In the red

IT was just a small variation of the question that dogged Julia Gillard yesterday in honour of yet another poll melting some wax from Kevin Rudd's wings, but it was Neil Mitchell's query on 3AW that produced the most interesting answer: "So will you promise you will not be leader at the next federal election?"

IT was just a small variation of the question that dogged Julia Gillard yesterday in honour of yet another poll melting some wax from Kevin Rudd's wings, but it was Neil Mitchell's query on 3AW that produced the most interesting answer: "So will you promise you will not be leader at the next federal election?"

Gillard: "I can, completely. Neil, this is, you know, it makes good copy for newspapers but it is not within cooee of my day-to-day reality. You may as well ask me am I anticipating a trip to Mars."

Gillard is correct about it making good copy, and we thank her for her generosity. But Mars? As in, the red planet? What is that if not a coded signal from the nation's bloodnut-in-chief that she's thinking about domination on a global scale? Prepare for the reign of the ranga! What's that? Someone say tenuous?

Leafy surrounds

SPEAKING of space adventures, we have been utterly unable to stop watching the Liberal Party's freshly minted "real action" ad, possibly, if not entirely, due to its compelling awfulness. Is that loving, lingering close up of the hospital drip meant to symbolise the drip-drip-drip water torture effect of Tony Abbott's remorselessly repeated "great big new tax"? Are those sinister, red, foreign arrows menacing Australia homage to the swastika-heavy opening credits of Dad's Army? And does the "Authorised by B. Loughnane bit at the end suggest Liberal Party federal director Brian Loughnane wasn't willing to give his full name? Happily, the ad also directs users to the Libs' revamped website, where those who still hanker for the magnificent awkwardness John Howard brought to his YouTube appearances will be gratified by Tony Abbott's oddly stiff performance as he performs the welcome-to-website ceremony. As an added bonus, he is standing in front of what appears at first and even second (if not quite third) glance to be a big, bushy wall of cannabis.

Tome after tome

CHRISTOPHER Pyne was doing a Bob Carr yesterday and refusing admirably to park his light under a bushel. Appearing alongside former Labor senator Chris Schacht in the regular Two Chrises slot on Adelaide's 891 ABC, Pyne was grilled by a listener who'd seen in The Australian Literary Review (a discerning reader, clearly) that one of Pyne's favourite books was Plutarch's Lives of the Atheneans. "Why?" she demanded. "What's wrong with Battlelines? And have you actually read it?" Pyne replied: "I have a great interest in classical history, so it's one of my favourite . . .", whereupon he was cut off by hosts Matthew Abraham David Bevan, who wanted to know if it could be bought at the supermarket. Pyne pushed on undeterred, "Well, you can buy all sorts of books at the supermarket but I don't think Lives of the Atheneans is going to be one of them." Was it a ripper of a read? "It is, actually. It's a sensational read. So is Suetonius's Twelve Caesars . . ." Just before everyone drowned in sheer amazement that a pollie might want to read such big books, Schacht chipped in by declaring Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as one of his biggies.

Last word on budget SOME poor sods at Macquarie University's Centre for Language and Social Life (entrancing mix, that) have -- possibly at gunpoint, though that detail isn't mentioned -- done a linguistic analysis of federal budget speeches from 2005 to 2009. Among their findings: the word tax appears 126 times over the five budgets, but never as a verb; in his last three budget speeches, Peter Costello used the word Labor eight times (and not in a nice way), but Wayne Swan has yet to get around to returning the favour; Swan says the word spending much more than Costello and says saving much less; education appears in the top 20 words for the Labor Party speeches, but not for the Coalition. Distressingly, but not surprisingly, Swan favours "working families" over "people".

Kristina casts spell

THERE was an educational video that ran non-stop in the main foyer of NSW Parliament House to inform visitors on the history of the building, the state's political "system", and so on. The tape has just been replaced by a set of new tapes on various aspects of representative government in NSW that happily bring the whole story up to date. The only problem? In the subtitles for the hard of hearing, Premier Kristina Keneally is called "Christina" Keneally. We'll think of it as one of the parliamentary education section's works in progress.

Deveny, maybe

IS The Age a more sentimental rag than we'd ever suspected? Its website still espouses proudly the delights of one of its stable of scribes, a "comedy writer, stand-up comedian, author and social commentator named as one of the Top 100 Most Influential Melburnians. She is a regular on the speakers circuit, television and radio . . . an atheist, a dyslexic and describes herself as 'a serial pest and professional pain in the arse'." Yes, the editor may have canned her last week but it seems that at the Pravda on the Yarra, Catherine Deveny is neither gone nor forgotten. A bit like Miranda Devine's gerbils, in a way.