Play nicely, Laura, you've had your turn. Let someone else have a go in Cut & Paste

Laura Tingle in The Australian Financial Review yesterday:

THE last time Australia had much of a political debate on labour market participation, the Coalition was in one of its more cheerful phases of beating up on blacks and disabled pensioners. That was back before it discovered the untapped political potential of boatpeople.

The Australian's Paul Kelly on Sky News' The Nation on Thursday:

LABOR is breaking its own solemn principles because it has said that when it comes to infrastructure decisions will be based on proper cost-benefit analysis. And the reason is pretty clear, it wouldn't stand up.

Labor Senator Doug Cameron: That is not clear at all. You're just making assertion after assertion with absolutely no backing.

Kelly: Why won't the government submit the NBN to a productivity analysis? You tell me.

Cameron: The NBN will be the most looked-at piece of legislation.

Kelly: That's complete nonsense. There is no cost-benefit analysis. You tell me why.

Cameron: Well, because there is no need for a cost-benefit analysis.

Presenter Helen Dalley: How will it be scrutinised if it is not subject to these sorts of normal business practices?

Cameron: This is typical from The Australian.

Dalley: No, leave that out. Just tell us how it's going to be scrutinised.

Former Labor leader Mark Latham on outgoing The 7.30 Report host Kerry O'Brien in the current issue of The Spectator Australia:

EVEN at his peak, O'Brien was never an effective figure . . . Good interviewers have a knack of asking the questions politicians least want to hear. O'Brien was so full of himself, his questions . . . focused on the things he wanted to hear.

O'Brien on The 7.30 Report on October 20, 2004, 11 days after Latham had his derriere handed to him on a plate by the electorate:

O'BRIEN: What's going on, Mark Latham, you might be able to do without John Faulkner or Kim Beazley or [Bob] McMullan, or Lindsay Tanner, but are you so flush with talent that you can afford to lose all four? How hard did you try to persuade Lindsay Tanner or Bob McMullan to stay?

Latham: Well, they weren't discussions that focused solely on that issue. . . . In McMullan's case he's been a long-standing servant of the Labor Party and issued his statement. I'm not getting into the personal discussions I had with him. And with Tanner, I don't think you can characterise it as a discussion about whether he was going to stay or not. It was more a decision about the position he was seeking and how he saw his future role in the parliamentary Labor Party.

O'Brien: But you're the leader of the party. These two people . . . have a lot of experience, Tanner has been mentioned as a possible future leader. He's been one of, it seems, your key policymakers. My question was -- I don't want the detail -- how hard did you try to persuade either or both of those two men to stay?

Latham: Well, I've answered your question.

O'Brien: Not really.

Satirist Ben-Peter Terpstra on the Australian Conservative website:

[SOPHIE] Mirabella is an independent spirit. As well, she's a disciple of realism. Like Demeter, the Greek goddess of fertility, agriculture, horticulture, grain and harvest, the rural Victorian is a mature woman, without sheaves of wheat and a torch, but she certainly has plenty of spunk.

Interview with P. J. O'Rourke in Britain's The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday:

AT college in the late 1960s . . . "I went home at Christmas break with my hair grown long, wearing a blue-jean jacket with a big, red fist emblazoned on the back. My grandmother said: 'Pat, I'm worried about you. Are you becoming a Democrat?' 'Grandma!' I said. 'Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon are both fascist pigs. Of course, I'm not a Democrat, I'm a communist!' " 'At least you're not a Democrat,' said Grandma."

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