But he is also apparently not very attached to the idea of extended shopping hours, even though he’s talking about it. Thus, cutting aside the normal guff about “focussing on the future” and “look! wasteful spending, e.g. OSS!” … I fail to see any significant policy difference in the Liberal Party. And with everyone’s attention elsewhere, there’s no way he’s going to be able to get anyone to care about announcements.

In other news, the sudden conflict in South Ossetia has me wondering about what modern Russia is becoming, and the misinformation from both sides is awfully depressing, with terrible echoes of Yugoslavia or Chechnya in the 1990s …

Now I was skeptical about Kevin Rudd when he got to the top of Federal Labor, and that was obviously wrong, but the Ruddster had a much easier job than the WA Liberal leader. After all, the State Liberals have still got to deal with an alienated coalition partner, ridiculously poor polling, no major policy to speak of, and the departure of key members …

• I have only one response to the current State Liberal leadership scuffle: LOL! (hey look, I’ll destroy my leadership ambitions with a drunken escapade! As if it’d improve the party’s fortunes anyway.)
• I’ve spoken to quite a few people lately who’ve observed that Team Ruddster haven’t done much since taking office. But tomorrow’s meeting of Federal and State treasurers could prove to be the team’s first big change, if they can agree to straighten out the mess of specific purpose payments. (If.)
• I do hope that Fortescue Metals sorts out their weak safety record, even if the press have sensationalised it (to wit: “working families”!). Their apparently-weak management here is one of the few things I can see as getting in the way of their crazy take-over-the-Pilbara plan.
• Sir Edmund Hillary probably deserves the fanfare that has accompanied his unfortunate passing. By contrast, the forthcoming death of Suharto shouldn’t merit anything of the sort.

Perhaps it was fortunate that the Liberals lost last weekend; John Howard had previously emphasised the unified strength of his team, but now that’s looking like it was just a facade. Or maybe the party is full of back-knifers.

And then there’s the race for a new leader. Malcolm Turnbull is indeed the best of the three, while Brendan Nelson has suddenly grown a conscience, but neither they nor Tony Abbot have the nous that made Howard so good at holding votes.

Alongside the news yesterday of John Howard repeating a $400m pledge for road upgrades across Perth (half of which is for the highways around Perth Airport in partnership with its owners; what, you say, the airport needs money elsewhere?!) was the first letter in my mailbox to tell me who my Liberal candidate is.

What struck me, apart from the absence of commitments to spend money in the region (which I think is the most prominent feature of Liberal campaigning so far), was this line near the end: “Don’t experiment with your vote.”

Um.

This seat has been held by Labor for decades.

It’d be an experiment to vote Liberal …

And indeed, later that year the majority was used to rush through WorkChoices and a couple of other changes (like voluntary student unionism). But since then, there have been remarkably few big-ticket laws, and certainly nothing that took advantage of the opportunity for serious reform in contentious areas like tax (and I don’t mean this frittering with thresholds nonsense).

So there is some truth (and, of course, some falsity) in Team Howard’s claim to have stuck to their promise of using the majority ‘responsibly’, by which they mean in a boring and conservative manner. It’s like they’ve run out of ideas for major change despite having a silver-platter opportunity.

There have been not-well-heard voices pointing to the Government fiddling with procedural matters, like scrapping committees and ignoring amendments. Maybe these will cause the Senate’s role to change, like how it stopped caring about the complaints of State politicians (and even local candidates) in saying “waaaaah Canberra isn’t giving us enough money”.

Or maybe Labor will win the lower house, while the Liberals hold on to their majority, and things will drift back to the way they were.

That, of course, was then. Nowadays the coalition is dissolved, the major partner is struggling to find relevance, and the best that the minor partner can do to influence policy decisions is to mount civil disobedience on a rather minuscule scale.

It’d be nice if the 2009 election isn’t a one-horse race, but I don’t have high hopes.

(And a nitpick to the news reports: WA already has two timezones, since the hundred-odd people living around Eucla unofficially set their clocks to UTC+8:45.)