Carlo Sands

Will the trials and tribulations of trying to be a decent, hardworking billionaire in this nation ever end?

First, coalmining magnate Clive Palmer told News.com.au that billionaires “were oppressed” in Australia, and, when asked if he was serious, said: “Yes, I get ridiculed all the time.”

Finally, we have a reason to get excited about elections. Yes, billionaire mining magnate Clive Palmer has formed a political party and is determined to become Australia’s next prime minister.

For the first time in god knows how long, we have a real alternative to the tweedledum-tweedledee politics of the big parties. Palmer's bid for PM poses a crucial question: why shouldn’t those who own this country, run it too?

People of the world, freedom is under attack! And as shocking as it might seem, this threat to liberty is emerging from within the “Land of the Free” itself.

Yes, there was actually a bill put to US Congress that sought to increase the background checks on individuals seeking to buy semi-automatic rifles of the sort that Sandy Hook mass murderer Adam Lanza used to gun down 20 children in December.

It must be great to have the ability to simply declare people you don't like “illegal”. This is the Liberals’ response to “boat people”.

I get that the Liberals hate dark-skinned foreigners with the gall to arrive at our borders and ask for asylum rather than staying where they belong, getting bombed by our military in Afghanistan or tortured by a regime we support in Sri Lanka.

But it actually takes more than simply hating something to make it illegal. You usually find it requires an actual law to be broken.

Some things should never be forgotten, and some things should never be forgiven. Both apply to the mass slaughter of ordinary people in World War I, including Gallipoli.

With the death of another “controversial” world leader, what the media should have done was go back to their editorials that threw around terms like “authoritarian” and “tyrant”, and were filled with tales of a legacy of economic destruction and class hatred and support for dictators, and just used a simple find/replace to remove “Hugo Chavez” and insert “Margaret Thatcher”.

“The future is uncertain for more than 400 Shell employees,” ABC.net.au said on April 4, “after the company announced it is selling its refinery in Geelong in Victoria.”

Shell's Clyde refinery in NSW and Caltex's Lytton refinery in Queensland are both closing, at a cost of 1080 jobs.

Having tried absolutely everything they could think of to win the support of voters besides push good polices in favour of working people, there was really nothing for Labor's parliamentary caucus to do except launch yet another leadership spill on March 21.

It might have been a farce that will help worsen Labor's defeat in September, but it did reveal one startling fact: Simon Crean is still in parliament. I know, right?

Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chavez, died on March 5, and if there is one thing we can take away from coverage in the Western mainstream media is there is now one less dictator threatening the free world.

Sure, on the surface, Chavez didn’t really seem like much of a dictator, what with the whole coming to power through free elections and encouraging unprecedented political participation by ordinary citizens thing. But it is just like those serial killers whose neighbours always say seemed so nice until the horrible truth came out.

That Richard Hinds needs a few lessons in sports journalism.

“Such has been the atmosphere created by the Western Sydney Wanderers' fans, usually dispassionate critics have left Parramatta Stadium raving the experience makes the Camp Nou [in Barcelona] seem like a winter night at the Wentworth Park dogs,” the chief sports columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald had the sheer gall to write on February 18.