Opinion

Jeff Corbett

Changing your vote

Posted: 01 Oct 09 | We've heard about lowering the voting age to 16 and introducing online voting, but for most people that's about the sum total of the cover of the Federal Government's electoral reform green paper released just over a week ago. |

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Religion versus ethics

Posted: 30 Sep 09 | If you don't want your child soaking up their religion, the churches won't have your child doing anything constructive for that hour, and especially not learning about ethics. |

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Winning grins

Posted: 29 Sep 09 | So why does the Hunter's media scramble to record Richard Branson's chopper visit to Newcastle this week to check out his rebuilt yacht and not Bruce MacKenzie's occasional visits to clean out the bookies? |

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Bring back Neville

Posted: 28 Sep 09 | My mate and I see Neville as leading us into the unPC age, and I'm sure he's up to leading us all back to an age of guilt-free confidence if we can find him. |

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Camping questions

Posted: 25 Sep 09 | Suddenly people who seem forever tripping off to this or that resort are asking me about camping, and you know what that means? In a few months we'll be crowded out of our favourite camping spots. |

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Housing children

Posted: 24 Sep 09 | Why did it take resident protests, or more likely the media's cover of those protests, to remind the State Government and Housing NSW of its responsibilities? |

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Parental embarrassment

Posted: 22 Sep 09 | At first, I'll admit, I provoked the embarrassment that has afflicted all my children in their teenage years, or, I should say, deliberately provoked it. |

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Morning grumps

Posted: 21 Sep 09 | I have known, well, quite a number of people who would describe themselves as "not a morning person", usually by way of apology, and some were positively unpleasant for the first hour or two of the day. |

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A rates bloodbath

Posted: 18 Sep 09 | Have a guess what your council rates would be today if the Wran Government had not introduced rate pegging 32 years ago. |

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The gardeners' battle

Posted: 17 Sep 09 | Food gardeners in the Hunter have, in the main, two curses - the fruit fly and the caterpillar - and I'm engaged in battle with both. And I think I'm winning! |

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Pedophiles in the midst

Posted: 16 Sep 09 | The fact is that Ferguson needs to live somewhere, and another fact is that unless this is in jail the somewhere will have children. |

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Filling mower cans

Posted: 15 Sep 09 | It's always a Saturday morning, and I go to the back of the car, lift out an old plastic crate holding three Victa fuel cans, plonk the crate on the ground and set about filling them. But you won't see me do this again. |

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A painless horsewhip

Posted: 11 Sep 09 | Evidently the Australian Racing Board sees more than 18 applications of the whip as cruel and 18 or fewer as not cruel, and it has the support of no less than the RSPCA in this assessment. |

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Supermarket power

Posted: 10 Sep 09 | For starters, the supermarket sets the price for the brands that compete against its own. That alone is huge power in the market. |

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Five serves of veg!

Posted: 09 Sep 09 | The mantra of five serves of vegetables a day has been hanging over us since the days of nightly meat and three veg. |

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Online shopping

Posted: 08 Sep 09 | I had believed that traditional, in-store retailing was under serious threat from online shopping and so I'm delighted that the direction of the battle's advance may have changed. |

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Neighbours from hell

Posted: 07 Sep 09 | We can't choose our neighbours and new neighbours are always a small risk, but when they're chosen by a government department as a social experiment the risk is not so small. |

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Failing the mentally ill

Posted: 04 Sep 09 | A man who shuffles along inner Newcastle's streets day and night is a tragic example of the new right of mentally ill people to be independent of care. |

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Life's priorities

Posted: 03 Sep 09 | Imagine that you've been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and, since life is never fair, perhaps you don't need to imagine. Sink into that diagnosis and prognosis for a few seconds. |

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A flawed health plan

Posted: 02 Sep 09 | While some of the Preventative Health Taskforce's recommendations are good, many fall short and many opportunities for reform don't get a guernsey. |

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