Baghdad Blues

Thursday, 20 March 2003

I've spent most of today in a state approaching mental paralysis. It's been coming on since Monday. There are too many topics to blog on today. The biggest of course is that the war in Iraq is finally underway and there have been plenty of events since noon (Melbourne time) that invite comment that I'm not yet ready to write. Most of that comment has already been provided, in part at least, elsewhere. My list of candidate blog topics started with George Bush's letter to the US Congress, providing his justifications for going to war. Tim Dunlop tips a much-deserved bucket on it here. Gary Sauer-Thompson has anticipated my post on John Howard's total failure to convince the majority of the Australian people that this war is right. Right now, my belief is that expecting us to trust in the moral convictions of a chronic liar and self-righteous humbug finally turned out to be too much of an ask.

James Russell asks:

Now that the warbloggers have pretty much got the war they were looking for, what will they write about?

He'll find one answer at Tim Blair's site: it's not too different to blogging the Melbourne Formula One Grand Prix as it happens.

Another topic that I won't be writing much about today is John Howard's address to the nation. I caught a part of it on radio: Howard's attempts at a soothing tone reminded me of an old BBC radio show called "Listen with Mother" which the presenter always began with the words "Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then I shall begin." I was also reminded of Sir William MacMahon, unsung architect of Gough Whitlam's 1972 election victory - all that was missing was Macmahon's querulous tremolo.

Finally, there's the Federal Government's decision to reintroduce its ASIO Bill to Parliament today. The debate on the Bill should be interesting to say the least: Simon Crean has said that our involvement in the war on Iraq increases the risk of terrorist attack on Australians: in his address John Howard said it will make no appreciable difference in the short term and in the long run will make us safer from terrorism. I might come back to this one tomorrow. On the other hand, I could wait till next Friday: I think we'll be seeing some excellent dummy spits over the next week or so.

Dummy Spit of the Week

Wednesday, 19 March 2003

OK, so this item was supposed to appear on Monday, making it two days overdue. It's not exactly as if any of you bastards were any help - I gave you the opportunity for some serious reader interaction by nominating likely dummy spits and what do I get? A tediously earnest discussion of whether the Wog is a snob or not. Not good enough people.

First, an honourable mention to the Dean of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, Dr Philip Jensen. Inspired in part by the example of a Hindu student who, despite Jensen's offer to show him that Hinduism is wrong without attacking Hinduism, continued in his false religion due to family and tribal pressure, Dr Jensen mounted to the last bastion of free speech in Australia, the pulpit of Sydney Cathedral and took the sword of the Spirit to the benighted secularists. Verily did he smite them hip and thigh and they were vanquished in the sight of the Lord. Demonstrating commendable endurance and flexibility of mind, Jensen followed up with some interesting comments in an interview on ABC Radio's PM the following day:

The Bible says that he [Christ] did die. Now, I was not saying which of these was right, or which was wrong, but I was saying that you can't get rid of the category of right or wrong in this area, because they both can't be right.

JO MAZZOCCHI: Can you understand, though, how your comments could be interpreted as being quite insulting to other religions?

PHILLIP JENSEN: No, because I'm saying that Christians could be wrong. It may be that Jesus did not die, and is Islam is right.

I look forward to a future sermon from Dr Jensen where he develops the other leg of his argument: the consequences for the Sydney Diocese if Christians are wrong and Islam is right.

This week's winner comes from the world of international diplomacy. Well done France, for adapting the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive self-defence to create the Chirac doctrine of the pre-emptive security council veto.

Nominations are again open for the next Dummy Spit of the Week, which I have decided to move to the end of the week for obvious reasons. Nominations close Friday 28 March, assuming that you lot are prepared to pull your socks up and lift your game. Otherwise, you'll just have a lot of gallows humour to put up with. This is your last chance gentle readers: don't blow it.

She Agrees With Them and I Agree With ...

