Oooh, Tough Talk From Costello The Big Quitter

Costello Blames Howard For Losing The Election, But Some Liberals Blame Costello

Look out, Peter Costello's tossing blame around for the Howard government's humiliating election annihilation, and he's claiming he could "neutered" Kevin Rudd.

Well, that's what Costello claims he could have done, if he hadn't been such a big coward, and if he hadn't cut and run from the leadership of the Liberal Party, that is.

So why didn't he challenge Howard for the leadership? Not enough support. How did Costello know this? His colleagues told him so. Of course, with the full backing of the Murdoch media behind him, if Costello had actually challenged Howard last year, or even earlier this year, there would have been such a wave of momentum and excitement around mounting a fresh front to fight Kevin Rudd, Costello would have found himself enormously popular with his colleagues, who were growing more desperate by the week as the polls sunk into the sewer.

According to now ex-foreign minister Alexander Downer, they knew they were not going to win with Howard in charge for most of 2007.

If Costello had tried to push the old man aside, of course the party would have rallied behind him. They wanted to win the election.

So why didn't Costello make his move? Why didn't he finally take a crack at the golden ring after pissing on year after year after year about how Howard wouldn't give him a go, like he promised?

John Howard wouldn't let him. The big meany :

The Liberals were continuing to play the blame game last night as Peter Costello handed John Howard responsibility for the party's massive electoral defeat.

The Treasurer, who aspired to be prime minister, was denied his opportunity after Mr Howard refused to retire despite diminishing support in cabinet.

Costello's first post-election interview with Lateline is now up here. Very wussy. He blames Howard, without saying "John Howard" and says they would have had a better chance with a "fresher face"...Costello is talking about himself? That battered, hang dog old mug of his is a "fresher face"?

Was he planning on hitting the Botox harder than Howard?


After spending a week blaming John Howard for losing the election, other Libs are now turning on Peter Costello :

A senior Victorian Liberal has hit out at former federal treasurer Peter Costello and his "factional henchmen", accusing them of stacking the party with yes-men and women...

Senator Judith Troeth said the faction, led by Mr Costello and his close friend, Melbourne businessman and former Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger, was a "cult of personality" devoted to "Peter's ascension to the Lodge".

She said now that Mr Costello had decided to quit politics after last Saturday's devastating election loss, Victorian branch members should rise and rid the party executive of the Costello-Kroger henchmen.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

So much time wasted on their petty little internal brawling.

No wonder so many young people show absolutely no interest in getting into politics. Life is too short.


Here's here's Costello talking tough about what he woulda, coulda, done to the Labor Party :

"We could have neutered that appeal of Labor..."

Sure you could have.

Did it ever occur to Costello that one of the reasons why the Liberals were falling out of favour with the public was because of his ranting, sneering, smug head yelling all over the news from Parliament every couple of days?

Costello's antics might have made for big laughs in the former boys club of Parliament House, but it's no stretch to imagine that his yelling, and yawning, was pissing off more Australians in their living rooms than it was entertaining.

"We Can Change The Way The Public Thinks..."

Rupert Murdoch Admits He Does Tell His Newspapers Who To Back And What To Print

By Darryl Mason


Okay, prepare yourselves, and try not to be too shocked by this revelation :

Rupert Murdoch has admitted to a parliamentary inquiry (in the UK) that he has "editorial control" over which party The Sun and News of the World back in a general election and what line the papers take on Europe.

Mr Murdoch's comments were revealed in the minutes from evidence he gave behind closed doors on 17 September in New York, during the committee's inquiry into media ownership.

But the News Corporation chairman said he took a different approach with The Times and The Sunday Times. While he often asked what those papers were doing, he never instructed them or interfered, he said.

The minute stated: "For The Sun and News of the World he explained that he is a 'traditional proprietor'. He exercises editorial control on major issues – like which party to back in a general election or policy on Europe

Which raises the obvious question, how many of the 70% of all Australian newspapers that Rupert Murdoch controls does he instruct to back or attack chosen politicians, political parties or political causes?

Is the Sydney Daily Telegraph as editorially independent of Murdoch's influence as the London Sunday Times?

Or can The Australian newspaper claim that honor?

Was the Herald Sun free to back Howard over Rudd in the elections? Or was the Herald Sun's pro-Howard line more for reasons of 'balance'?

Perhaps the UK parliamentary enquiry revelations explain why Murdoch blogger Andrew Bolt (whose blog features on the main news.com.au portal, as well as the Herald Sun and Courier Mail websites, reaching hundreds of thousands of Australian online readers) was so enthusiastically pumping the fact that, just before the election, the Sydney Daily Telegraph backed Rudd, while the Herald Sun did not, and why Bolt was earlier so vehemently denying that Murdoch's papers went hard after Howard when he refused to step down.

Murdoch's revelation of purposeful editorial control should not be a revelation to readers of The Orstrahyun blog.

As regular readers would remember, Murdoch clearly admitted, back in June during his climate change awakening, that not only did he instruct his newspapers to push a certain reality that he favoured, but he could also muster the entire forces of his internet, newspaper, cable and TV empire to push his belief systems onto the world and change not only what they believed, but how they behaved.

Here's Rupert Murdoch explaining how this would be done on the issue of 'waking up' his readers to the reality of climate change :

"We need to reach (our audience) in a sustained way. To weave this issue into our content-- make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior.

"The challenge is to revolutionize the message.

"We need to do what our company does best: make this issue exciting. Tell the story in a new way.

"Now... there are limits to how far we can push this issue in our content."

"...we can change the way the public thinks about these issues..."

Within weeks of Rupert explaining how effectively his vast media empire can wage a psychological war on its viewers and readers to influence their beliefs and behaviour, most of his dozens of Australian city and suburban newspapers became champions of fighting climate change, launching special liftouts, dedicated websites and awareness campaigns over the next few months, under such Al Gore mantras as 'Saving Planet Earth'.


UPDATE : On September 10, 2001, John Howard had a long, private dinner with Rupert Murdoch in Washington, DC. Howard was suffering some of the worst poll numbers of his career, and the Liberal Party was scoring its worst poll ratings since the mid-1970s. But Tampa was heating up the front pages back home, and 9/11 was about to shock the nation.

Murdoch allowed himself to be interviewed by the media when he exited the restaurant with Howard, in scenes that were repeated in early 2007, in New York City, with then Labor prime ministerial hopeful Kevin Rudd.

From an ABC Radio report on the Howard-Murdoch 2001 dinner :

For two hours the two men sat alone in the upmarket Oxidental Grill deep in conversation. At 10:00pm local time they emerged and Mr Murdoch was asked by waiting journalists who'd win the next election.

RUPERT MURDOCH: No, we never discussed it.

REPORTER: Do you think Mr Howard deserves a third term in Office, Mr Murdoch?

RUPERT MURDOCH: Mm?

REPORTER: Do you think the Prime Minister deserves a third term in Office?

RUPERT MURDOCH: It doesn't matter what I think. You ask my editors.

REPORTER: Mr Murdoch, how do you think Kim Beazley would go as Prime Minister?

RUPERT MURDOCH: It would be very interesting.

REPORTER: Were they productive discussions with Mr Murdoch?

JOHN HOWARD: Well, we had a pleasant dinner.

REPORTER: Did you talk politics?

JOHN HOWARD: We talked everything.

MARK WILLACY: There's little doubt about that, given Rupert Murdoch's interest in media policy and the extraordinary influence of his Australian print empire. His response when asked if John Howard deserved a third term is well worth another listen:

RUPERT MURDOCH: It doesn't matter what I think. You ask my editors.

Rupert Murdoch was far more forthcoming on Kevin Rudd when he was asked by a journalist in early 2001 whether or not he thought the contender would make a good prime minister. The reply then was, "Oh, I'm sure..." Big smile.


A note we received yesterday, from a person who claimed to be a former staffer in John Howard's office, said that it was common gossip within many government departments that when John Howard refused to hand over the leadership to Peter Costello at the end of 2006, Rupert Murdoch was less than happy. And that editors of at least two Murdoch Australian city papers, likewise, were less than happy.

The self-claimed former Howard staffer said that when Rupert Murdoch publicly appeared with Kevin Rudd in New York City in April, 2007, laughing and grinning after a long meeting at the News Corp. headquarters, and then dinner together, a climate of doom descended amongst many in the prime minister's department. The belief was that Murdoch had given Kevin Rudd the Big Tick, particularly after the "Oh, I'm sure" quote was aired, which meant Howard was probably finished.

The Sydney Daily Telegraph soon became very obvious champions of Kevin Rudd, and Howard suffered a sustained stream of extremely negative Daily Telegraph front pages, featuring large photos showing Howard looking old, stressed and confused.

But then again, one city newspaper doesn't win an election. Does it?


"We want to inspire people to change their behavior....The challenge is to revolutionize the message...We need to do what our company does best: make this issue exciting. Tell the story in a new way...we can change the way the public thinks..."

Liberals Suddenly Very Interested In The Government Being Held To Account

The Rudd Government, That Is

Libs Helen Coonan and Christopher Pyne now believe that an Australian government should keep its promises, should be held to account for its actions and should face heat and intense scrutiny when it acts dishonestly. Nothing like being kicked out of power to make politicians champions of integrity, honesty and substance :

Helen Coonan : "It's very important...that the Rudd led Labor party is made to fulfil their promises to the electorate and be kept accountable."

Christopher Pyne : "....the one thing that counts, which is holding Kevin Rudd accountable for his promises and his frontbench accountable for their incompetencies."

Helen Coonan : "I think it is very important to hold Kevin Rudd accountable..." "Can I just say one thing about holding Kevin Rudd accountable...eventually somebody's going to have to actually implement what they say and we will be holding Labor accountable, I assure you."

Great. But what about holding the Liberal Party accountable for the past 11.5 years? Christopher Pyne explains how that works :

"...we have to forget about the past."

Well, you can have your dreams.

Former foreign minister, Alexander Downer, is all for forgetting the past as well :

"...what’s the point of going back over the last 12 months, we can't relive that. It's all over. We just, I think for the Liberal Party, it won't be doing itself much of a favour by a constant retrospective."

It's no wonder Downer, and the rest of the survivors, want to forget about the past year, and the past11.5 years, of Liberal/National government.

Tim Dunlop runs through some of the numerous ways the Howard government shafted the Australian people and ducked and weaved their way through some of the most outrageous and shocking events, boondoggles, double standards and outright fabrications of recent decades :

I can’t remember the number of times we were told that Mr Howard doesn’t lie and that even if he does, so what, all politicians lie; that “core promises” was a perfectly legitimate way of dealing with election commitments; that any government or prime ministerial fudging in regard to “children overboard” was a figment of the “Howard haters” vile imagination; that there were absolutely no problems with the government’s handling of AWB scandal; that the Haneef matter was dealt with strictly according to the law with no eye to political advantage; that David Hicks deserved everything he got and that the government were always perfectly upfront about their dealings with the Bush Administration on the issue; that we were told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the invasion of Iraq; that the subsequent change of position of why we were in Iraq and how long we were staying there was perfectly reasonable; that the former government did have a mandate for WorkChoices because they mentioned something about in passing on their website before the 2004 election; that the “fairness test” wasn’t a backflip contradicting their previous commitments to make no fundamental changes to the legislation; that the business union ads the previous government demanded were a completely honest assessment based on sound econometric research; that Mr Howard’s multi-billion dollar splurge on government advertising was justifiable down to the last cent and that the ads themselves never had any political intent...

Dunlop has more on all this here and makes this final, extremely valid point :

Thank you, Mr Howard. By running the most dishonest government in living memory you seem to have converted a generation of your own supporters to the cause of integrity in government and this is, apparently, going to be a key theme of the new Coalition Opposition...This is a good thing for the country, something some of us having been arguing for some time.

Indeed.

Liberals Go For Brendan "We Went To Iraq For The Oil" Nelson

Nelson's First Betrayal Of The Wing Nuts : "We Love Kyoto, Too!"

Uh oh. Paul Kelly will not be happy, but the wing nuts will be. The Liberals have voted in former Labor Party member and one time union leader, Brendan Nelson, as their new messiah, with Julie Bishop as deputy.

Nelson has managed to fight off the Malcolm Turnbull Leadership Coup, but only just, winning his spot at "the worst job in Australian politics" by only a handful of votes.

This means the Liberal Party will rumble with chaos and "Did Turnbull do it?" leaks undermining the new leader for months, or even years, to come.

Brendan "We Went To Iraq For The Oil" Nelson can be counted on to make life a little bit difficult for the Rudd government, but will remain a figure of public mockery, and will continue to provide plenty of gaffes and jaw droppers to keep the Liberal Party In Chaos entertainment coming.

So much for the Liberals taking a message from the election and creating a new, more appealing front line team and set of themes. They will isolate themselves even further from the Australian mainstream, with Nelson now free to air his wacko views on education, religion and the 'War on Terror' whenever he likes.

It's now time for all of those who confidently predicted Turnbull would win the leadership to quickly distance themselves from their previous comments.

UPDATE : Maybe the wing nuts won't be so happy with Nelson, after all.

Brendan Nelson is podiuming and announcing...Kyoto Is Good!

"I have heard the message from Australians that was delivered on Saturday and whatever some critics of the Kyoto Protocol might actually think, it's symbolically important to Australians," he said.

Now symbolism is important to the Liberals?

Here's Brendan Nelson hating Kyoto in 2005, and cheerleading nuclear energy :

"Australia has rightly refused to sign the Kyoto protocol."

"...is it not time to consider in the longer term the most obvious power source, nuclear power? It is not only in electricity production that nuclear energy offers potential for Australia. It could also be used to fuel water desalination on a large scale."

The Labor Party will have lots of fun with those quotes.

Let's see how Nelson's We Love Kyoto, Too declaration today compares to those that The Australian's Paul Kelly instructed the next Liberal leader to utter :

"The Liberal Party believes in Kyoto ratification and a post-2012 system that binds developing nations into the compact."

Kind of close.

It looks like Nelson will be uttering plenty of "Me Toos!" in the coming months, on WorkChoices (goodbye), on withdrawing combat forces from Iraq (good luck) and on embracing the fight against climate change (our members own waterfront properties).

The more the wing nuts rip into Nelson for not being as demented, bigoted and extreme as they are, the more isolated they will become in Australian politics, and Australian society.

"Listen Up, Turnbull, This Is How It's Going To Be"

Esteemed Journo Offers Broken, Desperate Liberal Party A Helping Hand


The announcement will come within hours that Malcolm Turnbull has 'won' the leadership 'battle' to apply the jumper cables to the barely flailing corpse that is the Australian Liberals.

The Liberals are in big trouble, as every columnist in the country is telling you. These are desperate times for Australian conservatives. Not only will they have to publicly acknowledge that Al Gore was right on global warming, they will have to shut the hell up about "Evil Lefties", lest the Australian public think they are the party of John "That Stubborn Old Bastard!" Howard.

If Malcolm Turnbull hadn't launched his leadership coup, Brendan Nelson would be in charge tonight. Now while that would make for some spectacularly hilarious entertainment, it's not good for Australian democracy.

There has to be the illusion, at least, that the Labor Party will not rule the land for one or two generations to come and that we have, at the minimum, a viable two-party democracy.

Turnbull will be the new Liberal Party leader, as so many in the Australian media have already made clear. The Liberals don't have a say in this. The media decided it. It's Turnbull, or it's pitiless mockery from the front pages, opinion pages and probably the sports pages as well until the London Olympics.

But even choosing the new leader for the Liberals is not enough for the media. So thoroughly shipwrecked is the party of Australian conservatives that the big players in Australia's media are even writing talking points for the very first speech of the new leader who is, on early Thursday morning, still yet to be elected.

This from Paul Kelly, esteemed Editor At Large for The Australian, funneling new policy directly into the brain of Malcolm Turnbull, who is no doubt listening carefully :

Now is the time for the Liberals to be politically and intellectually ruthless. The new leader must burn the dead wood so furiously and symbolically that a new Liberal era is signalled. Nothing else will suffice.

"The Liberal Party accepts the new industrial relations settlement as voted by the people at this election." This should be Turnbull's pledge at his first press conference.

It will be a difficult retreat, but this is democracy.

A democracy where journalists write speeches in a national newspaper for political party leaders not yet elected? Yes.

"The Liberal Party believes in Kyoto ratification and a post-2012 system that binds developing nations into the compact." This needs to be Turnbull's second pledge at his media conference.

Whatever you say, boss!

Can anybody have a go at this? My turn :

"The Liberal Party believes in free video games and cannabis for old people who won't eat and are bored mindless, and will better the Labor Party in their planned national 'Sorry' to the Aboriginal people by saying 'We're Really, Really, Really, Really Sorry'."

We'll come back later today to see if Turnbull has delivered what his political masters in the media have demanded of him.

Whitewashing Howard's Iraq War Legacy

By Darryl Mason

In a long, glowing tribute to John Howard, 'the most influential foreign affairs commentator in Australia', Greg Sheridan, decides the debacle and horror of the Iraq War is hardly mentioning. Well, not beyond a weighty 42 words worth of whitewashing.

Regardless of how Sheridan tries to spin it, in two or three decades, Howard's involvement in the Iraq War will be one of the three key reasons why his name will be mentioned in the history books, along with his, reportedly, platonic man-love affair with President George W. Bush.

Historians care little for "the economy" in the long term, they always write at length about the controversies and dramas, the wars and conflicts and the big historical events that divide and unite the nations that prime ministers and presidents lead.

Howard's larger national and international legacy is not "the economy". It is the Iraq War. Without Howard's shameless appeals to President Bush, from early 2002, if not earlier, that Australia was right behind the Iraq War, Bush would have had one less key member of the Coalition of the Willing, which was thin enough to begin with, outside of the involvement of the UK and Spain.

The Iraq War has occupied five years of Howard's 11.5 year reign, almost half of the total years Howard served as prime minister, if you consider the Iraq War began for Australian when it sent in special forces troops in late 2002.

The lead-up to the Iraq War saw the largest gatherings of people opposing a government policy in the nation's history. And it some of the most foul and odious columns ever written by Australian opinionists, in a disturbingly co-ordinated effort to try and dampen down the overwhelming opposition to the coming invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Many so-called journalists, including Sheridan, followed Howard's psy-op line that if you opposed the war you were giving "aid and comfort" to Saddam Hussein. Tell that to the many thousands of Australian war veterans who marched and spoke out in early 2003 against the brutal violence and mass civilian slaughters they knew, from experience, were coming to the people of Iraq.

Before the Iraq War began, Australian, British and American intelligence agents broke protocol, and cover, to warn Howard directly against backing the extremely dodgy 'Saddam Has Nukes And Lots Of WMDs' NeoCon fakery, most of which was built around the claims of the infamous 'Curveball', who turned out to be nothing more than a desperate Iraqi who was being paid to tell NeoCons what they wanted to hear, so they could use it to try and sell their war to the people.

None of it worked to convince even a thin minority of Australians that the Iraq War was necessary. Regardless of the mass opposition from the people, Howard sent his nation to war, knowing full well the NeoCon-packaged WMD intelligence was pure crap.

So here's how Greg Sheridan, supposedly one of our most respected and highly regarded foreign affairs journalist, sums up Howard and Iraq :

Howard made the right call on the information available, and it took incredible guts to do it. There were certainly no lies involved - every responsible authority was convinced Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction - and Howard will be vindicated by history.

This is whitewashing at its best, and most shameless.

The lies from Howard about the Iraq War were many, and Sheridan knows this.

Here's but one of the many bold and outrageous lies from Howard on Iraq : He told us he had not committed Australian forces to war in Iraq, literally 48 hours before the 'Shock And Awe' bombings of Baghdad began. But Howard knew, as Greg Sheridan knew, that Australian special forces had been working away in Iraq's west for months, and many Australian troops had been told in October and September, 2002, that they were going to Iraq to fight a war, and that they were prepare for war, and that they were prepare their families for that fact.

That Sheridan would even think he could float such an absurd paragraph in a major newspaper and that people would believe him is just bizarre.

Perhaps Sheridan is so mortified by what has happened to the people of Iraq, in a war that he relentlessly promoted through the last half of 2002, and right through 2003, that he really wants to believe his own twaddle. Maybe he has to. Perhaps it is easier then to sleep soundly at night, and not think of the millions of innocent people, mostly young people, killed or maimed or driven from their homes.

And don't think for a moment that Sheridan was some of sort of apologist, or PR flack for Howard. God, no. Sheridan himself admits he was "savagely critical" of Howard during the former prime minister's 30 year long political career. How many times was Sheridan "savagely critical"?

I'll let Sheridan reveal the vast extent of his savage criticism for himself :

"Twice in Howard's career, I have been savagely critical of him."

Twice!

Sheridan was relentless in holding Howard to account for his foreign policy decisions and disasters, and you would expect nothing less from 'the most influential foreign affairs commentator in Australia'.

How did Howard stand all that pressure and scrutiny from Greg Sheridan?

It must have been tough.


Janet Albrechtsen : I Don't Even Mention The Word "Iraq" In My Howard Whitewash

September 2007 : Greg Sheridan's Shameless Anti-Democracy, Anti-Free Speech Propaganda

February 2007 : Sheridan Helps Dick Cheney Make His Case For War On Iran

Sheridan Predicts "Outside Chance" Victory For Liberals In 2010, With Tony Abbott In Charge

NO! Abbott Cuts And Runs On Liberal Leadership

Dammit, former health minister Tony "Too Raw" Abbott has withdrawn from the Malcolm Turnbull Liberal Party leadership coup...sorry, the very competitive Liberal Party leadership race :

Mr Abbott says after talking to his colleagues it is clear he does not have enough support to be a credible candidate.

