I imagine most of you reading this have a blog or your own little website, a place where you’ve invested time and energy so as to carve out your own little corner of the web. You’ve probably bought your own domain name, or have a cool name on tumblr and you’re quite proud of it.

Imagine that you’re wrapping up the year and you’ve written a list of your favourite songs from the past year. Imagine then, that someone in the comments posts a link to one of those songs, where someone else can download it. Under the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (And Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act), you are liable for the content posted and, should anyone follow the link and download the song, your domain name can be seized and your site blocked from major search engines. All for one little comment. There’s a fantastic infographic at www.americancensorship.org/infographic.html that explains how this system works.

Now you might be wondering why I’m more than a little bit worried and more than a little bit upset about a bill that would seemingly only affect American web users. Think about how many different web services you use that reside in or were created in, the United States? Tumblr, where this piece was first published, is hosted in the US.

Some people hold political affiliations with an almost religious fervour.

Their political beliefs shape everything, from their world-view to where they buy their groceries. Almost every major decision is influenced in some way by their political beliefs. Along with their entrenched views often comes something far more concerning: the complete inability to consider alternative points of view.

We all know bigots — people so slavishly devoted to an idea that they will not countenance any alternative. But I’m talking about something a far more subtle and insidious.

Take your average left wing adherent. It’s not hard to find one — social media is saturated with bloggers and tweeters ranting about the evils of Tony Abbott, the hated legacy of John Howard and the moral deficiency of the entire right wing.

To this adherent, the IPA is the birthplace of devils and the Liberal party is where they are nurtured The right winger is selfish, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist, heartless and devoid of compassion or any other redeeming feature.

Defence of the Fertility Control Clinic

The front gate of the Fertility Control Clinic in East Melbourne is a frontline of the struggle over life and death rights in Melbourne.

A group of Catholic protestors (the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants) meet there at 7:30am, six days a week, to protest patients’ moral rights to a legal service, authorised by elected representatives of the people of Victoria three years ago. The protest expresses their unflagging commitment to expunging this parliamentary offence against the revealed word of their god.

The taxi driver in Maui picked the accent straight away.

“Look out!” he said. “The Aussies are here!”

Turns out he used to date a woman from Australia. She used to bring tour groups to Hawaii and when she did, she brought a leg of lamb for him.

“She’d drop the lamb on Maui, go do her tour on the big island, and then come back here and cook me the lamb. Pretty sweet set up.”

I asked him if he’d been to Australia.

“Spent some time in Sydney,” he told me. “Was thinking of settling there until you guys went all socialist.”

Oh, Jesus, I thought. Here we go. I’ve lived in the US and I’ve had these conversations before. You are on a hiding to nothing. No matter what facts you array against their anecdotes and Trivial Pursuit-level knowledge of your country, you cannot shift their preconceptions. Still, I couldn’t resist.

“So you want to compare economies?” I asked.

Australia has one of the most complex, inconsistent and opaque school funding arrangements in the developed world. You couldn’t design a worse school funding system if you tried.

This is because our education system is actually dozens of systems, public and private. Each is shaped by political opportunism, compromise, ideology, and turf-wars. Each is layered upon the others. This jungle severely limits accountability and contributes to growing resource and performance gaps between rich and poor schools, with disadvantaged students suffering most.

It all started with science blocks.

Under the Australian constitution, schooling is a residual power of the states – essentially because it is not listed as one of the Commonwealth’s exclusive powers. This continued colonial arrangements.

Things began to change in 1964, when the Menzies government introduced capital funding for science laboratories for both public and private schools. A few years later, in an attempt to woo Catholic voters and respond to localised funding crises, they provided some funding to non-government schools. Until this time, private schools had largely funded themselves.

The enormous electoral popularity of these piecemeal education programs did not go unnoticed by the Labor Party. On gaining power in 1972, Labor established a comprehensive review into school funding and, from 1974, started providing general recurrent funding to public and private schools based on their perceived needs.

