Lost to the party

TONY Abbott - reported in The Australian yesterday as worried about the calibre of candidates selected by Queensland's Liberal National Party - should be more worried about the politicians it has rejected (one MP and two senators have become independents this year).

TONY Abbott - reported in The Australian yesterday as worried about the calibre of candidates selected by Queensland's Liberal National Party - should be more worried about the politicians it has rejected (one MP and two senators have become independents this year).

Disendorsed federal MP Michael Johnson is rallying the disaffected. Johnson has sent Strewth an email from developer Maha Sinnathamby, who says he is "pleased that you are fighting back". Sinnathamby donates mostly to Labor but has managed to find more than $60,000 for the LNP in recent years.

Close to the chest

THE duel of the political T-shirts is heating up. First, last week we had the clever "Remind. me. Who voted for Ken Henry?" Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop have been snapped jogging wearing "Keep mining strong", a slogan perfect for no-nonsense miners but definitely lacking in poetry. Kevin Rudd resurrected the trend with his catchy Kevin07, a simple rhyme that had a strange appeal for many younger voters in 2007. But that was when the nation was in love with the Rudd phenomenon. Now there is "Kevin 07. Out By 11" worn with style in Perth yesterday by Evy Litopoulos (pictured), who joined a protest against the new mining tax. Of course, political T-shirts have been around since Gough Whitlam was leader of the opposition in 1972, when every young politico had to be seen wearing "It's time". And look how long Gough lasted.

Another useless tool

SOUTH Australian Premier Mike Rann is overseas on a trade and investment mission, travelling alone and only communicating with home via Twitter. But he has had to make at least one exception for Treasurer and acting Premier Kevin Foley. Barely a day after his admission that he is not the sharpest tool in the kit, Foley yesterday told local ABC radio hosts Matt Abraham and David Bevan that he can only communicate the old-fashioned way. "He doesn't communicate to me via Twitter because I don't know how to use it," Foley said. "I've never quite got that Twitter thing, to be honest." You are not alone there, Kev.

Osama down under

IMMIGRATION detention is not usually a subject for light-heartedness, but some of the workers at the new outback camp in Leonora have arrived with a sense of mischief. This is the unpretentious mining town where barmaids wear bikinis and ordering a glass of white wine means choosing from boxes marked dry or fruity. On Tuesday, the media pack hanging out at the camp's fence was desperate for a yarn, so they began calling to anyone who came into view. The questions were loud but not very imaginative ("Do you like Australia?" and "How long have you been here?"). When a reporter mistook an interpreter for an asylum-seeker and asked him his name, he replied: "Osama bin Laden". Another said he was seeking asylum from Japan. Never let it be said immigration officials don't have a sense of humour.

Carr on a roll

AS he launched Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt's biography of journalist Alan "The Red Fox" Reid on Tuesday night, lapsed NSW premier Bob Carr got a few things off his chest about his party. He reflected on a time when the ALP was "mind-numbingly, colossally stupid". According to Carr, who once worked with Reid at The Bulletin, "You could write a book about Labor from bank nationalisation in '47 to the advent of [Gough] Whitlam and call it Ship of Fools." This was the Doc Evatt-Arthur Calwell-run party that Reid, a one-time ALP member, got so much mileage out of attacking; how he might have felt about the present incarnation of NSW Labor was left to dangle in the air. Not that all of Reid's skirmishes were with Labor. Carr reminisced about the time one of his Liberal victims, John Gorton, penned a withering critique of Reid. Carr explained, "This would be like Kevin Rudd sitting down and writing an article about David Marr." While Carr said Reid wasn't always right ("He was the last journalist to stop calling Bob Hawke a left-winger"), he said he was motivated by one of the higher forces in journalism: having fun.

Those tricky words

THE New York Times has published a list of words that stump readers. Top of the list is inchoate followed by profligacy, sui generis and austerity. Next is baldenfreude, a word that a NYT columnist invented to mystify readers. Other contenders are opprobrium, apostates, solipsistic, obduracy, internecine, soporific, peripatetic and nascent. Inchoate was used in 13 news stories and seven opinion pieces or editorials between January 1 and May 26. The Australian has used inchoate 12 times in the past 12 months, once in a letter to the editor.