"It's pretty obvious to me that Malcolm and Brendan have more support and so I am announcing today that I will be withdrawing my candidature and I won't be running tomorrow," he said.

His colleagues, eh?

Surely Abbott's decision to cut and run had nothing to do with this massive headline plastered across The Australian newspaper this morning :

The Liberal Party's Future Lies With Turnbull


Former defence minister Brendan "We Went To Iraq For The Oil" Nelson is now taking on Malcolm Turnbull for the leadership. He thinks he has a solid chance.

Or, to put it another way, Brendan Nelson is pretending he has a chance against the Turnbull-Julie Bishop juggernaut so as to give the appearance that the only person left in the Liberal Party with the money to pay for the 2010 campaign, Malcolm "Australia's richest politician" Turnbull, is not being handed the Liberal Party leadership on an eco-friendly hemp-fibre platter.

Do you think all those news stories about the terrible death of Bernie Banton that featured Tony Abbott saying Banton did not "necessarily have a good heart" might have affected Abbott's chances?

The Murdoch media didn't give the shell-shocked Liberal Party back roomers the slightest chance of a fair fight against the Turnbull coup. Turnbull was the Murdoch media's man from the moment Peter Costello quit on Sunday morning. Or perhaps even before then.

It will be interesting to learn in the post-election books if Costello was encouraged to quit because Turnbull was already chosen by the higher powers to lead the Liberals into defeat in 2010 and 2013.

It will also be very interesting to watch as the far right inside the Liberals try to shatter Turnbull by spreading the stories that it was Turnbull's people who leaked some of the most damaging anti-Howard stories over the past year.

The chaos inside the Liberal Party will continue for years under Turnbull.

It's going to be fascinating watching the Libs and Labor battle each over in Parliament over who can claim the mantle as the most anti-global warming party in Australia. Outside of The Greens, of course.

It's going to be even more fun to see how Andrew Bolt, Dennis Shanahan and Piers Akerman sing the praises of Turnbull in the coming months.

Tony "Reasonable People Skills" Abbott will quit Parliament and "go home to his wife" by July 2008, if not sooner.

Bolt : My Readers Are Dumb

For months before the election was called and on a daily basis through the entire election campaign, hundreds of stunned, shocked, horrified, hopeful, teary, desperate, confident and faithful conservatives, Howard Huggers and Liberal Party voters gathered at Andrew Bolt's blog and talked up the reasons why, and the chances of, John Howard pulling off another major big election win.

Even when the polls were desperately hopeless, the Howard Huggers rarely lost hope. They'd list the reasons why Howard should win, and would win. And Andrew Bolt encouraged them to keep on believing the end was not so very nigh.

Now the election is over, now that Howard has led his party to the most devastating loss in the history of the Liberal Party, now that the party founded by Howard's hero Sir Robert Menzies lies in tatters, Andrew Bolt tells his mostly conservative, Liberal Party devoted readers what he really thinks of them :

"The phoney election is over. Only the dumb or desperate Liberals ever thought Labor would lose."

What a rude and obnoxious shithead Andrew Bolt is.

But then, you probably already knew that.

Talk about sticking in the knife and giving it a twist.

This is Julie Bishop. She will probably be the deputy leader of the Howard Hating Liberal Party by Friday morning. If you don't behave, there will be consequences. Dire consequences.

I'm sure she's actually a very nice person. The men in Parliament will be shrinking in terror when Bishop and Labor deputy Julia Gillard go at each other across the big desk.

Australia Finally Gets A Viable Third Party

The Greens Scored More Than One Million Votes At Election 2007

The success of The Greens at Saturday's election would have been much more impressive if both the Labor and Liberal Party had not adopted soft version of their climate change key platforms in the past twelve months.

The Greens put climate change on the map as a key election issue. Labor got serious about climate change when around 30% of Australians said they were concerned about how global warming would affect their childrens' and grandchildrens' future. The Liberals Under Howard suddenly became climate change disciples when that percentage tipped over 70.

It's also refreshing to see that despite a concerted anti-Greens campaign in Murdoch daily papers in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Melbourne, The Greens still polled remarkably well. More than one million votes.

In some locales, they blasted the Nationals out of the water and also managed to match, or at least came close to matching, the number of votes cast for the Liberal Party.

No doubt, Bob Brown's appearance on Rove, six days before the federal election, killed off a lot of the negativity and scare campaigns hurled at The Greens by the Liberals, Family First, the Exclusive Brethren and the Murdoch media.

Bizarrely, for a party that we were told want to end all coal-mining within three years (they don't), The Greens managed to pick up thick slabs of votes in coal mining districts like Kalgoorlie.

When Australia undergoes a generational change, and transformation, they really go in hard :

The Greens have declared themselves Australia's third-largest political party claiming to have out-performed the Nationals by a "country mile".

The party says it attracted nearly 1.1 million (9.02 per cent) senate votes at Saturday's federal election compared with less than 6 per cent for the Nationals.

And, in claiming a definite five seats in the Senate with a chance for two more, the Greens have also seen off the Democrats whose four senators all lost their seats.

"The Democrats' famous aim was to keep the bastards honest but our long-term vision is to replace them," Greens leader Bob Brown said.

"All the epithets and abuse have boomeranged and people valued the big environmental issues around climate change, the pulp mill and drought."

Senator Brown said the party's rural vote had increased along with its pensioner vote after the party campaigned to increase pensions by $130 a week.

Tucker still chances to secure spots.

The Greens surpassed the Senate quota barrier (14.2 per cent) in Tasmania for the first time, meaning they won a Senate seat in their own right and didn't have to rely on preferences.

Labor could not have won the election without the help of The Greens. They will demand, and should get, some of their wishes fulfilled.

The Greens deserved one million votes if only for their pledge to do something about the appalling poverty that hammers elderly Australians, many of whom worked themselves into the ground for decades for the good of the country, besides going to war and having to cope with that emotional and physical fallout.

In their last days, the elderly should be treated with far more respect and regard than John Howard ever felt they were worth.

Bob Brown Hugs Trees "Very, Very Often"

Turnbull Will Win Liberals Leadership, But Abbott Will Supply A Few Days Of Comedy

UPDATE : The Liberal Party have voted in former defence minister Brendan "We Went To Iraq For The Oil" Nelson as their new leader. Nelson defeated Turnbull by only three votes. More here.

The Liberal Party meltdown must, by now, be one of the most spectacular and entertaining in Australian political history. The election defeat was devastating, but the fallout has been absolutely nuclear.

And it continues.

Malcolm Turnbull will be the new leader of the Liberal Party by the weekend. I know this because the Murdoch media keeps telling me it will be so. And who in the Liberal Party would be brave enough to defy Rupert? The price paid for such insolence will be heavy. Newspoll derived headlines will shred any choice other than Turnbull.

The federal Liberals will move fast to distance themselves from WorkChoices and will repeatedly blame John Howard's decision to stay on as leader as the main reason for their shattering election loss.

If they don't do these things, they will draw too much attention to the other horrors of the Howard Liberals era that so many of those remaining so heartily, enthusiastically backed all year, and in some cases all decade, long.

As we mentioned here yesterday, Tony "Too Honest" Abbott has decided to offer up some comedy for the rest of the week, as he challenges Turnbull and the other contender, Brendan Nelson, for "the worst job in Australian politics", as the position of leader of the opposition is more commonly known in Canberra.

Tony Abbott kicks off the laughs by claiming he has much to offer the Liberal leadership, not the least his "people skills". Yes, really :

He admitted did not have the best of campaigns, but said he had demonstrated "reasonably good people skills"...

Here's but one example of Abbott's people skills.

"I had some tough times on the campaign trail and I would be the last to say that I was prince perfect,'' he said.

"We badly mishandled the politics of the fourth term [but] I’m not going to be repudiating the Howard government," he said.

That's why he won't get the job.

The Liberals are heading to the centre, and will rebrand themselves as far more tolerant understanding of the tough economic times faced by the millions of Australians who live in poverty, and the millions more who will be facing a fairly new kind of Australian poverty - they'll live in nice houses, have good jobs, but will have trouble paying for rising mortages, petrol and food bills.

Abbott was still singing the praises of John Howard :

"[He] will go down in history as a very great prime minister."

Very great? What happened to the Greatest Prime Minister In Australian History? Or at the very least, the Greatest Prime Minister Since Robert Menzies?

Here's Paul Keating explaining why Abbott won't be the new opposition leader :

"Well I don't know who should lead the Liberals, but I mean, I know who I wouldn't be going for. If they take Tony Abbott they're just going to go back down hill to wherever they've been. He's the one most like Howard ideologically....he's what I call a young fogey.

"Howard was the old fogey. He's the young fogey."

You can bet the Malcolm Turnbull backers are already calling Tony Abbott "The Young Fogey" behind his back as they try to scuttle the former health minister's support.


"I Want To Lead The Liberal Death March Into Greater Political Oblivion"

Tony Abbott : What A Scumbag

Tony Abbott : What A Scumbag Part Two

Goodbye Ma'am

The things you learn reading London newspapers. Apparently, under the Rule Of Rudd, we're gearing up to get rid of the Queen, and Malcolm Turnbull's installment as head of the Liberals will make the shape of the Republic something of an election issue come 2010, or 2011.

You can go here to read the comments from the London Times, a few of which from the Old English are hilarious.

Apparently we are "ungrateful Aussies" who are "always whingeing" and "whining" because we want to dump the Queen. We should all be left to "roast on the beach" and are little more than "organic malcontent." Whatever that means.

Some of the Old English have never forgiven our convict forefathers for striking it somewhat lucky with deportation to Australia, at least as far as the weather goes, and then destroying British rule. More than a century later, we're still a pack of feisty anti-authoritarians. We've never been forgiven by the Etonian class for that, either.

It's a strange choice for the key issue of quite a large story in the London Times on the change of government. I don't think I heard any politician mentioning dumping the Queen at any time during the election. If they did, they didn't do it very loudly, or very often.

Becoming a Republic certainly wasn't an election issue. But it is very likely to be, come the end of Rudd's first term.

John Howard's Humiliation Now Complete

Maxine McKew Takes Bennelong


Knocking on 8000 doors, and sitting down for hundreds of cups of tea and actually listening to what the locals have to say, and doing it all without a crush of media and security in tow, really does pay off.

Maxine McKew has won the seat of Bennelong from John Howard. Her victory is the final grave marker in John Howard's political career.

For the first time in three decades, Bennelong has a new local member of Parliament, and for the first time in history, that MP is from the Labor Party.

Consider this : Bennelong was, until recently, one of the most conservative and safest Liberal seats in the entire country.

John Howard was comprehensively beaten by a woman, a Labor Party true believer and a former ABC Television news journalist. The triple whammy.

Could Howard's humiliation be any more complete?

Only if Kevin Rudd had dispatched removalist vans to Kirribilli House at 6am on Sunday morning.

McKew's win is a repudiation of everything Howard claimed his Australia was all about.

If Howard had even dared to raise immigration-related issues during the election campaign, in search of a new Tampa, as he desperately campaigned to hold onto immigrant-rich Bennelong, his defeat would only have been more massive.

The media consensus is that the disgusting Lindsay Leaflet Scandal cost Howard dearly in Bennelong, where the immigrant-strong local population got all-too-real and rare glimpse at the racist dark heart of the Liberal right wing conservatives Howard had proudly allowed to blossom under his decade long rule.

The international media headlines on Howard's total defeat have been brutal :

Howard's Final Humiliation - Out Of Parliament And Out Of Government

Rupert Murdoch Admits He Does Tell His Newspapers Who To Back And What To Print

"We Can Change The Way The Public Thinks About These Issues"

By Darryl Mason

Okay, prepare yourselves, and try not to be too shocked by this revelation :

Rupert Murdoch has admitted to a parliamentary inquiry (in the UK) that he has "editorial control" over which party The Sun and News of the World back in a general election and what line the papers take on Europe.

Mr Murdoch's comments were revealed in the minutes from evidence he gave behind closed doors on 17 September in New York, during the committee's inquiry into media ownership.

But the News Corporation chairman said he took a different approach with The Times and The Sunday Times. While he often asked what those papers were doing, he never instructed them or interfered, he said.

The minute stated: "For The Sun and News of the World he explained that he is a 'traditional proprietor'. He exercises editorial control on major issues – like which party to back in a general election or policy on Europe

Which raises the obvious question, how many of the 70% of all Australian newspapers that Rupert Murdoch controls does he instruct to back or attack chosen politicians, political parties or political causes?

Is the Sydney Daily Telegraph as editorially independent of Murdoch's influence as the London Sunday Times?

Or can The Australian newspaper claim that honor?

Was the Herald Sun free to back Howard over Rudd in the elections? Or was the Herald Sun's pro-Howard line more for reasons of 'balance'?

Perhaps the UK parliamentary enquiry revelations explain why Murdoch blogger Andrew Bolt (whose blog features on the main news.com.au portal, as well as the Herald Sun and Courier Mail websites, reaching hundreds of thousands of Australian online readers) was so enthusiastically pumping the fact that, just before the election, the Sydney Daily Telegraph backed Rudd, while the Herald Sun did not, and why Bolt was earlier so vehemently denying that Murdoch's papers went hard after Howard when he refused to step down.

Murdoch's revelation of purposeful editorial control should not be a revelation to readers of The Orstrahyun blog.

As regular readers would remember, Murdoch clearly admitted, back in June during his climate change awakening, that not only did he instruct his newspapers to push a certain reality that he favoured, but he could also muster the entire forces of his internet, newspaper, cable and TV empire to push his belief systems onto the world and change not only what they believed, but how they behaved.

Here's Rupert Murdoch explaining how this would be done on the issue of 'waking up' his readers to the reality of climate change :

"We need to reach (our audience) in a sustained way. To weave this issue into our content-- make it dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior.

"The challenge is to revolutionize the message.

"We need to do what our company does best: make this issue exciting. Tell the story in a new way.

"Now... there are limits to how far we can push this issue in our content."

"...we can change the way the public thinks about these issues..."

Within weeks of Rupert explaining how effectively his vast media empire can wage a psychological war on its viewers and readers to influence their beliefs and behaviour, most of his dozens of Australian city and suburban newspapers became champions of fighting climate change, launching special liftouts, dedicated websites and awareness campaigns over the next few months, under such Al Gore mantras as 'Saving Planet Earth'.

UPDATE : On September 10, 2001, John Howard had a long, private dinner with Rupert Murdoch in Washington, DC. Howard was suffering some of the worst poll numbers of his career, and the Liberal Party was scoring its worst poll ratings since the mid-1970s. But Tampa was heating up and 9/11 was about to shock the nation.

Murdoch allowed himself to be interviewed by the media when he exited the restaurant, in scenes that were repeated in early 2007, in New York City, with then Labor prime ministerial hopeful Kevin Rudd.

From an ABC Radio report on the Howard-Murdoch 2001 dinner :

For two hours the two men sat alone in the upmarket Oxidental Grill deep in conversation. At 10:00pm local time they emerged and Mr Murdoch was asked by waiting journalists who'd win the next election.

RUPERT MURDOCH: No, we never discussed it.

REPORTER: Do you think Mr Howard deserves a third term in Office, Mr Murdoch?

RUPERT MURDOCH: Mm?

REPORTER: Do you think the Prime Minister deserves a third term in Office?

RUPERT MURDOCH: It doesn't matter what I think. You ask my editors.

REPORTER: Mr Murdoch, how do you think Kim Beazley would go as Prime Minister?

RUPERT MURDOCH: It would be very interesting.

REPORTER: Were they productive discussions with Mr Murdoch?

JOHN HOWARD: Well, we had a pleasant dinner.

REPORTER: Did you talk politics?

JOHN HOWARD: We talked everything.

MARK WILLACY: There's little doubt about that, given Rupert Murdoch's interest in media policy and the extraordinary influence of his Australian print empire. His response when asked if John Howard deserved a third term is well worth another listen:

RUPERT MURDOCH: It doesn't matter what I think. You ask my editors.

Rupert Murdoch was far more forthcoming on Kevin Rudd when he was asked by a journalist in April, 2007, whether or not he thought the contender would make a good prime minister. The reply then was, "Oh, I'm sure..." Big smile.

A note we received yesterday, from a person who claimed to be a former staffer in John Howard's office, said that it was common gossip within many government departments that when John Howard refused to hand over the leadership to Peter Costello at the end of 2006, Rupert Murdoch was less than happy. And that editors of at least two Murdoch Australian city papers, likewise, were less than happy.

The self-claimed former Howard staffer said that when Rupert Murdoch publicly appeared with Kevin Rudd in New York City in April, 2007, laughing and grinning after a long meeting at the News Corp. headquarters, and then dinner together, a climate of doom descended amongst many in the prime minister's department. The belief was that Murdoch had given Kevin Rudd the Big Tick, particularly after the "Oh, I'm sure" quote was aired, which meant Howard was probably finished.

The Sydney Daily Telegraph soon became very obvious champions of Kevin Rudd, and Howard suffered a sustained stream of extremely negative Daily Telegraph front pages, featuring large photos showing Howard looking old, stressed and confused.

But then again, one city newspaper doesn't win an election. Does it?

Tony Abbott : I Want To Lead Liberal Party Death March Into Greater Oblivion

By Darryl Mason

Oh please please please make Tony "Too Honest" Abbott the new leader of the Liberal Party. He's now offered himself up as a human sacrifice to Julia Gillard :

Outgoing health minister Tony Abbott has declared he will challenge Malcolm Turnbull for the leadership of the Liberal Party.

The race is on to fill the Liberal power vacuum after Peter Costello's shock decision not to nominate for the job yesterday.

"I'm offering myself as a candidate, I don't know how the numbers are likely to pan out," Mr Abbott said this morning.

"Obviously we're mourning our politically fallen colleagues but I will be a candidate. "

"I think there are going to be some tricky problems of party management but I think I have reasonably good people skills.

"It's going to be very important to hold the Government accountable.

"I think it's very important that we're fair dinkum with the Australian people."

That would be a nice change. Please lead by example, Mr Abbott.

"I think in the months and years ahead, people are going to want substance, not spin from their political leaders."

He did learn something from the massacre of the Coalition at Saturday's election after all.

Abbott has clearly decided to ignore the advice of his mates who reportedly had been pushing him to give up politics and "go home to his wife" when the Coalition lost the election.

Tony Abbott is already about as popular as a kick in the nuts with most Australians. Having him pout, hiss, stare demonically, yell, shriek and whine as opposition leader for the next three years will steer the Liberals the way of the Democrats. Total oblivion.

Plus, with Tony "Too Raw" Abbott as the bullhead of the New Far Right, room will be made for Alex Hawke to be given a 'voice' in the Liberal Party, now he's completed his coup crusade and has been installed as the member for Mitchell, in Sydney's Bible Belt.

If you don't know who Alex Hawke is yet, don't worry, you'll hear about him soon enough. His first speech to Parliament will likely feature his favourite mantra about the power and beauty of what happens when Christianity Meets Capitalism.

That's exactly what Australian conservative politics needs right now, the rise of wealthy evangelicals. After all, look how well it's worked out in the United States with President Bush.


Tony Abbott Furious At Success Of Dirty, Rotten Labor Trick He Didn't Think Of Pulling First

Tony Abbott's Last Stand : Why The Liberal Party Won't Lose The Election

Greg Sheridan Pegs Tony Abbott As The New Messiah Of The New Liberals

Glenn Milne : Finally, My Hero Costello Will Lead The Liberal Party!

Oh....dammit!

Glenn Milne has been barracking from the pages of The Australian and Sydney's Daily Telegraph for Peter Costello to take over the leadership of the Liberal Party for so long, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Glenn lights candles in front of a Costello shrine in the corner of his bedroom each evening, while chanting, "Soon Peter, soon you will lead..."

For almost a decade Glenn Milne has been working centre stage, and behind the scenes, to help score the leadership of the Liberal Party for the man he just can't get enough of. If Costello was Britney Spears, Milne would be running the fanclub and the chatroom.

Then finally, finally, it happened. John Howard lost the election and announced, late in the evening last Saturday that this was it, he was out of politics forever. The leadership of the Liberal Party was open.

Glenn Milne pounced. By 11pm on Saturday night, shortly after Howard announced his retirement, Milne's first breathless story announcing Peter Costello would become leader of the Liberal Party was up on the Sunday Mail website.




From The Sunday Mail :

Victorian Peter Costello will take over a decimated Coalition unopposed as Opposition Leader, knowing he would have been able to mount a stronger fight against Kevin Rudd and Labor.

Mr Costello has long held the view that if Mr Howard had stood aside months ago and allowed him to establish his vision for Australia, the Coalition would have had a better chance of winning last night.

There is unlikely to be any credible challenge to Mr Costello when he formally stands as leader at the first Liberal Party caucus meeting.

Previous contenders - Alexander Downer, Brendan Nelson, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull - have all faded under the weight of their own mistakes.

By 7am, Sunday morning, Milne had reworked the story for the Sunday Telegraph to include a firm commitment from Costello that he would seek the leadership of the Liberal Party :




From the Sunday Telegraph :

Peter Costello will take over a defeated Coalition unopposed, in the knowledge he would have been able to mount a stronger fight against Kevin Rudd.

Mr Costello considers politics to be his vocation and does not want to repeat Mr Latham's mistake - abandoning his career too early and living the rest of his life wondering "what if''.

Within hours of this Glenn Milne "exclusive" appearing online, Peter Costello was standing in front of the media, with his wife by his side, announcing he didn't want to be leader of the Liberals, and would soon be leaving politics completely.

Whoops.