Who the fuck am I meant to vote for at the next Federal election? This is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know. Who is meant to get my vote? Who do I trust to do the right thing most of the time, and how do I minimise the inevitable disappointment of supporting people who will, with a high degree of predictability, do things I hate? Not just disagree with, or squirm a bit about, but actively hate. How?

Watching politics at the moment is a serious exercise in parallel universism. All the received wisdom about what is right and wrong with the parties, the policies and the process strikes me as the grandest nonsense, indicative not of intelligent analysis and a keen eye for the facts as presented, but the habits of a political class so immersed in their own specialness that the whole thing has become about them.

I’m even over most of the alternative commentary, the blogs, the outsiders on Twitter, the amateurs and semi-professionals who I always thought cast a new and interesting light on what is going on. Maybe I’m just having a bad year, but some of them are driving me nuts.

Twitter itself, for all its virtues — and I would seriously be lost without it — has also become a site of pathetic servility and co-optation. With so many ‘serious people’ now on there, so many ‘big names’, there has been a discouraging outbreak of brown-nosing as the Outsiders try and gracefully lodge their heads in the arses of the Insiders. The edge has gone out of the critique of the alt.commentary team and they are [nearly] all starstruck. They used to want to show up the shortcomings of the professionals; now they want to be their followers. Fuck that.

New media is no longer providing a challenge to the mainstream, it is serving to entrench it.

So here we are, teetering over the cusp of 2012. This is the year that apparently will make or break the major party leaders, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. It’s the year that kicks off the long countdown to the next federal election, which is due anytime from 3 August 2013 to 30 November 2013.

We’re told it’s the year we’ll see whether Gillard can rebuild her battered leadership credentials, whether Rudd has enough mongrel to bring his own party down, and whether Abbott can recast himself as an alternative Prime Minister worthy of our respect.

Sharemarket volatility, plummeting business confidence, the impending collapse of the great single currency project and the liberal rotation of headlines such as $X billion was wiped off markets following renewed fears of Y.

The world is being swept by a financial storm. The question is, has your government remembered to Scotchgard its suede shoes?

The first thing to note is the ‘eurozone crisis’ or ‘GFC II’ isn’t an isolated event. Following waves of ill-conceived bailouts, it marks an alarming progression from concerns about bank viability to that of government insolvency. Whole countries inside and out of Europe find themselves up Shizen Creek without a paddlé.

When I was completing my law degree, we were taught that there are a number of competing considerations in sentencing.

Exactly how many considerations there were depended on whose list you were reading, but a common selection would be retribution, rehabilitation, deterrence, and incapacitation.

Retribution is similar to punishment, or, in some situations, revenge. In almost every crime, either the victim or the community has suffered a loss, the perpetrator has gained an advantage, or both. Punishment seeks to rebalance the equation.

I can’t pinpoint the precise date I became a Muslim because it took me a few years of dabbling in what would become the world’s largest socially-devalued religion, to know whether I wanted to make the stigma my own. The best I can come up with is late-nineties, when it was Dolly the cloned sheep who was horrifying good conservative Christian Australians, rather than their Islamo-fascist sleeper-cell neighbours posing as Afghan refugees. Since then, the world has been rocked by religiously-motivated terrorists* and the Islamification of our food supplies. I’ve also become a bit of an expert on things Muslimish, so here’s a handy guide to things you don’t need to worry about.

For libertarians, government encroachment into the lives of individuals has gone a step too far. Even libertarians accept there is a limited role for government in restricting individual behaviour. But it’s rooted in principles of property, self-determination and personal responsibility. Not objectives that prefer a broader ideal at the expense of liberty.

On an episode of ABC’s QandA in June 2011, NSW Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon argued she ‘often find[s] that this notion of the nanny state, it’s trotted out when people are a bit hard up for an argument’.

The term ‘nanny state’ is dismissively thrown around but it has strong intellectual roots.

