Wonders will never cease.

After a horror start to the week for the Liberal Party of Oz (see earlier post) the later half did indeed improve with some valuable comment from some Liberals.

Unfortunately for the Party it came from elder members who no longer have much input but nevertheless it was nice to see something a bit more thoughtful for a change.

First cab off the rank was Malcolm Fraser (pictured at left) who made an insightful reply to Fran Kelly on RN Breakfast. When asked what he thought Kevin Rudd should do (principally about boat people) he said "Kevin Rudd should get out of the way and let his Ministers manage their portfolios."

A very good observation although I appreciate he is viewing it from a different angle. The problem with Oceanic Viking got blown way out of proportion and Kevin 07 did not need to be in center stage as it exploded. He should have left it for his Ministers to solve and only get involved if it really went pear shaped.

The problem arose from some misreading of a poll and Labor is not the only interest group to get it wrong. Even Michelle Grattan got carried away and started reading more into the data. For those who missed it a poll was undertaken just after the rescued Sri Lankans refused to leave the Oceanic Viking at an Indonesian port. Now some Voters were excited and the Press certainly got their knickers in a twist but the Public in general were just watching things unfold. A few different Labor folk started jumping in front of cameras too and that also caught the publics attention.

The results of the poll were Labor down 15 points but Kevin himself only 2 points. For some reason the pundits and even Kevin himself, decided the love affair with Kevin was over. I thought the data was clear. The Voters were happy enough with Kevin but unhappy with all the other members of the Party and trade unionists loudly asking for the asylum seekers to come straight through.

More detailed polling has since shown that the Voters are pretty evenly split over how to treat asylum seekers. Some want to push them away while others want an "Open Door" policy.

The upshot was Kevin hitting the airwaves a la John Howard and popping up all over the place. Personally, I think this is a bad tactic. Eventually you will say something that offends just about everyone or people just get sick of seeing you around. I simply wouldn't go there.

If Rudd hadn't jumped in he could still be relaxing back at the Lodge instead of having to keep going over the same ground.

The second Elder Liberal to make an intelligent comment was a real shock. None other than Sadam Hussien's bag man Alexander Downer. His observation was uncharacteristically accompanied by an admission of having made the same mistake himself. The comment was about carrying on negotions with a megaphone ie. through the Press. He equated it to their (The Libs) dealing with the Tampa the same way. When you use the Press to publicise your agreements you paint the Indonesians into a corner and you will struggle to get the desired result.

Normally Kevin 07 understands this as shown by the Hu Stern case, but somehow this one slipped through. Being the clever clogs that he is, I'd be surprised if he doesn't learn from this error of judgement and he probably recognises disunity was part of the problem after the more detailed polling.

Rudd has had a challenging week, not a disastrous one, and if he reflects on the lessons and fine tunes himself and his party, life for Turnbull is going to be a hard row for quite some time yet.

Exactly how long is it going to take for the Good Ship Lost Cause (otherwise known as her majesty's Opposition) to plug the holes and get sea worthy again?

It's been a shocking week and it's only Wednesday.

Monday night got things off to an exciting start with the 4 Corners program giving the Climate Change skeptics a full run. After all Malcolm's efforts to try and hide these characters the ABC has given them the opportunity to increase the size of the hole in the hull and they went for it boots and all.

Then something snapped in Joe Hockey who is supposed to be a future leader of the Libs. For some strange reason he has decided to play the God card, presumably because he thinks it will better his chances in Leadership ballots. Logic fail. Kevin 07 beat Howard in spite of his religious beliefs not because of them.

Aussies are always supicious of "God Bothering" from pollies. Yes, you can declare your hand if the matter is raised by others but to start the topic yourself is a very dangerous tactic. When you have another political challenger in your Party representing Cardinal Pell pushing a different God then things can get ugly mighty fast.

To add insult to injury, young Joe has also come out with the extraordinary claim that he doesn't lie. Perhaps he has already forgotten his part in promoting Work Choices but the victims of it haven't. It shouldn't be too long now before the Interviewers start reading back on his unhappy time as the Minister and start quizzing his pronouncements. Perhaps he should have added the caveat "from now on" but even that would be a struggle. His announcement that "People smuggling is in decline" though not an outright lie is certainly a dishonest presentation of the facts.