Eyes Show Devastation Of Shocking Defeat



Two excellent accounts of John Howard's last day as prime minister :

'That's How It Goes' - Howard Campaigns For Every Last Vote


And the day after, with a bit of the night before as well :

24 Hours In The Life Of An Ex-Prime Minister


The rage and bitterness on show in these stories from shocked Liberal supporters towards non-Howard voters is disturbing. What happened to graciousness in defeat?

So much for all that alleged violence of the Howard Haters.

Speaking of which, a whip around the online newspaper sites reveal that just about everyone connected with the 'conservative' side of politics this morning has already become one of the Howard Haters they used to so very recently revile.

Much of this New Howard Hatred comes from the dawning horror that the Liberals are in ruins, for the next few months at least, and that Howard purposely shafted Costello and destroyed any chance he had of becoming prime minister, or even an enthusiastic leader of the Liberal Party.

No wonder Costello decided to pass on the leadership. Who'd want to hang around this grim and explosive pack of bitterly sore losers for another six or ten years?

Cheers Matt

Journo, and one very fine and very entertaining writer, Matt Price died today from brain tumours. He was quoted on Sunday morning on Insiders, by the host, who had visited Matt and said he was putting up a good fight. Hours later he was dead.

Damn shame.

Matt was a great bloke.

A wonderful obituary can be read here - "life is fragile..."

According to Insiders host Barrie Cassidy, Matt Price had one final prediction for Australian politics, of the kind that he was often happy to make in his writing, and it went like this : Kevin Rudd's loud declaration that "The Buck Stops With Me!" will be the millstone around his neck for years to come.

A solid final call.

Here's Matt Price's blog archive from The Australian site. Hopefully they will leave it up as a permanent memorial to his excellent work, and his genuinely interested and often fun interaction and feedback with many of those who commented at his blog.

If you've never read Matt Price's work, hit the archive, dive back a few pages and check his predictions before the election was called. You won't be disappointed.

Australian politics desperately needs more fine and witty writers like Matt Price.

Howard "No Doubt Well Pleased At His Work" Of Destroying Liberal Party

The New Blame Game : Why The Liberals Were Massacred At Election

By Darryl Mason

The John Howard Liberals have been effectively destroyed at the 2007 Australian federal election. It's a stunning victory, and Kevin Rudd will go down in history as the Labor leader who brilliantly defeated the supposedly unbeatable John Howard.

The Liberals, and conservative media, will never admit it, but Labor won because they ran a smoother, far more effective campaign and had a better dream to sell, and they sold it with skill, focus and patience.

The Liberal Party is already tearing itself apart. Alexander Downer's interview on Sunday morning on Insiders was absolutely hopeless. Expect him to join the conga line of "fuck this, I'm outta here!" Liberals moving on to very greener pastures in the corporate world. Costello will be first, Downer most likely second, followed by Tony Abbott.

David Flint, salty monarchist and paranoid conservative, has kicked off the "We Wuz Robbed!" campaign, and previews the long months to come of rampant conspiracy theorising amongst Liberals as he decides to blame :

....internal Liberal fighting and media bias for the poor Coalition showing and giving Kevin Rudd "a dream run".

Ah yes, media bias.

Not the media bias from Andrew Bolt, or Tim Blair, or Miranda Devine or Piers Akerman or most of the editorialists at The Australian newspaper. They were all for shredding Rudd and Labor without pause, so that was fair enough in Flint's view.

He's talking about the 'media bias' of the dreaded ABC, Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age. Curse those Evil Lefties!

But Flint has more theories than just 'media bias'. Dark theories. Of 'own goals' inside the Liberal Party. There was a plot, dammit! And Flint knows all about it. But he won't elaborate. Naturally :

He also blamed "a member of cabinet" who he would not name who he suspected of having leaked information detrimental to the Liberal cause, first that the Prime Minister had lost the confidence of Cabinet later APEC, and then that Malcolm Turnbull had tried to get him to ratify Kyoto. The Liberal party will be "shaken" for some time," he said.

This sort of stuff will be very entertaining to watch in the next few weeks.

Former foreign minister Alexander Downer has some theories on why they were slaughtered at the election as well :

(He) has put the Coalition's federal election defeat down bad timing for himself and his Liberal colleagues.

"I think people just think it's time," the outgoing foreign minister told a function in his South Australian electorate of Mayo, which he retained.

"People think we've been in for about 11-½ years, they are comfortable with Australia, they think we've done a good thing but it's time for a change."

Mark Vaile echoes Downer, as he offers his explanation for why the Howard government was nuked at the election :

“Our commitment to the war against terrorism, in some quarters, affected our vote,” he said.

“There seemed to be a sense of just wanting to change for change's sake in Australia.”

Ahh, yes. The Timing. It was all about The Change.

That's what Liberals will keep telling themselves and each other. We weren't voted out because people were sick of us, or hated what we were doing to the country, or that they liked Rudd's ideas and policies more. Hell no. We lost because...you know, the timing.

Or the It's Timing.

Mark Vaile succinctly summed up one of the reasons why the Howard government were tossed out : they think Australian voters are morons who don't vote for policies, but because they simply wanted different politicians in power. They really do think you're that stupid.

John Howard will cop plenty of blame for the utterly humiliating defeat that will shatter the Liberal Party.

In fact, it's already started. Liberals turned on Howard before he even conceded defeat :

Liberal Senator and former minister Ian Macdonald said Mr Howard should have stepped aside a year ago.

"I say that it's tragic that someone who's done as much for Australia as Howard ends up like this. I'm very sad for Howard - I wish he had gone a year ago."

Liberal Senator Gary Humphries said Mr Howard's decision may have hindered the party's chances.

"It may well be that the prime minister's leadership didn't help the Coalition at the end of the day. It may well have been better to have had a different leader going into these last six to nine months of the campaign."

This will get very ugly indeed. But that's what happens to Australian conservatives when they get flogged. Lots of infighting, hating, and even spitting :

Glumly watching television as the results unfolded, Liberal supporters at the main party event in central Sydney, where Prime Minister John Howard was soon to concede defeat, were devastated.

Some said it felt like a funeral.

Vitriol spilled out when Labor's Maxine McKew, who could unseat Mr Howard in his Sydney electorate of Bennelong, appeared on TV.

"I hate that woman," one young man spat.

With all that hatred and spitting, this young lad could have a new career as a conservative columnist.


More senior Liberals are now going after Howard for not stepping aside a year ago and giving Costello a proper chance at beating Kevin Rudd :

Senator (Ian) Macdonald says he respects Mr Howard but he should have gone a year ago.

"It's a tragic way for such an able, committed man and someone who's been so good for Australia to leave," he said.

"I think it would have been different had Peter Costello been leading the party for 12 months."

He says the cabinet ministers should have that ensured Mr Howard went earlier.

"I'm very confident the Coalition would have won had Peter Costello been leading the party," he said.

Murdoch journo, and decade long Peter Costello pimp-in-chief and cheerleader, Glenn Milne, absolutely guts John Howard in this scathing piece of vitriol and conspiracy theorising :

You have to hand it to John Howard. The man who immortalised himself as "Lazarus with a triple bypass" has reached from just beyond the point of political extinction to achieve his ultimate personal aim; denying Peter Costello his chance to lead the Liberal Party.

Howard has likely incinerated two generations of Liberal leadership on the bonfire of his own vanity.

The price of Howard's fatal misjudgment of his own worth is Costello's exit and the consignment of the Liberal Party to at least two and perhaps three terms in Opposition.

Howard is no doubt well pleased with his work. As the Liberal Party tastes the bitter dregs of defeat and digests the effective departure of Costello we now realise why the outgoing prime minister constantly lectured his party room against hubris. Because all along it was the dark whisper that fluttered at the core of his own being.

And on Saturday night he finally succumbed to that spirit by playing out the last act in a succession of acts of wilful pride that eventually took his party down with him. Having ignored the repeated urgings of his colleagues to go both in his own interests and those of his party, Howard's hubris saw him finally dare the voters to dispatch him. They obliged, ultimately convinced it was the only way to get rid of him.

We'll have to come back to Milne's toxic spew at Howard. It's too good not to dissect further.


John Howard knows who to blame. Himself. Well, kind of :

"I accept full responsibility for the Liberal Party campaign and I therefore accept full responsibility for the Coalition's defeat in this election campaign...."

Good to see John Howard taking "full responsibility" for one of his awful decisions (to stay on when he should have handed over to Treasurer Peter Costello).

Update : I've realised hours later that Howard only took "full responsibility" for the campaign, not for his decision to stay on past his use-by date

Of course, Howard's decision to finally take "full responsibility" for something came at the very same moment he was announcing he was going to be leaving Australian politics for good.

They will praise him for now. Maybe a day or two. But the first of many books featuring senior Liberal ministers and power brokers absolutely tearing Howard to pieces for staying too long and destroying the Liberal Party are about to head to the printers. Some will be on the shelves for Christmas.

Gillard To Challenge Rudd For Leadership Of Labor Party

I just wanted to be the first to put that into a headline. If Rudd makes a meal of his leadership, The Australian will be running headlines like that by March, 2009.

Now deputy prime minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, had some very nice and very respectable things to say about defeated PM John Howard :

"This is a man who devoted his entire life to public service, you've got to admire that, and I do," Ms Gillard said.

"He's led the nation through some difficult periods.

"I did admire the Prime Minister when under very difficult circumstances he achieved better gun laws in this country - it was obviously divisive amongst his own support base, and he stood up and did it.

"There have been times when this nation's obviously faced great tragedy, like Bali, and John Howard's led the nation in mourning, so once again I would acknowledge that.

"I think John Howard will be remembered ... with respect and, I suspect, some affection as well."

It's a shame that due to the absurd nature of Australian politics and media that Gillard couldn't have said such things about Howard before today.

Hopefully the nasty, sanctimonious nature of politics and media in Australia will change in the immediate future, off the back of a Rudd Labor government. But probably not.

The Liberals attack pack, with Costello at the helm (for now) will be even more savage and vile in opposition than they were in government.

The conservatives will have to change their attitude, nature and culture if they can even hope to have a fighting chance in 2010 or 2011.

Election Blogging And Drinking

I was wrong. Turns out I don't have a life.

This will be election night blogging mixed with a drinking game.

Every seat declared for Labor, one shot of Wild Turkey.

Let's begin.

6pm - votes are rolling in, some booths are counting slower than others. Bob Hawke has apparently called the election for Labor. Literally. He shouted it out the window of the car driving him to the Sky News studio while laughing maniacally.

Oohh, first couple of seats are being called for Labor with less than 1% of the vote counted. Good enough for me. Three seats, three shots.

7pm - more Labor seats, more shots. Is this dangerous? Decided each three Labor seat shots of Wild Turkey have to be balanced out with shots of orange juice or black coffee for Liberal seats declared.

Christ, is this eight Labor seats already, or twelfvve? Who cares....must eat something.

7.30pm - No. Mal Brough is being tipped to lose his seat. But Tony "Too Honest" Abbott will keep his seat. Of course, one of the only few decent Liberals loses. Howard & Friends will be finding Labor chewing gum under the opposition benches for months to come. Is it over for Howard & Friends? Yes.

8pm - Labor, shot, Labor, shot, Labor, shot, Labor, shot, Liberal, coffee, Labor, National, Labor, Lalorr, Layloooh..

8.20m - Bob Hawke has been calling it live on Sky for an hour. Kerry O'Brien has to cover the growing smirk with his hand, but his huge hand is not big enough. With the amount of hair Julia Gillard lost each week of the election to new makeovers, she's lucky it's finally over. Two more weeks and she would have had Peter Garrett's hairstyle.

8.40pm - Labor, Labor, Labor (let's go for just LR for Labor okay?) LR, LR, LR, Liberals...wow, Howard will lose to Maxine McKew. So paying personal visits to 8000 homes in Bennelong without the nation's media and a half dozen security in tow does pay dividends.

9-ish? - bluurg. Oh crap. whi is the rooom tilting to one syde? LR, shot, LR, shot, LR shiit.

Howard will concede soon. Costello is speaking now, so Howard will make his arrival at the hotel and cut into Costello's near-tears speech.

Howard arrives at hotel with clearly pissed off Janette The Wife. Howard's mere riding up the escalator is enough for every channel to dump Costello's speech just as he was getting to how awesome Australia is. Story of Costello's decade really.

Great speech from Mal Brough. He asks Labor to continue his work in Aboriginal communities. No doubt they will, but without handing over land to mining companies which was always Howard's plan.

9whenever - Howard is history. That's worth two shots. Interesting speech from The Loser but Janette's grimace is distracting. She's still interrupting and nagiiiinng him even when he's strying tto exit with class. Howard all but concedes Bennnelong to Maxine McKew as his farewells his extremely bitter supports. "NOOO!!!! WE LOVE YOU JOHNNN!!!" Fantastic. Someone in the crowd manages to shout "HOWARD IS A WANKER!!!" loud enough for it to be heard on the ABC. What a send off. Great speech from Howard. Pity he didn't talk up how awesome Australia is more often in the campaign instead of claiming we would plunge into living hell if Labor wins.

...there is no Liberal government anywhere in Australia now. The whining of the conservatives begins. Naturally they will blame the ABC. And Channel Nine. And, hilariously, the Murdoch media. Blah blah blah

10pm - W-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-Wipeout! The Liberals 11.5 year reign is over. Finished. Australians clearly didn't believe Howard's bullshit. The world will not end on Monday morning. Another chapter in Australia's history will begin.


I said you sonn offa bitch! I never likkked yuuo....listen listen, listen, you are bloody great mate, really...no, no, listen....shit...I gotta ss ff what? .............fuckit.....woiw r rr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr


1.58am - crashed out in a pile on the floor when Kevin Rudd started his victory speech a few hours ago. Sign of things to come no doubt. Children won't go to sleep? Put on the Kevin Rudd Best Speeches DVD and they will fall into a half-coma within minutes.

Liberals booed any mention of Labor when Howard conceded. The Labor faithful managed to mostly restrain themselves when Rudd praised Howard.

Good Christ! Alex Hawk won Mitchell. If you see him, splash him with holy water and watch him scream and writhe. Tony "Too Raw" Abbott now has competition for who will be the biggest arsehole on the opposition benches. We will watch this nasty piece of work very, very closely.

2am Sunday morning - so it's over. Conservatives have been absolutely routed in Australia last night. Labor wins by 22, or more, seats. One of the most complete and total victories in Australian political history.

Some fantasists are already claiming that seeing as Rudd outed himself as a conservative, the conservatives won regardless of Howard's loss. Yeah, okay. That's Howard quality bullshit. Remember what Peter Garrett said? "When we get in, we'll just change it all" or something like that. Clearly that's what Australians want to happen now.

Kevin Rudd, we're already being told, won his monumental victory off the back of catchy slogans and populist salesman pitches. Of course he did. John Howard completed the transformation of Australia into a consumer society, so why shouldn't Rudd win when he had the best buy-this-now slogans and the far more impressive marketing campaign?

The new age of Labor begins tomorrow. The bloodbath in the Liberal Party has already begun. Conservatives are in the vast minority in Australia today. Australia just became more Australian, once again.

Predictious

Here's some prophetic headlines for next week's election fallout, and the next six months, based on carefully researched wild guess work and five beers :

Labor Wins By Five Seats

Howard Loses Bennelong

Liberals Retain Wentworth

Greens Nail 14% Of National Vote

John Howard Brutalised In Media By Liberal Party Colleagues For Losing Election

Peter Costello Announces Retirement

Tony Abbott Announces Retirement

Malcolm Turnbull Fights For Liberal Leadership Against Demented Far Right

John Howard Embarks On $100,000 Per Speech Tour Of American NeoCon Think Tanks

Liberal Party Fractures, Descends Into Savage Infighting

Shelf Full Of New Books Reveal Dark Secrets Behind John Howard's Years As Prime Minister

John Howard To Score Knighthood From Queen

The Shape Of Rudd's 'New Labor Conservatism' Comes Into Focus - Lefties Grow More Nervous By The Day About Future

Peter Garrett Quits Politics, Rejoins Midnight Oil To Fight Rudd's Pro-Logging, Pro-Nuclear New Labor

Philip Ruddock Quits Politics To Take On Role As Mr Burns In Non-Animated Simpsons Movie

One Of These Men Will Wake Up Sunday Morning A Total Loser



Interesting photo. Note the handshake. Kevin Rudd's gone for the dominant, intimidation grasp, with his thump on top, pressing down on John Howard's hand, pinning him, which is a good way to sum up the entire campaign, or the whole year in fact.

Both John Howard and Kevin Rudd have supplied news.com.au with last ditch pitch columns to win your vote....unless you're voting for The Greens, or the Shooters Party. And let's face it, who isn't?

Not much new in either column, but Rudd definitely wins the battle of the headlines :

Howard : There Is No Risk-Free Change Of Government

Well duh. Snoooze.

Rudd : What's The Point Of Voting For Howard?

Ouch.

A two party, winner-takes-nearly-all-election like ours guarantees that either Kevin Rudd or John Howard will suffer a soul-crushing, spine-cracking, head-melting, brain-frying, spirit diluting defeat.

Which is great fun, if both of them give you the absolute shits.

The best part is when the loser has to front the media and try to act like they don't feel as though they've been run over by six consecutive road trains.

You will probably see John Howard cry if he loses. And Alexander Downer cry. And Peter Costello cry. Tony Abbott, meanwhile, will just look like he has eaten twelve raw kittens and is looking for more.

There will be no federal election live-blogging here. I do have a life. There may be an update early Sunday morning, but no promises on that.

Remember, if anyone tries to intimidate or threaten you on your way in to casting your vote, you are legally allowed to kick them. Probably.

Election 2007 : Before We Look Forward, A Look Back

Rudd, Gillard Had Howard's Number All Year

Going back over the 70 odd posts that have gone up on this blog on the 2007 Federal Election, one thing is overwhelmingly clear : Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have had John Howard's number since December last year.

They were spelling out how "old" and "tired" Howard was from the start, hammering him over Iraq, climate change, his retirement and his "worn out ideas". Howard has been on the defensive, countering pinpoint Labor Party attacks, accusations and spin, since February.

We hope you enjoy this look back over the last 11 months, and give us a pass for not posting a Final Word piece on the election before its over (though we still might, if inspired later today).

There's not much more to be said. We think a review of the year is far more interesting :

December 2006 : Gillard Claims Howard's Best Days Are "Behind Him"

December 2006 : Howard Volunteers To Have Nuclear Power Plant Built Next Door To His House

February 2007 : Kevin Rudd Declares John Howard "A National Security Threat"

April 2007 : Howard's Last Days - PM Faces Devastating Defeat At Federal Election

May 2007 : What Terror Threat? Howard Spends More On WorkChoices Propaganda Than Raising National Security Awareness

May 2007 : Only 30% Can Think Howard Can Win - Prime Minister Set To Lead His Party To Devastating Defeat

May 2007 : John Howard Suddenly A Global Warming True Believer!

June 2007 : Culture Wars? Who Cares? We Want An Australian Renaissance

July 2007 : Howard Finally Admits That Iraq Was A War Of Oil

July 2007 : Howard's Fury Over War For Oil "Distortions" - Murdoch Media Hastily Rewrites Headlines

July 2007 : The Australian Newspaper Begins The Dooming Of John "Dead Man Walking" Howard

July 2007 : Howard & Friends Prepare "Better To Be Safe Than Sorry" Mantra For Coming Election Day

August 2007 : Interest Rates Hit Ten Year High - Journalists Laugh In John Howard's Face While He Trots Out Excuses

August 2007 : Alexander Downer Rattled By 17 Year Old's Climate Change Questions - Federal Minister Verbally Attacks Student For Asking Hard Questions

August 2007 : Drunk, Slurring Alexander Downer Makes A Clown Of Himself On Lateline

September 2007 : Conservatives Cut Off Howard's Head - Chant Begins "You Must Quit!"

September 2007 : Murdoch Journalist Denies Murdoch Media Conspiracy, But Rupert Admits He Uses Media To Shape And Change Public Opinion

September 2007 : Pressure Builds But Howard Refuses To Step Aside For Peter Costello

September 2007 : Howard The Bitch, Tells Liberals 'You're Nothing Without Me'

October 2007 : Bush Backs Rudd? "New Leadership" Refreshes Democracies

October 2007 : Rudd To Howard, Costello : 'I Can Do You Both'

October 2007 : Howard Tells Us We're Entitled To Believe What He Wants Us To Believe

November 2007 : Rudd, Garrett Betrayal Of Green Vote Comes At Heavy Cost

November 2007 : Howard Already Whining Like A Loser - Depression In Coalition Ranks Seals Their Fate

November 2007 : Why Conservatives Don't Do Comedy


It'll almost be worth a John Howard win on Saturday just to see how all the professional journalists, opinionsts and poll analysts explain how they got it all so very, very wrong.

Almost.

Liberal Party Pro-Terrorism Leaflet Scandal Grows And Grows As Federal Election Dawns

Jackie Kelly : "I Think It's A Huge Entertainment..."

Controversy Linking Sydney Muslims To Supporting Terrorism Against Australians Will Help End John Howard's Government


By Darryl Mason

The scandal over a leaflet drop in Sydney's western suburbs by volunteers for prime minister John Howard's Liberal Party fills newspapers today, and steals precious column inches, headlines and news breaks away from Howard's message in his last big push for re-election.

The leaflet, purporting to be from an Islamic group support terrorism, a group that doesn't actually exist, claimed the opposition government, now expected to win Saturday's election, supported terrorists who killed Australians, and said Muslims would soon have more opportunity to convert Christians.

