FORMER prime minister Gough Whitlam has been in hospital in Sydney since last week but a spokesman will not reveal what illness he has. Does one get hospitalized for megalomania? Just asking.

With Della Bosca stood down and his weird wife undergoing counselling the ALP would like to think that is the end of it. No way. The NSW opposition are after some blood and I wish them well. From everything I’ve read about Belinda Neal she needs to be dis empowered not counselled. Federal Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner today said the counselling referral should be the end of the matter.

“Belinda’s having some counselling, that should be the end of it,” Mr Tanner told the Nine Network. “Nobody’s died here, nobody’s lost their life savings.“

What a strange thing to say – it’s either stupid or arrogant and neither make him look good. We aren’t talking about death or dollars we are talking about abuse of power. Counselling doesn’t excuse her behaviour; it just might, and it’s a big might, slow down future incidences of her weird behaviour but in the meantime she needs to be called to order and I trust this happens in the house this week. The ‘She said…he said’ situation with stat decs made and then withdrawn needs to be resolved and the truth needs to come out.

Fuel Watch currently operating in WA is obviously working as West Australians watch their fuel price go up to the second highest of all the capital cities. Not that will worry Rudd as he will still try and bring it in nationally. Last week Rudd told OPEC to release more fuel to fix the problem while financial commentators think it has something to do with trading and this week he is telling our poorer Asian neighbours that they should lower their subsidies so us rich Aussies can have cheaper fuel. What is he on?

So says Brisbane’s Courier Mail

EVERY 10cm of the Ipswich Motorway will cost taxpayers more than $17,000 to upgrade but the Rudd Government denies ever committing to fix the entire route.

The link is only a one paragraph article but there’s more and it’s all on the front page in huge font and says a lot about the papers changing attitude to the spin and empty promises of the Rudd government. As Rudd lectures about whales and focuses on meaningless gestures the Japanese worry about the Chinese and Rudd’s sinocentric, mandarin speaking personae. As Hugh White says in the Australian Rudd flubs Tokyo chance;

…. his visit focused on two strangely meaningless Big Initiatives: his idea of an EU for Asia, and the new crusade to rid the world of nuclear weapons. No one could disagree with these noble objectives, but no one seriously believes that such ill-considered and under-prepared announcements offer any hope of achieving them. They simply confirm that Australia’s Government has not yet found its feet in foreign policy, and still fails to understand the difference between a real policy and a press release.

If anyone believes there will be an outcome from these ‘big initiatives’ then sometime down the track they too will fell dudded. I wonder if the voters in NSW central coast seat of Robertson feel dudded yet? Belinda Neal, a former Labor senator and staff member who had fought bitter preselection ballots in the NSW central coast seat of Robertson, was endorsed with the backing of the NSW Right but not expected to win. Unfortunately for the electorate and the ALP she did win. Since the election it transpires she is a foul mouthed, temper raging loose canon. As Denis Shanahan reports in a ‘Cautionary Tale;

She is caught up in a swirl of allegations and reports of having misled parliament over telling pregnant Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella her baby would turn into a demon, of police being called to the family home because of loud domestic disputes and the contested content of sworn statements being investigated by police.

The contested contents of sworn statements relate to an incident at a restaurant where she went ballistic over staff wanting to move her and her husband so diners could dance. She was accused of threating the livelihood of the staff and the establishments licence using language that most would find inappropriate in public The staff submitted sworn statements and then withdrew them under, and I’m guessing here, pressure from above. She denies the incident and the language but Rudd, after trying to laugh it off, has gone into damage control and demands she seek counseling. Voters of Robertson, you too have been dudded. Who else one wonders?

Howard was awarded an AC in the Queens Birthday Weekend Honours and Awards and I’m pleased for two reasons. For a start I believe he deserves an award. He was part of a team that brought us out of the financial abyss the ALP left us in; set us up to gain the benefits of the commodity boom; enhanced our international reputation (with governments and people who matter) and generally steered the ship in the manner and direction I would prefer. There were any amount of matters that I disagreed with over the years but I was happy with the general direction. However, the main reason I am happy he has been so honoured is that it winds up the Left as witnessed by this comment at LP

Doubt very much that Rudd is going to be arraigned for war crimes at the Internatuional Crimimal Court, the way Howard will be. So he won’t have to hand any gongs back, the way Howard will. Apart from which, apart from his forthcoming war crimes trial, the sad, publicity-hungry little fart is irrelevant. With a little bit of luck and even more courage rhan I think he’s actually got,, Rudd might get rid of everything bad and evil the little pr*ck did over the past 11 years. Though I doubt it.

