Hugh Bingham's Candid Comments

CPI goes up by 2.8% Your rent goes up by 85%: Millions of Australians will receive an increase in their pensions and income support payments when the CPI increase kicks in later this month. Pensions, allowances and some family payments will be indexed against the consumer price index (CPI) increase on September 20.
The 2.8 per cent CPI increase, calculated over the past six months, will lift the single pension by around $15 a fortnight to around $560.
For all those Aged Australians resident in rental villages, your rent will automatically increase by 85% of the CPI increase. You will benefit personally by $2,50. Congratulations!

What I've learned turning 80: After four years of difficult health (heart and all that) with probably a lot more to come, I am at last thinking about my end.

So I had a talk with Lyn Nicholson, that warm and wonderful person from Burstow’s whom I’ve known for years, and pre-paid for the last bit of fun right down to the wine casks and savouries. That should save my marvellous daughter a lot of worry.

No, I don’t want Church stuff. Just friends to remember me however they like. I’ve long since separated my God from Church Corporate. He and I are pretty OK.

When I had my little farm at Felton East, He. the Big Fella, showed me a wonderful thing one afternoon when my small grandchildren were running about and so were the foals, the calves, the pups, the kittens and chickens and goslings. Little infant creatures, whether human or animal, were so much the same – cheeky, adventurous, daring, exploring, and running frantically back to Mum when fun turned into risk. And Mums, feathered or fleshed were there to shelter them, kiss them, cuddle them, cluck at them.

It hit me like a rampant rainbow – there's something special in this God stuff after all. And this from a man, a newspaper journalist ye gods, who was christened at St Alban’s at Wilston in Brisbane, prepared for confirmation at one of the City of London’s most venerable 15th Century churches, and, wait for it, confirmed at St Paul;’s Cathedral by the Bishop of London. Took me a long time to feel at one with Him.

Costello’s going and staying: Peter Costello’s Memoirs have at last hit the streets. And the speculation about his Liberal Leadership ambitions have gone into “hold.” They will stay “on hold” while he stays in the Parliament. And he has declared that he WILL stay in the Parliament as the working Member for the blue-blooded Melbourne electorate of Higgins until he makes up his mind what to do. It’s anybody guess what any MP for Higgins ever has to do – Higgins is an electorate of self-generated influence.

By the way, Costello still refuses to declare “Never-Ever” about his ambitions for the leadership.

Not everyone has the benefit of writing a best-selling history of his time in Parliament wielding the reins of power while he’s still on full salary as a Member of Parliament. Especially when the Memoirs are ghosted by his father in law, the distiniguished journalist Peter Coleman. If the Memoirs weren’t apparently so readable, the whole matter would be risible.

Leadership chauvinists – Julie and Joe: The Liberal Party in Opposition can’t get it right. Costello claims he doesn’t want the job. Malcolm Turnbull got over-ambitious and half the Parliamentary party went right off him. So they made Brendan Nelson the Leader – and the Public Opinion Polls just won’t go the right way for Brandan. So now that Costello announced he doesn’t want the job, it’s on again between Malcolm and Brendan. I don’t think the Polls will move one little bit for Turnbull.

The solution is staring this Opposition of Chauvenists in the face but they’re blind to it. The magic political recipe for revival Julie and Joe – Deputy Leader Julie Bishop and Leader of Opposition Business Joe Hockey, “Shrek” to most of us.

Julie is the Opposition’s greatest waste of talent – experienced, smart, articulate and attractive with a real individual presence. Joe could be everybody’s friend – if he can survive John Howard’s assignment to him to “sell” Work Choices, he could lead almost anything.

Hello? After two world wars, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq - The most chilling admission of post 9/11… “America cannot kill its way to victory!” …

So said the top military officer at the Pentagon, Admiral Mike Mullens, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff. “Victory in Afghanistan cannot be achieved solely by the military” he said. “The West is not winning the war in Afghanistan and time is runing out.” Mullens believes victory will come eventually but not until the West works more closely with the Parkistan Government to eliminate safe havens from which Al Qaeda and Taliban are striking. An overdue matter of hearts and minds perhaps..

Questioning the value of school chaplaincies: There’s something socially worrying about the rush to appoint chaplains to school to impart Christian values to kids and to counsel them when they’re in need. The concerns are manifold – ranging from character, training, worldliness, and the uncertainty about what exactly are “Christian values”. Churches have taken a bit of a battering over the last decade ranging from child and sexual abuse by Minister, to the teaching of “Creationism” which distorts the truth of science, and to the sloth of traditional church enlightenment and the exaggerations of some of the charismatics. My grandfatherly preference is for the teaching of social ethics and their progression through known history.

Freeing up public hospital bets by re-housing the elderly: The State Government’s promised determination to free up hospital beds by re-housing older patients in nursing or palliative home is good stuff but it’s very long term. In Toowoomba, don’t expect just to snap your fingers and get into a nursing home. I’m told that Toowoomba Base relocates patients as far from Toowoomba as Crows Nest, Pittsworth and Millmerran

In my view, this critical shortage of beds is yet another example of how the Howard Years wasted opportunity and ignored investment – two memorably ineffective Ministers for Ageing, the notorious Queenslander Santo Santoro and .the young blood ambitious South Australian Liberal Christopher Pyne.