Quiet on the front

THERE'S an eerie silence emanating from the Lodge, assuming silence can emanate.

THERE'S an eerie silence emanating from the Lodge, assuming silence can emanate.

Julia Gillard must be flat out in her study trying to thrash out some hard questions for News Limited to answer. As she sweats over this challenging task, she leaves the media to Tony Abbott, who is making hay in the winter sunshine with pithy sound bites on carbon, the leadership plight of South Australian Premier Mike Rann and Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron's cringeworthy letter to Gillard congratulating her on the carbon tax, which must be some sort of world first. We can tell when Abbott is having fun. "Mike Rann is not the only Labor leader who would be feeling very insecure this week," he says with mischief written all over his face. Who can he be talking about? Not Gillard, surely? Give her a break, Tony. She's got a list of hard questions to prepare.

Still got the numbers

IT looks like the Rann era is over, which is a shame for those cyber friends who have shared the small details of his life over the years. Doubtless his eventual successor will have his or her share of quirks that we can record in future columns. But Rann, like his close colleague Kevin Foley, will be a challenging act to follow. It was Rann who first brought the wonders of Twitter to our consciousness with his manly relationship with cyclist Lance Armstrong, the seven-time winner of the Tour de France. Naturally, we went to Rann's Twitter site and, oddly given the push to give him the shove, he has not responded to traitors in his midst. But we did notice that Rann has a very modest 14,080 followers. Further investigation reveals that there was once a fake Mike Rann tweeter who closed down in November 2009 with a derisory 25 followers.

Bile-free diet

HAVING read, digested and purged Mark Latham's column in The Australian Financial Review last Thursday, we rushed to see what bile he had written for his regular page in The Spectator Australia, only to find it wasn't there. But there was an interesting piece by Tim Blair of The Daily Telegraph who managed to beat lefties around the ears without once mentioning Latham. In Hobart, The Mercury was happy to mention Latham in an editorial advising Tasmanian Premier Lara Giddings of the folly of locking up native forests. "Former Labor leader Mark Latham lost the federal election in 2004 for offering $800 million for similar forest lock-ups," the paper reminds us. That was the end of Latham's electability.

Votes you can sell

THE Museum of Australian Democracy, based in Canberra's Old Parliament House, has come up with a rather perplexing research finding: one-third of Canberra residents have admitted to casting a donkey vote. Bizarre. And to put Canberrans to further shame, Queenslanders are more likely to know who their local member is. This may be because it's difficult to ignore MPs such as Bob Katter. The findings also show that 10 per cent of Australians would sell their vote if they could. But the research doesn't say how many, or who, would be interested in paying. "Four in five of those surveyed believe we should stand up for our democratic rights," says the museum 's Michael Richards. Which prompts the question: does that mean 20 per cent of us don't believe in standing up for our democratic rights?

Last of the lunchers

FUNNY girl Judith Lucy has enjoyed a modest snack with The Age's Raymond Gill, the latest in a series of lunches that first caught Strewth's attention in May when Tex Perkins and Kylie Northover racked up a bill for $550. Lucy and Gill could only muster $300 (with GST) for their meal at Circa the Prince in St Kilda. Biggest item was a $68 bottle of Mornington Peninsula 2009 Verve Chardonnay, so obviously there is still some petty cash in the Fairfax till.

Indian women walk

THE recent story about Indian call centres teaching their staff that Australia is the world's "dumbest continent", where people "drink constantly" sprang to mind when we discovered that Indian women held a "Slut Walk" yesterday in New Delhi, protesting about drunken young Indian men preying on them at night. A recent survey shows that 85 per cent of Indian women fear being molested. The Slut Walk is also known by the Hindi term besharmi morcha (shameless front) after Indians complained about using the word slut.

Love is in the air

GEELONG forward Cameron Mooney has the occasional bout of white-line fever, so it's good to hear his views on team-mate Paul Chapman's stoush with Melbourne opponent Lynden Dunn. "He looked a little bit angry there, Chappy," Mooney observed. Former Geelong coach Mark Thompson says of Chapman: "I love him." Mooney says of Thompson's replacement Chris Scott: "Off [the field] he's just a little teddy bear -- we've all got a bit of a man crush on Scotty down there at the moment." What's going on in Geelong?