Wednesday, 19 March 2003

If you passed over this post by Ken Parish yesterday, you might have missed this article in the Australian, where a group of international lawyers argue that an attack on Iraq is legal. Ken has expressed doubts about their argument, basically on the grounds that whatever they are talking about, it's not law as he understands the term.

I almost found myself in agreement with Ken, at least on his point that whatever a UN Security Council resolution might be it isn't international law. But today, once again in the Australian, I found this heroic article which puts the legal case for war with a great deal of force and originality. So, faced with a choice between the opinion of a sometimes opinionated Australian legal academic at a minor commercial college, who doesn't appear to be forward thinking enough to recognise that the way of the future in legal education is combined degrees in Physical Education and Law and the opinion of my favourite hero-columnist, I know which way I'm going to decide. I'm probably going to cop some stick for saying that. It's unfortunate that Haloscan has fallen over yet again because Ken will just have to dish it out on his own blog rather than doing it here.

Update: No, Haloscan is back again.

R*d* W**ds

Wednesday, 19 March 2003

This morning, a client asked whether we could provide an obscenity filter for a chat forum. You know, one of those software routines that detects typos in words like spit, duck and count and renders the results as @#%! or something similar. This isn't a difficult programming task but it does raise some interesting issues.

From a technical point of view, there's not much to an obscenity filter - all it has to do is search text input for specific sequences of characters and replace them with whatever sequence of dingbats you're using to indicate that the user has entered a dysphemism. In Perl, for example, you can do the job with a single line of code:

$nice_text =~ s/$nasty_word/\@\#\%\!/gi

The interesting part is identifying all the possible values of the variable $nasty_word. Sticking with the example of Perl code, do you use a constant regular expression, hard-coded into your script or do you use an external data file, where users can add new obscenities as they identify them? If you take the first approach, you're stuck with breaking the first rule of polite programming, which is never include offensive material in your source code. If you take the second, you're going to end up with an external text file or database table of obscene epithets which, if your organisation is infested with Mrs Grundy types, will have to be kept a closely guarded (and undocumented) secret within the IT department, lest someone get the wrong idea about the general character of the technical staff.

In the end, writing a successful obscenity filter boils down to human and organisational factors: you need programmers who are able to swear like an old matelot with Korsokov's syndrome. And with imagination. Otherwise, the filter is going to produce output which includes strings like mother@#%!er, or the somewhat ambiguous @#%!-licker which is either Mark Latham's favourite synonym for Prime Minister or something other than Mark Latham's favourite synonym for Prime Minister.

I suspect that somewhere in the English speaking world there's a programmer who has written the ultimate obscenity filtering routine. Of course, we'll never see it in commercial use - I don't think you'll have any trouble working out why.

Lighting the Powder Train

Tuesday, 18 March 2003

So care needs to be taken when employing military force: the powder train can run very quickly and in the most unexpected directions. (Nigel Bagnall, The Punic Wars)

Here's how a people who are free to be proud of their country and heritage, free to realise themselves as individuals, and free to pursue their hopes and ideals, who value excellence as well as fairness and independence as dearly as mateship, go to war.

At 6.00 am your Prime Minister gets a telephone call from the President of the world's only remaining superpower with the long anticipated formal request for a little more involvement in the coming conflict than a mere "pre-deployment". In between finishing the call and heading into a cabinet meeting, your PM drops in to the ABC to give an interview about the phone call. Throughout, he valiantly maintains the fiction that the decision is not a foregone conclusion:

I indicated that Cabinet would meet again this morning, and Cabinet is meeting again this morning, at 8:30, to formally consider that request. We did, of course, talk in some detail about the whole issue last night and when Cabinet has taken a decision, that decision will be immediately communicated to the United States and of course to our military forces.

After the cabinet meeting, the PM briefs all Government MPs on the Cabinet decision then announces the decision publicly.

The Government strongly believes that the decision it's taken is right, it is legal, it is directed towards the protection of the Australian national interest, and [I] ask the Australian community to support it.