All this on top of Howard sticking his head up to remind the Voters of children being imprisoned with their asylum seeking parents.

The week can only improve from here.

It just keeps getting worse for Osama Bin Laden.

Firstly he lost his two best recruitment officers in Bush and Cheney, then the US Treasury suggested he has cash flow problems. Now the top little earner of the opium harvest is struggling to hold it's price levels.

In the early years of this century (2001) the Taliban felt drugs were evil and almost eradicated the harvest reducing the cultivation by an impressive 91% under their regime. They must have then hired an Economic Rationalist because they have since had a rethink and these days take a cut of the harvest calculated at around 10 %. On current figures this is supposed to come in at around $200M to $400M per year. That's one heck of a lot of explosive in anyone's book.

In 2008 NATO and the Afghan government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy an estimated 3% of the opium harvest. An expensive operation which basically had no effect because the oversupply has driven the price way down. The World consumes about 5,000 tonnes a year but Afghanistan alone grows far more than this level. The upshot of the oversupply was a 33% drop in the price last year.

The Taliban have become rather attached to the previous price levels so now NATO forces are uncovering stockpiles of the crop when raiding Taliban hangouts. Like the drug users themselves, they are addicted to their biggest revenue raiser.

Hopefully the forces of light will reconsider the previous program of eradication (which cost many lives as well as dollars) and try something a bit more innovative like promoting legal crops.

This wins on so many different levels.

1. The Afghan government doesn't have to irritate the farmers by destroying their income.
2. The Taliban have an even bigger problem of oversupply to deal with.
3. The cost in lives and dollars to the Afghan government is significantly reduced.
4. NATO forces are less obvious in the negative sense in their interaction with the locals.
5. The opium affect on GDP which currently stands at 3% can be replaced by other crops.

The dollar addiction for the Taliban is a real problem for them. Just like a junkie they will have trouble scaling back their earnings. The nature of their behaviour is to put pressure on to maintain the status quo. Instead of promoting themselves as the "Liberators" they are going to suffer from the stand over tactics that naturally accompany a military boys club. When you add greed to the mix that already has them upsetting the population with their indiscriminate bombings, they have a PR nightmare in front of them.

Good job too. It's high time they were put on the back foot. Let's hope this opportunity to destabilise the Taliban is embraced.

Last week I came across a briefing in The Week dealing with the use of pilotless aircraft around the world.

The first stunning fact was how many aircraft are deployed over Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The US operates these craft out of 2 bases in the States. Creech in Nevada and Davis-Monthan in Arizona. The amazing number of 250 pilots piloting around the clock gives a hint of the size of the enterprise but add to this figure that pilots can handle 4 drones at any one time and the numbers really start to climb.

Impressive logistics must be involved when you think of contractors launching closer to the action then control being managed from the continental USA.

Currently the high priority targets for this force is leadership figures standing against the US and they have had some success. But here's the rub. According to Aussie counter insurgency expert, David Kilcullen, who actually works for the State Department in the US, for every al-Qa'eda or Taliban leader killed, 50 civvies also die.

Is that a net gain or loss in the overall picture? You can insert your own bias here as to if you think it's worth the effort.

What is beyond doubt though, is this is an expensive operation in both dollars and human lives and not especially clear cut in its advantages when you factor in the negative effect killing civilians has on boosting Taliban recruitment.

To make matters even worse from where I'm viewing it from, the so called "good guys" feel the need to cheat in elections so they are not as confident of public support as we were led to believe. Add to that the rule changes made against their women folk and the ramping up of protection for the churches with strengthened blasphemy laws, and I start to wonder exactly why we are even involved.

Americans might call it Democracy but its a pretty generous definition under normal standards. How many lives should be sacrificed for such an imperfect result?

Currently the Government is deciding how to break up the 500 pound gorilla after suffering unending legal challenges to every change in policy. Clearly I am not the only one sick of their greedy intransigence.