Ever since the vagaries of politics put Andrew Wilkie into a position where he could insist on gambling reforms, Clubs Australia and their oleaginous spokesman Andrew Ball have being trying out various bullshit campaigns to convince us that the reforms are a Bad Scary Thing. Every campaign they’ve run crashes up against a wall of facts and logic because the only truth to their fear of the reforms is that they are trying desperately to protect their own profits.

Clubs Australia’s latest scare campaign is that gambling reforms will cost jobs.  It’s yet another emotive claim, designed to whip up fear and anger, which has no actual basis in fact.

Reducing gambling to a solely recreational pastime might reduce the number of jobs in the gambling industry, but it does not mean that the total jobs and money in the economy will shrink – quite the opposite.

Stop The Boats. Great Big New Tax. Moving Forward. Working Families.

Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

On second thought, I take that back. On third thought, I don’t take it back, I just append to it ‘unless you’re going to actually say something for once’.

Which, on fourth thought, would render most of our politicians silent most of the time and our TVs and radios deliciously mute, or at least casting around for another few episodes of Big Fucking Bang Theory.

We’ve all been bitching for years about ‘soundbite politics’, where a complex issue, like tax reform or how the hell do ciphers like Craig Thomson get pre-selection, is boiled down to a few words at a presser.

Soundbites came into existence as politicians realised that they would only get a couple of sentences on the news so they had to make sure they were the right ones. Reporters liked it, because it made their jobs easier both from an editing point of view and in terms of not taxing their intellects by having to decipher a press conference for the rest of us who, mercifully, weren’t there.

Everyone’s talking about gambling these days. Poker machines are at the middle of a war between the Federal government and just about everyone else, bikini-clad girls and voodoo dolls are flogging mobile betting apps, and sports betting (especially the aggressive in-game promotion on a certain channel for a certain company during a certain grand final held on a Sunday) and pissing off the majority of the population. Yet for all the fuss, there’s a couple of important points that need to be remembered.

Firstly, poker machines and sports betting are legal. Love them or hate them, they’re playing by the rules, even if they are bending those rules as far as they can. And secondly, changes are coming to both of them that will fundamentally alter their place in Australia’s gambling landscape.

But there’s another gambling option which, in this country, is somewhat analogous to the old wild west. The laws are few and were made to be broken, cowboys operate without fear or responsibility, and once you’re there, you’re on your own.

I’m talking about online gambling. More specifically, I’m talking about online casino games: poker, roulette, pokies, blackjack... you name it, you can find it online. These virtual casinos currently account for a small slice of the pie in terms of dollars gambled in Australia, but that slice is growing rapidly. And that’s a real concern.

‘If an election were held today...’ is probably the most oft-repeated phrase in political reporting after ‘stop the boats’ and ‘people smuggler’s business model’. Weekly polls and the slightest irrelevant movement therein are reported breathlessly by the media and picked over by both sides of politics. They’ve ceased to be a reflection of political views and become instead a driver of them. Even worse, irrelevant polls, taken years out from an election, have become so all consuming that they’re used as political weapons, dangerous enough to threaten even a popularly elected Prime Minister.

It’s understandable that polling is journalistic crack for the Press Gallery. It creates concrete figures out of the unwieldy mass of varying opinions and allows nuanced responses to be reduced to a simple yes/no, for/against, capitalist/communist result. Much easier to deal with than policy analysis or objective assessment of government performance, but it’s lazy journalism.

While we hear so much about polls in the media, we hear very little about the mechanisms that give us the results. So here are the basics on the major polling organisations and some common tactics.

I used to think multiculturalism was the bee’s knees. Don’t get me wrong — I’m grateful Australia has an official policy that recognizes cultural diversity under the umbrella of loyalty to our nation. Unlike Europe, which is struggling with how to conceive of the French identity of Algerian-ancestry migrants, or the German identity of Turkish-ancestry migrants, true-blue Aussies have come from many different ethnic backgrounds.