The husband of the Liberal Party candidate running for election in the Western Sydney seat of Lindsay this Saturday, and the husband of the retiring Liberal Party member, have now both been kicked out of prime minister John Howard's party for distributing the leaflets claiming a vote for Labor is a vote in support of terrorists who've killed more than 80 Australians in the Bali bombings.

The leaflet also claimed the Labor Party would build more mosques in Western Sydney and were in favour of allowing Islamic extremists into the country.

A third man, in the executive of prime minister John Howard's party, has also been expelled.

All this less than 48 hours out from an election that is widely tipped to see the downfall of the John Howard government.

Incredible.


John Howard's reaction?

He knew nothing about the leaflets, they were not authorised Liberal Party election material, he has distanced himself from the scandal, and now he expects us to believe that neither of the two Liberal Party politicians had any idea of what their husbands were up to in writing, printing and then delivering the leaflets to hundreds of homes in one of the most highly contested seats in the election.

Current Liberal Party member for Lindsay, Jackie Kelly, is still insisting the unauthorised campaign brochure her husband helped to write, print and distribute to homes in Western Sydney was "a joke" and that she thought it was "funny." She tried to explain away the scandal, still laughing, by claiming her husband, and the other men involved were drunk and bored.

Pressure is on Howard to now announce the resignation of the Liberal Party candidate for Lindsay, Karen Chijoff, who's husband, Greg Chijoff, has been named as one of the three men now caught up in the election rocking scandal, along with Jackie Kelly's husband, Gary Clark.

How could Karen Chijoff not have known that her husband Greg, who has been campaigning by her side for weeks, was not involved in the illegal distribution of unauthorised Liberal Party leaflets trying to capitalise on the distress and fear resulting from the more than 100 Australians killed in terror attacks in Bali and the United States?

Tonight's current affairs shows, which draw combined audiences of about 20-25% of Australia's population, are expected to go hard on this story, uncovering similar tactics used by Jackie Kelly in past elections, and interviewing the families of Australians killed in international terror attacks.

Bizarrely, John Howard tried, unsuccessfully, to spin away the storm of controversy today by claiming that a wife should never be held responsible for the actions of her husband, and attempted to relate the individuality of husbands and wives to the rise of feminism, and that such separations of responsibility for each other's actions should be celebrated, not damned.

Barely mentioned in most of the coverage so far is that the leaflets directly linked Australian Muslims to supporting international terrorists and terrorist attacks. Linkages that have been essential to John Howard's divide-and-rule strategy of giving white Australians an easy target for vilification and loathing, though it should be pointed out that only the smallest minority of Australians have ever fallen for Howard's race and religion-based baiting.

The Howard government defeat may be even worse than the latest polls indicate, which is, to quote John Howard from earlier in the year, already set to be a defeat of near total "annihilation."

The 'Pro-Terror Liberal Party Leaflet Scandal' has literally exploded from nowhere in less than 18 hours, and questions about the involvement of senior members of the Liberal Party dominated John Howard's final major pre-election speech and Q & A session with the cream of Australia's journalists.

Excerpts from retiring Liberal Party politician Jackie Kelly's unhinged interview earlier today :

JACKIE KELLY: Well, I've read the alleged pamphlet and when I first read it I had to laugh because I think everyone who reads it has their first instinct is to laugh, pretty much everyone who's read chuckles in terms of the parody it does make of various things that have happened during the campaign.

CHRIS UHLMANN: But just to establish it, your husband and two colleagues were handing out this pamphlet...

JACKIE KELLY: Well, my understanding is they were letterboxing...

CHRIS UHLMANN: This pamphlet?

JACKIE KELLY: Well, I don't know. Well, I don't know, allegedly. Allegedly.

CHRIS UHLMANN: And this pamphlet says it comes from an Islamic organisation that doesn't exist? It says the ALP wants the Bali bombers forgiven and supports the construction of a mosque in western Sydney. What's funny about that?

JACKIE KELLY: Oh, look, it makes a parody....I think its sort of, I think its intent is to be a send-up but it obviously hasn't worked.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Isn't it its intent to drive people away from the Labor Party? Isn't that the intent of this?

JACKIE KELLY: No, well, I think if you read it you'd be laughing. I think it's quite....most people who've read it have sort of said, "Oh, well, that's a Chaser-style of prank."

CHRIS UHLMANN: Alright, who printed it?

JACKIE KELLY: Oh, look, I don't, I don't - I'm not, I don't know enough about it.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Was it from your office?

JACKIE KELLY: No. Absolutely not.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Who funded it?

JACKIE KELLY: I don't know. I don't know.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Who authorised it?

JACKIE KELLY: Well, look, there isn't any authorisation on the alleged document....

CHRIS UHLMANN: Can you guarantee that no funds came from your office, or from the Liberal Party for this?

JACKIE KELLY: Yes. Yes. Absolutely.

CHRIS UHLMANN: So where did the money come from? Someone must have printed it.

JACKIE KELLY: Look, everyone's got home printers and whatnot...

CHRIS UHLMANN: Was the Liberal state office involved in this joke?

JACKIE KELLY: No, not at all.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Was the Federal office involved in this joke?

JACKIE KELLY: Not at all.

*******************

JACKIE KELLY: Where is this conversation going?

CHRIS UHLMANN: I rang and I've identified myself as a reporter and I want to know how much you know about this particular document?

JACKIE KELLY: I don't know anything about it, right? I know basically what my husband has told me, his version of events, and obviously what the papers are alleging, and obviously what the ALP is putting about.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Jackie Kelly, finally, do you approve of this kind of thing?

JACKIE KELLY: No. Absolutely not. With my experience in politics and everything, this is just really immature stuff, that hardly makes influence on anyone's vote and I think it's a huge entertainment for other people.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Jackie Kelly, thank you.

JACKIE KELLY: Cheers.

Cheers?

The audio of the interview makes clear that Jackie Kelly is lying through her teeth.


Here's the full text of the leaflet from the non-existent Islamic Australia Federation :

"The role of the Islamic Australia Federation is to support Islamic Australians by providing a strong network within Islamic Australia.

"Muslims supporting Muslims within the community and assisting and showing christian Australians the glorious path to Islam.

"In the upcoming federal election we strongly support the ALP as our preferred party to govern this country and urge all other Muslims to do the same.

"The leading role of the ALP in supporting our faith at both state and local government levels has been exceptional and we look further to further support when Kevin Rudd leads this country.

"We gratefully acknowledge Labor's support to forgive our Muslim brothers who have been unjustly sentenced to death for the Bali bombings.

"Labor supports our new Mosque construction and we hope, with the support or funding of local and state governments, to open our new Mosque in St Marys soon.

"Labor was the only political party to support the entry to this country of our Grand Mufti reverend Sheik al-Hilaly (sic) and we thank Hon Paul Keating for over-turning the objections of ASIO to allow our Grand Mufti to enter this country."

It's beyond obvious that the leaflet was not intended as a joke, or a "Chaser style prank."

It was a carefully planned and constructed psychological operation to smear the Labor Party as supporters of terrorism against Australians and to scare voters in the mostly Christian western Sydney suburb of St Mary's into believing they would be converted to Islam if Labor wins the election.

Labor Party volunteers caught the Liberal Party volunteers in the act of distributing the leaflets on Tuesday night. The Labor Party was tipped off to the leaflet and its distribution by people inside the Liberal Party who strongly disagreed with this extremist and anti-Democratic behaviour.


The Chaser Offers Jackie Kelly A Job

Why Conservatives Can't Do Comedy

Go Here For The Latest Stories From 'Your New Reality'

The Chaser Responds To Liberal Party's Pro-Terrorism "Chaser-Style Prank"

Citing The Chaser as a way of trying to defuse the growing scandal and outrage over the fake Labor Party leaflet, detailed here, was the second big mistake retiring Liberal Party MP Jackie Kelly made, after laughing about it on morning radio and television.

She has made sure the scandal stays in the headlines right through to Saturday. Unless something, or someone, explodes.

Jackie Kelly tried to defend her husband, Gary Clark, when he was busted on Tuesday night stuffing pro-terrorism leaflets, plastered with Labor Party logos, into Western Sydney letterboxes by claiming he was "drunk" and was attempting "a Chaser-style prank."

The Chaser has now responded :

The Chaser's executive producer Julian Morrow has now invited Ms Kelly, who will retire after the election, to join the comedy team.

"Jackie will obviously be looking for a job," Morrow said.

"One of the criticisms of The Chaser is that we don't have any women on our team.

"Bronwyn Bishop has got the inside running, but Jackie is welcome to make an application."

"It's a bit of a worry when the best argument you have to defend your ethical practices is that you were doing what The Chaser does.

"We are hoping this will lead to a profitable political consultancy for The Chaser in the future."

We'll update later with the raft of questions John Howard is expected to be hammered with during his press club final speech, and pitch, to the nation.

Howard must be ready to cry to have such a disgusting and incredibly stupid scandal erupt so close to voting day.

The final nail in Howard's political coffin has come from his own people.


Why Conservatives Don't Do Comedy

The Chaser : We Are Wankers

The Chaser Delivers Osama Bin Laden To President Bush's Hotel

Fight Terror, Jail Comedians

Don't Laugh At The Chaser, Live In Fear

Why Conservatives Don't Do Comedy

It was a simple and straightforward Liberal Party smear tactic : print up leaflets that tell voters if they vote for Labor, they are voting in support of terrorism.

What could possibly go wrong with such a plan?

Except getting caught and photographed in the act...

But come on, it's easy to condemn those Liberal Party leaflet distributors. You just don't understand. The Liberal Party is about to be destroyed at the polls. There is no tactic too dirty, too undemocratic and too disgusting not to try.

I suppose it's all a matter of interpretation. You can interpret the 'A Vote For Labor Is A Vote For Terrorism' leaflet as a tactic straight out of the sewer. Or you can see it as not unexpected from a political party that has seen great gains over the years from marginalising Muslims and fearing up the public over women in burkhas.

Or maybe we don't understand sophisticated Liberal humour. After all, that what's the wife of one of the men responsible is now claiming it was. Just a joke.

Just because they stuck a Labor Party logo on the leaflet and claimed it was from a Islamic group that supports suicide bombing, doesn't mean those who had the leaflet stuffed into their letterboxes were supposed to take it seriously.

What do you mean you don't get the joke? What's wrong with you?

I mean, everyone's done it, haven't they?

Got pissed, jumped on the computer, designed and wrote and then printed off a few hundred copies of a leaflet where you pretend to be a fictional religious group thanking your opposition political party for supporting terrorists who killed more than 80 Australians in the Bali bombings, then rounded up a few mates and gone letterboxing those leaflets through your neighbourhood.

Who hasn't tried to stir up some anti-Muslim sentiment in their own neighbourhood after a few too many, a couple of days before a resounding Liberal Party defeat at the polls?

Where's your sense of humour? It was a joke.

Well, that's what retiring western Sydney Liberal Jackie Kelly is claiming was the intent of the anti-Muslim, 'Labor Supports Terrorists' leaflets her husband, Gary Clark, and his "bunch of drunk" mates wrote, printed up and then distributed through suburbs like St Mary's and St Clair.


Kelly said anyone who actually read the leaflet would be amused :

"On first read it is quite funny..."

"If you read it you would be laughing. Most people who have read it have sort of said that's a Chaser-style of prank."

"Pretty much everyone who reads it chuckles."

Jackie Kelly was still laughing about the leaflet, which used the deaths of more than 80 Australians in the Bali bombings to spread around some anti-Muslim fear, when she was questioned about it earlier today.

So let's take a look the fake leaflet put together by Jackie Kelly's husband and his Liberal Party mates (all without her knowledge, of course, even though they used her house as a base for the distribution) decorated with Labor Party logos and under the name of the fictional Islamic Foundation Australia :

"We gratefully acknowledge Labors [sic] support to forgive our Muslim brothers who have been unjustly sentenced to death for the Bali bombings," it says.

Hilarious!

"Labor supports our new Mosque construction and we hope, with the support and funding by Local and State governments, to open our new Mosque in St Mary's soon."

Ha hahahahahaha!

Comedy gold! Gold!

These people are demented.

Jackie Kelly has offered up a variety of explanations this morning for how her husband and senior members of the Liberal Party came to be busted stuffing these leaflets into letterboxes in Western Sydney late in the evening :

"I think its intent is to be a send-up, but it obviously hasn't worked..."

"He hates the unions, my husband."

But Jackie Kelly was disgusted. When she managed to stop laughing. She was not disgusted at her husband and the leaflets he helped to think up, print and distribute, but at the Labor Party and union "thugs" who tried to stop the Liberal Party members from terrorising the locals :

" ... an ALP goon squad, which I understand was led by some unionists, have chased down and hunted down and tried to intimidate. I understand there was even a fight," she said.

No wonder conservatives hate the unions so much. They get in the way of Liberal Party hate campaigns.

This is why so few Liberals and conservatives try their hands at comedy. Obviously, their sense of humour is too complex for mere mortals to understand.

John Howard is really going to be looking forward to answering questions about this at his last major speech of the election today.

For those who missed the link above, you can read the leaflet in question here.

Tasmanian Author Promises Biggest "Civil Disobedience Campaign" In Decades For Anti-Pulp Mill Protests

The new Tasmanian pulp mill scored the approval of both Labor and Liberal, and saw conservationist Peter Garrett forced to toe the party line, and lose a rainforest worth of credibility while he was at it. We won't know until after the weekend just how much of an impact the controversial pulp mill's approval will have on the election, or in particular on the electoral choices of the voters of Wentworth, the seat of pro-pulp mill environment minister Malcolm Turnbull.

But activists against the mill are promising that it will never be built.

Here are some excerpts from a fiery speech given by author Richard Flanagan to a crowd of anti-pup mill protesters in Tasmania a few days ago.

While providing some solid background on the history of the massive corruption linking the Gunns woodchipping corporation and the Tasmanian state Labor government, Flanagan promises to join protesters in a civil disobedience campaign he declares will be the biggest since the successful protests stopping the damming of the Franklin River in the early 1980s, and claims the controversial pulp mill will never get the chance to destroy a forest or pollute the environment :

And if, in the end we have all other avenues denied us, if we are left with no other alternative, if it takes standing on the road to the pulp mill site and placing our bodies between their machines and our home, we will stand there, in peace and with pride, united against hate and greed, joined in our love for our island. And if we are arrested and thrown in jail, then we will go to jail in our tens, we will go to jail in our hundreds, we will go to jail in our thousands, and Paul Lennon will have to build seven new prisons to house all the people who will come and who will keep on coming before they even attempt to pour the foundations of one new pulp mill.

Now is the time for turning, now is the season for our change, now must come that moment when we no longer are cowed, when we cease to be silent, when we speak the truth to power and say no to this pulp mill and yes to a future in which we are governed in the spirit in which we live: with goodness, with the interests of others in our heart and not the leash of greed tearing at our throat. Now is that hour, now is our future. The journey is long, the road is dark and frightening, but together we can reach our destination: the Tasmania of which we all dream, where all are welcome and all prosper, made not of lies but truth, built not of rich men's hate but our love for our island and for each other. Our love. Our island. Let's take it back. Let's start marching.

Richard Flanagan brought the issue of the new Tasmanian pulp mill, and the long history of foul corruption linking Gunns and Labor and Liberal governments, to national attention in this shock-inducing article from The Monthly magazine. It is a story that every Australian should read.

Flanagan is the author of the novel, 'The Unknown Terrorist', which has become an international hit and has now been optioned for a movie by Steven Spielberg's company Dreamworks.

'The Unknown Terrorist' is so despised by Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt, who haven't made clear that they've actually read the book they've dismissed as trash, that I had to read it myself. If they hated it so much, there was likely much on interest to be found in those pages. I'm halfway through, and it's a fast, interesting read, which successfully predicted the terror-related non-events of this year, where 'unknown terrorists' were rounded up, publicly prosecuted and then released.

Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt appear to be on a dedicated mission to trash Richard Flanagan as often as they can, but not so often as to raise suspicion to their motives.

Perhaps Bolt is annoyed at Flanagan's best-seller status, while his own book's sales stalled. Perhaps Blair is jealous that Flanagan has actually written books in the first place.

Naturally, Bolt and Blair seem to have absolutely no problem with what Gunns is doing to Tasmania's environment, and the further damage to come from the pulp mill, all against the will of the majority of Tasmanians. Flanagan remains their target of choice, even though there is a state Labor government involved that should be mocked and derided at every opportunity.

Flanagan's promised "civil disobedience" campaign will supply both Bolt and Blair with plenty of material to continue their mockery of those who choose to not sit idly by while a behemoth like Gunns mows down whatever, or whoever, gets in their way.

Expect the Tasmanian pulp mill issue to leap back into the headlines in the first few months of 2008.

By then, the pro-Gunns sate Labor government will probably be feeling cocky enough to try and stop the anti-mill protests and blockades using powers under the anti-terror laws. The powers that already allow for the prosecution of protesters who "interfere" with the smooth running of corporations, like Gunns.

The fear of Islamic terrorism was the bulldozer that rammed through the anti-terror laws, but the laws, and the definitions of what actually constitutes terrorist actions or terror support, are open enough to allow for the prosecution of pro-environment related protesters should a corporate entity like Gunns wish to do so. The bet is that they most certainly will.

If Richard Flanagan goes through with his plans for massive "civil disobedience", he may find himself in a very similar position to a key character in 'The Unknown Terrorist'. Except in his case, it will be his pro-environment actions that may see him fighting 'anti-terror' related charges in the courts.

Flanagan, however, appears ready and willing to fight that battle.

Liberals Have An "Outside Chance" Of Winning The Election...Next Time

Greg Sheridan gets in really, really early with his prediction that if the Liberals can get their act together, and treat Tony Abbott as their Socrates-meets-Tony Montana for the next three or four years, they could break the always-a-two-term rule of Australian governments and unseat Rudd at the next election :

...the Liberals might have an outside chance in three years' time. But they will need to remain credible: more than that, to have a sense of life about them, a sense of vigour and purpose.

And who will the Liberals have to rely on for all this life, vigour and purpose? Tony Abbott, of course. Who else is there? Alexander Downer? Brendan Nelson?

Sensing the Liberals are, after the weekend's presumed election defeat, going to lose Abbott to a opposition bench free lifestyle, Sheridan all but begs Tony Abbott not to follow the advice of friend Glenn Milne and "go home to his wife" :

Abbott has been central to conservative politics for the past 15 years. He needs to be central to it for the next 15 years. Even in opposition the Liberals will need to try to shape the debate, defend their record, defend their heroes and defend their ideas...you can't win a battle without warriors.

Even if the only viable 'warrior' you've got left is Tony "Too Honest" Abbott.

Tony Abbott's Last Stand

Howard's vicious mutt, Tony "Too Honest" Abbott, knows his government is going to lose the election this weekend, but he still can't believe it. Just the idea that his days in power are almost over has completely done his head in, which is why he came up with this :

Something unprecedented will happen on Saturday. A highly effective government will lose despite generally good economic circumstances or 12 months of opinion polls will turn out to be wrong. Australians are not reckless gamblers, at least not with the future of their country, so I think it's much more likely voters will prove the polls wrong than change the government.

Abbott, a very religious man, is now praying for a miracle. Perhaps he should, instead, be cursing divine retribution.

His betting that 12 months of polls will turn out to be wrong is a long way from his position many, many months ago when the polls were about the same as they are now, with his government way behind. Back then he thought the majority of Australians were a bunch of dingbats who expected far too much from their politicians and were unwilling to give them the praise he believed was due to politicians like himself.

Well, that's when he wasn't threatening Australian voters with "dire consequences" if they dared to vote against his government.

Tony Abbott will be one of those who will be blamed by the Liberals for helping to lose the election, due to his appalling public behaviour during the election campaign. And he deserves plenty of blame, if only for his disgusting attack on a dying man who had given of himself in ways that Abbott could never comprehend, or dream of matching.


Friends Should Tell Tony "Too Raw" Abbott To 'Go Home To His Wife'

Tony Abbott Attacks Australians For Demanding The Very Best From Their Politicians

Australia 'Locked Out' Of Huge New East Asian Free Trade Union On Orders Of China

Alexander Downer has, by now, learned that Australia has been locked out of joining a vast new ASEAN nations free trade and energy union. And China demanded Australia be excluded.

Downer is at the East Asia Summit, where he laughingly claimed he would be trying to get a last minute climate change related 'breakthrough agreement' from developing countries like China, Indonesia, Vietnam and The Philippines. Good luck with that.

More here :

China, Japan and South Korea agreed to work with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations to open up regional trade, dropping a plan to include India, Australia and New Zealand.

Leaders from the 13 nations said the so-called Asean Plus Three group ``would remain the main vehicle toward the long- term goal of building'' an Asian regional community, according to a statement released after a meeting today. The document makes no mention of the other three nations that will also attend tomorrow's East Asia Summit in Singapore.

Asean secretary general Ong Keng Yong earlier this year insisted that India, Australia and New Zealand would be included in plans to establish a free-trade zone covering all 16 nations who participate in the East Asia Summit. Today's statement recognizes China's demand that only Asean Plus Three countries should be included in the community.

This will be Downer's last trip as foreign minister of Australia, barring a bizarre upset at the weekend elections.

Will there be time enough left for him to remind us all how great Australia's relationship is with China and East Asia before he takes a board gig with a defence contractor, or joins the NeoCon talk circuit in the United States?

Two Major Journalists Required To Cope With Sheer Weight Of Howard's Final Week "I Shit You Not" Fear Mongering Pitch

When I worked as the editor of a city newspaper, many years ago, the newspaper's owner would walk into the office with a local MP's wordy press release in hand, plonk it down on the desk and say "Just run it."

