Bovine empathy

LIBERAL senator Bill Heffernan is not just an eccentric farmer with a taste for bizarre behaviour, he's a frustrated scientist only too happy to show off his eclectic knowledge.

LIBERAL senator Bill Heffernan is not just an eccentric farmer with a taste for bizarre behaviour, he's a frustrated scientist only too happy to show off his eclectic knowledge.

At a Senate estimates hearing yesterday, Heffernan said that a cow has 22,000 genes in its genome (possibly a rubbery figure) and that 80 per cent of them can be found in humans. (He probably meant comparisons of non-coding DNAs aligned by orthologous exonic sequences, but we'll let that pass.) "There is more in common with cows and humans than rats and mice," he declared. Noticing the generously proportioned Industry Minister Kim Carr and the Nationals' ruddy-faced Senate leader Barnaby Joyce, Heffernan suggested Carr was a Belgian blue cow and Joyce a Hereford. According to our Despatch Box blog correspondent Samantha Maiden, Heff thought he might be a Brahman. "No," Carr replied. "You're a mad cow."

Back where he started

HAVING shopped around for a safer federal seat, Coalition frontbencher Peter Dutton is denying he has been shopping around. Much as Strewth admires Dutton, it won't be enough to save him from the wrath of voters in Dickson, the seat he holds at present but feels he can't retain. Ot at least that's how he felt until Tuesday, when he changed his mind. He tried for preselection in the Gold Coast seat of McPherson and failed to convince backbenchers Peter Slipper and Alex Somlyay they should do the right thing and make room for the falling star. "I'm not shopping around for seats," Dutton told ABC radio yesterday. He also revealed he had received six emails telling him to get lost after his decision to dump Dickson, but 400 that were positive. "It will be very difficult to win Dickson, there's no question about that." At least he got that bit right.

Pre-dawn feedback

ADELAIDE journalists are accustomed to feeling the wrath of Premier Mike Rann's media unit, but usually not in the early hours of Sunday. In a possible indication of the sensitivity surrounding Rann's friendship with a former parliamentary barmaid, his media adviser Lachlan Parker sent a pointed text message to Sunday Mail political editor Brad Crouch at 2.07am on a Sunday. Crouch is happy to wear criticism and understands journalism is a 24-hour gig, but was less than impressed at being woken at such an hour.

Sorry about that

MORE considerate is Malcolm Turnbull's spinner Mark Westfield, who waited until 10.10am yesterday to berate Strewth for saying Liberal MPs were implicated in dodgy dealings in NSW when we should have said Labor. Westfield, a former business journalist at The Australian, is a top bloke and gun reporter who broke the story on the HIH debacle. He also has a reputation for being a writ magnet and was once fined for contempt. Westfield is also in the interesting position of working for the man who once sued him back in the 1980s. Perhaps Westfield's experience in making grovelling apologies came in handy when landing the Turnbull job.

Madoff's new routine

BERNIE Madoff, the New Yorker who stole $US65 billion from people who trusted him, is serving the first year of a 150-year sentence. How does the 71-year-old spend his time in jail? Well, he socialises with former Colombo crime family boss Carmine Persico and Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. Most of his fellow inmates committed drug or sex crimes. He shares a cell with a 21-year-old drug dealer and eats pizza cooked by a child molester. Madoff's recreation consists of walking around the prison track at night. We know all this because it's contained in a complaint lodged with the New York Supreme Court.

Tweets ahead

USELESS information alert: Twitter has recorded its five billionth tweet, apparently from Robin Sloan in San Francisco. Further useless info: Sloan calls his tweet a pentagigatweet. Twitter recorded its billionth tweet about a year ago. For the arithmetically challenged, this means four billion tweets have been sent in the past 12 months, at the rate of 300 a second. We can't blame it all on Kevin Rudd and Mike Rann.