Scott Morrison comes to the defence of Fiona Scott’s “Asylum seekers clogging the M4” comment: “We’ve had 50,000 people turn up over the last five years,” he said; “in addition to that we have 20,000 people who have been released into the community under the government’s policies and they have principally been released into south-western Sydney and in Dandenong area in Melbourne and other places. Proving this is purely about the presentation rather than the actual issue, Morrison neglects to mention the 50,000 asylum seekers over 5 years represents only 5% of the 883,626 migrants that have been granted settlement in Australia over the same time. They’re not all living in Bondi and St Kilda, Mr. Morrison. ...

Houses and Holes on Macrobusiness reflects much the same view I have in my Election 2013 post below - sheer politics is getting in the way of good policy: Deloitte acknowledges that this is not a cost benefit analysis. But if we’re talking about a $25-$30 billion uplift in household standard’s of living per annum, even at a significantly higher cost of building that would be worthwhile and it would be difficult to match in any other spend of the same amount of money. ...

I wonder how long the general public cottons onto the fact that campaign launches are as much a marker of how much money a campaign wants to get out of the public purse as it is of a cohesive platform launch. Again this year, Labor and Liberal parties left their campaign “launches” until the latter half of the actual election campaign period, allowing them to claim up until that day as part of their regular business of representing people. What crock. ...

John Gruber, arguing for Nintendo to just develop for iOS, states his admiration for Disney: One thing that has long fascinated me about Walt Disney was that he was always looking for the next big thing, and never worried about protecting the last big thing. This really doesn’t square with Disney’s long-term support for the Copyright Term Extension Act where Disney is constantly trying to protect their last big things. Nintendo, currently, is utterly dependent on reinventing the wheel of their existing franchises, and I suspect that is what needs to change more than any deep seated lack of progress on the hardware front. ...

New from Nintendo: The new Nintendo 2DS system gives you all the features of the Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo 3DS XL, minus 3D viewing. And the price makes the world of Nintendo games even more accessible. Did I miss something where Nintendo didn’t have a dual-screen console beforehand? Or where they can’t just implement this in software? And now the 2DS doesn’t fold up like all the dual-screen consoles before, meaning it needs something to protect the screen. ...