After I'd scanned through the mind-numbing mass, or mess, of information, the conversation would usually go like this :

"I need to check the claims he's making here...some of this is way over the top."

"Just run it."

"I need to give the opposition a chance to react to these claims. They deserve the right of the reply."

"Just run it."

"People are going to laugh at this. They're going to pick up the paper next week and think we're just a local government mouthpiece."

"Just run it."

"Why do you need journalists? You could just get the secretary to type all this shit up..."

"Just run it...Actually, run it on the front page."

The editorship didn't last long.

I flashbacked to those days when I looked at The Australian today and saw this story, where John Howard summons up his most doom-laden verbiage to try one last Big Scare. It's the last minute of the final quarter, the clock is ticking, Australians need to be told they should be trembling as they hover that pencil on Saturday near boxes marked Labor or The Greens.

After weeks of desperate electoral tactical meetings and long lectures from supposed masters of political campaigning and 'damage control', John Howard is finally ready to unveil the New Horror.

The Labor-Green 'Axis'! Lookout! Booga! Beware!

Howard uncorks so much spin, froth and horror-heavy twaddle that The Australian needed two of its biggest hitters - Dennis Shanahan and Paul Kelly - to transcribe it all.

Because that's all this excretible excuse for a news story, from the newspaper that proudly boasts it "keeps the nation informed" really is, in the end. One long Howard rant, with barely a few hundred words from Kelly and Shanahan, but they're only writing what John Howard is saying, instead of just having Howard say it. They typed in a handful of their own words to break up the full stream of direct Howard quotes.

Back at my small city newspaper all those years ago, we only needed one person to transcribe the politician's press release and turn it into a front page story. The Australian needs two senior journalists to do the same thing.

Unless, of course, the editor of The Australiian thinks that having the names of Dennis Shanahan and Paul Kelly in the byline will give this gormless guff some weighty credibility. You know the kind of thing : it must be true what Howard is saying because, look, it's got Kelly and Shanahan bylines on it.

A double team effort! Whoa!

Because Paul Kelly and Dennis Shanahan are merely transcribing what Howard had to say, we're providing a handy translation. The Kelly/Shanahan 'interview' transcript is in italics.

John Howard has warned Australians they risk electing a Labor-Greens alliance that would impose a new national direction and conduct radical experiments with their values and institutions.

In a final-week interview with The Australian, the Prime Minister said the nation faced a "watershed election", where the real issues had been disguised by the me-tooism of Kevin Rudd and in which the workplace reforms of his Government would be lost forever if Labor were elected.

Most Australians clearly want the the workplace reforms to be lost. That's why they're voting Howard out.

Convinced his hopes of a Coalition win at the weekend are not yet extinguished, Mr Howard said: "Part of my mission this week is to drive home the risk. My every waking hour and every available minute will be to drive home the risk of Labor."

Howard is going to rant doom around the clock like a drunk evangelist on a street corner wearing a 'The End Is Nigh' sandwich board.

He said a Labor government would mean higher unemployment, higher inflation and a rollback of industrial reforms that would terminate forever hopes of a freer labour market.

Complete and utter speculation from Howard. This is what he thinks may happen, but he has no proof, and most economists don't back up his claims. Kelly and Shanahan don't bother to even note that Howard could well be proven totally wrong.

Mr Howard warned that a Labor victory would mean a Labor-Greens Senate majority and an era of social re-engineering, with policy changes on drugs, education, social issues and political correctness in conflict with his social conservatism.

"There will be a return of political correctness. There will be a softening in relation to things like drugs. You will get a less socially conservative country at the very least.

Shocking. Rudd may actually wind back some of Howard's welfare for the rich, follow the nation's will and offer a Sorry to Aboriginals, and stop treating 19 year old pot smokers like psychotic hardened criminals.

"I think the country's mood is that people want economic progress but they don't want experiments with our basic values and institutions. Imagine if you are depending on the Greens to get a measure through the Senate on education. Imagine what they would extract."

Imagine if the Greens, who will likely claim 12% or more of the national vote, were actually able to represent the will and desires of their voters instead of having to suffer through the Coalition getting almost 100% of their bills and ammendments passed through the Senate? The horror!

Howard believes his values are what's best for all Australians, not apparently realising the 1950s were five long decades ago.

Asked about the future under the Coalition, Mr Howard said Peter Costello "will be elected unopposed" as his successor. In a warning to leadership aspirants, Mr Howard pledged to the Treasurer, saying this would be "the right thing" for the Liberal Party and for Australia.

Howard is dreaming.

By the time Howard finally hands the Kirribilli House keys back to Australia, if he's actually re-elected as PM, Malcolm Turnbull will have carved a deep trench through the Liberal Party on his way to the top job.

If the Coalition loses government, the old order will torn to shreds in months of bitter infighting about who lost the election, and all those golden Liberal seats. Peter Costello has about as much chance of becoming the next PM, or leader of the Liberals, as Peter Garrett has of taking control of BHP. Costello's poll ratings with the Australian public are absolutely abysmal, he's about as popular as a kick in the nuts with no $500 cheque from Australia's Funniest Home Video to ease the pain.

The Liberals are bitter, yet happy enough, to let Howard spin his little fantasy about Peter Costello taking over, but only until the New Year. Then the real fight inside the Liberal Party begins.

Mr Howard defended his policy of tax breaks to empower choice. He rejected the criticism it was middle-class welfare.

Of course it's middle-class welfare. Why does he think so much of the middle-class voted for him in 2004?

"It's not dependency to give a tax break to people for doing certain things," he said. "I find this blurring of the distinction between expenditure and tax incentives as ridiculous. We encourage people to make choices about their children's education through tax breaks ... We support people who have children by giving them tax breaks. That's authentic Liberal orthodoxy.

What Howard's true masters want, they get. Liberal orthodoxy under Howard is welfare for the middle class and fat tax cuts for the rich. The rest get less money spent on hospitals and education and an extra milkshake and a sandwich as a reward for not trying to storm Parliament House with flaming torches in hand.

It's no mystery why Shanahan would let his name go on such a rag bag of predictions, baseless projections and scare-mongering speculation. But why would Paul Kelly let his name anywhere near such tripe?

Does he no longer care at all? Is he about to retire?

Four more days to go...

Howard Keeps Australia's Media Moguls Rich With Your Money

16 Months, $500 Million

Nobody does more to keep the flow of taxpayer cash running hot into the pockets of Australia's extremely wealthy media moguls than John Howard.

In just 16 months, according to this story, the Howard government has spent a mind-boggling $500 million dollars on anti-Labor, anti-union fear campaigns, pro-WorkChoices propaganda and so-called 'government-funded information advertising'. The Howard government has spent more than $1 million a day on ads, for almost 500 days running.

But it's not government-funded advertising, it's You Fund It :

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet's annual report showed $281 million was spent on government advertising last financial year.

And the splurge didn't stop in July. Another $209 million was spent in the run-up to the poll announcement five weeks ago.

The most recent ad campaigns centred on changes to WorkChoices, climate change policy, changes to superannuation and internet safety.

Mr Howard defended the spending, declaring it all "legitimate", but Labor leader Kevin Rudd condemned it, pledging if elected on Saturday to tighten rules governing the use of taxpayers' money for publicising information campaigns.

The Howard government now spends more taxpayer dollars on advertising, per head of population, than any other country in the world.

You won't be surprised to learn that the Herald Sun, one of the big beneficiaries from such advertising splurges, buried this story under a headline about how John Howard backs his "good mate" Peter Costello to takeover the Liberal Party leadership when he finally quits.

John Howard calls directing half a billion dollars of your money into the pockets of some of Australia's richest people being economically responsible and "fiscally conservative."

UPDATE : I shouldn't be so hard on the Herald Sun. At least they ran the $500 Million In 16 Months On Ads story, even if they did so under a headline about another story. The Australian managed to wind back the impact of the revelations of Howard government ad spending this way :

Government Spends $196 Million On Ads

True enough, but as the Herald Sun article clearly reveals, it's not even half the real story.

International Media Picks Up On 'Howard's Battlers Now Turning On Him' Theme

As John Howard's government enters what certainly looks like its last days in power, the international media is starting to pump the theme that he will lose office because the legendary 'Howard Battlers' have decided to dump him because the 'McMansion Dream' has turned sour.

This from the UK's Telegraph :

The aspiring working classes of Australia who catapulted John Howard to power 12 years ago look set to turn on him in lethal fashion in this week’s election, as his promises of growing prosperity have soured.

A survey has found that two-thirds of voters with mortgages between $100,000 and $200,000 (£86,000) intended to vote on Saturday for the opposition Labour Party, heralding a catastrophe for Mr Howard’s conservation coalition.

Since being elected in 1996, Mr Howard has drawn much of his support from "battlers" – blue collar families living in the outer suburbs of Australia’s big cities – seducing them with a Thatcherite philosophy of economic liberalism and social conservatism.

But the Australian dream of owning an air-conditioned "McMansion" with a two-car garage has soured.

Interest rates have risen six times since Mr Howard made a rash pledge at the last election, in 2004, that he would ensure they stayed low.

Compounding the pain for mortgage holders is the fact that house prices have fallen in many working class "battler" suburbs since the property boom peaked around 2003.

The photo running with the story here shows John Howard looking old, bitter and annoyed. The story made the Editor's Pick on the website.

Bob Brown Hugs Trees "Very, Very Often"




For our international readers, a bit of background : Dr Bob Brown was the first leader of the Australian Greens elected to the Australian Senate and has been instrumental in helping to preserve vast regions of Australia's ancient rainforests and wilderness. Some of the areas Bob Brown fought to preserve discovered there was more money to be made from wilderness tourism than would ever have been made from logging.

Bob Brown's the only Australian political party leader you can count on getting an honest answer from to almost any question, and whether you agree or disagree with his political views, it's hard not to admire his honesty.

The Australian Greens have been rapidly building their base in the past six years, opposing the War On Iraq, the detention of immigrant children in outback prison camps, John Howard's 'War On Drugs' and the absurd fiasco of Australia's supposed anti-terror laws.

The Greens are expected to probably win control of the Australian Senate in next weekend's federal election, and could capture as much as 12% of the national vote.

Quick fact : Dr Bob Brown was working as a hospital intern in London in 1970, and he was the young medico who stood before the media and announced that Jimi Hendrix had died.

Murdoch Media Already Publishing Howard Government Obituaries

Glenn Milne Tells Tony Abbott To Go Home To His Wife

The Australian newspaper today features a number of early obituaries for the Howard government, and in particular, Health Minister Tony Abbott. First this :

Who should the Coalition hold responsible in the event that Labor winds up running every government in the nation, federal, state and territory?

John Howard’s name springs to mind, of course.

He chose to remain prime minister when some of his colleagues, most notably Alexander Downer, thought Peter Costello might have had a better chance of deflating the Kevin Rudd bubble.

Take a step back and consider how the conservatives find themselves just one defeat away from being in opposition in every jurisdiction in the land.

Conservatives will try to convince you that a Labor federal government win this Saturday will be some kind of aberration, a freak event, an act of successful brainwashing by a slick marketing machine. They wish.

Instead, it's culmination of a Labor takeover of the nation, that began with Labor in control of NSW in 1996; then taking Queensland and Tasmania in 1998; Victoria in 1999; West Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory in 2001 and finally South Australia in 2002.

Australians are not becoming more conservative. They've turned their backs on conservative state governments, and this Saturday they are more than likely to elect a federal Labor government, completing the decade long rejection of Australian conservatives.


Glenn Milne, who says Tony "Too Raw" Abbott has been a friend for 17 years, mourns the coming loss of Tony "Too Honest" Abbott from the Australian political scene. Abbott's friend says Abbott's friends "should advise him to go (home to his wife)" :

Abbott is a figure of substance, a conviction politician in an era of white noise convergence. But watching Abbott's disintegration you have to ask whether the strength of those convictions was ever viable in an environment where the electorate increasingly likes its politics "lite" in all respects, including when it comes to values.

I count Abbott as a friend. We met in the early 1990s, and there's not a dinner table you'd share with him that wouldn't leave you passing into the later night wrestling with some of the bigger questions of the universe.

In some senses, Abbott is simply too honest and too raw for modern politics...

Tony Abbott has spent the past decade as John Howard's most savage attack dog, shredding the competition for minor indiscretions, cutting loose with grim and vindictive bullying whenever possible and venomously destroying political careers, then reveling in his small victories. Now we're supposed to feel sorry for him?

Milne's generous praise and all but casual dismissal of Abbott's disgusting behaviour during this election campaign, let alone the past ten years, is enough to make you want to reach for a bucket.

But then, if you can't use your national newspaper column to whitewash the grand, insipid failings and genuine nastiness of a friend, what's the point of being a Murdoch media columnist?

The Top Five Immediate Missions Of Australia's New Prime Minister

Number One : Ratify Kyoto Protocol

Kevin Rudd has revealed the five things he will do, straight off the bat, when he becomes prime minister after next week's federal election :

1. Ratify the Kyoto Protocol. "We need to make sure we are around the negotiating table immediately ... for the next round of commitments on reducing global greenhouse gas emissions."

2. Start immediately to negotiate with the states on reform of hospital practices. "That is of crucial importance - we've got $2.5billion on the table but we'll need to frame a co-operative agreement around performance measures."

3. Begin the roll-out of the high-speed broadband network, along with connections to schools. In tandem, open up tenders for the $1 billion school computer program.

4. "Hit the ground running" with the implementation of the $2.5 billion program to upgrade trades training centres in secondary schools. "I went back to C block [the technical faculty] at [his old school] Nambour High the other day - it hadn't changed since I was there. It was like walking into a museum."

5. Begin negotiations with the Americans and Iraqis for the staged withdrawal by mid next year of Australian combat troops. "I have been very blunt with President Bush ... I have a no-surprises policy when it comes to these things."

It will be interesting to see what John Howard & Friends do with this story. Rudd has all but declared victory, before he's victorious. It should drive Howard nuts, and he will have restrain himself from having a full meltdown so close to the election.

Rudd has pledged to do all the above five within the first 100 hundred days of taking power. How very American presidential of him.

He also said Labor would get two days off, Christmas and Boxing Day, then it's "straight back to work."

He should have added a sixth pledge. Actually answer the questions journalists ask him. His masterful evasion of answering even the most basic questions may completely change, after he wins. If he doesn't, he can expect to cop many months of hammerings from journalists.

I don't actually think Rudd is being arrogant in unveiling his Top Five agenda a week before the election. I'm sure he's privately very nervous that something could go drastically wrong on Election Day. I'm more inclined to think that Rudd's headline grabbing interview, for the Sunday papers, and a leader story on the evening news (Sunday being the day of the biggest newspaper sales, and highest audiences for evening news) is yet another example of his CIA-quality psychological war against John Howard.

Expect Howard, or at least a few of his ministers (we're looking at you Downer) to absolutely flip out at Rudd's "incredible arrogance" in unveiling his 'Once I've Won' agenda.

Now Shanahan Tries I-R-O-N-Y : Denying Polls "Defies Logic"

After writing numerous columns this year where he stubbornly ignored that Labor was absolutely, relentlessly, canning the Coalition in poll after poll after poll, notorious pro-Howard propagandist for The Australian newspaper Dennis Shanahan is now claiming the Coalition's desperate position of last defence, that the polls must surely wrong, "defies logic."

Yes, really :

John Howard only has one chance left to retain government: the published polls are wrong.

It's a scenario that takes another beating from today's Newspoll survey, showing swings in the 18 most marginal Coalition seats no better than the general polls, which have shown a consistent Labor lead of 8-10 points on a two-party-preferred basis all year.

Yet party officials on both sides, federal and state, insist the contest remains close and the election will be tight.

This defies logic and the published polls. How could a contest that has been poles apart ever since Rudd became leader of the Labor Party become tight overnight on November 23?

Err, that's pretty much the same question that the bloggers you and your editor had an absolute shitfit about, back in July, have been asking you, Mr Shanahan, all year long. How can you defy the logic of the polls?

There will be so much back-flipping from Australia's conservative media in the next week, as they try to recast themselves as not backers of the losing team, that editorial floors will look more like Olympic gymnastic venues. But full of not nearly so attractive, or limber, gymnasts.

Bolt Tries I-R-O-N-Y

Tony Abbott Furious At Dirty, Rotten Labor Trick He Didn't Think Of Pulling First

Andrew Bolt, of the Herald Sun, sure knows "crude propaganda" when he sees it.

And why wouldn't he? It's his daily currency.

Bolt figures Lateline fell for a pretty seedy Labor party trick when they aired carefully edited video of Tony Abbott revealing, at a public meeting held during the week, that a great swathe of workers "protections" had been swept away by WorkChoices. It was Tony Abbott speaking the truth.

But the full, unedited video shows Abbott explaining his point in more detail, while making the exact same point. However, the video aired by Lateline on Thursday night had been slickened into a fast soundbite that played on all TV networks and most radio news bulletins throughout Friday. A flood of stories claimed Abbott had admitted WorkChoices robbed workers of once valued protections (he did), and that he said if you don't like your job, then quit.

Another full day of Howard and Abbott forced onto the defensive, and seen nervously answering questions about how WorkChoices is screwing workers. Not how either would have wanted, or planned, to spend the day.

And all this was on top of the auditor general's report which revealed Howard & Friends had rorted the taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars in 2004 for pet projects in electorates where they were begging or paying for votes. Howard was left mumbling that he "hadn't been briefed on the report." Ha!

In all, an absolutely nightmarish day for Coalition, which must have had Howard wondering if someone had slipped hallucinogens into his breakfast eggs.

Bolt claims the 'edited' video was a crude and dirty trick by Labor, echoing Tony Abbott, naturally.

The woman who may well be deputy prime minister soon, Julia Gillard, fired back with :

"What appears on that tape is what Mr Abbott said. There has been nothing done to that tape, it appears as Mr Abbott said it, with the words coming out of his mouth that he said and he meant."

Which is true enough. No matter how the video is sliced and diced, Abbott said what he said. The only context is that Abbott and Bolt hate the way it played to the public.

A crude, dirty trick dreamed up by Labor and given life by Lateline?

As crude a dirty trick as the 'video scandal' orchestrated by Liberal attack dogs (hmm, Tony Abbott?) and a appallingly pliant media during the 2004 campaign, where Mark Latham spent endless days denying there was a virtual pornographic bucks night video of him floating around.

There was no video. It was simply a sleazy smear campaign originating in Crikey, and then widely promoted, discussed and debated by Andrew Bolt's media friends and colleagues.

Perhaps Andrew Bolt is more upset by the fact that the edited Abbott video got so much play in the media and was so effective in ramming home Labor's mantra that workers are far worse off under WorkChoices?

Rudd's now legendary 'head messing' continues, relentlessly.

"Crude propaganda" indeed.


Health Minister Verbally Attacks Dying Man, Only Apologises After Seeing The Headlines

Tony Abbott : What A Scumbag

Tony Abbott : What A Scumbag Part Two

If The Threat Of 'Terror' To Australia Is So Great, Why Is Howard's Security So Weak?

I was photographing the security fence cutting through the Botanical Gardens, during the APEC summit, when an American jogger walked up and asked what I was doing. I showed him the camera, and some of the images, and told him it was such an amazing and weird site to see that I had to get photos.

"It's like a piece of modern art," I said, and the American laughed. "Yeah, ugly as hell."

I asked him if he was a Bush secret service agent, on a break, a question he ignored completely. He then asked if John Howard went for a walk every morning along the foreshore of the harbour, like he had seen on the news.

Every morning he's in Sydney, I said. The American nodded and snorted a laugh, before saying something along the lines of "He's not worried about his security then?"

It's a question worth considering. No doubt John Howard insists on a low key security presence, so passers-by are able to say hello and shake his hand. He clearly enjoys the contact with the people, and it looks good on TV as well.

But if the threat of terrorism to Australia is so great, so real, and so pending, you also have to ask why it is that any terrorist's presumed number one target leaves himself wide open, every morning on his walk, and at almost every speech and public appearance?

All of this was sparked by the incident today, where a man armed with a pooper scooper tried to "rush" the prime minister during a speech. The man was holding the pooper scooper, he said, because he wanted to clean up Howard's smelly trail of non-core promises that he's left in his wake :

A protester carrying a doo-doo collector surged towards the prime minister, getting to within three metres of him as the PM took the stage.

The man - wearing a badge marked Ken Franklin but later identified as education union official Ken Case - was tackled by security and thrown out of the Convention Centre, before explaining he had been collecting Mr Howard's non core promises.

And a long and festy trail of broken promises it is indeed.

If Howard's lax security is anything to go by, perhaps the threat of terrorism is not quite as intense as all those evening TV ads and intrusive airport security checks might lead you to believe it is.

If the prime minister, a prime mover in the horrific War On Iraq, can leave himself so wide open to protesters and possible snipers every morning and every afternoon, what the hell are the rest of plebs supposed to be afraid of?

Murdoch Mouthpiece Barks : Pro-Peace Aussies Hate News That Less Iraqis Are Being Slaughtered

A gruesome example of absurdity from the editor of The Australian newspaper, Chris Mitchell :

The sad fact is that for most of the anti-war Left, the only thing that matters is delivering a defeat to the Bush administration, and in achieving that end the Iraqi people are expendable.

The anti-war, anti-American Left should be ashamed, but precisely for this reason they continue to look away when Iraq doesn't fail in the way they wish.

What absolute twaddle.

Mitchell clearly still believes in the fantasy that only 'The Left' are opposed to war on defenceless people. That means something like 70% of Australians, and even a greater number of Americans, must be 'Lefties'.

This is yet more garbage about the fictional Left/Right paradigm so favoured by those who want to divide the populace into pro-this and anti-that, honing in on what supposedly divides the minority instead of focusing on what unites the vast majority.

