Tony Abbott debates policy using gut feeling.

Coalition frontbencher Tony Abbott says New South Wales is playing nanny state politics with its ban on smoking in cars when children are present.

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Mr Abbott says the ban is over the top.

“I was a child that was regularly imprisoned in a car with heavy smokers,” he said.

“My parents both smoked heavily when I was a kid. Now has it done me any harm?

“You be the judge …”

Forget research, expert opinion and statistics, Tony’s fine so let’s legislate based on his personal experience.

We all know that Brendan Nelson likes to formulate policy on whiteboards minutes before releasing it publicly, but how does he do it when there’s no whiteboard available?

QUESTION: …how do you frame policy like this? I mean you take a while to come up with a pension policy, so how do you frame a policy? Do you take an amount of money and divide it by the number of people who benefit and you come up with a figure? Or how do you do that?

DR NELSON: Well terms of looking at it – by the way, you don’t need to have a committee to do this – there are pensioner organisations and… there’s plane (sic) common sense to be applied and I think what you’ve got to do is look at the cost of living pressures that pensioners face. You look at what you think is reasonable for people to try to survive on a pension, and then I think you need to look at obviously the finances of the country and what it can afford reasonably to do so, and then a decision has to be made.

Got that? No? Well, don’t worry — Bren-doc just steals Greens Party policy anyway.

Here is the good Doctor Brendan Nelson stressing the importance of developing considered and robust climate change policy.

Our very strong view Kerry is firstly that you’ve got to make sure in implementing an emissions trading scheme that it’s done responsibly, methodically… This is an extraordinarily important policy debate for Australia… It’s been a very important part of our process to go through the process of considering the policy of climate change.

Here is the good Doctor Brendan Nelson developing the Liberal Party’s version of considered and robust climate change policy.

In the party room… some backbenchers were angry that no written policy was presented to the meeting — which then proceeded to draft one. Mr Hunt and Ms Bishop wrote on a whiteboard as Dr Nelson dictated.

With income tax the big issue of the campaign so far, Lachlan Connor has released his own tax policy.

Episode 34: In which Lachlan holds a meeting to revise his policies and update his website.
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Lachlan Connor has announced his climate change policy.

Lachlan Connor has announced his policy on government assistance to farmers.

Lachlan Connor has announced that he will release a policy each day for the rest of this week, ahead of a trip to Canberra on the weekend to “soak up the democracy.” I wonder if he’s going to drop into Fyshwick to soak up anything else?

Here is Lachlan’s first policy release for the week: education.

Lachlan Connor has today launched his Advertising to Children policy. He explains the policy in more detail in a YouTube personal broadcast.

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