Ben’s Blog

I think it was about February 1997 that my lovely wife Lyndall decreed that I was no longer allowed to watch ABC’s political opinion program, Insiders, on Sunday mornings anymore on the grounds that anytime former foreign Minister Alexander Downer featured my fairly vocal responses helped expand the vocabulary of our impressionable, then 4-year-old, Gabe, in ways that might have been hard to explain at his preschool.

But it seems that Downer is, once again, and for reasons completely opaque to me, deemed quoteworthy by Australian news media these days.

Most recently the Downer has weighed in on whether Prime Ministers should “be dumped” if the polls turn against them. Apparently he thinks that’s bad form.

I suppose he’s a little bit cranky that the ALP figured out how to do something the Libs couldn’t work up the guts to do in in 2007.

Yes, I’ve still been following Australian politics. And loving that we have our first ever redhead PM.

But the axing of a PM in Australia pales a little compared to the ongoing drama of defiance, ultimatums, machinations, inertia, occasional bomb blast, resignations and intrigue that characterises Nepal’s national governance at the moment. It’s a rampaging whirligig that ends up exactly where it began (quite possibly by not actually moving very far from that spot in the first place).

And if you thought local government was boring, spare a thought for Nepal’s Village Development Committee (VDC) Secretaries who not only suffer a legitimacy deficit as local elections have not been held since 2002, but now face death threats from a relatively unknown outfit, the Samyukta Jatiya Mukti Morcha (roughly, the United Ethnicities Liberation Front). At last count the VDC Secretaries in 10 of Nepal’s 75 districts had resigned because of these threats. Though in at least 2 districts they went back to work fairly promptly.