The Punch

Let’s not make any excuses for the morons associated with the Aboriginal tent embassy who sparked Thursday’s ugly events in the national capital. When they interrupted a medal ceremony for courageous emergency services personnel involved in the Queensland floods and Victorian bushfires, their behaviour was vile.

“Who f***ing cares? They’re not our heroes,” yelled one of the first protesters to arrive. Then, spotting the opposition leader, she screamed: “Tony Abbott, you f***ing big-eared Dumbo c***.”

This was followed by more obscenities directed at Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Things went downhill from there.

Continue reading "We need smarter security, not beefed up security" »

I went to the KFC T20 Big Bash League game at the Sydney Cricket Ground in character. My self-assigned role was to play the sporting curmudgeon, a cricket connoisseur abhorring the form of the game designed for people who don’t like cricket, and left-wing romantic appalled by the abominations of corporate consumption capitalism at its most bone-headedly tasteless.

Attending my first live Twenty20 event was an exercise in leisure and education, meaning that I was looking for fun but brought my notepad along.

Following the pedestrian flow through Surry Hills to Moore Park and breathing humid evening air spiced with vehicle and restaurant emissions, the collective feeling was unmistakeably that of summer carnival.

Continue reading "Shh! Don’t tell my highbrow chums I liked the Twenty20!" »

So we now know who is responsible for putting Julia Gillard into the most peril she’s been in since she became Prime Minister - her own office.

A senior member of the Prime Minister’s team has tonight resigned after it emerged he was the one who tipped off an Aboriginal Tent Embassy contact that Tony Abbott was in the Lobby restaurant yesterday - information that led to the Prime Minister being dragged to her car in undignified scenes that are now world news.

Tony Hodges, who was the one trawling the Press Gallery yesterday afternoon trying to sheet home blame for the ugly scenes to the Opposition Leader, is tonight no longer working for the PM. If it wasn’t so disgusting it would be funny. This came a day after a member of senior Cabinet Minister Anthony Albanese’s staff saw fit to send his boss off to the Press Club armed with a raft of fantastic quotes from a Hollywood movie.

Continue reading "When is this sorry mess going to end?" »

Once upon a time, in a mythical kingdom called Canberra which most people don’t really believe exists, a lady called Cindergillard lost her shoe.

The lady didn’t lose her shoe at a big fancy schmancy ball, but what can you do? Ball, restaurant, same effect.

The hunt was on. Who would the shoe fit? In ye olde days, they settled this kind of issue door-to-door. On this occasion, the matter was handled in the mercenary manner of the interwebs.

Continue reading "This week’s lesson: politics is no fairy tale" »

On February 1 the Federal Government will lift its ban on Australian same-sex partners receiving the documents they need to marry in other countries where same-sex marriage is allowed.

To her great credit, Attorney-General, Nicola Roxon, has asked the Department of Foreign Affairs to start issuing certificates of no-impediment to marriage (CNIs) to same-sex couples marrying overseas on the same basis as they are now issued to heterosexual couples.

A CNI is required by many foreign governments as proof the foreigner who wants to marry in their country is of marriageable age and isn’t already married where they come from. 

Continue reading "Cruel treatment of ‘marriage refugees’ to end" »

Julia Gillard should be congratulated for maintaining even a shred of dignity after being dragged minus a shoe through a crowd at a speed she couldn’t keep up with. Most Australians were horrified by the images from the steps of the Lobby restaurant, and in turn would have been relieved when a composed PM, with two fresh shoes on, reassured everyone from outside The Lodge that she was fine.

She should never have been placed in that terrible position in the first place, and there are many questions unanswered about how and why she was.

1. The location for yesterday’s inaugural emergency services medal presentation was poorly chosen.

Continue reading "How was yesterday’s drama ever allowed to happen?" »

Margaret Court has been, well, courting controversy these past weeks. The former world no.1 tennis star, turned pastor, has raised the ire of many with a volley of comments labelling homosexuality a sin. Earlier this week the tennis great wrote in The Herald Sun: “Australia is in a steep moral decline”, “especially when it comes to the issue of sexuality”.

Outraged gay rights supporters have returned serve. They’re pushing for the Margaret Court Arena at Melbourne Park to stripped of its name and they’ve been encouraging Australian Open attendees to drape themselves in rainbow in defiance.

The kerfuffle is sure making a racket, but there’s something else at fault here. Since when were places named after people while they were alive anyway? Isn’t the whole point of naming a place after someone to commemorate the life and achievements of a person, you know, after they’ve died?

Continue reading "You’re courting disaster naming places after the living" »

AND, action! A senior cabinet minister generally regarded as among the more effective, uses a major speech on Australia Day-eve to channel an American president without acknowledging it. Worse, it wasn’t even an actual president but a fictional one.

On the same day, a few hundred metres up the hill, the 2012 Australian of the year is unveiled as an A-list Hollywood actor, Geoffrey Rush. Rush, a gifted pretender with an expressive face, promptly weighs in to some of the more divisive political debates in this country hinting at the moral failure of both sides of politics to recognise the human courage of asylum seekers, the failure to progress gay marriage equality, and to deliver enough on climate change.

Later he defends his A-list compatriot Cate Blanchett who had been lambasted for taking part in an advertising campaign on carbon driven global warming. OK as movie plots go this is bit lame but it certainly seems fanciful enough. Besides, it has the advantage of being “based on a true story” and all that. It even has some real actors in it.

Continue reading "The saying goes, politics is showbusiness for ugly people" »

The world is ruled by extroverts. The loudest voices, unsurprisingly, are often the only ones we hear.

The Australia Day honours are meant to pay tribute to the unsung heroes, thereby making them sung.

While the most attention is too often given to the already well-sung - celebrities, the actors and the sportspeople who make the list - there are also the local heroes, the young and the senior Australians.

Continue reading "Singing the praises of the unsung heroes" »

Half a dozen years ago I regularly attended concerts in the dark and smaller halls of inner-Brisbane with a guy named Mick. We had very similar musical tastes and if Lambchop, Vic Chesnutt or Micah P. Hinson were in town we’d be sure to show up.

Not that I ever saw Mick but I knew he was there. At the time we worked together at The Courier-Mail, he was a young newcomer to journalism with the mark of a good writer possessed of a keen eye for those specialist fields, music and sports.

I knew Mick was there because most of the time after he’d leave the now sadly departed Troubadour or the Zoo, he’d clock on for the graveyard police rounds shift at the paper and there in my inbox the next day would be a note about how much he’d enjoyed the music of the night before.

Continue reading "A quirky southern folk rock that will send you into a spin" »