Who could deny the Aussie credentials of singer John Farnham; NSW Governor Marie Bashir; AFL legend Ron Barassi; TV presenter Ernie Dingo; and comedian Magda Szubanski even though they all come from a range of different ethnic ancestries and some (Farnham and Szubanski) were born overseas.

But while multicultural accurately describes Australians, multiculturalism has its share of critics, including Andrew Bolt, who, upon losing his racial vilification case, argued that ‘multiculturalists’ have silenced his critique (Herald Sun 29/9).

The problem with multiculturalism is that it means different things to different people. Opinions on the concept vary from severe criticism on the one hand, to promoting multiculturalism as a substitute for national identity, on the other. For Bolt, it seems, multiculturalism threatens Australia’s social cohesiveness.

The Libs are riding high in the polls, but they didn’t get there with careful planning and detailed policies. They did it by implanting into the media, and from there into the electorate, fear and relentless negativity towards the Gillard government. Despite the screeching about boats and carbon, however, the issue that matters most to people, the one that is most likely to dictate their vote, is employment and job security. And on that particular issue, the Libs have nowhere to go. Like the person atop Mount Everest, any step they take in any direction — left or right, forward or back — will be a step down.

They’ve been burnt by the business community, who abandoned them over WorkChoices in 2007, but they can’t credibly promise a system that will protect people’s jobs without getting business even further offside. They’ve been vindicated in their approach by high polls, but in policy terms they’re stuck. Whether they can stay stuck and win is an open question, but, in my opinion, it’s highly doubtful.

When Labor looked like losing the 1996 elections the labour movement were shouting out warnings that a Howard government would be disastrous for Australian workers. They couldn’t make that stick because union membership (as a measure of unions’ credibility) was in free-fall, and because Howard’s persona was all about reassurance, stability and certainty. The rise of skilled manual workers as independent contractors meant that people once considered solidly Labor were more inclined to vote Liberal through self-identification as independent entrepreneurs, with all the tax breaks and other incentives attached to such status and, naturally, they were less likely to be union members.

The waterfront confrontation was an aberration that proved the wider point: the union won a symbolic victory over dogs and balaclavas, while the government’s legislation remained in place and waterfront productivity went up. Everyone, apparently, was a winner.

I grew up in a pretty good time in Australia, I reckon. Oh, the media, as it always will, would disagree, telling me all manner of terrible things about the mid-Seventies to early Eighties, but like so many increasingly frustrated Australians, I don’t believe what the media tells me.

As I made my neurotic way into my teens, I began to take an interest in politics. I was born just days after the Whitlam dismissal and every time it was dragged back to public awareness I would look into politics again, with the vigour one had to have in those pre-Internet days.

We were also enjoying the Hawke-Keating years and all of the eccentricities that entailed. I was disgusted by the election of Nick Greiner’s Liberal government in NSW and its horrendous gutting of the NSW school system. Then when Howard got in, I thought the world had gone to hell in a hand basket.

Before Howard, the thing I most remember was that politics seemed important and that politicians tackled the big issues. The arguments seemed to be over things that mattered, like, you know, the future of the country. Yes, there was a bit of aggro over stupid things and the beginnings of talk of ‘the public interest’ when someone wanted to embarrass Bob Hawke about his drinking or womanising, or Andrew Peacock’s wandering… um…peacock.

On July 29 this year, Tony Abbott declared on Nine’s Today show that carbon dioxide was “an invisible, odourless, weightless, tasteless substance,” making its industrial emissions too hard to measure. Anyone with a Year 10 chemistry textbook could have proved him wrong. But if we were expecting a response to such a sizeable error, we found a nation’s media staying strangely quiet.

It seems that every bulletin in the last six months has opened with Abbott, in a hardhat or a high-vis vest or a pair of safety goggles, prodding at a piece of machinery like a gibbon with a Scrabble set, then crankily soundbiting the same evidence-free statements he made the day before at a different dog food plant or Slinky factory. This is a toxic tax. It’ll cost lots of money. Lots of jobs. Ruin our economy.

