• News this weekend out of Beijing (and not just about the Olympics)! On the one hand, airy statements about how the Communist Party might one day deliver on the promise to bring full democracy to Hong Kong left the pro-democracy movement there feeling rightfully annoyed. 2017 is what John Howard would call a non-core promise …
• On the other hand, the Japanese PM held meetings with the Chinese leadership that have been much more productive than anything either of the last two Japanese leaders achieved. But that’s not saying much.
• In Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s assassination has brought forth the aspirations of her son (who’s only 19!). I only hope that fresh leadership and public anger at the fundamentalists will put their party on a strong footing, rather than prompting more violence in an already-fragile part of the world.
• Locally, I’m disappointed that the WA Turf Club and the Swan River Trust couldn’t sort out their bureacratic disagreement so as to let the former’s (awesome) redevelopment go ahead — if either side had any creativity, surely the plan could have been tweaked to minimise its environmental impact.
• And finally, it’s pretty impressive that Wild Oats XI took line honours yet again, though I’m surprised by Rosebud taking the overall gong.

The headline of my community newspaper yesterday: “Stadium bid sunk”.

The Major Stadia Taskforce announced, in its interim report, that its short list of sites consists of Mueller Park in Subiaco, and land near the old East Perth power station.

Never mind that the former is a perfectly nice park (and as yesterday’s West Australian points out, plenty of people like it that way) while the latter is already earmarked for fairly radical redevelopment.

When the Cockburn stadium bid was first announced, I thought it’d be an ideal way to encourage development at Cockburn Central — pubs, restaurants, and maybe a hotel or two — that would give the area a CBD flavour of its own, like a mini-Parramatta. This kind of development, after all, was decided as the most desirable outcome after the Dialogue with the City process (I should know, I was there!) with a stronger Cockburn helping to drive the growth of a ‘networked’ Perth. But the task force seems not to care about that, giving barely three sentences to the bid and focussing instead on fluffy guidelines about “sports entertainment hubs”. Heck, even the Belmont Park proposal is better than the sites in their short list.

P.S. Something else jumped out at me in yesterday’s newspaper: yet another anti-OBE letter, this time from some professor at that so-called university in Fremantle, arguing that “post-structuralism … is just that, a theory”. Now while it’s not surprising for an average newspaper-letter-writer to not understand the formal meaning of ‘theory’, for an academic I’d say it’s no less than inexcusable.