Hundreds of thousands of Australians didn't march in the streets of towns and cities across the nation in early 2003 because they wanted the United States to be defeated in Iraq. They marched because they didn't want Iraqis to be slaughtered in an illegal war. They knew they were being conned, by media like The Australian, and they knew that the War On Iraq would lead to massive civilian death tolls and untold suffering.

The 'pro-peace' movement so despised by an ever depleting slice of Australian and American 'conservatives' are now supposed to be furious that the death rate of Iraqis is dropping?

This is maniacal spin of the most chilling kind.

The editor of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, is deploying his version of the fabled "six more months" argument rolled out by so many talking heads on American news shows through the past four years. If we stay "six more months" everything will be just wonderful and dreamy.

To try and now claim that the pro-peace movement is disappointed by the very recent reduction in Iraqi civilian deaths is just plain bizarre, and incredibly insulting to every Australian war veteran (thousands of them) who protested the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq because they knew, from experience, that war simply doesn't work when it comes to solving a problem like that posed by Saddam Hussein and his alleged arsenal of WMDs. The very same veterans who shook their heads in disgust when newspapers like The Australian enthusiastically pumped the fable that the Iraq War would have only a small number of civilian deaths.

It's not the pro-peace movement who have to rethink their positions on the War On Iraq. Their concerns and fears were proven right by the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed or maimed, the appalling insurgency, the horrific humanitarian crisis, the millions more who were forced to flee their homes and their country and the continuing destruction of the nation's infrastructure.

It is the pro-war mob who have to admit that they were wrong to back an illegal war against a mostly defenceless country, in the face of untold warnings about NeoCon lies on WMDs, and of the tribal and ethnic massacres and guerilla warfare that would inevitably follow the invasion.

Chris Mitchell also writes :

It is far too early to declare victory...

Declare victory? Nobody, except Murdoch mouthpieces like Chris Mitchell, is ever going to officially declare 'Victory' in the War On Iraq.

Not even President Bush mentions the 'V' word much any more.

War was not the right answer when it came to Iraq, no matter how much those who were so very involved in dispensing and pumping the BushCo. propaganda campaign in this country, like Chris Mitchell, to try and dupe Australians into backing the Iraq War fiasco, want to believe it all worked out for the best.

Chris Mitchell and the massed ranks Murdoch propagandists failed to get even one-third of the country on side back in early 2003 to support the illegal invasion, and they fail still in their gruesome efforts to find diamonds amongst all the death and destruction unleashed upon Iraq.

Mitchell should be ashamed of himself.


The Suicide Soldier Epidemic : 6000 'War On Terror' Veterans Killed Themselves In 2005

The Chaser : We Are Wankers


Channel Seven boss David Leckie

On Wednesday night, Channel Seven's Today Tonight devoted a solid, ad free 18 minutes to The Chaser. Unfortunately, it wasn't very funny. It was mostly footage of a couple of The Chaser team caught out in the midst of a stunt in the offices of Today Tonight, talking about calling their lawyers, saying their needed to speak to their lawyers and then speaking to their lawyers.

The funniest moments were delivered by a Today Tonight 'reporter' who berated The Chaser for "trespassing". This from Today Tonight less than a week after they aired footage of one of their reporters and a camera team refusing to leave the front yard of a western Sydney family, after being asked to get off the property God knows how many times.

The only big laugh from the increasingly symbiotic relationship between Today Tonight and The Chaser was the Rodney Rude-esque reaction from Channel Seven boss David Leckie :

'Where's The Chasers? What about The Chasers team? They're just f---ing wankers. They're nothing but a bunch of tossers, they're f---ing wankers."

The Chaser reaction?

"We are wankers," said Chaser executive producer Julian Morrow. "We make fun of people so we can't expect people not to make fun of us."

Morrow also got off another good line when he learned that Today Tonight had gone to court to stop them airing footage they had shot during the Today Tonight 'ambush'.

"We're stunned that Today Tonight has completely beaten up this story. Who do they think they are? Today Tonight?"

The Chaser and Today Tonight both need to take a long break from each other.

Or team up for a joint show.

Howard Already Whining Like A Loser

Depression In The Coalition Ranks Seals Their Fate

Howard And Friends had Mark Latham on the defence for most of the 2004 election. Every time he announced new policy, or held a press conference, he spent valuable time answering questions about a host of orchestrated lies and accusations that flowed like a river from Howard's team.

Kevin Rudd is very successfully laying out the issues that Howard is then forced to comment on, or react to. Now it's Howard's turn to constantly be on the defence. And he's not very good at it.

He looks sulky, he sounds whiny, and has the presence and demeanour of a man already in opposition.

Witness his reaction yesterday to Kevin Rudd's remarkably effective campaign launch speech.

Howard seemed shocked that Rudd had the gall to declare The Reckless Spending Must Stop :

Mr Rudd savaged Mr Howard as a selfish big-spender, prepared to risk inflation and land Australian families with higher interest rates to buy his way back into office.

...the Opposition Leader put economic conservatism at the centre of his political case for power, offering $2.3 billion in new promises and contrasting the spending with Mr Howard's "irresponsible spending spree" of $8.5 billion of pledges at his campaign launch on Monday.

"Mr Howard spent nearly $10 billion on Monday trying to buy his way out political trouble," Mr Rudd said.

"Unlike Mr Howard, I will not place in jeopardy households already struggling with mortgages.

"I don't stand before you with a bagful of irresponsible promises that could put upward pressure on inflation ... I am saying loud and clear that this sort of reckless spending must stop."

You can almost imagine Howard choking on his cup of tea and shouting "Son Of A Bitch!" at that.

Howard knows Rudd outspun him, and did it with gusto, and it's clear Howard is furious that most of the media brought the line that Rudd proved he was an "economic conservative" by announcing spending of 1/4 to 1/3 of that announced by Howard on Monday.

Howard is a defeated man, and acting like he has already lost will now finish him off :

John Howard last night accused Kevin Rudd of being "deceitful" by painting himself as an economic conservative, saying voters should look beyond Labor's campaign launch spending because overall the Coalition had promised to spend less than Labor.

The Prime Minister, campaigning in Townsville, said economic conservatism should be judged by the "aggregate of your behaviour - it's not just how you behave in an election campaign".

"Mr Rudd is being deceitful in his cost comparisons," he said.

"He wants the public to compare the cost of the announcements he has made in his launch with the cost of the announcements we made in our launch as if they are the only announcements that have been made by either side ... It's the total cost of commitments that matters."

He described Mr Rudd as an "arsonist claiming responsibility as a firefighter", saying the Opposition Leader would in fact hurt the economy with his plans to rip up Work Choices.

"On the score of economic credibility, Mr Rudd went missing today," Mr Howard said.

Maybe so, but few noticed. The headlines and lead news stories were virtually all in Rudd's favour. Another set of nails were banged enthusiastically into Howard's coffin.

Most of the Howard team has given up trying to win the election by praising the man who has ruled their roost for 11 years. Their coasting to defeat, and barely putting up a fight. Most of the senior Howard ministers are probably too busy lining up their new jobs, outside of politics. Leave it to Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce to cut to the core of what's now happening inside the Coalition. Depression is spreading like a flu virus through their ranks :

Coalition MPs are getting depressed and frustrated over their parties' poor performance in opinion polls, which are uniformly pointing to a Labor landslide, Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce has said.

Senator Joyce last night said the Coalition's election campaign might be faring better if it had made a big infrastructure announcement to capture public imagination.

“There is a sense of depression about it. If the polls are the reality we're not going to lose, we're going to get annihilated,” Senator Joyce told Sky News.

He blamed the trend on voter ambivalence about a change of government. “It's frustrating for us, obviously.

“I see it like you're in a perfectly good marriage that's been going for 11 and a half years - would you get divorced just to see what it was like?”

“We're working on the premise that there are a lot of people out there who are still making up their minds.”

He expressed some admiration for Labor leader Kevin Rudd's campaign strategy - which has been derided as a "me-too" plan to win office.

“Mr Rudd has done a very good job of neutralising any form of division between the two parties.”

The Queensland senator said the Coalition may have erred by focusing much of its attention on the economy, health and education.

“These are dry topics which people really have to really read through the paper to understand. It's a hard thing to sell in a pub on a Friday night.”

Joyce is right. Most of the punters don't want to read about it. They just want to government to do it, fix the problems, and shut the hell up.

Howard and the Coalition are not announcing Big Vision strategies. As others have noted, we are a wealthy nation, with huge surpluses, so where are the grand infrastructure projects that make jaws drop and get people excited about the future?

Howard seems only to be patching up holes in health and education, which leads many to ask, cynically : "Why now? He's been there for 11 years. If he has to spend so much to fix the problems, what's he been doing all the years to let education and health fall into such disarray?" Blaming state governments simply isn't cutting through.

Rudd has effectively echoed a lot of the Friday night pub talk that Joyce is talking about, hitting on themes like these :

"Howard only cares now because he's about to lose"

"Howard had years to fix all this stuff and he didn't do it"

"Howard's been there long enough. It's time for something new."

"I'm really sick of hearing Howard and Costello and Downer waffling on and on about how awesome a job they've done, but now they tell us how much there is to fix up."

Let's hope the action in this election campaign picks up next week. If not, it won't be an orderly change of government. It will be a thoroughly boring change of government.

Landslide Takes Out 20% Of Victoria's Power Supply


An incredible photo from Matt Smith, running in the Herald Sun, shows the aftermath of a massive landslide in an open cut coal mine at one of Australia's biggest power stations. A 'landslip' tore apart the retaining wall of a river and water poured into the mine.

The story behind the landslide, and how it will effect Victoria's electricity supply, can be read here.

Robert Manne Kisses John Howard Goodbye

There's already been a few John Howard eulogies published, but this one from Robert Manne, published today in the latest issue of The Monthly, will set the standard for the so-called "Lefties" that many on the Liberal side of politics and commentary are expecting to dance all over Howard's political grave. They're probably going to be bitterly disappointed.

Manne's comments are mostly respectful, honest and throws some early perspective on The Howard legacy. I'd certainly agree with Manne that the darker days of Howard's reign will shock future generations, while his success as a steady hand on the economic tiller will mostly be forgotten. That happens with all prime ministers and presidents. Howard will be no exception.

Howard was right to stare down many conservative Australians to bring about effective gun control. It is hard to believe that the absence of urban massacre since Port Arthur is an accident. Despite very serious intelligence and political error in the lead-up to the East Timor independence plebiscite, the role his Government played in the creation of an independent East Timor represents Howard's finest hour.

The greatest mistake in the first half of the Howard years was the attack he launched against what American neo-conservatives had labelled political correctness. The country's racist past was increasingly denied. The ambitions for reconciliation with the indigenous population and for the creation of a multicultural society were abandoned. The bitterness of so many indigenous people and the daily experience of marginalisation faced by Australian Muslims are the consequences.

The Keating government bequeathed to Howard a dangerous legacy in the policy of mandatory detention of asylum-seekers.

After losing East Timor, Indonesia secretly encouraged boats of asylum-seekers fleeing from the regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban to sail on to Australian territory. The cruelty with which the Howard Government treated these people will astonish Australians in the future

... Our support for the invasion of Iraq was the worst foreign policy decision ever made by any Australian government.

Manne also writes that "Only when (the Rudd era) opens will the meaning of the Howard years become clear."

A growing number of commenters on the blogs of Piers Akerman, Andrew Bolt and various opinionists for The Australian are gloating loudly about how the careers of conservative commentators will be over once Rudd wins and Howard is gone.

Hardly. The Akermans, Bolts and Tim Blairs will thrive on the change of government, as Rudd moves to implement his new policies and some will inevitably fail, or fail to live up to the hype. But how long will their readers put up with "I told you so!" and "Lookit what they done now!" as insightful commentary?

The fans of a losing cricket or football team of the final test or grand final don't mind getting together after a horror defeat to drown their sorrows, complain about the refs or rip to shreds the players who they know were capable of better. But even the most die-hard supporters only want to do that once or twice. They don't keep getting together to bitch about the defeat. They mostly move on, and look forward to the next season.

If a Rudd government manages to shake off the darkest days of the Howard era, and injects Australian society with new energy and optimism, the bitterness, endless whining and sniping of the Akermans, Bolts, Shanahans and Blairs will lose them a fat chunk of their audience. They risk becoming what they so despise today : the kind of commentators who can't stop complaining and fail to see the nation as it is, and the positive ways a federal government can change the nation for the better.

Rupert Murdoch Threatens Caroline Overington With "Disciplinary Action" For Her "Just Joking" Election Interference

Malcolm Turnbull : Murdoch Journalist "Not Part Of My Campaign Team"

The story of journalist Caroline Overington asking an independent candidate to preference her friend, Malcolm Turnbull, probably would probably not have been more than a one or two day wonder had News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch not weighed in on the controversy.

During a shareholder's meeting in Adelaide, Murdoch was asked about the Overington Vs Ecuyer story :

News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch says disciplinary action would be taken against any reporter who tried privately to influence political candidates in the name one of the company's publications.

He says the company cannot restrict the private actions of individuals.

"If they're doing it in the name of the paper ... we would more than discourage it, we would take disciplinary action," Mr Murdoch said.

"It's a free world and a reporter is entitled to his opinions as much as anybody else. I'm sorry about that."

Caroline Overington asked Wentworth independent candidate Danielle Ecuyer to "please preference Malcolm (Turnbull)" as an employee of The Australian newspaper. She told Ecuyer it would possibly become a front page story.

Murdoch's threats to take "disciplinary action" against Overington will ensure the story reaches the international media (probably only in a minor way), where the tale of independent candidate Daniellle Ecuyer running against her ex-boyfriend for the seat of "Bondi Beach" is already scoring headlines.

Malcolm Turnbull, Overington's preferred politician for the seat of Wentworth, dives into the controversy, choosing to back his friend, and supporter :

Malcolm Turnbull has defended a journalist accused of trying to pressure an independent candidate to direct her preferences to him. Mr Turnbull says Caroline Overington, a journalist at The Australian, is entitled to her opinion.

Ms Overington says the email was a joke.

Mr Turnbull says the journalist is entitled to her opinion on the direction of preferences in Wentworth.

"Assuming Caroline Overington's comments were serious and not tongue-in-cheek - and the email exchanges seem to be fairly humorous - she was expressing her personal opinion to which she's entitled," Mr Turnbull told reporters on the Gold Coast today.

"She's not part of my campaign team obviously."

Obviously.


Murdoch Senior Journalist Claims Her Interference In Election "Just A Joke"

1 In 2 Australians Use Credit Cards To Bridge Gap Between Wages And Household Bills

Credit Card Fees No Longer Restrained By Reserve Banks

A rich and prosperous nation lashes out with their credit cards to live the high life, splashing out on luxury item like food and rent and electricity bills and mortgage payments.

The awesome gulf between John Howard's claims that Australian families are enjoying the benefits of a 'booming' economy and have never had it so good, and the reality of two million Australians (1 in 10) living below the poverty line, and millions more struggling to keep their houses paid for and food in the fridge becomes ever more stark, and disturbing :

In a sign of increasingly hard times, over half of Australians have admitted to using their credit cards to get them between pays and cover cash shortfalls, a survey reveals.

But plastic users are being stung with fees and charges and they aren't happy about it.

The survey of 1366 people conducted by NEWS.com.au and online polling firm Coredata found 54 per cent of people had used their credit card to get between pays after their cash ran out.

The survey revealed over 90 per cent of respondents had at least one credit card
with 36 per cent holding two. The survey was carried out between October 9 and 16.

A whopping 52 per cent of those with credit cards had been stung by penalty fees or interest rates in the 12 months before the survey.

Of those who had been hit with late fees, 83 per cent said they were a "rip off"...

They may feel ripped off, but the guilt-tripping propaganda and threats of legal action from banks that don't often even hold the money they are lending (themselves borrowing much of the money they issue as credit) does work, with 23 percent of surveyed people who have admitted to having paid late fees believing being hit with extortionist late fees "serves me right for not paying on time."

The vast majority of late fees charged by banks are forced onto low income workers. People who use their credit cards to pay the bills that their wages cannot meet. Late fees build up, incurring more fees and interest charges. If you've ever wondered why so many people on low wages are courted by the banks offering generous credit, via credit cards, it is because the banks know that poor people will clock up late fees, and will incur greater interest fees accumulations than the wealthy.

Unfortunately, many poor Australians feel intimidated by threats of legal action from the banks, over fairly minor debts, not realising that many such letters of impending legal action are nothing more than form letters.

The good news is, as this story points out, more and more people caught up in the credit card swindle are finding ways to pull themselves out of the hole.

How do so many banks and credit institutions get away with swindling the poor on so many fees?

Easy. The Reserve Bank of Australia "removed restrictions on merchants applying surcharges to credit-card payments."

That is, the Reserve Bank, no longer contained by the federal government, is letting the banks run wild, charging exorbitant fees when people miss making repayments on their credit cards by one, or a few, days.

Australian banks, per customer, are now some of the most profitable in the world.

Journalist Claims Her Controversial 'Interference' In Prime Liberal Election Seat Contest "Just A Joke"

Caroline Overington Downgraded By Editor From Walkley Award Winning Senior Journalist To "Colour Writer"

It's the sort of story that a journalist like Caroline Overington should never have become caught up in, regardless of how she is now trying to explain away the controversy :

From The Australian :

An independent candidate for the marginal Sydney seat of Wentworth will make a formal complaint to the Australian Electoral Commission after accusing a reporter from The Australian of trying to influence the outcome of the election.

Danielle Ecuyer, who is standing against Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Labor's George Newhouse, last night told The Australian she thought an email communication had been "inappropriate".

Ms Ecuyer plans to make a formal complaint as early as today to the Electoral Commission alleging an inducement was offered - a front-page article - in return for making a decision on her preferences.

Writing in The Australian newspaper today, Caroline Overington says :

I'd been at Ms Ecuyer's house a week or so earlier. We'd joked about her failed relationship with Labor's candidate for Wentworth, George Newhouse. She was loving the publicity, and the fact it described her as glamorous.

I asked whether she'd direct her preferences away from George and she laughed, and said she wouldn't preference anyone who supported Tasmania's pulp mill.

The idea that she would instead give her preferences to Turnbull to spite George was also raised. It was so absurd, I kept the joke up in emails to her a few days later.

In the email, I give her a wink, to show her I am joking when I say she should give her preferences to Turnbull.

Now she says I was serious, which is too hilarious, and so obviously a pitch for more publicity from a woman who just loves attention.

The emails, which I'm happy to provide to anyone, are obviously happy, lighthearted banter.

Danielle Ecuyer is an independent candidate for a prime seat that may help to decide whether or not John Howard returns to power. Malcolm Turnbull has a close relationship with a number of key journalists and opinionists for The Australian.

Danielle Ecuyer is battling both the Labor and Liberal parties massive publicity machinery. Of course she's going to love any attention, or headlines, she can get. Overington knows this.

MediaWatch claims :

Ms Ecuyer tells us she never discussed who she would be preferencing with Caroline Overington.

Despite Overington's attempts to downplay the content of the e-mails, the key e-mail cited doesn't sound like a big joke, at least not in isolation. It sounds exactly like what Ecuyer is now claiming. Overington says she is "happy" to provide the e-mails to anyone, but doesn't quote from them in her column to back up her claims. Why? Here's the key e-mail that sparked the controversy :

"Please preference Malcolm (Turnbull). It would be such a good front-page story. Also, he'd be a loss to the parliament and George (Newhouse) - forgive me - would be no gain."

Not a laugh to be seen.

When MediaWatch asked Caroline Overington why she asked Danielle Ecuyer to "please prefence Malcolm", the journalist responded :

"I would say journalists use a range of different ways to get their stories."

"I would say I didn’t ask her to send her preferences to any candidate."

When asked what the words "please preference Malcolm" meant, she replied :

"It could be a way of getting a story from her."

Or a way of gettting Ecuyer to preference Malcolm Turnbull, who desperately needs preferences from independents like Ecuyer to win.

Despite all that, Overington should be more concerned with how her editor at The Australian describes her :

"Ms Overington is a colour writer."

Overington is not a "colour" writer. Here's how The Australian newspaper proudly describes her :

Caroline Overington is a senior writer and columnist with The Australian. She is a two-time winner of the Walkley Award for investigative jouralism (2004 and 2006) and last year received the Sir Keith Murdoch Award for Excellence in Journalism...

Overington also wrote an excellent, comprehensive and highly praised book on the AWB scandal. She has become caught up in this low-level scandal because she was pursuing a story, one that she believed would have made the front page of The Australian.

Faced with embarrassing headlines and growing controversy, The Australian's editor does not leap to Overington's defence, he writes her off as something much less than a serious investigative journalist.

Her editor's flippant dismissal of her talents, in the end, will probably be more damaging to Overington's reputation than the "joke" e-mails that started the controversy.

The Australian's senior editors were furious earlier in the year when bloggers referred to the newspaper as the 'Government Gazette'. Controversies like this don't help much to dispel that reputation of Rupert Murdoch's national newspaper working hard, in print and behind the scenes, to ensure the Coalition government wins the coming federal election.

Nor do front page stories like this one, from Dennis Shanahan, where he manages to bury the lead, at least three times, when he all but totally dismisses the devastating news that John Howard's government is going backwards, once again, in the latest Newspoll, less than two weeks out from election day.

Overington Slams Peter Garrett For Claiming He Was "Only Joking" When His "We'll Change It All" Quote Hit The Headlines

Tim Blair Just Can't Stop Lying

Tim Blair continues to cement his reputation as the new Piers Akerman by lying through his teeth, making utterly false and defamatory claims and trying to smear his critics.