Each rehash is reported as though it were news. For an industry keen to avoid accusations of bias against the Opposition, these blue-collar-meets-clean-white-collar publicity parades are in the national interest. But ‘unbiased’ does not mean allocating each side 37 seconds in the lead bracket. It means that journalists should report what actually happens. If someone has nothing to say, you’re allowed to mention the fact.

News Ltd columnists can always find time in their busy days to complain about left-wing media bias, having apparently missed the memo that their employers own 70 percent of Australian newspapers. The lack of scrutiny of the opposition leader’s claims indicate exactly the opposite tilt.

Malcolm Turnbull had his shot at leadership of the Liberal Party and bollocksed it up royally, but no-one would believe for a second that means he’s given up on the idea — and nor should he. In Canberra’s political firmament he’s the only star on either side with the combination of balls and brains, chutzpah and charisma, vision and intellect that has been missing from Australian politics since Paul Keating’s demise. Someone people can vote for without wanting to punch themselves in the throat before they leave the ballot box.

It is fashionable to the point of cliche to intone wisely that the political terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ no longer have any meaning. Let’s call this the Disappearing Left/Right Hypothesis - DLRH.

Supporting argument for DLRH goes something like this: in western democracies, which tend to have a two-party system, both major parties try so hard to appeal to average voters that they converge on the centre, with a set of policy prescriptions bland enough to offend no-one.

Additionally, there is meant to be a consensus on economic management. There is no longer any real debate between which is better, a market-based economy or a state-run one, the former having crushed the latter in the debate of acceptable ideas. So we have ended up with rough agreement on the fundamentals, with some differences around the edges as to how big the safety net should be.

No more towering arguments about Communism versus Capitalism: we are all smug, mixed-economy aficionados now, the very splitting of the difference, with its soft landing on the sweet spot between the two extremes, being proof in itself of our un-left/rightedness.

Given my history as the world’s greatest Treasurer and second greatest PM (after God, I mean Gough), I am allowed carte-blanche to comment on anything I fucking well want. No fucking editor tells yours truly what to write!

So, I will write about the impact of Mahler in New York in the early 20th century.

Just kidding, that is next issue.

At the moment, ask yourself: Do you pay enough tax? I know the answer and you are wrong. You do not pay enough tax.

Remember Punch and Judy? Those wacky, zany puppets who smack each other (and anyone else who comes near) around with big sticks? Well there’s a new puppet show in town, with a host of little Punches and Judys lining up to take a whack. The target of their attention? Poker machine reform… and the puppeteer is ClubsNSW.

Let’s be very clear about this. The single biggest, loudest and most aggressive opponent to poker machine reform in this country is ClubsNSW. Every other dissenting voice is simply doing their bidding as they pull the strings and direct the play.

So who are the puppets in this ensemble? Who does ClubsNSW have lined up to fight their fight for them?

The main thing people tell you ahead of your first visit to the United States is that it’s expensive. “You’ll leave America broke,” they say, nodding sagely, “a loaf of bread is, like, $8.”

Who knows when the collective travel unconscious picked up this particular factoid - maybe in an alternate-1980s, like Alan Moore’s Watchmen - but it’s a monstrous falsehood: America is unquestionably, eye-wateringly cheap.

But what was thrilling on my first journey to the States in late-2009, with our dollar buying about USD$0.86c, paradoxically feels alarming on my third trip, with the exchange rate even “better” now, hovering just under USD$1.10.

Great for holiday shopping, but alarming because thinking a little more deeply about buying that large punnet of organic blueberries for a steal at $2.99 leads you to wonder exactly who IS making any money over here.

It was reported this year that the wealthiest Americans - the fabled “1%” - take in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income; “In terms of wealth rather than income,” the report in Vanity Fair expanded, “the top 1 percent control 40 percent.”

The carbon tax is no longer a proposed financial tool to address an environmental problem. It’s now an ideological touchstone for the Greens, a political weapon for the LNP and a millstone around the neck of the Labor party. Typically, in all the political fisticuffs the facts about a carbon tax, what it can do and how effective it can be, are lost.

