With Julia Gillard on the back foot, Tony Abbott makes a foolish ministry pledge, writes MICHELLE GRATTAN.

Tony Abbott says Julia Gillard has been running a 'protection racket' for Craig Thomson as the former Labor MP is arrested.

With Julia Gillard announcing an election on September 14, Andrew Elder says the campaign will be a race between those who want to discover what an Abbott government will be like and those who want to hide it.

The election will not be won by popularity, being positive or negative or specific policies, but by who makes us more comfortable.

It was with a silken touch that the government slipped the bank lobby's ''covered bond'' legislation through the Senate a little more than a year ago.

Mr Abbott again took aim at the carbon tax.

Tony Abbott's handpicked former parliamentary secretary Cory Bernardi has apparently breached strict rules by failing to declare his ties to a right-wing, pro-tobacco group fighting gun controls.

The organisation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, was involved in a High Court challenge against the Gillard government last year and has financial ties with big tobacco.

If Wikileaks teaches us anything it is that our leaders lie. And lie. And lie.

Australia Day will be no different. Bourgeois clichés about the lucky country (what irony!) and our great nation will compete with bullshit about our brave soldiers overseas and how we all in  this together. 

Few passing London tourists would ever guess that the premises of Bulgari, the upmarket jewellers in New Bond Street, had anything to do with the pope. Nor indeed the nearby headquarters of the wealthy investment bank Altium Capital, on the corner of St James's Square and Pall Mall.