In the below post from his blog, Blair first insinuates that I tried to con him into running false information on his blog, and then he flat out claims that I have done so in the past.

Tim Blair is wrong in both cases, and he knows it. He admitted that he knew he was wrong, but he refuses to post a correction. Every day the below post remains uncorrected is another day he shows what a desperate liar he has become.




Blair also persists with his fantasy that I've contacted his blog under a fake name, or fake names, repeatedly. I've asked him to supply proof to back up his accusations, but he refuses to do so, and has refused to do so for more than 18 months.

In regards to his Friday post, claiming twice that I've tried to encourage him to post fake or hoax stories, he really outdoes his previous efforts with this pathetic behaviour. He knows what he claims isn't true, but he clearly wants it to be true.

From Blair's Friday post.

Someone called “DM” emails:

Tim, Stumbled across this item in the Journal of Geoclimatic Studies...new report pans man-made CO2 as the cause of global warming...bad news for Dr Karl? Only if msm actually reports it, I guess.

The report is bogus. As for “DM”, it could be - let’s take a wild guess - that he is popular internet celebrity Darryl Mason. Multi-identitied Darryl has tried this crap before.

What makes these accusations from Blair particularly hilarious is that I wrote a story on the hoax global warming report on this blog, the day before, pointing out that it was a hoax and that someone was trying to sucker in global warming skeptics with it. That story is here :

Who Is Hoaxing The Global Warming Skeptics?

The story helping to expose the hoax report, and questioning the motives of the person responsible, went online the day before Blair posted his absurd accusation that I had probably sent him news of the report, trying to pass it off as the real thing.

The story I wrote on the hoax report, on Your New Reality, was picked up by a number of international websites with formidable reputations as global warming skeptics.

Tim Blair has my e-mail address and could have easily contacted me to ask if I had sent him that e-mail under the 'DM' moniker. But he didn't do that. He just posted the accusations on his site, and now he knows the truth he refuses to post a correction.

His credibility continues to sink into the same pit that his News Limited colleagues Andrew Bolt and Piers Akerman already dwell in. They are pulling him down with them.

No wonder his Australian readership is peeling away.


A few years back, Blair saw himself as a kind of gatekeeper on the Australian political blog front. When a new blog showed up, and started to get some attention, Blair would go out of his way to try and discredit the blogger (usually screaming "Liar!" with little to back up his claims) on his site. He then left it to his mostly American desperately unhinged right wing commenters to unleash hails of abuse, threats of violence and usually disgusting and extremely defamatory claims about the blogger's sexual preferences, their beliefs and the behaviour of the blogger's parents.

Some of the new bloggers were so shocked by the foul language, accusations and threats that were hurled their way, and filled their comment boards, thanks to Blair, that they were often forced to close their comments or chose to give up blogging.

So much for Tim Blair's helping to build Australia's blogging community.

Even a woman running a small coffee shop near Byron Bay found herself on the receiving end of vile vitriol and puerile abuse from Blair's readers after being singled out by Blair for mentioning that Philip Adams had stopped by her shop.

When the few on Blair's comment boards ever dared to suggest that the some new blogger Blair had singled out for rigorous attention deserved a fair go, and that Blair was being a bully, they too would then be subjected to the same kind of abuse and then often banned from the comment boards for being "a troll".

You would expect that as now Blair has been joyously welcomed into the Australian right wing commentariat elite, and in the process has picked up a gig as the opinion editor of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, that he would hold himself to a higher standard of journalistic professionalism and ethics than to post pure lies as fact, and then refuse to post corrections.

But you'd be wrong.

Blair is showing signs of extreme stress and desperation as he tries to cope with the reality of the rapidly shrinking Australian readership at his blog, despite it being granted the equivalent of a large strip ad across Blair's full page Saturday column in the Daily Telegraph each and every week.

Where only a year or so ago Blair could lay claim to having the biggest readership of all the Australian political blogs, he is now being flogged by the likes of Poll Bludger and Blogocracy, to name only two, and relies on regular links from Andrew Bolt's blog, through the hugely viewed Herald Sun site, to stem the tide of his falling Australian readership.

Blair has now adopted the exact same unethical tactics that he once so loftily and enthusiastically accused so many mainstream "Lefty" journalists and opinion writers of repeatedly using to attack or defame their critics.

But Tim Blair was an independent blogger back then, with fire in his soul.

Now he's just another mainstream sellout, gasping for attention.

More Gay Men Would Rather See Howard Nude Than Rudd

Perhaps the Australian Associated Press figures this is the kind of light-hearted story that allows them to drop the serious tone. Well, you'd hope that's the excuse for this story intro :

Twice as many voters want to see a nude Kevin Rudd than John Howard with his gear off, according to another opinion poll sure to worry the Prime Minister.

John Howard worries about how many Australians want to see him naked? Well take a wild guess and presume that Howard is probably more concerned right now by nine solid months of polls that have shouted, week in and week out, 'You Are Not Going To Win The Election No Matter What You Do Now'.

But all hope is not lost in the 'nude stakes' for Howard. He's a firm winner with the gay vote :

...18 per cent of men want to see the PM in the buff, compared to only 14 per cent for Mr Rudd.

Could Howard find a new career in retirement as a gay icon?

Howard scored only limp interest from the all important Yoof Vote :

Among 18- to 24-year-olds, Mr Howard fared even worse, with an estimated 153,000 keen for an eyeful, compared to Rudd's 845,000.

The federal election campaign has now become so intensely boring that this will probably be the most interesting Howard Vs Rudd story of the day.

From ED Day :

It's 5am. The sun's barely up and the heat is already becoming intense. No rain during the night. The city is wrapped in smoke. The fires in the suburbs and on the north side of the harbour are still burning. I can see the smoking ruins of dozens of houses across the water.

There's so many trees over there, small forests and national park lands packed with dried leaves, wild grass, dead branches. The fires could burn for weeks, months, until they run out of fuel.

If I thought it would work, I'd kill one of the lambs as a sacrifice to the Gods just to get some rain. Not just rain to put out the fires. The veggie gardens up on the roof are starting to wilt. The water drums up there are getting scary-low.

I've got enough water stashed away in my room, and other rooms of this hotel, to last me and Maggie and the other shut-ins three and a bit weeks. But that's only if I stop watering the vegetable gardens and fruit trees.


The above is an excerpt from the latest chapter of the online novel ED Day.

Go Here To Read More

Refuse To Shake PM's Hand? Get Questioned By Police

Calls Of "Scumbag!" Follow Howard On Suburban Mall Visit

Not the best day out on the campaign trail for the prime minister :

* A woman was knocked unconscious and lay unattended at Howard's feet in a shopping mall, after she was 'bowled over' in the rush of media, security and civilians surrounding the prime minister. Wonder if she'll get a "sorry" and an apology?

* At the same shopping mall in Penrith, Howard's progress was marked by waves of locals shouting "You're a disgrace" and "scumbag!" Malls in Penrith are supposed to be the heartland of Howard's 'battlers'. During the last election he was greeted like a hero in Penrith shopping malls. Not a good sign.

* A man who refused to shake the prime minister's hand, saying "I'm not a fan" was "questioned by police, before being allowed to leave". A public show of dissent scores you a quick questioning by police?

* Howard was rigorously questioned by locals on the interest rate rise, why he had 'lied' to them during the last election campaign about keeping interest rates low, why he had hit them with Workchoices and other subjects less appealing for the PM than a bunch of shoppers "Good on you, John!" The shouts of approval were apparently few and far between today.

* Howard was reduced to quoting from the 'conservative' mind of Mark Latham, as he continued his desperate search for anything that he could use to attack Rudd leviathan.

A photo of the suburban shopping mall woman, knocked to the ground, can be seen here.

There's something about that image that should make Howard extremely nervous. One of his cherished 'battlers' lying prone on the floor of a shopping centre, unconscious, the prime minister standing over her, unable to help, not knowing how to help her.

In comparison, Rudd's morning was boring.

Daily Telegraph Brands Kevin Rudd 'Gay'

12 Hours Later, Dirty Tricks Headline Wiped From Website

A few days ago, we mentioned that we were getting e-mail tips that the Sydney Daily Telegraph had a big 'scoop' on Kevin Rudd planned for its Friday front page. The rumours ran that Liberal dirt units had uncovered something allegedly dodgy about the way Kevin Rudd came to purchase his current home in 1994.

So here it is, Friday, and what's the big 'scoop' in the Daily Telegraph?

All we could find in the online edition at 1.20am was this incredible headline :




Kevin Rudd, John Howard's election rival, is 'gay'?

If true, it would certainly be a scoop indeed.

Trouble is, the story under that headline mentions nothing about Howard's election rival being 'gay'. It doesn't mention the word 'gay' at all.

Instead it's a story on John Howard and Julia Gillard waffling on about Howard's Monty Python-esque explanation of how saying "sorry" for rising interest rates is not the same as giving an apology for rising interest rates.

So what's going on here?

Is this a dirty tricks attempt by the Murdoch media to plant a thought-seed in peoples' minds that Kevin Rudd might be 'gay'?

What other explanation could there be for such a bizarre and unsubstantiated headline on a news site visited by tens of thousands of people this morning? A headline that has now been indexed on GoogleNews?

The headline is not a typo. The intention and headline is clear, despite what editors will later claim. And the accusation is all over the Daily Telegraph site. Here's how it appears on the 'National News' page :




Here's how it appears in the 'Also in News' listing on the main Daily Telegraph site (its second appearance on the main page) :



The aim of such a headline is clear : to spark speculation about Kevin Rudd's sexuality, and force him into a position where he has to issue denials.

This is very similar to the 'make him deny it' media campaign against Mark Latham in the 2004 election, where the Labor leader was forced to repeatedly deny that there was a saucy video tape of his bachelor party doing the rounds.

The Daily Telegraph and its sister Melbourne paper The Herald Sun were all over that one as well. There was no video tape, but Latham spent days in the final weeks of the election campaign denying it existed, or that his bachelor party was anything less than respectable. It didn't matter that the allegation was utter fiction, it planted seeds of doubt in voters' minds.

Clearly, the intention of the Daily Telegraph here is to plant a few seeds of doubt about Rudd.

The last two weeks of the election campaign, as far as some branches of the media is concerned and if this odious effort from the Daily Telegraph is anything to go by, is going to get extremely nasty.

UPDATE : The PM Not Sorry, Election Rival 'Gay' headline was removed from the front page of the online Daily Telegraph site around 11am today. It's still running, without explanation, on the National News page and the DT's Election 2007 page.

UPDATE II : The PM Not Sorry, Election Rival 'Gay' headline is now gone from all Daily Telegraph online pages. The complete x-ing of that headline happened at around 1pm. Same story, but brand new headline :



An e-mailer who claims to work at the Daily Telegraph, but sent a message during his/her lunchbreak from an internet cafe, claims journalist Malcolm Farr "went ballistic" when he heard how this story was spreading.

But not when he saw the original headline on his story?


Go Here For The Latest Stories From 'The Orstrahyun'

Go Here For The Latest Stories From 'Your New Reality'

Go Here To Read Darryl Mason's Online Novel ED DAY

1600 Mothers Delay Births To Get Government 'Baby Bonus' Payments

This takes the idea of 'birth control' into bizarre new territory.

Over the past few years, more than 1600 pregnant women have purposely delayed the birth of their children so they would qualify for thousands of dollars in government payments.

Treasurer Peter Costello urged Australians to get busy breeding, and made sure they were rewarded for their contribution to the growth of the population. It's hard to believe that no-one in the government foresaw that making payments worth thousands of dollars only applicable after a certain date would lead to this kind of behaviour :

A huge number of expecting mothers delayed births in order to qualify for the increased Baby Bonus payments in July last year, a new study has revealed.

And many more soon-to-be mothers will do the same for the next increase in 2008, researchers from the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University warn.

The researchers estimated that more than 600 births were delayed until after Baby Bonus payments rose to $4000 a pop in July last year.

According to the Born (again) on the First of July study, mothers refused induced births or caesareans until the July 1, 2006.

Researchers claim more the births of more than 1000 babies were delayed when the scheme was introduced two years ago.

The Baby Bonus scheme was introduced in July 2004, with mothers receiving a lump sum payment of $3000.

Doctors and health workers have been concerned about the number of mothers delaying birth in order to receive the payments, citing health concerns for both woman and child.

You can't blame the mothers. Some two million Australians (ten per cent) now live below the poverty line. If giving birth on June 28 got you nothing, but giving birth on July 1 scored you $3000 or $4000, money essential for the very expensive business of raising children, why wouldn't a mother delay the birth of the child if they were able to do so?

"Psychotic" Blue Poles Painting The Work Of 'CIA Mind Control Programmers'



In an effort to give some unbiased publicity to the smaller parties contesting the upcoming federal election, the Courier Mail reports today :

A party contesting the federal election believes a painting hanging in the National Gallery is undermining our collective ability to think straight.

The Citizens Electoral Council, with a 16-strong team in Queensland, endorses a pamphlet called Children of Satan III: The Sexual Congress For Cultural Fascism.

The pamphlet alleges the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" was a CIA-backed group which sponsored modern art to undermine "the population's ability to think".

It's a most curious choice of all the platforms and positions the Citizens Electoral Council takes for the Courier Mail to single out this one. They couldn't be trying to make the CEC look like a bunch of nutters, could they? The 'Children Of Satan III' pamphlet was released more than three and a half years ago.

More up to date is the CEC's opposition to the 'cult' of global warming. Strangely, Rupert Murdoch's Courier Mail makes no mention of the CEC's consistent railing against the global warming "fraud", a platform that has brought their website plenty of new traffic recently, and represents a position strongly echoed by two Murdoch journalists, Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt.

On their opposition to Blue Poles, the CEC prefers students to be taught about classical paintings, not modern art. Here's what the CEC has to say about the Congress or Cultural Freedom (CCF) :

"...it is a CIA-funded cultural warfare unit sponsoring hideous modernist and postmodernist "art" against the Classical tradition in art. This irrational garbage called "art" is used as a way of undermining the population's ability to think. One notorious example of this cultural warfare was the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom's support for the psychotic "Blue Poles" painting in the National Gallery of Australia by Jackson Pollock, a stalwart of the CCF.

A classical education must start at Pre-School level and henceforth be encouraged and funded throughout all schooling levels, universities and government media—radio and television alike. The CEC will adequately fund classical orchestras, actors, painters, sculptors and indeed all artists embracing the classical tradition.

Over time, this education will generate a culture of beauty, allowing us to understand the true nature of mankind—that we are creative beings inspired by ideas—not animals obsessed by instantaneous pleasures. Our suicide rates, crime and drug culture would necessarily reduce and as such we will witness a corresponding economic renaissance.

They could have just said they don't like a lot of modern art.

Plenty would agree with them on that.

How Truly Desperate Have Howard & Friends Become?

Now Fighting For The Rights Of Gay Couples

This doesn't undo a solid decade of intolerant, prejudiced and sometimes downright nasty anti-gay behaviour from Howard & Friends, but it's a start :

The Coalition has relented to pressure and will grant to gay and lesbian couples the same rights on Commonwealth public sector superannuation as heterosexual couples.

Malcolm Turnbull, who is under considerable political pressure from the sizeable gay community in his seat of Wentworth, flagged the changes in a speech to a gay and lesbian business leaders function last night. They will be confirmed today.

While the Coalition will not grant gay couples de facto status, or adopt any of the other 58 recommendations outlined in a human rights report in June, it will allow, if re-elected, interdependent gay couples to share each other's public pensions and super benefits - as heterosexual couples do.

Labor has already promised to institute all 58 changes, saying it was unfair to discriminate financially against people on the basis of them being gay.

In 2004 such discrimination was abolished in relation to private sector superannuation.

Mr Turnbull was unsuccessful in pushing the changes through cabinet and further deliberation was postponed until after the election. But with Mr Turnbull in trouble in his seat, and his Labor rival, George Newhouse, supporting the change, the Coalition has made the promise now.

Naturally, the big change in attitude and policy comes directly as a result of plunging opinion polls on the likelihood of Turnbull holding onto Wentworth.

It's amazing how open-minded Coalition politicians can suddenly become when they're facing Howard-branded "annihilation" on election day.

Armoured Vehicles For Australian Police

Federal Police Transforming Into Paramilitary

With the announcement that Australian Federal Police will be buying a fleet of armoured vehicles, they are well on their way to becoming a paramilitary force.

The Australian Federal Police currently has some 320 officers stationed in the Solomon Islands, Afghanistan, Cyprus, Nauru, East Timor, the Sudan and Cambodia.

The AFP are primarily concerned with counter-terrorism and peace-keeping, but have become engaged in armed conflict in East Timor and the Solomon Islands.

Even though the AFP is currently preparing to buy armoured vehicles, most likely including the sort of heavily armoured vehicles used by Australian Defence Force soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, no official announcement on the cost, number or type of vehicles that will be purchased has been made.

The AFP is now doubling its international forces to some 1200 officers, at a cost of more than half a billion dollars.

Naturally, we are told the AFP's armoured vehicles would not be used domestically, but of course if prolonged conflicts in Australia or internal disruptions, for example an unstoppable flood of asylum seekers or climate change refugees, demanded it, the armoured vehicles will be deployed.

Australians are likely to see their federal police in war-zone recognisable armoured vehicles towards the end of 2008 when training is underway, and they are rolled out for the media. There will be plenty of occasions for the media to cover the AFP tooling around in their new armoured vehicles so we quickly get used to the sight of seeing our federal police in 'bomb-proof' Landrovers and mini-tanks, on our city streets.

The Australian Federal Police seemed pretty well convinced that chaos is likely to break out in the Solomon Islands and East Timor, as well as other Pacific nations, for many years to come. Hence the need for 'riot-ready' vehicles covered in light-to-heavy armour.

More On This Story Here

What Does The Daily Telegraph Have In Its Friday 'Scoop' Bucket For Rudd?

'HouseGate' - Rudd May Have Scored Big Discount When He Purchased Family Home

When I first heard that the Daily Telegraph is preparing a huge front page 'scoop' for its Friday paper that is expected to do some damage to Kevin Rudd's credibility, I thought it might be photos of Rudd with his face buried in a stripper's breasts at that infamous New York City strip club.

But the scoop, if the e-mails flowing in can be relied on, won't be anywhere near as dramatic, or damaging, as that kind of imagery might have proven to be.

The story goes that the Liberal Party's dirt units have dug up records relating to a house purchase Rudd and his wife made in 1994. The house the Rudd family now lives in.

The big 'scoop' then, supposedly, is that Rudd, or his wife, managed to pick up the house at a substantially discounted price. Someone did them a big favour.

Pretty Kruddy, but how damaging? It depends on how cheap they got the house, or probably more importantly, who they got the house from, or who negotiated the deal.

It may be a one day wonder, and it will probably stretch through the weekend, if the public interest level is high enough and if another bigger story doesn't break the same day.

The Liberals may be able to get some mileage out of claiming that Rudd knew the 'HouseGate' story was coming, and this is why he announced policy earlier this week on helping young families to buy their first homes.

Then again, if Rudd's people know this story is coming, and it certainly appears that they do, then they've had days to prepare something big themselves for Friday to try and steal away the media's attention.

And, of course, when it comes to discounted housing, it's hard to go past a big photo of John Howard living the high life in Kirribilli House, where he lives for free, billing the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the extensive wine cellar, renovations and general upkeep he and his wife demand so the house remains spiffy for the many grand parties they throw for their wealthy friends.

Glasshouse. Stones. Throwing.

It should be easy for Ruddites to counter the 'HouseGate' scandal, if it even proves to have some momentum, by blasting away at Howard for seizing and occupying Kirribilli House and denying its use to a long list of charities who had previously made great use of its beautiful location and expansive lawns for fund-raising activities.

And 1994 is a long time ago. If the dirt units want to rip Rudd apart, they clearly need something far more recent. 'HouseGate' won't be the last of the dirt unit leaks to the Murdoch media and you can presume they have something far worse for the last week of the election campaign.

The media will have to be on their toes, however, to make sure they don't fall for the ridiculous 'bachelor party tape' bullshit they were so easily suckered into during Mark Latham's run at the Lodge.

It'll be very interesting to see how accurate the e-mailers are to the truth about the Friday Telegraph's Bucket On Rudd story, how much impact the story will turn out to have, and how effectively Rudd's team will be able to counter its appearance.

If the 'HouseGate' scenario mentioned above turns out to be close to the 'scoop', we will also know that Rudd has friends inside the Daily Telegraph who are leaking pre-publication news of damaging stories in the hope that the full impact of a surprise front page story will be weakened by 'rumours' floated on blogs, like this one, in the days before the big story 'breaks'.

Australian Soldiers Cheaper Than Robots

Troops In Afghanistan Denied High-Tech Bomb Detecting Bots

An Australian soldier in Afghanistan, Sergeant Michael Lyddiard, had his arm and eye blown away over the weekend when a roadside bomb detonated only a metre from his face. He was flown to a medical base in Germany and members of his family have now joined him there. Some 28 Australian soldiers have been wounded in Afghanistan since 2001, two have died.

On that back of the news of Sergeant Lyddiard's injuries comes the shocking revelation that Australian troops have been denied the kind of bomb-detecting robot technology that has saved the lives of countless American and NATO troops in Afghanistan :

...the Howard Government cancelled work in 2004 to develop robotic technology capable of dealing with roadside bombs.

The aim of the program was to develop robotic technology to counter IEDs. Questions are now being asked inside Defence as to why Australian soldiers and explosive detector dogs are being used to render roadside bombs safe when other NATO forces use advanced robotics.