He also announces that Parliament will debate the issue this afternoon: once again, well after the critical decisions have been taken. In doing so, he is acting in accordance with the constitution and the precedent set by Mr R J Hawke when Mr Hawke involved Australia in the first Gulf War.

Doesn't it make you glad you live under a democratic and federal system of government which exists under law to preserve and protect all Australians in an equal dignity which may never be infringed by prejudice or fashion or ideology nor invoked against achievement?

What Goes Around ...

Wednesday, 12 March 2003

Andrew Wilkie's resignation from the Office of National Assessments has come in for a lot of comment in the blogosphere today, with Tim Dunlop, Gareth Parker and Gary Sauer-Thompsom all witing considered pieces on the subject.

The government has been playing down the significance of Mr Wilkie's resignation. One of the claims being made is that Mr Wilkie was not very well-placed to comment on Government policy on Iraq as he did not have access to all the intelligence that is regularly reported to the Prime Minister. This is pretty much the exact opposite of the Prime Minister's story on "A Certain Maritime Incident" - back then, it was the bureaucrats and political minders (and possibly a certain ex-member of Parliament) who knew more than the PM and didn't bother to tell him. It's good to see that the Government has learnt something in the interim.

Update (Thursday, 20 March 2003): it's taken a while but I've finally achieved a major milestone: the first ice-pick joke in a comments thread. Congratulations, "Cassandra", on a pithy piece of original wit. I'm sure that as soon as I identify the non sequitur you refer to, I'll feel cut to the quick.

Future Trends in Civil Law

Tuesday, 11 March 2003

Trial by combat made a return in New Zealand last week, when the CEOs of two telecommunications companies agreed to settle a legal dispute with a best out of three arm wrestling match. If this trend catches on, it's very likely that students seeking entry to law degree courses in future will need to have very good results in secondary school physical education - a return to the old standard of mens sano in corpore sano.

A Dark Secret of Leftism

Tuesday, 11 March 2003

Unless you're one of those weirdos who likes delving through second hand book-stores searching out crackpot books, it's unlikely that you will have heard of the Rev Montague Summers, author of this passage:

Immediately upon the receipt of the Bull, Summis desiderantes affectibus, in 1485, Fr Henry Kramer commenced his crusade against witches at Innsbruck, but he was opposed on certain technical grounds by the Bishop of Brixen, nor was Duke Sigismund so ready to help the inquisitors with the civil arm. In fact the prosecutions were, if not actually directed, at least largely controlled by the episcopal authority; nor did the ordinary courts, as is so often supposed, invariably carry out the full sentence of the Holy Office. Not so very many years later the civil power took full cognizance of any charges of witchcraft, and it was then that far more blood was spilled and far more fires blazed than ever in the days when Kramer and Sprenger were directing the trials. It should be borne in mind too that frequent disturbances conspiracies of anarchists and nascent Bolshevism showed that the district was rotten to the core, and the severities of Kramer and Sprenger were by no means so unwarranted as is generally supposed. [My emphasis]

It's from the Rev Summers 1928 introduction to the Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger and will no doubt be ridiculed by those who believe that the roots of leftism are in the 18th century Enlightment and the French Revolution. Still, I'm sure that there's someone out there who will seize on the Rev Summers' link between anarchism, Bolshevism and witchcraft as further evidence that leftists are basically evil, regardless of their protestations of good intent. If so, they can find it on-line here. This section, on 15th century feminism should prove especially fascinating.

Dummy Spit of the Week

Sunday, 9 March 2003

I had intended to leave this till Tuesday (I'm taking tomorrow off, blogwise) to allow time for more nominations. Instead, after a brief tour of Ozblogistan, I've decided to bring it forward a day in the interests of timeliness.

As I don't have any candidates from the op-ed and political worlds, this week's Dummy spit award is going to a blogger. Aaron Oakley gets an honourable mention for this post bitching about the fact that Margo Kingston has been ignoring him for the past two months. James Russell also gets an honourable mention for this complaint that John Quiggin overlooked his on-line quiz where he asks readers just what price they are prepared to pay for peace.

