A painful innings, but medics deny Clarke hampered by injury

MICHAEL CLARKE was, his captain insisted on Wednesday, at better than 90 per cent fitness for this match. What he produced during his spell at the crease yesterday suggested otherwise.

Food

Butterflying is a terrific way to deal with a leg of lamb. Have your butcher prepare it and away you go: you should have a nice rectangle of meat to fit easily on the barbie.

Madeleine Eastoe

Principal artist with the Australian Ballet, occasional sugar plum fairy, mother.

The Gillard verdict: good, but can do better

THE end of this parliamentary sitting will be a welcome relief no doubt for Julia Gillard. Throughout it she has been like a sailor trying to make headway into a stiff breeze. The spring sitting was scheduled to finish on Thursday, but the opposition managed to delay the passage of legislation which will split up Telstra - a necessary preliminary for the national broadband network. The delay and political trickiness involved are fitting: that is the way it has been all the way through the Prime Minister's first Parliament since the election, and progress has meant tacking this way and that to cover a lot of distance without moving a long way forward.

We're all paying a high price for hiding our debt

IT DOESN'T seem to have occurred to Julia Gillard that her resolve to make this the "decade of infrastructure" - with a gold-plated national broadband network as its centrepiece - doesn't fit with her core promise to return the budget to surplus in 2012-13 and eliminate government debt ASAP.