When I first got involved in politics at the age of 18, I knew nothing at all about the ancient practice. Nothing. I didn’t know the difference between left and right philosophies, how parliament works, or the fundamentals of modern democracy.

Yet I joined a political party, mostly because the boy I lived with had done so, and became instantly entranced by the political world. So entranced in fact that I’ve worked in and around politics for most of the 30 years since.

A lot has been said in recent times about Australia’s skills shortage and the so-called idle unemployed. Julia Gillard’s recent declaration of war against idleness saw her call on the unemployed to “pull their weight” and not give into welfare dependency.

Australia. The sunburnt country; the lucky country. So lucky, in fact, that we’ve got wall-to-wall poker machines to take advantage of that luck. Because, as everyone knows, Aussies love to gamble. Lucky, lucky us.

What is this malaise that’s gripping Australian voters? According to the latest opinion poll we’re deeply unhappy with Julia Gillard (disapprove 50%, approve 37%) yet we still prefer her to Tony Abbott as Prime Minister (Gillard 42%, Abbott 33%). Even more confusingly, despite our concerns about Abbott, it seems we would elect a Coalition government tomorrow if given the chance.

Smoking is highly addictive, expensive and disgusting to be around if you’re a non-smoker. Is it dangerous as well? Of course it is. The facts about smoking are undeniable.

The ABS estimates that, despite Australia having one of the lowest smoking rates in the OECD, tobacco was second only to obesity in the leading causes of disease in this country.

The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein, is the ducks fucking nuts. The most fitting endorsement I have heard of it comes from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow; “The only book of the last few years in American publishing that I would describe as a mandatory must-read. Literally the only one.”

Why do we love to hate someone when vigorous disagreement should be enough? In competitive arenas such as sport why do we get so much joy from seeing the object of our hatred not only lose, but also be smashed into oblivion?

Perhaps even more curiously, why is it that we love to hate but we don’t love the haters?

Today’s circumstances are different from the 1970s when a country like France faced the oil crisis, decided to push towards “energy independence” and eventually reached 75% nuclear electricity.

Whilst still revolving around fossil fuel, our current problem is to develop ways of producing energy that will limit our impact on the environment.

So for Australia, the question is not so much to debate the absolute merit of nuclear energy per se, but to appreciate whether to introduce its use is appropriate in that context. Is it logical to swap fossil fuel issues for nuclear ones?

I’m an impulsive, emotional soul. I make decisions on the spur of the moment, based on my gut feeling. I’ll factor the ‘vibe’ into my reading of any situation. I’m not particularly shy of making my feelings known to others when I’m trying to make some changes in my immediate environment. Sometimes this has worked for me - a certain degree of empathy has allowed me to avoid some dicey outcomes. Overwhelmingly, however, these tendencies have not ended well for me - I’ve ended up with significant debt, have had to make grovelling apologies and have been slapped in the face more than once. So I’m not entirely sure I consider these attributes to be positive, which is why I become alarmed when I see them wholeheartedly embraced by our political leaders.

The first three months of 2011 have seen Australians in an almost constant state of disruption as we’ve been bombarded with natural disasters and the stories of loss and hardship that have followed them. Events like the floods that affected so many areas along the East coast, Tropical Cyclone Yasi and the bushfires in Western Australia grab national attention, and are generally followed by a familiar refrain from those affected “This community will stick together”.

Gambling is a strange addiction. When you say “addiction” most people think of drugs, legal or otherwise. Cigarettes, alcohol, prescription drugs, ecstasy, heroin, cocaine... you get the picture. The thing that’s common to all of these is that there’s a physical component to the addiction. Your body craves the drug, and so you give it more. As a long-time smoker, I know all about this.

Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business - Churchill

Canberra seems to have forgotten its Churchill quotes again, as the feverish party games continue. Julia Gillard is stumbling around playing blind man’s buff with the Real Julia; Tony Abbott is stuck in an endless Pin the Tail on the donkey loop and he still can’t work out which ass he’s playing with. Joe Hockey, Wayne Swan and Nicola Roxon are re-enacting a Play School tea party while Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten mutter sulkily in a corner and wait for Musical Chairs to start again. Meanwhile, the Canberra press gallery plays tiddly winks in front of a mirror and the electorate gives them all a resounding ‘meh’, then turns to the likes of Andrew Bolt and Mia Freedman for analysis on policy and international affairs.

Will Australians’ faux environmentalism derail our greenhouse effort?

It seems the Government’s proposed flood levy has tested the limits of Australians’ willingness to help others. While many thousands voluntarily gave money, supplies and physical support to those affected by the floods, opinion polls show around half the population has balked at a modest Government levy to share restoration costs.

Here’s a thought swingers. How about we grow a pair and start stepping up to the crease? Why don’t we stop trembling in the corner like aspidistras with Parkinson’s disease and actually take the fight to some of the festering rodents who somehow managed to get elected to our federal parliament, despite their multitudinous social handicaps and glaring ineptitude?

As we yet again saw when the Queensland floods unfolded, disasters have a knack of bringing out the best in people. Many of those faced with immense hardship usually think of others first. They’ll help a neighbour move their belongings or try save a house from bushfires as their own home lies in ruins. They don’t expect anything in return. For most people, helping others is a way to temporarily forget about their own personal tragedy.

I often think to myself “Jeez the world would be so much better if I could just behead everyone who irritates me or disagrees with me.” Unfortunately that’s a bit difficult to do as I don’t command the Mongol hordes right now. They’re working in the film and television industry, hacking and reducing to ash anything resembling creativity or talent. Which will be interesting once they get around to squaring off with the lads from Sons Of Anarchy.

Out in the real world where I’m not a media mogul, I’m currently sitting on a Working Party re-writing a piece of legislation, and when you look at the limited sanctions available for all the bits of dickheadedness that humans can get up to, you find yourself longing for something a little simpler.

12 months after the Liberal Party leadership spill it’s worth taking a moment to consider how Tony has performed as leader.

Abbott is many things, some of them unpleasant, some of them admirable, but one thing he does not appear to be is comfortable in a leadership role.

A snapshot from my media consumption over the past couple of days:

- Jon Stewart interviewed Barack Obama on The Daily Show.

- Joe Hockey did yet another terrible interview with Tony Jones on Lateline.

- Steven Conroy and Malcolm Turnbull are having one hell of a debate about the National Broadband Network.

Democracy. We fight for it, kill for it, we send our young men to the other side of the world to die for it. We’ve fought wars to impose it on other cultures (and stood back bewildered when they didn’t then use it to choose the government we wanted them to have).

It’s the worst form of government (except for all the others) and the problem with venerating it as the sovereign remedy for the world’s ills is that it leads us to expect far too much of the people who use it as a path to power.

Some background for all our readers who don’t obsessively follow all the sparks of outrage constantly exploding in the twitterverse:

James Massola an online reporter for The Australian, outed anonymous political blogger Grog’s Gamut as Greg Jericho — a public servant working in the film area of the Office for the Arts of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

By any measure, 2010 has not been a good year for Australia in the war in Afghanistan. Of the 21 troops lost in the war since it began, 10, almost half, have paid the ultimate price this year; we’ve been there since 2001. The reasons for the sudden, dramatic surge in casualties are impossible to ascertain now, that will be the subject of debate for many years to come; initially in parliament and the media, before eventually becoming the post-graduate theses of strategic policy and sociology students.

What the fuck just happened? I spent years hating Howard, disgusted by our country being a lapdog to the worst US President in history, appalled by the treatment of refugees, and genuinely afraid of incursions into civil rights via so-called “anti-terrorism” laws. Then Dear Kevin came along, with promises and promise; he would sign Kyoto, he would say Sorry to the Aborigines, he would bring us a government that looked past the next election and acknowledged that there was a world out there beyond our backyards.