But the clear winner, by several long-winded lengths, is the Wog for this attack on the snobbery of Phillip Adams and Tim Dunlop. In it, the wog also provides a list of the things he likes:

... Opera, art, architeture, industrial design, chess, European history, restraurants, horse racing, museums, reading, public radio, ABC - I can handle all of it, cos I like it. But then we add country music, comics, car design, Tony Roma's Deep Fried Mozzarella Sticks, porn, that F1 racing game at the TimeZone etc etc.

Allow me to paraphrase the Wog's post.

Phillip Adams is bad because he is a snob. Tim Dunlop is bad because he is a snob. I am not a snob. I like "culture" stuff but I like common people stuff too. That makes me better than a snob. Because I am better than a snob I am better than either Phillip Adams or Tim Dunlop.

Now that sounds like snobbery to me.

Nominations are now open for the next "Dummy Spit of the Week".

Legal Challenge

Saturday, 8 March 2003

At the moment, it's personally annoying that John Quiggin's blog is proving such a source of inspiration. Anyway, I was thinking about this post and I'm wondering, with so many of the alleged child dumpers now in the country, whether there's any possibility that they could take action under our defamation laws on the whole "Children overboard" lie. Not all of the allegations and comments on the affair were made under the protection of Parliamentary privilege - I'd say, offhand that anything said on either Tonsils' or the other fellows talk-back shows would be fair game for an action, if there was basis in law to bring one. Over to you, legal bloggers.

Update (Sunday, 9 March): Oops, silly me. I meant to canvas the possibility of a class action for defamation.

Update Too (Tuesday, 11 March): not a snowball in hell's chance of such an action winning according to Ken Parish. There goes my John Gresham style legal thriller, all three paragraphs of the first chapter of it. Bugger!

Bullshit Tactics (and How to Use Them) Part 2

Saturday, 8 March 2003

Today's bullshit tactic is:

2. Maintaining that, because major libertarian reform is at present politically impossible, it is nonsensical to explore and evaluate the desirability of such reform. Libertarianism is unrealistic.

In my view, this is an imprecise description which covers two distinct possible situations:

A: Your libertarian interlocutor is wittering on about how much better off everyone would be after a program of complete, radical libertarian reform.

B: An argument is being made for a significant, but specific reform in which libertarian principles are being invoked to justify the repeal of laws which "unnessarily" restrict personal liberty: perhaps a liberty which your interlocutor wants herself.

In the first case, the best bullshit tactic is to ask how your libertarian proposes to achieve the program of reform which will lead to the libertarian utopia. This is a significant challenge as she cannot, as a rule, appeal to the usual fantasy of devout Marxists, that it will happen as an historically inevitable and natural result of the collapse of capitalism. But, like a devout Marxist, she is living in cloud-cuckoo land. Point this out tactfully and courteously and don't forget to make the comparison with Marxist fantasies about life after the revolution.

In the second case, you face a more arduous task: you have to show, by careful application of the techniques you should have picked up from reading The Euthyphro and a little argument of your own, that the extension of her own personal liberty will result in a loss of liberty for a lot of other people. For example, if allowing more people to own guns results in more fatal shootings, the "right" of gun ownership is exercised at the expense of the total loss of liberty for everyone who gets shot as a result of easing restrictions on gun ownership (there is no liberty in the grave). You can't always sustain this line of attack successfully: there are going to be times when using it will put you on the wrong side of the argument. No one person or political philosophy can be right all the time. It's much more common to be persistently wrong through unrepentant pig-headedness.

Call for Nominations

Saturday, 8 March 2003

Reading this post at John Quiggin's blog reminded me that I'm stuck for a "Dummy Spit of the Week" to start next week's blogging. I'd like to keep it as a more or less regular feature (at least for the next few weeks), so if anyone can remember any likelty candidates from the last weeks events in politics, please post a comment (preferably with a link, of course).

