Old habits die hard

WITHIN the grounds of Parliament Housethere are various courtyards that are usedby all politicians for media conferences.

WITHIN the grounds of Parliament Housethere are various courtyards that are usedby all politicians for media conferences.

There is the Opposition Leader’s courtyard and the increasingly irrelevantly named Democrats’ courtyard. Julia Gillard, a day away from being our first female (Acting) Prime Minister, convened a press conference yesterday in the Opposition Leader’s courtyard, prompting one journo to suggest maybe she hadn’t become used to the idea of government. Well, she replied, some of the media seemed to like the tree-lined courtyard, which was away from the setting sun. ‘‘But if you like another space better, let us know,’’ she added. What about the big courtyard outside the Prime Minister’s office? ‘‘All right, we will bear that in mind, thank you,’’ she said with a wide grin.

We’re all mates here
FRIENDSHIP is clearly very important to K. Michael Rudd. On Sunday the Prime Minister was at pains to point out that he wasn’t meeting Kiwi PM Helen Clark for the first time. ‘‘I regard myself as a friend of Helen’s, going back several years,’’ he declared. Yesterday, as he spoke about his trip to Bali, Rudd said he was looking forward to catching up with his ‘‘old friend Robert Zoellick’’, president of the World Bank. He then added that he was also ‘‘meeting with my old friend Al Gore’’, with whom he had promised to have a celebratory drink. About the only bloke Rudd spoke about who didn’t rate as an old mate was Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Ardent conversationalist
WHEN Environment Minister Peter Garrett wandered out of his pub in Nusa Dua yesterday morning, the slow-moving queue for accreditation for the UN climate change conference was more than 300 people long. It wound out of the airconditioned accreditation tent into the nearby gardens, where delegates struggled to find some shade to protect them from Bali’s tropical sun. Garrett had a meeting planned with former US presidential candidate John Kerry, so there was some speculation between Strewth’s undercover koala and his wombat mates about how and when Garrett would get his official accreditation. As he is not Australia’s Climate Change Minister, Garrett can spend his time happily wandering about outside the conference while chatting to interesting people such as fellow pop singer Bono and Nobel prize-winner Al Gore.

Gotta whole lotta love
PROVING you can’t keep an ageing rock fan down, Germaine Greer has burst into print declaring her undying love for Led Zeppelin. With the band giving its first public performance in more than 25 years in Britain last night, Greer shared her memories of the group with readers of London’s The Daily Telegraph. ‘‘For 10 years, rock ’n’ roll had been working towards something that would combine the extraordinary capacities of electronic instruments with the anarchic energy of youth, and there in the Albert Hall on January 9, 1970, I found it. The spring god Dionysus had arisen and was shaking his streaming red-gold mane on stage.’’ Having found rock love in the Albert Hall bleachers, she continued the relationship back home. ‘‘In 1972, when Led Zeppelin toured Australia, I was in Sydney and, having time on my hands, decided to gatecrash a reception at the Sebel Townhouse and say hi to the biggest band in the world. And I found that they were big physically, not boys but men. The band were to discover over the years that theirs was a pact made with the devil, but, in 1972, as four British lads on the razzle in Sydney, their frolicking was more innocent than debauched. The legendary excesses must have come later, if ever.’’

Pigs of the world united
DO you expect the ham on the bone you carve up for Christmas lunch to be meat and bone from the same pig? That’s the focus of an argument between the peak pig industry body, Australian Pork Limited, and the country’s biggest producer of Christmas hams, KR Castlemaine. APL’s Andrew Spencer wants KR Castlemaine’s chief executive Mike Adams to withdraw the product, which combines the meat from a Canadian pig with the bone of an Australian pig, from the market. Adams says the product is not misleadingly labelled and the company is not breaking the law. ‘‘I think that the product does not look like your traditional bone-in ham,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s manufactured. It doesn’t look like your normal Christmas ham, it’s quite different, both in its colour and shape.’’ But Spencer says while the company may not be breaking the law, the ham should be taken off the shelves. ‘‘When it calls this product ‘ham on the bone’, the consumer expects the bone to be from the same animal as the meat itself, and that is clearly not the case.’’