No time to lose

ONE of the more comically cruel spectacles of Saturday night was one television station after another pulling the plug on Kevin Rudd's victory speech; rumour has it he's still going.

ONE of the more comically cruel spectacles of Saturday night was one television station after another pulling the plug on Kevin Rudd's victory speech; rumour has it he's still going.

So it was a relief to see Tony Abbott try the opposite approach yesterday, proving that as well as being a master of marathons, he's the prince of sprints, too, doing a whole press conference in three minutes. It was so concise everyone seemed taken by surprise when he walked out. Certainly ABC News 24 was, lingering for seconds on the spectacle of photographers - even our normally Zen-like colleague Ray Strange - looking about with "Surely some mistake!" expressions. Then, off camera, a journalist's voice cried out, "Three minutes! . . . That's outrageous." And suddenly it was time to flick back to the studio.

Bob's her uncle?

WHILE Julia "Regrets, I've had a few" Gillard ponders the the horse-trading days ahead, she may feel buoyed by this thinly veiled message from Strewth's favourite independent, Bob Katter: "[We will] determine a responsible course of conduct to which we can move forward." Mind you, he also expressed his open-minded approach to negotiations thus: "I don't care whether they're the Labor Party, the Liberal Party or the Callithumpian, er, er, er, Mongoloid party."

Party paralysis

IF there's even the tiniest part of you feeling of foolish for underestimating this election campaign, you're far from alone. Even a seasoned veteran, such as former NSW premier Nick Greiner, was caught out. Greiner and his wife Kathryn normally throw an election party of epic proportions, but the enthusiasm wasn't there this year. "I thought, bugger it, this is going to be a boring election," Greiner tells Strewth, revealing that the party was canned, until the last minute, when it became apparent a night of magnificent oddness was in the offing. "In the end we had a mini-party for the desperate and the dateless."

Keeping it simple

ONE Liberal candidate who didn't fell a sitting Labor member was Gordon Weiss, who was pitted against Tanya Plibersek in the inner-city seat of Sydney. Even his campaign photo showed the self-conscious expression of a man who knows he's probably a sacrificial candidate. But full points to his hip, young foot soldiers who were handing out how-to-vote cards outside Annandale North Public School. If someone informed them they weren't planning to vote Liberal, they handed them a Weiss flyer with "I love you" scrawled across it.

Return of the mo

ONE of the great comebacks of Saturday night was Warren Entsch. The big question is, will the mighty Entsch moustache make a comeback, too? Last year, when Entsch canvassed the possibility of coming out of retirement and having a tilt at his old seat of Leichhardt, we were distressed to learn his upper lip pelt - which lay across the Entsch face like a slaughtered bison and was one of the seven wonders of the political world - had gone. It turned out the mo had been sacrificed as part of Entsch's mourning for his beloved sleeper earring. There was no question of there being one without the other and, as a pensioner at the time, Entsch ruled out blowing precious dough on a new earring. In an attempt to be helpful, Strewth put out an appeal for a new earring. This was not, as Entsch reminds us, a raging success. "I was expecting a truckload of earrings. I didn't get one," he reflects, adding pointedly, "The power of the press is as weak as piss." After a brief and probably accurate digression on how Strewth's lack of persuasive powers suggests the chance of us ever getting a pay rise are slim, Entsch says the old equation still holds. "My moustache has gone from black to salt-and-pepper to white. If I have a white moustache, it's a sign of lost youth. Together with an earring, though, they add up to something interesting. But if I only have the white moustache, I just look like a cranky old man." Someone please send him an earring; Entsch says he expects gold to pour through his door.

Swan a sitting duck

CONGRATULATIONS to the Nine Network for pulling off a mighty feat on election night: making us feel sorry for Wayne Swan. Swan normally strikes us as being big enough to take care of himself, but we felt a tinge, however fleeting, of pity as the Liberal Party's Michael Kroger and Nationals leader-in-all-but-name Barnaby Joyce joined up for a game of tag-team assault on the federal Treasurer, and it got a bit shouty. "Who is this lunatic you have on your panel?" Swan pleaded, and eventually, as the pummelling went on uninterrupted, asked plaintively "Do I have to put up with this?" It reminded us of that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Sir Galahad, having been taunted mercilessly by the French knights, asks, "Is there anyone else up there I could talk to?" Meanwhile, we were pleased to see another Nine panellist, Peter "It coulda been me" Costello, taking his customary pace when it came to questions of wresting the Coalition leadership, suggesting the new member for Longman, Wyatt Roy, could be in the hot seat by 2035.