Thomas O’Neil once said that all politics is local. I don’t actually believe this is true, but, after the last week, I wish it was.

The Tribune decided fairly early on that there was little point in us putting together an election issue that just regurgitated the mainstream media’s take on federal politics, but we thought we could make something of the local candidates, given that some people we asked had trouble naming the sitting member, let alone any other aspiring ones.

I love voting, I really do. I love, despite my misanthropic nature, seeing humans of all shapes and sizes, from all walks of life, trooping together to the polling station, ready to line up and take part in the one thing that we can actively, easily do to make a mark. I love that most of the local schools run sausage sizzles and markets, to give you something to do and something to eat while you wait to vote.

It’s Day Ten or something of the election campaign as I write this, and the wonk blogs are getting a bit stabby. As well they might, considering how infantile and cynical and utterly, utterly Jason Akermanis’ self-awareness-level empty the whole thing is.

The one “Great Debate” wasn’t a debate at all, just a series of campaign speeches where neither speaker answered a single Goddamn question while the moderator checked his makeup, and the only interest in it was how uninterested everyone was in it, because it was on the same night as the Masterchef final.

We put a fair bit of shit on Family First. You may have noticed, but there’s a good reason for it: they deserve it.

Think I’m just being a leftist reactionary? Well I’m not. Fundamentalists, of any stripe, are dangerous, in the same way that Pauline Hanson was dangerous, because they give a voice and a sense of power to an ignorant and bigoted minority.

Politics, what the hell…?

Blast and bloody hell. Dog balls and arse biscuits. Have you two lost your minds?!? I tried this political writing once before. I even tried it twice, just to make damn sure I had no idea how to do it, found that I couldn’t and scurried off to the safety of motoring. Now you are asking me to do it not once, but bloody twice again, pre- and post-election. Mad I tell you.

I’ve been happily coughing curse words at my TV over this issue for the last few months, but there’s only so many times you can hear a “Think Of The Children” argument before you lose the plot and just want all the children to fucking die.

The Bushfires Royal Commission has heard final submissions and will deliver its final report to the Governor on July 31. Should the Commissioners accept the thrust of what Counsel Assisting, Jack Rush QC, has to say, the government will find itself in a deeply uncomfortable position, as will many of the people who were supposed to be in charge of emergency response on Black Saturday.

It is not the function of a Royal Commission into this kind of event to seek out scapegoats; however it is impossible to recommend changes to a system or an organisation without recognising its failings, and if personnel and culture are part of that then they need to be identified.

I’m fairly sure I’ve said it before, but for anyone who had more interesting things to read that day, I’ll say it again. I’m a right wing (small L) liberal. I don’t like the govern-by-committee, let’s mouth-platitudes-at-the-vocal-minorities-without-actually-doing-anything-to-help-them, suspicious-of-small-business-and-overawed-by-big-business, all-my-friends-are-teachers-or-public-servants smugness of the left. It makes me itchy and cross.

We’re glad that there have been calls for a Royal Commission into the murder of Carl Williams, and we’re glad that the response from Premier Brumby has been so dismissive and populist. We’re thrilled to bits that people are saying things like “lie down with dogs, get up with fleas”, and “live by the gun, die by the gun”, and “he was a piece of shit crook, his killer’s on toast, why waste money on a Commission?”

Well, Tony Abbott’s Great Big New Distraction worked for a short while, until it got bumped off the front pages by healthcare. Paid maternity leave was hot topic for a couple of news cycles and women everywhere, from Prue Goward to Mia Freedman, were proclaiming it as a huge win for feminism.

I can quite see why Tony Abbott would be delighted at the idea of more women staying home to look after babies, but it baffles me that so many women are marching in lockstep with him.

A selection of off and on the record quotes from various knobjockeys that we thought might interest you.

Some of these quotes may not have made it into the public record yet, but that is probably because we just thought of them today...