Off-message

SHOULD he ever forsake the joys of being a mining billionaire, Clive Palmer could have a wonderful career on the stage.

SHOULD he ever forsake the joys of being a mining billionaire, Clive Palmer could have a wonderful career on the stage.

 At his press conference yesterday in Perth, having arrived back from China the previous night, he thundered thus: "I've had enough of the press in this country. The journalism I've seen in the last day or two while I've been out of the country has been very, very poor. Not one journalist contacted me. Not one journalist checked their sources. No one contacted any of the [Chinese] companies. This is the biggest beat-up I've ever seen." Strewth isn't privy to what other media outlets might have tried, but from this newspaper alone, Andrew Fraser, Sean Parnell and Sarah-Jane Tasker all left messages on Clive's mobile while he was in China. All of them heard Clive's tones asking them to leave a message. All did. None was returned. Check the message bank, Clive.

Coalition ammo

FOR a nice bloke, our colleague Peter van Onselen isn't afraid to (a) get to the point in a hurry, and (b) show his cruel streak. Take for example this opening line of his in yesterday's Oz: "The performance of Kevin Rudd on Monday night's ABC TV program Q&A was nothing short of embarrassing." Not too much in the way of ambiguity there. Then there was this thought: "If the Coalition wants to maximise its electoral prospects, it should make 10 million copies of the Q&A program and post one out to every household." While they haven't gone quite that far yet, Coalition whips were busily handing out A3 copies of van Onselen's article and table to MPs arriving for question time yesterday. Sadly, MPs who imagined the sheer size of the photocopies meant they would get to wave them in the chamber were cruelly disappointed.

In Peter's place

SHOULD we read anything into the fact that former opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull occupies never opposition leader Peter Costello's old office in Parliament House? Is it a departure lounge for the Liberal Party's big cheeses? Or is Turnbull merely showing that he's less like Napoleon, as previously thought, and more like Charles de Gaulle, in retreat in the Canberra equivalent of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises and contemplating his return to power? Or does the person in charge of office allocation just have a sense of humour?

Rann takes a risk

SOUTH Australian Premier Mike Rann was a guest speaker at a business luncheon yesterday and was seated at the head table along with the editor-in-chief and the managing director of Solstice Media, publisher of The Independent Weekly, a newspaper of which the Premier's office is none too fond. So imagine their delight when he left the luncheon, only to leave his mobile on the table. As Adelaide daily The Advertiser noted last year, "the SA government resides in Mr Rann's mobile phone". Rann is always on his phone, texting his ministers or staff with ideas, sending Tweets or keeping up friendships with all manner of people (not, as we once briefly suspected, just Lance Armstrong). The Premier got his phone back, but no one is saying whether anyone had the nerve to sneak a peek.

Not that ayatollah

FOR those of us who occasionally pine for some of the fruitier oratory of Saddam Hussein, it was pleasing -- at least until the possible ramifications began to percolate through the brain -- to hear this from Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: "The Iranian nation, with its unity and God's grace, will punch the arrogance [that's us, by which we mean Western powers, not The Australian] on the 22nd of Bahman [that's today] in a way that will leave them stunned." Crikey clearly got a kick out of the quote, too, but accompanied it with a photo of the wrong ayatollah, the quite dead Ruhollah Khomeini. While we hate to sound petty here inside our glass house, we reckon we can live with it.

Old school ties

CLASS warfare broke out in the Senate economics committee yesterday as firebrand former Manufacturing Workers Union boss, senator Doug Cameron, confronted his nemesis, Productivity Commission chairman Gary Banks. Banks's heresy, in Cameron's eyes, is his belief that a more productive economy can be achieved by exposing industry to greater competition. Yesterday he was determined to prove Banks and his 200 staff are nothing more than ruling class cat's paws. "Can you provide the commission with a list of what public and private school education your staff went to?" he asked. He had previously demanded a listing of their qualifications. "Your concern is that the commission may have staff that are all cut from the same cloth," Banks replied. He noted he had himself been surprised by the diversity of his staff's qualifications, including social workers, lawyers, linguists, psychologists, social scientists, urban geographers, as well as economists. Cameron might even recognise Banks's own secondary school, Noble Park High, as a factory feeder in an industrial suburb about 30km southeast of Melbourne. Still, best to be safe.