Howes low

ONE could be forgiven for thinking/hoping/praying like mad Paul Howes had got pretty well everything off his chest about Kevin Rudd in Confessions of Faceless Man.

ONE could be forgiven for thinking/hoping/praying like mad Paul Howes had got pretty well everything off his chest about Kevin Rudd in Confessions of Faceless Man.

But perhaps sparing the Rudd constitutes foiling the riled, and that will never do. So when Rudd hit Twitter yesterday - "Just spoke again to NZ Mines Minister Gerry Brownlee. Everything that can be done is being done. Thoughts and prayers for them all." - Howes was ready. "Another Beaconsfield memory: irrelevant pollies trying to score cheap headlines," he tweeted*, neatly reminding us of his role at Beaconsfield on the one hand, leaving the other hand free to be bunched into a fist and planted into Rudd. But "irrelevant"? We'll hand over to former Rudd staff member Annie O'Rourke, who tweeted, "Wow that was nasty. He is Foreign Minister. Bitchy comments dilute your other critiques." (*Incidentally, none of the headlines Howes scores is cheap; it took an entire team of artisans to come up with that headline in The Weekend Australian declaring his duel with Mark Latham had "more tit for tat than a topless tattoo parlour".)

Huh? Say again

AND now for a new paradigm moment, brought to you by Joe Hockey on ABC1's Insiders yesterday: "I think [people's taxes are] well spent on the ABC, Barrie."

Oh, Happy Days

WE'VE been haunted all weekend by a press release issued by NSW Premier Kristina Keneally's office after she and her bicycle had a falling out on Friday. Beneath its entrancing headline: "Statement from the office of the Premier: The bicycle incident", each sentence is alotted a paragraph of its own, which suggests it should be declaimed aloud: "The Office of the Premier has confirmed that the Premier had a minor incident involving her bike / No other vehicle was involved / Her handlebar separated from her bike as she was riding into the basement of Governor Macquarie Tower / Police called an ambulance, but it was not needed and it was cancelled / The Premier has a bruised knee and has resumed her normal duties." There's something about it that brings to mind Donald Rumsfeld's more gnomic utterances, though our Macquarie Street observer sees in its pared-back lines an evocation of Samuel Beckett's late novels. We could adapt a title from one of the great man's earlier periods: Waiting For Ballot has a certain ring to it.

Going downmarket

THE Reserve Bank has spent a lot of time pulling apart economists' claims Australia has a housing bubble, but documents obtained under Freedom of Information show they also penned criticism of a Sydney Morning Herald piece on property prices. RBA head of financial stability Luci Ellis was perturbed by the newspaper's claim readers could not buy in the suburbs they grew up in: "Since when did first-home buyers have a right to buy in the same suburbs they grew up in? First home buyers have traditionally bought at or near the fringe, where the location value is lower." Ellis also took issue with the paper's claim the prices of seemingly ordinary properties were surreal: "SMH's readership are basically the people who want to buy a nice little doer-upper in [inner Sydney's] Annandale. The property might look ordinary, but the location certainly isn't. [A] $250,000 income might not buy much in [harbourside] Balmain, but it will buy something pretty decent in [not inner Sydney] Ashbury or Campsie." Hmm, Hobart is looking pretty good.

Spy vs Spy

IN our Rather Them Than Us department, one of our colleagues has become possessed by a desire to know what protection employees have from bosses who might want to spy on them. So on Friday, he rang the Fair Work Ombudsman, thinking privacy in the workplace might have something to do with the principle of fair work. Bless. Alas, the local spin master indicated the ombudsman had no interest in privacy and directed our colleague to the Privacy Commissioner. The Privacy Commissioner had in fact already been rung, but was a little unhurried in replying. A second phone call revealed the commissioner was having voicemail problems and the earlier phone call had not been received. An email sent at 3.30pm asked for comments on the laws for employers to monitor telephone and internet use by employees, and the use of agents within the workplace or externally to monitor employees. A spokesman said "we don't think we can do justice to those questions" because they were "very broad". That's one way of respecting privacy. As it is, our colleague has now been referred to the Victorian privacy commissioner. He doesn't show any signs of going mad yet, but we're keeping an eye on him.

Overhead?

SOMETHING that may have been better kept private is a new flashing sign on the descent to York Street from the Sydney Harbour Bridge (in other words, quite some distance from anywhere the Reserve Bank thinks sane people should be home-hunting). The sign warns: "WATCH OUT FOR PED'S". It's an alarming vision (we had no idea it was that bad), though it could just be a timely reminder of the danger of roaming pedants.