By the way, John's bloody lucky to be getting mentioned in this context after this post on the strange silence that has descended on his little corner of Ozplogistan, where yours truly doesn't rate a mention as one of the bloggers who have been "busy and interesting" this week - evidently, nothing I've written since Tuesday has been up to scratch. I wouldn't have mentioned Mr John Bloody Smart-Arse Quiggin at all if he weren't consistently one of my own top 5 referrers. Still, Tim Dunlop remains way out in front by miles, which says something about the relative good taste of his readers compared to sodding Quiggin's.

Sharp As Blu-Tack™

Friday, 7 March 2003

I found this article by Boris Johnson (Bojo to his fans) through the site of a certain self-styled "journalist, commentator and oppressor". It's about Iraq. In it Boris explains the rationale for the war in Iraq in terms one of his characters could understand:

You know how it is when you are a teenager, and you have a hot date with a chick on, say, Friday. It has taken a lot of guts to organise, and you feel sure that, if you play your cards right, it could be your lucky night. Like the world at the end of the Cold War, you are in a state of pleasurable excitement, not unmixed with anxiety. And then round about Tuesday of that week, you notice something worrying. Somewhere on your left cheek - roundabout the place where Iraq is on the globe - something begins to throb. There is no getting away from it. The thing is a zit.

Boris canvases how you might deal with this problem, and arrives at the conclusion that, if you're really serious about getting your end away, you'll just have to put aside your worries about collateral dermatological damage, bite the bullet and squeeze the damn thing. And the global community has to do the same with Saddam Hussein: he's a zit that has to be squeezed.

This just leaves two questions:

What's the geopolitical equivalent of getting your end away on Friday night?

How come the Eton and Balliol educated Mr Johnson has never heard of Clearasil™?

Update (Saturday, March 8): in the comments thread, dj provides an alternative, folk remedy for facial suppurations. It's not hard to see where this discussion is going to go.

Bullshit Tactics (and How to Use Them)

Thursday, 6 March 2003

I found a list of "Bullshit Tactics Used Against Libertarians" at the Australian Libertarian Society site yesterday. Most of them are pretty good so I decided the list would be a good basis for a series on how to really piss off the libertarian in your life. There are 14 tactics in all - we'll just have to see how far I can get through the list before I get bored and move on to something else. Here's number one:

1. Pointing out that there are gray areas between voluntary and coercive action, and pretending that the existence of gray areas destroys the distinction and, hence, the very idea of liberty. Libertarianism is illusory.

This is obviously inadequate, and needs a little fine tuning. I suggest you begin by reading the Euthyphro from The Last Days of Socrates, to get an idea of how a master would handle things. Then, rather than pointing out those grey areas, just put this simple question: "Just what do you mean by liberty?" Don't take "Oh come on that's obvious" for an answer: insist on a definition.

If you get something like "Freedom from tyranny", you're on an easy winner - just follow up with "OK what's tyranny?" If you can't lead your libertarian adversary into a circular argument, you're just not trying hard enough. On the other hand, beware of asking the question "What are the responsibilities of consciousness?" You're very likely to get a long lecture on the importance of recognising that a straight line is a straight line and not, say, a parabola with the equation f(x) = 0x² + bx + c.

Your goal, by the way, is not to show that "Libertarianism is illusory": it's to show that your adversaries idea of libertarianism is naive because it relies on an unquestioned and ill-defined conception of liberty. If you're dealing with someone who has a more developed notion of liberty, from reading John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty for example, you may have to put in a lot more work to reach the point where your exasperated libertarian says the magic words "You're full of shit!" I think we'll save that for the advanced course.

Welcome Light Relief?

Wednesday, 5 March 2003

With all that's happening in the world at the moment I felt desperate for a little humorous reading last night, so I resorted to my Penguin Classics copy of Dante's Inferno, translated by Dorothy L Sayers, noted medievalist and author of several books of detective fiction including "The Nine Tailors, a fascinating novel about campanology."