Thousands of remote-control mine and IED detectors have been rushed to Afghanistan and Iraq by the US military, with more than 5000 in operation last April, compared with 150 in 2004.

The ADF, however, relies mainly on sniffer dogs and perilous manual defusing, such as the job Sgt Lyddiard was attempting when the device exploded in front of him.

The robot plan, known by its army designation Project Land 133, was shut down by former defence minister Robert Hill.

A spokesman for Defence Minister Brendan Nelson yesterday admitted the project had been shut down but said the decision was taken on the advice of the army.

Brendan "We Didn't Do It" Nelson keeps up his usual standards of buck-passing.

What's happened to the endless promises made by John Howard and defence ministers Hill and Nelson that Australian soldiers could always count on being given the very best equipment during overseas deployments?

The grim truth is that even though the Australian government spends almost $1 billion a year fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our troops are forced to continually cut corners and often have to make do with inferior or substandard equipment.

Robot development programs are expensive, and number crunchers have clearly worked out that it's cheaper to put soldiers' lives at risk than to spend the money needed to build and deploy bomb-detecting robots.

It's a miracle the casualties in Afghanistan, and Iraq, have not been higher.

Garrett & Rudd Betrayal Of Green Vote Comes At Heavy Price

How can Labor lose 'green' votes to Howard And Friends? Easy. Betray the hardcore over issues like Kyoto and opposing pulp mills and watch their anger and dissent spread amongst the waverers like wild fire.

Some amazing stats drawn from the latest NewsPoll :

* In only four weeks, Labor has lost a big fat ten points in its lead over Howard And Friends on the question of which party would best handle the environment.

* 22% of 'Howard Huggers' would rather Peter Garrett be environment minister than Malcolm Turnbull. Yes, really.

* 45% of voters believe Garrett would be a 'more capable' environment minister than Turnbull at 37%. But there's still a whopping 21% of voters who believe neither are 'more capable' or remain uncommitted.

From The Australian :

Labor's strong lead over the Coalition on handling the environment - about 15 points since Mr Rudd became leader and appointed former rock singer and conservationist leader Mr Garrett as his environment spokesman - has shrunk dramatically.

Last weekend, when asked which party would better handle the environment, 29per cent said Labor, 24per cent said the Coalition and 27per cent said "someone else".

In June last year the ALP and the Coalition were equal on 28per cent and "someone else" almost the same on 26per cent. But after Mr Rudd became leader, the ALP's support jumped to 41per cent, the Coalition dropped to 24per cent and "someone else" registered 15per cent.

Labor is going soft on one of its biggest issues. And they're paying for it.

Think about it. Peter Garrett is losing votes to Howard And Friends on the environment.

Howard is now actively trying to portray himself as being a successful and reliable custodian of the Australian environment, a conservationist and the person who can realistically handle the complex environmental, social and economic issues surrounding climate change.

Incredibly, it seems like Howard The Greenie is now starting to become a more believable proposition to more and more voters. If Howard thinks there are votes in it, you might even see him lying down in front of some old-growth forest clearing bulldozers. Okay, maybe not. But you will see him standing with his hands on his hips staring up at a rainforest canopy sometime soon. Or handling some wide-eyed trembling little marsupial.

Turnbull, meanwhile, is quickly on his way to becoming as popular as Tony Abbott. That is, as popular as slipping in someone else's warm vomit on a hot summer evening.


And seeing as we haven't done this yet, we'll quote some lyrics from a Garrett-credited Midnight Oil song, one of their best, 'Pictures' :

I just want to talk through paradise
I just want to see that clear clear ight
Don't want to be a member of a species that's deceasing
Keep on making those promises that they aren't keeping

Don't sit around in silence you don't need a licence
It's moving in a hurry
there's no need to worry
We're really going to change it the critical mass approaches
I can almost hear it

The video for 'Pictures', from 1985, which ends with a quote from Dr Bob Brown follows :





Garrett can't afford to forget the messages that helped make him such a popular and important leader of the 'green movement'. Claiming he can achieve more by working within the system, rather than pushing against it from the outside, only cuts through for so long. He's losing the faith of green voters. Indeed, a critical mass approaches...

How The Garrett 'Gaffe' Will Become The Message Of Positive Change

Howard Prepares To Say Goodbye Bennelong

Three more weeks to go until we learn whether the Rudd opposition has succeeded in pulling off one of the more incredible election victories, and political psychological warfare operations (against the government facing defeat), in Australian history.

John Howard must by now truly understand what Kevin Rudd meant when he said he was going to mess with the prime minister's head. Rudd is 'psy-oping' Howard into a state of barely concealed terror. Howard knows he is going to lose, and it will be impossible for him to hide the fact that he knows this in his heart.

There will plenty of pouting, lots of whining and bucket loads of begging.

The Rudd "Me-Too" strategy is likely to go down as one of the more brilliant election strategies in decades. Rudd has managed to avoid nearly every wedge that Howard And Friends had planned to isolate and crucify him with. It's absurd to read Howard huggers like Piers Akerman and Andrew Dolt claiming that Rudd is running a dirty campaign. Well, why wouldn't they? They learned from watching John Howard, the Yoda of dirty politics, for a decade. They know every one of his tricks, and now they're using them all against him. And it's working.

Rudd has managed to not make this election so much a choice between Labor and the Coalition, but a choice between Howard and Rudd. And Rudd is just far too popular for the prime minister to beat right now. The majority of the Australian public don't hate Howard, but they don't want to vote him back into office. They want some new blood, or Rudd.

That may change in the next 22 or 23 days, but it's impossible to imagine how.

The Liberals are viewing Peter Garrett's supposedly serious admission that everything will change, as far as Labor agreeing with Liberal policies once they win the election, as "Gold!"

They think they've found the hammer they can use to crack Labor skulls.

This week, we will see the same old, tired, boring parade of Costello, Abbott, Howard, Downer and Joe Hockey trying to Fear Up the Australian public over what Labor will do when they win.

"It's all a big con!" they'll shout and whine. "You're being fooled!" "They'll turn Australia into a Union Socialist Utopia and you'll lose your job and your home!"

It won't make much difference. Not to Rudd's chances of winning anyway. But unless the Liberals have plenty of good, exciting and positive news to fill in the gaps around all the worthless Fearing, they'll find they're doing more damage to themselves than Garrett has done to Labor.

The media will lose interest by Monday night in Garrett's 'gaffe'. It doesn't help that the person most seriously pumping the story, radio jock Steve Price, has a wife employed by a federal government minister as 'an advisor'. Seriously, where is this guy's credibility?

Price thinks he has delivered the scoop of the election, the revelation that will turn the tide for Howard And Friends. Good luck with that, Steve. Garrett has already all but neutralised his own words. The interest rate rise will rip Garrett's 'gaffe' from the headlines and make it into yesterday's news.

In fact, Howard already has done exactly that :

To be handed such a stick with which to beat Labor was an unexpected windfall. But the PM knew where to draw the line. "(Are) you saying that a political party should outline everything they're going to do in the next term of government if they are re-elected?" Howard was asked in Darwin. "No, no, I'm not, I'm not saying that," he said quickly, seeing the familiar trap. Before the last election, he didn't signal WorkChoices...

It's hard to imagine anything more crushing for Howard than heading into the final half of the election campaign with the biggest selling newspapers in Australia headlining how he is going to lose his Bennelong seat to Maxine McKew. The polls are grim all round for Howard and the Liberals. How can they turn it around? What will work now? What have they got left?

The Murdoch media is running wide today with the story that John Howard is renovating his all but abandoned suburban Sydney home in preparation for his departure from his 11 year long occupation of Kirribilli House. Millions of Australians will read or hear about this, and most will probably think : 'The old bugger's already given up.'

Howard And Friends now have to get to election day without looking like they are heading to a funeral.

Howard, his ministers, his advisors, his 'huggers' in the media, can't believe what is happening. How did this all go so very wrong? How did those hopeless Labor union patsies get on top of them so quickly, so effectively and how do they keep winning the week?

Even John Howard's infamous morning walks are turning against him. For the next three weeks, every morning he steps out into the early sunlight, he will be ambushed by comedy teams, hecklers, protesters and bizarrely costumed attention seekers. As Michelle Grattan points out, as bad and as embarrassing as the morning walks have already become for Howard, he can't just stop them now :

The Liberals might be better off if the walk was scrapped before it gets entirely out of hand. But presumably the PM thinks he needs the exercise. More to the point, ditching it now, after so many years, would be akin to throwing out a major policy. The significance would take up hours of airtime, acres of print.

Garrett's gaffe, or blatant honesty, will excite them for a few days, but it won't carry them all the way through the next three weeks. And Garrett has already found a way to spin the 'gaffe' to Labor's advantage :

"Notwithstanding what was said, there is no doubt things would change under a Labor government," he said.

"We would launch an education revolution. We would get rid of WorkChoices. We would deliver a high-speed broadband network across Australia. We will end the blame game on hospitals."

His comment was about a change "for the better" that would come with a Labor government. "It's very clear to me that the changes we refer to here are the positive changes that Rudd Labor could bring forward … across a range of issues that count to the people of Australia," he said.

Garrett looks like he has already killed the controversy, or at least turned it to Labor's advantage, before the Liberals can even get started on it.

Every time the Howard cheer squad bring up Garrett's "everything will change once we get in" quote, Labor can counter it with exactly what Garrett said above.

They can now dare the Liberals to run with some full-blown Fearing on the Garrett quote, and get their positive, future-looking message even more air time.

The Rudd-approved messing with Howard's head continues, with gusto.

90,000 Australian Soldiers To Be First On National DNA Database

'Voluntary' DNA Samples, Then Mandatory

Australian Government, Military Prepares For 'Rising Death Rates' In War Zones

Australian soldiers, all 90,000 of them, will be called on to voluntarily supply DNA blood samples to go on a database, reportedly to make the process of ID-ing troops killed in warzones like Iraq and Afghanistan much quicker.

Isn't that what dog tags are for?

And what happened to the ID chips that were being discussed in Australian military circles in 2005?

Obviously, having DNA samples of every Australian soldier provides a hell of a lot more information than dog tags or an ID chip would. Blood and DNA in a database means Australian soldiers can be evaluated for the likelihood of developing illnesses that may not be related to their tours in war zones. That would obviously help later on when it comes time for the Defence Department to dispute medical compensation claims from veterans.

More on this here :

The collection plan will be voluntary in its initial phase because laws prevent soldiers from being forced to give DNA samples against their will.

The newspaper says Australian Defence Force tender documents make it clear that military chiefs want the DNA scheme to be rolled out, and for it to eventually be mandatory.

"In its mature form, it is envisaged that the DNA repository will hold samples from all ADF personnel, with the provision of a blood sample being obligatory," the tender document reads.

The soldiers' DNA is likely to form the basis for a national DNA database of all citizens.

School children will be the next in line to supply 'voluntary' samples of DNA and blood, with the reason given that having such genetic information on a national database would mean children would be more quickly indentified in the event of an emergency or tragedy.

About A. Bolt

Thanks to the dozens of readers who've forwarded me the A. Bolt column supposedly claiming 'We've Won The War In Iraq'. It won't get a link or a quote here. At least, not yet. Why bother? It's not the first time he's made such claims. 'We're winning the war in Iraq' falls from Bolt's stubby fingers about every six to nine months.

Why add to the cavalcade of genuine disgust and outrage from hundreds of people who've already commented on his blog and on the news.com.au site? The disgust quotient currently runs at about 98%, many of whom genuinely can't seem to comprehend that a mainstream newspaper journalist/columnist has actually said that 100,000 or more Iraqi civilian deaths don't matter because Saddam may have killed more.

Of course they're disgusted. Who wouldn't be?

Imagine Bolt's outrage if a Sydney Morning Herald columnist said 6 million dead Jews under Hitler didn't matter because Stalin probably killed 20 million people?

Bolt's a cheap huckster, who knows that the more outrage he manifests, the more hits his blogs and columns will get and the higher the ad revenue take will be as the comments pile up. That's all he's interested in. No doubt he probably now gets a cut of the online ad action.

Your anger and outrage at Bolt's justification for the deaths of more than 100,000 innocent Iraqis is worth about two cents in ad revenue, for every comment you post at his site.

That's how much he values your opinion, and feelings.

Bolt knows he was one of the key and highly influential supporters of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. He knows that he must take some of the blame for Australia's involvement. He knows that he was used, and willingly, by Howard operatives in an attempt to discredit Andrew Wilkie, a brave Australian who destroyed his own career in an attempt to get the truth out about the awful lies that was leading Australia into an attack on the innocent people of Iraq.

No wonder Bolt felt the need to disappear for a few days after writing such pro-genocidal garbage.

Howard Cashes In On Soldier's Death

Claims 'My Burden' Is The "Greatest To Carry"

John Howard and Kevin Rudd will both attend the West Australian funeral of Mathew Locke today, the Australian SAS soldier killed in Afghanistan by the Taliban.

The classy thing to do, of course, would be for Howard to say something like "I'm going to the funeral to support the family and give my condolences. Beyond that, I'd rather not comment any further, thank you."

But this is John Howard, and he is facing a staggering defeat in three weeks time at the federal elections.

So we get this instead :

"I think about it a lot because I'm the person in the end who sends men and women into battle," Mr Howard told Sky News.

"I feel a very direct responsibility for any death or injury that occurs on the field of battle and it's the greatest burden that anybody has to carry and discharge."

Well, it's not quite as large as the burden that is carried by the families and children of the dead and physically and mentally wounded veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, who will have to deal with the fallout of Howard's decisions to go to war for the rest of their lives, including such things as alcoholism, PTSD and suicide, while Howard gets to retire and take a well-paid board position with an American defence contractor, or a $100,000 a gig speaking tour of NeoCon think tanks.

Howard forgot to mention that it was his government who tried to cheat Australian war veterans out of more than $500 million in much needed support and entitlements, until an extremely brave and honourable whistleblower exposed the disgusting scam and forced Howard to give the veterans the money.

So much for the "greatest burden" he has "to carry".

Howard Praises His Health Minister For Showing "Backbone" After His Shocking Attack On A Dying Man

Abbott Admits He Only Decided To Apologise After He Saw The Blitz Of Outraged Headlines

This is John Howard's idea of a politician who has "backbone."

His health minister, Tony Abbott, launches a shocking personal attack on a dying man - "just because a person is sick doesn't necessarily mean that he is pure of heart in all things," Abbot said. He knows his words are going to hit the headlines, but he doesn't care. Abbott said what he said for a reason. He knew it would get him in the media the next day where he intended to try and turn up the heat on Labor. It didn't quite work out that way. But was John Howard furious at what Abbott said? Well, no. Did he demand his health minister step down? Of course not.

Howard just waited until Abbott apologised, as he knew he would, and then claimed Abbott was showing backbone because he was brave enough to say sorry for his "mistake."

Of course, Howard then used Abbott's trojan horse into the headlines to demand Labor apologise for something their former leader said five years ago. As though there was a comparison.

It's not a new tactic from Abbott. He's done this time and time again. Insult somebody publicly, and then claim to be so very sorry, and admit how wrong he was, and then fill the rest of every interview he gets, because he is the story of the day, with attacks on the opposition.

It's incredible the media still falls for the same trick. But they do. Which is why Abbott keeps doing it. It works for him. He knows he is one of the most unpopular politicians in Australia, so what's he got to lose? He doesn't have to give a shit, particularly now his government is facing defeat, so he uses his odious and foul attacks for the benefit of his political masters.

Here's Howard openly praising Tony Abbott, less than 48 hours after he attacked a dying man :

"Tony Abbott was man enough to apologise," he said in Melbourne.

"That's a person who's clearly got a backbone no matter how unwise his comments clearly were.

"Mr Abbott has done something that many people in the Labor party guilty of equally unwise comments were not prepared to do."

Naturally, Howard found a way to use his own health minister's attack on a dying man to try and gouge away at the credibility of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.

And they can't understand why more than 60% of Australians are thinking about voting the lot of them out of office?

And here's Tony Abbott admitting in an interview on Lateline that he only decided to apologise after he saw news and television headlines. That is, he decided to apologise once he saw that every media outlet in Australia wanted to talk to him :

Q: What possessed you to launch a personal attack on Bernie Banton? That was bonkers, wasn't it?

TONY ABBOTT: It was a mistake...

Q : Was it bonkers?

TONY ABBOTT: It was an error of judgement on my part, I shouldn't have done it, and as soon as I realised what I had done, I rang him this morning and I apologised.

Q : As soon as you realised what you'd done, that's sometime after you did it, presumably?

TONY ABBOTT: Look, yesterday was...

Q: As soon as someone made you realise...

TONY ABBOTT: No, no, no, no, no, no, look, I didn't need to be told, once I saw it in black and white in the paper the next morning, I though, 'No, this is a problem, I'd better call him up and apologise.'

TONY JONES: It is a problem. The Health Minister insulting a dying man who is trying to get better access to expensive drugs to treat mesothelioma sufferers. But what I want to ask you here, it's such a bad look, did you actually consider resigning your portfolio today?

TONY ABBOTT: I didn't, mate.

Professional Howard government apologist, Andrew Bolt, doesn't go after Abbott for his appalling behaviour. Of course not. Bolt claims that Abbott is "at heart a decent and humble bloke" and showed "great dignity. Bolt attacks Lateline's interviewer, Tony Jones, for not showing Abbott enough courtesy and respect.

BTW. When Tony Abbott snaps "mate" to a journalist, through those tightened lips, with that pure hate storming in his eyes, it's his polite way of saying "you fucker."

More On All This Here

Tony Abbott : What A Scumbag

Tony Abbott : What A Scumbag Part Two

Tony Abbott : What A Scumbag Part Two

It was Labor who was supposed to crack under the pressure of a six week long election campaign. That was John Howard's strategy. And some Labor heavyweights are showing the strain, most notably Peter Garrett in a swirl of confusing messages about climate change. But the public expects newbies, like Garrett, to make mistakes and to occasionally stuff up the message.

But when one federal government minister after another makes a fool of himself in public, you can see that the enormous pressure of six weeks under the microscope is being felt all round.

Earlier in the week it was environment minister Malcolm Turnbull who cracked, when a 'leak' revealed that he all but demanded the Liberals change their concrete stance on refusing to ratify the Kyoto Treaty.

Yesterday it was health minister Tony Abbott who shattered under the strain.

Abbott was late for a televised debate, then lost it and swore on camera. But far worse was the number of disgusting comments about a dying man, and questioned his legitimacy. A man whose chief concern in his last months of life is that those dying from asbestos-related illnesses, like himself, be given access to drugs that will ease their condition and the suffering of their families.

Abbott said Bernie Banton's motivations should be questioned :

"I know Bernie is very sick, but just because a person is sick doesn't necessarily mean that he is pure of heart in all things."

The public reaction was generally one of absolute disgust, and Abbott admitted that he felt no need to apologise until he saw the headlines in the newspapers.

The fact that his disgusting behaviour was the lead news story on most evening news broadcasts would have only convinced further to say he was sorry. But how sorry was Abbott? The fact that he was smirking throughout the apology he gave on camera gives no credence to his claims that he believed he stepped over the line.

Hilariously, Andrew Bolt, yet another of the Murdoch media's team of professional Howard government apologists, strove to remind us that Abbbott was a good man, with a good heart, and wanted us to feel sorry for Abbott because he had, according to Bolt, been unfairly treated in a Lateline interview last night.

We are supposed to believe that Abbott's attack on a dying man was something unusual, and that the health minister bagging out a victim of asbestos is not the sort of behaviour that should see him forced to resign as health minister.

But Abbott has long been a nasty little creature, who will say and do anything, insult and disparage anyone, if he thinks it will help his own career and that of his political masters.

In May, Tony Abbott threatened the Australian public if they dared to vote Labor into office. Sounding like a cross between Darth Vader and a brutal dictator, Abbott said all Australians would face "consequences...dire consequences" if they tossed out his government.

Abbott's threat signaled the start of a tide of raw panic flowing through the Coalition government, reaching up to the highest ranks of the Liberals, which continues today, despite a recent slight improvement in some polls.

In June, Tony Abbott whined about how Australians expected too much from their politicians :

"Nothing but the best is good enough from Australian politicians and, the better it becomes, the more zealously voters reserve their right to raise their expectations."

Heartbreaking stuff. If only our expectations of our politicians to deliver on their promises was so much lower, then their jobs would be so much easier.

Only a few weeks ago, Tony Abbott's 'dark' past as a secret unionist and strike maker was exposed, just when the Liberals were pouring another $10 million or so of taxpayers money into advertising claiming the Labor Party was full of unionists who would destroy the nation's economy.

In early October, Abbott claimed that women who had not had a 'broad range of experiences' were qualified to hold positions of power in the Australian government, and bagged out deputy opposition leader Julia Gillard for spending too much of her time working at her task. This from a government who has done more than any other to force women, particularly single mothers, into the workforce. He was forced to apologise for that as well.

But Abbott has long had his Day Of Hell coming. He is a man who has long cherished his well-deserved reputation as Howard's chief attack dog, and political assassin, but you can only get away with being a destroyer of lives and careers for so long before all that bad karma comes back to you, with gusto.

Abbott has long been one of Australia's most unpopular politicians. Questioning the credibility of a dying man, who has devoted what remains of his life to helping others, and smirking his way through an apology, will do nothing for the government's chances come election day.


Tony Abbott Threatens Australians Will Face "Dire Consequences" If They Vote Labor

You Demand Too Much Of Us, Abbott Whines About Australians Wanting Politicians To Keep Their Promises

Tony Abbott's 'Dark' Unionist Past

What A Scumbag : Part One