THE captain and watch officer of the Chinese ship blamed for causing unprecedented damage to a coral shoal on the Great Barrier Reef will face court today on federal charges that attract heavy fines and jail. I guess unprecedented damage refers to ship-caused damage only and not damage from tens of thousands of cyclones that have battered the reef over its long existence. Even that must be considered an iffy statement but then considering that seemingly a full 50% of a journalist’s tertiary education must be ‘Hyperbole 101‘ then maybe the story fits. OK, get up the idle Chinese Captain and First Mate and slap a fine on them but can we have less Doomsday prophesies.

The ABC website reports that O’Brien found Obama to be “quite expansive and quite genuine on what he saw as the commonality and connections” between himself and the Australian Prime Minister, “one of which was humility.” Sometimes I amaze myself – how could I get it so wrong. It simply didn’t occur to me to think it through and arrive at the obvious conclusion that Kevin Rudd is humble. When I think of it, he’s simply wrapped in humility. Isn’t he?

The Australian just keeps on pointing out problems with Julia Gillard’s BER programme and she just keeps on ignoring it. The frightening thing is NSW is the only state providing detailed costings. All the other state governments could be just as bad. At the very least it looks like Queensland is;

Nine months after Education Minister Julia Gillard told federal parliament that Holland Park State School was “delighted” with the “once-in-a-lifetime enhancement of its facilities”, her department has quietly agreed to let the school swap the unneeded buildings for eight new classrooms.

P&C president Craig Mayne – who has since quit the post – blew the whistle on cost blowouts last year in two letters to Mr Rudd and five phone calls to his Griffith electorate office.

“My issue is not with the program but how it is being implemented,” he wrote in June. “We have a situation where the Queensland Public Works Department is proposing and implementing a system that is open to massive rorting.”

And that’s my point: My issue is not with the program but how it is being implemented. In the land of amazing circumstances nine schools in NSW have identical costings for different projects in different areas with different site considerations. The link is to a .pdf but worth having a quick look. Rudd and Gillard ignore this problem at their peril. They really need to get on top of it and convince the electorate that the program is being managed. It’s one thing to say school principals are ecstatic about their new buildings but of course they will be. Their responsibility is to their school, not to the fiscal management of tax payers money. And in the centuries old advice of follow the money I’m reliably informed by insiders that the flow of money is to the large companies and middle men, not the worker. The ute guys are picking up work but I bet they aren’t picking up millions for jam. Someone is but I wonder if we’ll ever know exactly who. Most probably not.

I have to say I’m disappointed about the weekend election results. South Australia’s Mike Rann seems to have fallen over the line and in Tasmania the Libs may have to negotiate with the Greens to form a coalition. Sure, there was 12.1% swing away from Labor in Tasmania and 7.4% in South Australia but that’s simply not enough. Anthony Green’s piece on why the ALP won in SA has some hope for us anti-labor types with mostly double digit swings against the ALP in all but two seats. A part of those stats has to be as a result of Australians waking up to Rudd’s shallowness and fiscal “throw another few billion at ’em” policies.