Firstly, I should declare that I was once an employee of the company when they were at the pointy end of developing the network and more interested in evolving than churning customers from their competitors. It was a time when aiming for the best for the country was the priority rather than offering huge wages to a select few at the top.

Those days have long since gone and the business model has been a bit of a basket case for quite some time. Currently the existing customer base are suffering through a new billing system that they appear to have brought on line before it was finished. The upshot is a flood of complaints where the customers are helping the company debug the software. Now to the Economic Rationalists it probably looks like a winning strategy but they have failed to measure the effect on their client loyalty.

In the first place it's a bad idea to abuse you client base in this cynical way but an even worse idea is not correcting the problem on the first call. Folk who have told me about their troubles invariably mention how many calls it took to solve the problem and I can't remember one who was satisfied with an easy solution.

You can imagine how hard this makes the job for the folk trying to churn the customers back to Telstra once they have had enough of them in the first place.

But I see some more pain coming courtesy of Telstra. This time it's the share holders but this time I'm less sympathetic.

Some folk seem to value trading in shares as somehow more up market than punting on the gee gees. For all its sophistication, shares is simply betting on a different commodity. Now I can't imagine anyone would be in favour of covering my bets at the local TAB so I'm not inclined to be throwing support on a different form of gambling that didn't work out. Fairs fair.

It's not as if the Telstra investment has ever been a good one. Those who accepted John Howard's invitation to invest have been drifting down the gurgler ever since and should have hit the exits long ago.

Of course if John Howard wanted to throw some of his personal wealth to help the victims this would be an honorable thing and I would applaud it but somehow I can see that happening. He certainly was party to Ziggy overstating the value of the shares something Ziggy fessed up to much later on.

The Libs seem intent on trying to hold up the demise of Telstra but once again they have failed to think about what the Voters want. Finding Telstra fans is harder than finding fans for Malcolm Turnbull.

Meet Margot Bates. He she is preparing for the 100 meters back stroke where she is the oldest competitor.

I was watching the News last night when she featured in an interview that really tickled my fancy. When asked if she was feeling fit her response was "Any fitter and I'd be dangerous."

What a ripper response. At the stately old age of 97 (I think) it was the quip of the reports. Another nice one was the interview with the 100+ year old woman competing in the shot put.

When quizzed about celebrating her victory from the field of one she said something like "I don't smoke or drink so I won't be celebrating like you."

There's no fool like an old fool I guess.

I see young Alexander has seen fit to criticize the awarding of the Nobel Peace prize to the current US President Barack Obama.

Obviously he feels he qualified on matters related to peace after his promotion of war and the attempted destruction of the Geneva convention during his chance to do something positive in easing tension around the world. Something he failed at dismally.

I'm not surprised Downer has failed to see the lifting of the tension caused by the shortsightedness by George W Bush. He was so locked into caveman politics he was never aware of the massive damage caused by Bush not understanding the international community.

His solution to more terror attacks? Get bigger guns and kill more people in the vain hope that you can kill more terrorists than you create. Policy FAIL.

Alexander did his bit to promote terrorist organisations too. He tried to credit the loss of an election by the Spanish Government to a train terror attack when in actual fact the Voters thought the incumbent Government were untrustworthy. Not even the Yanks fell for that one.

Another feather in Downer's hat is his support for water boarding. Yep. Alexander and his crew of moral pollies signed right up for the "water boarding is not torture" rubbish. Folk much smarter than he and especially those old enough to remember WW2 must have been horrified to see the weakening of one of the few protections available for POWs.

I was more than amused to see Lech Walesa complaining about the prize win too. When he scored the "Peace" prize I wondered what the reasoning was. If it was called the Democracy prize it would have made sense but at that time his efforts to destabilise the Polish Government were hardly promoting peace.

I'm sure the Obama detractors will moan long and hard over the awarding of the Peace prize but the World is already a safer place with the departure of Bush. The fact that Obama was lucky enough to be measured against his predecessor was his (and the worlds) good fortune. The fact that someone as shallow as Alexander Downer does not approve is just the icing on the cake.