Does Paul Burns, the author of this strange alignment and sequence of words, actually believe what he writes? One can only wonder. Mark Bahnisch seems to think the fact that Paul Keating didn’t get an award is relevant and maybe he suggests that Howard shouldn’t have accepted his AC because Keating didn’t. Doesn’t compute with me. Keating is one-off weirdo who actually did the country considerable damage and he was possibly concerned that an image of the medal may have been impressed on his forehead by all those voters with baseball bats in hand looking to get at him. While Keating refused his, Kelty didn’t and I for one don’t deny him the honour and recognition but then I never managed to develop ‘hatred’ into such an art form as did the left. Howard, AC…has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

Having fixed up Australia and all her ‘conservative government’ caused problems Rudd is now overseas fixing world problems. In the ancient Japanese city of Kyoto Australia’s Chief Clerk outlines his vision for saving the world. He plans to set up an Australian answer to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, headed by Cheryl Kernot’s old boyfriend and former Hawke/Keating man, Gareth Evans. This is a recycled ALP idea as Evans set up an organization called the Canberra Commission on eliminating nuclear weapons during Labour’s last shot at glory. The Commission basically said a lot and achieved nothing and that’s exactly what we can expect from the ‘new’ initiative. Deja Vu Greg Sheridan nails Gareth with this line;

Any document written by Evans is bound to be lengthy, well informed, well researched, judicious, professional, comprehensive, pedantic and ineffective.

Which is exactly how I remember Gareth. All this comes from Rudd’s visit to the bombed out city of Hiroshma where he was so moved as to look ‘subdued’ and ‘found himself reaching for his wifes hand’. God help us! Rudd also spoke well of the Kyoto agreement and how much the city had contributed to the world and I guess if you’re a visitor it is incumbent on you to say words of praise but really what has Kyoto achieved other than some left wing votes for dubious governments. To compliment his Fuel Watch program whereby fuel costs are ‘watched’ and somehow lower themselves under Rudd’s steely gaze he has applied a similar approach to oil. Let’s call it Oil Watch where he accuses oil-producing nations of deliberately distorting the supply of oil to maintain high prices and has demanded the Group of Eight nations intervene. They seem to think that prices have surged because of market speculators putting large amounts of funds into oil, not because of a lack of supply. But who are they to doubt the wisdom of our own Superman Rudd? I wonder if Whaling has made the agenda yet? Probably not but then I think he’s got all the votes he wanted from his previous incursion into whaling where he dispatched a customs ship to take pics to add to the photo gallery of millions of other pics of Japanese whalers going about their legal business. This government is at risk of being very long on setting up inquiries and Commissions and very short on actually doing anything but in the interim the entertainment value is priceless.

I have reserved my opinion on Lindsay Tanner but now I can state I ‘m not impressed. I saw him on TV last night trying to put Rudd’s attack on the Public Servants into a favourable light He failed. He said words to the effect that after 11 years of not having any demands placed on them by the Howard government he has no sympathy for them now the Rudd is demanding some hard work. So Lindsay thinks they have been bludging for eleven years. Rudd is well down the track to alienate half of Canberra as he takes on the personae of a boss from hell and tells them to stop complaining and be prepared to work harder;

The Prime Minister’s peevish response to the cabinet leak brought on a deluge of defensive calls to talkback radio in Canberra. The attitude was repeated on Friday evening’s edition of the ABC’s Stateline. When the Prime Minister had a second go, he insisted that he had a mandate for reform and therefore could require the public service to work as hard as he believed was necessary.

And Bob McMullan is simply still condescending and offensive;

….public servants should feel privileged to work on a great program of reform.

Yeah, right! Keep attacking them Kevin and co and we may see something I never thought would happen – a Coaliton supporting public service.