Mike Rann

It was the week in which the words “Macquarie Banker” finally became rhyming slang after a member of the millionaire’s factory was caught perving on jpegs of Miranda Kerr during a live cross about interest rates.

The week in which the words “cyberbully” and “tweet” were listed for inclusion in a Macquarie of a different kind.

It was also the week in which one of the most old-fashioned politicians in Australia, a man who seemed puzzled enough by the 20th century and is really struggling with the 21st, blundered into a raging cyber-storm which had the potential to blow away a government seeking re-election in just seven weeks’ time.

Continue reading "How a political luddite got smashed in cyberspace" »

In their haste to get an agreement on national management of the Murray Darling Basin Kevin Rudd and Mike Rann quite literally sold the dream.

Now, as Mike Rann realises the deal he signed has left the Southern Basin high and dry despite floods flowing into the system up north, the South Australian Premier has been left so impotent that all he can do is write a letter to the Prime Minister.

It is reminiscent of the satirical movie Team America: World Police who lampooned former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix over his incapacity to bring North Korea to heel, with his character saying:

Continue reading "The real letter Mike Rann should write to Kevin Rudd" »

I owe my sex education to Christine Keeler. Not directly of course: I was eleven years old at the time the Profumo scandal convulsed Britain in 1963.

I was on a fishing holiday with my father, in a big house in the north of Scotland shared with two other families, including several teenage boys and girls.

In between tying flies and tramping across the heather, everyone – the adults and the teenagers – seemed to have only one topic of conversation, and Christine Keeler was it.

Continue reading "If it doesn’t affect national security it’s not a sex scandal" »

Denials do not get any more categorical or absolute than this - and as of his press conference an hour ago, Mike Rann is being hailed as Adelaide’s own Bill Clinton after looking straight into the camera and declaring that he did not have sexual relations with that woman.

But unlike Clinton’s twitchy and unconvincing handling of the Monica Lewinsky allegations, Rann came out all guns blazing, specifically denying key aspects of the bombshell interview by his former friend and parliamentary barmaid Michelle Chantelois, hammering the fact that she was paid bucketloads of cash to sell her story, and declaring that he will sue both Channel Seven and New Idea for peddling allegations which he says are categorically false.

Rann also seized on the fact that Channel Seven got a key part of its story wrong, in falsely asserting that Chantelois’s estranged husband Rick Phillips had not been charged with assault after he punched the Premier in the face with a rolled-up magazine in a chance encounter at the Adelaide Wine Centre last month.

Continue reading "Rann’s emphatic sex denial might not end this affair" »

Update 1.20pm AEDT: Rann is due to speak to the media at 2.30pm AEDT today. Passing waiting journalists heading into a cabinet meeting earlier he refused to deny outright having sex with Chantelois.

Today could decide the career of Australia’s most popular premier and Punch contributor Mike Rann. “It is disappointing and distressing that a friendship I had with Michelle Chantelois more than four years ago has become the subject of such sensationalised publicity,” the SA Premier said this morning. There’s more from his statement over the jump.

The publicity, which you may have caught, was the airing last night of a detailed account of an affair that former parliamentary barmaid Michelle Chantelois claims to have had with Rann. She claims it involved sex on the premier’s desk and clandestine trips to a golf course for romps in the dark. The trouble for Rann is that he has been insisting there was never any sex.

As one senior Labor figure said: “At the end of the day, she has either made the whole thing up or he’s lying.”

Continue reading "The Mike Rann sex scandal: is it a sacking offence?" »

It is hard to believe that not one South Australian Federal Liberal wouldn’t have tapped Malcolm Turnbull on the shoulder late last week and uttered two cautionary words – “Remember Marty”.

Where was SA’s Christopher Pyne or Nick Minchin? Where was Turnbull adviser, Adelaide’s Chris Kenny, in the lead up to the fake email affair and Malcolm’s call for the Prime Minister to resign?

Last week’s email attack in Canberra came just days after I read into Hansard an extraordinary apology from South Australian Liberal Leader, Martin Hamilton-Smith.

Continue reading "Dodgy Lib documents are deja vu all over again" »