Dotty's translation of Dante's immortal work is notable for two things: her truly appalling terza rima and her equally appalling explanatory notes, which make up the bulk of the text. I've been told by friends that the subsequent volumes of The Divine Comedy are also worth reading (if only to get the whole of Dante's allegory rather than just the sordid first third) but the idea of ploughing through another two volumes of questionable rhymes and didactic endnotes that belabour the patently bleeding obvious doesn't appeal. Except for one thing - quite unintentionally, Dotty gives us fascinating glimpses into the psychology of a Cultural Conservative with two Ps and a silent Q. Here for example, is the conclusion of her description of Dante's Universe (which is basically your standard medieval geocentric, or Ptolemaic universe, with the planets mounted on transparent spheres revolving around a fixed Earth):

The Ptolemaic universe is the universe we recognise, as we recognise a photograph or picture of the house in which we live. It is inferior to the Copernican in that its mathematics, even when corrected by modern knowledge, would be too complicated for ready calculation; but it is superior as a description of what the heavens have to show us, because it is a direct transcript of the observed phenomena.

Reading this passage, with its nostalgia for a simpler world where eternity was only a few thousand miles away, beyond the sphere of the Fixed Stars, you can understand why CP Snow got grumpy about the "two cultures". It's not merely that Sayers is woefully ignorant of the science, or even the history which resulted in the Ptolemaic view being replaced by the Copernican view. It's that she prefers to be ignorant and seems, at some level, to prefer that the rest of us were ignorant too, happily living in a glittering snow-dome cosmos with God on the outside peering in through the Primum Mobile. It reminds me of certain contemporary cultural conservatives who wring their hands over what we have lost in the inevitable cultural decline that followed the disbanding of the Doobie Brothers. There's something seriously weird about people who are nostalgic for times and places outside their own experience.

Today's Strikes

Wednesday, 5 March 2003

Angry loggers have backed down from their threat to disrupt this weekend's Grand Prix, contenting themselves with leaving 100 timber trucks parked around Victoria's Parliament House. That's a bitter blow for those of us who hoped to see a Mack prime mover take the chequered flag this year.

Victoria's screws are also taking industrial action, over the possibility that one of their number might face criminal charges for discharging his firearm at an escaping prisoner. The prisoner, Garry Whyte, 39, a remand prisoner, was attempting to escape from St Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne. According to a screw's union spokesman on ABC local radio this morning, the fact that criminal charges have been laid against a screw who exercised the authority given to him by Parliament to discharge his firearm to prevent an escape creates uncertainty for other screws. Until they receive a clear indication that they still have authority to discharge their firearms at escaping prisoners the screws won't be carrying firearms or undertaking escort duties where they might be tempted to discharge their firearms in the wrong belief that they have been authorised to do so by government regulation when in fact they might still be liable for the results of a discharging of firearms under criminal law. Got that? If not, keep an eye on this page for the next couple of days: they might put the audio of Jon Faine's interview with Julian Kenelly up. It's worth a listen if you have a robust sense of humour.

Word of The Day: Homonym

Wednesday, 5 March 2003

Which, according to my usual source, the Macquarie Dictionary means

a word like another in sound and often in spelling, but different in meaning, as meat and meet.

Or say, John Howard and great Australian Prime Minister. What brought it to mind was a report on AM this morning where the reporter kept talking about a small West Australian town called "New Nausea". Right now, New Nausea has a monastery and will soon be getting a European Space Agency tracking station. I'm waiting for the transcript so that I can get the correct spelling.

Dummy Spits of the Week

Tuesday, 4 March 2003

Time to brush the carpet fluff off the Trotsky dummy and resume blogging after a weekend of fear and loathing somewhere near Syracuse (that's the ancient city in Sicily, rather than any contemporary US namesake). The big dummy spit in Oz politics was produced by ACT Treasurer Ted Quinlan who, according to the ABC's AM, was one of four signatories to a letter to Federal Stealth Treasurer Peter Costello saying that there was no way that mr Graeme Samuel was acceptable as the new chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Why? Because

... Graeme Samuel has not only a pedigree at the big end of town, but he also has the image of a pedigree at the big end of town, and both those things I think mitigate against it being an appropriate appointment.

