The May budget has become not much more than a housekeeping document tacked on to the appropriation bills.
With preparations well in hand for the 2011 Census in August, we are assuming that the separate Census Interviewer Household Form, which has been administered to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in remote communities in past censuses, has been dropped by an embarrassed Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
On issues like this, I encounter the limits to my liberalism. Deep down, I think this is my business. This woman’s refusal to conform to one of the simplest, least demanding yet most basic of shared, social rules – put clothes on before going out in public – is confronting.