Ouch, that smarts

IF there's one thing journalists really know how to do, it's how to bugger somebody's afternoon.

IF there's one thing journalists really know how to do, it's how to bugger somebody's afternoon.

For example, there was Tony Abbott yesterday at Cape Preston on Western Australia's Pilbara coast, beginning his press conference on a celebratory note: "It's great to be here at the CITIC [mining] development." But it didn't take long for the assembled hacks to start dragging him down: "Mr Abbott, today's Nielsen poll shows that Malcolm Turnbull would be the preferred opposition leader to you. Why are you having difficulties getting public support when you've got a government that is not popular?" And more in this vein: "But why aren't voters then seeing you as the person who's exposing this bad government and preferring someone like Malcolm Turnbull over you?" And: "Given that you have got a government, though, which is trying to push through some very unpopular reforms, do you think that potentially you're not doing the best job that you can at highlighting that, if people aren't giving you credit for it?" And so on. Poor Tony. Episodes such as this serve only to highlight why some people enjoy journalists as much as pelican vomit. Let's take a lesson from Alan Jones in how to get it right:

Jones: "And you're totally opposed to the carbon tax and if the carbon tax is introduced and you became prime minister would you be rescinding it?"

Abbott: "Absolutely right. Absolutely right, Alan."

Jones: "Good on you. That's all I needed to know. I'll let you go."

You see? Easy. In the meantime it should be noted that Turnbull was in an exceptionally good mood on Twitter.

Armchair critic

HAVING reprinted some of Shirley "Flying saucy" MacLaine's steamy talk about Andrew Peacock yesterday, we feared we'd caught the attention of spamsters when an email lobbbed, suggesting we "Spend a night with Lindsay Tanner". It proved to be nothing more sordid than a Crikey promotion for Tanner's book Sideshow, in which the former finance minister "proposes solutions to tackle the rot in our political culture". He's outside the tent now.

Gift rap

AUSTRALIA'S wedding gift for Prince William and Kate Middleton will be neither tacky nor toe-curling but a tasteful $25,000 for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, as per the request of the nearly weds. It's an encouraging step up from one pressie we sent William's mum and dad for their wedding in 1981: a book bound in leather fashioned from cane toad skin. Prince Charles sent a letter in which he expressed his gratitude and his firm belief this toadish tome (or verminous volume) would bring him and Diana much pleasure in their married life. Ah, well.

From mighty Oakes

LAURIE Oakes seems almost as much a part of television as the on/off switch, so it was of some interest when he gave an insight into his viewing habits in this organ's Media section yesterday: "I watch TV, I love The Sopranos [amen to that, brother], but I tend not to watch things like Q&A: it's on too late and it's not a program I'm fond of mainly because I live the political life every day. I prefer QI to Q&A." Well, quite; a chunk of an evening spent in the company of Stephen Fry is never without appeal (unless, like our colleague Ian Cuthbertson, who resides in a rehab facility for the Fryed out, have overdosed on his plummily rich-vowelled omnipresence). But what about Tony Jones's feelings? Sure, the Q&A host may just give one of his winning smiles and laugh it off with his patented "I'll take that as a comment", but beneath that crisp shirt, could his heart not be bruising? Perhaps he'll just have to cling to the memory of March 14, when Julia Gillard was on and Oakes was not only watching, he tweeted this: "Agree with [Gillard] or not, this is a pretty impressive performance."

This is serious

IT is with a sense of relief and guilty delight that we fall on press releases emanating from the office of Bob Katter, so when one lobbed yesterday, we began reading greedily: "There's a growing sense of abandonment out there. There's a feeling that a lot of the attention has been disproportionately focused on Brisbane and that the forgotten victims in north Queensland will end up with only crumbs from the $1.8 thousand million package being raised by the federal government's disaster levy." And then it dawned: apart from Katter revealing himself as a stickler for a billion being a million million there was no wacky punchline lurking here, just a serious message. We felt almost let down. (Did we do OK, Your Bobness?)

Caws for concern

DEPLOYING as we do the occasional awful pun (we blame our father for the way he reared us), it does come as a relief to be reminded there are worse. For example, this merciless effort from P&O as it announced it had set up a refuge on board one of its ships for shagged-out seabirds: "As Pacific Dawn's Captain Neil Turnbull quipped, the birds are charged a competitive rate of '20 squid a night' for their 'bread and beak-fast'." Call the wallopers.

James Jeffrey