it raises “massive constitutional issues”. The ex-Labour MP is making a second bid for a judicial review of the verdict, which stripped him of his seat over his conduct in the election campaign. But Tory MP Edward Leigh said it was for “people to evict MPs not judges”. And Labour’s David Winnick said it could lead to any defeated candidate challenging election results.

There is a report of this hopefully significant step towards making election campaigning more hones on Crikey‘s The Stump website.

Europe’s economic uncertainty continues. Greece might not be going to have another general election but uncertainty about the country’s economic future continues if the money markets are any guide. Bloomberg show that the interest rate demanded on 10 year Greek government bonds continues to hover around the 12 per cent mark.

Austerity measures in Ireland as the government desperately tries to get its budget moving towards balance have not satisfied the markets either although the Irish Government at least has the advantage of not having to borrow again until next year.