More to journalism than he said, she said. I think.
It's easy for journalists to feel that so long as they produce a 'he said, she said' account of an issue, they've done the job. It's simple, it can be done quickly and on deadline, and no-one can accuse you of bias. But supposing that one side in a dispute could be, with a bit of digging, shown to be objectively wrong, and the other right? Isn't it the 'objective' journalist's job to tell us so?
Housing market: booms, bubbles and inevitable busts
The Government's First Home Owners Grant caused the number of house buyers to explode last year, and now the number is fizzing. There were just 46,000 home loans taken out by owner-occupiers in April, a cool 25 per cent down on the same month in 2009. So, as the stock of unsold houses in Australia mounts up, it is only a matter of time before the bubble bursts in our housing market.
Old age: an insidious plague
No government can look into the face of the future and plan for anything but a declining, ageing population.
Obama's War on Oil
Repeated cancellations of Obama's Asian tour illustrates you can only be as strong abroad as you are at home. After being forced to lobby for every single vote to pass basic healthcare regulation, the US president is now tied down by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. Both events represent deep challenges facing American society - its out of control health care costs and its desperate addiction, shared by us all, to fossil fuels.
#penrithdebate: O'Farrell 1, Democracy 0
Twitter is completely the wrong medium for a debate, so it made sense for NSW pollies to use it to conduct one.