Mr Quinlan also expressed his hope that Mr Costello would display more maturity than himself and that the ACT would not lose Commonwealth funding as a result of this ... principled stand.

But the soft patter of silicon rubber hitting the carpet was loudest from Washington this week. On Saturday, Whitehouse spokesman Ari Fleischer dismissed Iraq's decision to destroy its Al-Samoud missiles as

... propaganda, wrapped in a lie, inside a falsehood.

Fleischer continued this dismissive line in his press briefing of 3 March: as far as the Bush administration is concerned it's too little, too late. The optimist in me wants to believe that this is a case of the US government talking tough to get the result it wants (Saddam disarmed) but the pessimist doubts it. Still, I'm determined to look on the bright side - as soon as I can scrape a few thousand dollars together I'm investing in Brie futures. They're bound to go up once this whole thing is settled, one way or the other.

Reading and Other Matters

Wednesday, 26 February 2003

I picked up a shitload of books from the Moreland Library on Sunday: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (what I really want to be reading right now on this subject is Race In Mind: Race, IQ, and other Racisms by Alexander Alland junior which, I gather on the basis of a short review in The Age, continues the ongoing task of refuting the Sax-Rohmerist theory of the racial distribution of human intelligence. I've also got Trollope's Doctor Thorne and Framley Parsonage for "light reading" and a copy of Nigel Bagnall's The Punic Wars which I bought a couple of years ago to get through.

As if that weren't enough, I received The Diviner's Son by Gary Crew in the mail today. I won it by singing the chorus to Ruby Tuesday on one of those late night quizzes on the ABC. With a reccomended retail price of $14.95, it works out to 83 days of my 18 cents a day that I just got back. That's one in the eye for all you anti-Auntie whingers out there.

Best of all, we've just picked up some work! A $20,000 contract to build a new web-site, which should get the company back on the right side of the fine line between solvency and impending bankruptcy and perhaps allow it to pay some wages - or at least I might get a small "back-rent" bonus out of it, which ought to get the real estate agents off my back.

Dummy Spits of the Week

Monday, 24 February 2003

(This post is slightly overdue - let's all just pretend that I wrote it last Friday).

Federal Health Minister Kay Patterson decided not to attend a national conference of Health Ministers last week because, to cite various explanations offered by Senator Patterson herself, it was an exercise in grandstanding by the State Labor Governments in the lead-up to the New South Wales state election and she didn't want to be "hi-jacked" by the States (who organised the conference). As a result, Senator Patterson didn't get to hear the various submissions made to the conference by health professionals and administrators on the current state of the public health system: a fact that the Senator regretted but, as those sneaky State health ministers didn't bother to tell her that they were holding a conference on health spending with real doctors, it's not her fault that she denied herself this opportunity to hear some expert opinion on her portfolio responsibilities. If the impending war on Iraq weren't occupying so much attention, Senator Patterson's brilliant own goal might have got more notice than it has.

All the same, there's probably room for someone on the Government side of federal politics to take Senator Patterson in hand and give her a few pointers on dealing with hostile State ministers. Stealth Treasurer Peter Costello would be ideal for this job - you may recall the calming effect his charm had on New South Wales State Treasurer Michael Egan. Mr Costello briefly departed from his usual ground-hugging political flight path last week to comment on another burning political issue, the Liberal Party presidency. Mr Costello expressed some pique at the fact that current President Shane Stone did not seek his (Costello's) opinion before deciding to run for another term, saying:

I think that somebody who wanted to engage in wide consultation would have spoken to me about it, yes. But obviously, that's a question of the style and the degree to which they want to engage in consultation.

So, I think the more consultation the better, and I think it would've been advisable to consult in relation to this. But it's something that he must take into account in relation to his management of the organisation.

But really, for this one, you should listen to the audio. I swear, if you listen carefully, you can actually hear his lip quiver.