Grotty greenie revenge

IF there's one thing Tasmanian loggers hate more than a greenie, it's a grotty greenie. Damn them and their aesthetically displeasing means of protest!

IF there's one thing Tasmanian loggers hate more than a greenie, it's a grotty greenie. Damn them and their aesthetically displeasing means of protest!

That's the thrust of a campaign by Timber Communities Australia's state manager in Tasmania - the appositely named Barry Chipman - highlighting "how the forest of the Florentine Valley was turned into a dirty slum and tip site by the so-called protectors of wilderness, along with an old car body that was used as a weapon by these radical protesters to deny working families their right to earn an honest living". Photos include mucky campsites and vehicles turned into roadblocks with spray-painted messages conveying sentiments such as "Revenge" and the more cryptic "Ha ha hoo hoo". All's fair in love and war, but going after environmental activists on aesthetic grounds does seem a touch courageous, in the Humphrey Appleby sense. As our man on the ground puts it: "Of course, the greenies can show plenty of pics of clear-felled old growth that don't look pretty either." We suspect this won't be ending any time soon.

Lend me your earplugs

HAVING had one parliamentary wish granted - Philip Ruddock and Bronwyn Bishop in action in question time on the same day, and so soon after Brisbane's Zombie Walk, sigh - greedy Strewth is sending another request to the parliamentary wish fairies. Can someone please start subtitling Anthony Albanese so we can watch him with the sound turned down? After all, it appears some unheralded genius has managed to take the furious, blinding power of the sun and capture it in a necktie - at least that's what seemed to be going on under Human Services Minister Chris Bowen's throat yesterday - so simultaneous subtitling should be a piece of cake. It would be appreciated.

In lieu of Liu

HELEN Liu - the international woman of mystery whose undeclared gifts helped snuff out Joel Fitzgibbon's ministerial career - seems to have abandoned her mansion in Sydney's eastern suburbs. Neighbours told Strewth's agent in the field nobody has been in the Double Bay property for months. Her gold Mercedes-Benz is cloaked in red dust, courtesy of inland NSW. Happily, no one has performed the traditional community service of using their finger to write "wash me".

Riff in a hard place

STREWTH gets light-headed contemplating the fact Men at Work is being sued for allegedly ripping off Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree to create the famous flute riff in Down Under, a song we shall forever associate with Bob Hawke that one special morning in 1983. For those coming in late, the belated lawsuit arose from an episode of music game show Spicks & Specks, which featured the question, "What children's song is contained in the song Down Under?" Answer: Kookaburra. So we have to admire the counter-intuitive actions of David Catterns, the QC acting for the band's publisher Sony BMG Music Entertainment and EMI Songs Australia, who went back to the start of the whole controversy in the Supreme Court yesterday: "Even the experts - I don't know whether your honour has seen Spicks & Specks, but they are incredible experts on that show - even they didn't get it until they had a second go at it." How differently it might have all panned out if it had appeared on RocKwiz instead.

Bite at the biscuit

IT'S generally felt anyone who uses the swastika crowd to make a point forfeits the argument. But that's not stopping Sam Watson, deputy director of the University of Queensland's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies unit, in his war against Coles' Creole Cream biscuits: "The word creole comes from a period when people's humanity was measured by the amount of white blood they had in their bloodstream. This is the same kind of thought that underpinned horrific regimes like the Nazis."

Rabbit hot spot

IT'S time we looked beyond Volvos, Ikea, meatballs and all those bloody ABBA songs to draw some fresh and relevant inspiration from Sweden's latest genius scheme: bunnies as biofuel. Stray rabbits near Stockholm are being shot by hunters, their frozen carcasses eventually taken to a plant and incinerated to warm homes. Given the size of Australia's rabbit problem, we could be sitting on a goldmine. (Or a mixed metaphor.)