Rant, granted

IT is not only Pope Benedict XVI and the Queen who grant audiences.

WE thought it was only Pope Benedict XVI and the Queen who granted audiences, but you too can be granted an audience with former British prime minister Tony Blair for only $1000, or $10,000 for a table of 10.

These tours by has-been leaders are becoming more common, but Blair is charging about double Bill Clinton's rate. There were plans for the former US president to visit Australia last year, but before the visit was cancelled an audience with Clinton was advertised at $5000 a table, though there was no mention of any food on it. Blair's people are on to this: $1000 will get you not only an audience with Blair but also a gourmet meal, premium beverages and pre-event cocktails. According to the blurb, Blair will share "his unique insights and experiences in leadership, negotiation and innovation". No mention of the Iraq war or the futile search for weapons of mass destruction. And for $1500 you can get a VIP ticket, which includes a prominently positioned seat, a pre-event meet-and-greet, and an individual photograph with the great man once dubbed Bambi by the British press. Maybe you could just get a cardboard cut-out of Blair and be photographed with that; it would be cheaper than the $500 difference between being in the standard audience and the VIP audience.

Coal hard cash

TONY Abbott trooped up to NSW's Hunter Valley yesterday to tell of the perils of the carbon tax, going to Peabody's Wambo mine to stand in front of a giant machine and say he would continue to oppose the tax on behalf of a beleaguered coal industry. But Peabody had a couple of other issues on its plate yesterday, namely being part of a nearly $5 billion takeover of Queensland coalmining company Macarthur Coal. So on the very day coalminers were providing a venue for the Opposition Leader to talk about the perils of a carbon tax, they were planning to spend a couple of billion in the industry.

On his low horse

ABBOTT doesn't travel with the journos on these gigs, leaving that to Barnaby Joyce, never a man to undersell a story. On the bus he told a young reporter that "this crazy carbon tax would send us back to the Dark Ages and we'd all be riding ponies". Barnaby then identified the start of the Dark Ages as 1910, although the stuff about ponies seemed a bit obscure. Abbott then disappeared down a hole in the ground to have his picture taken beside a giant machine. While Abbott went to the Hunter Valley to see big miners -- the losers in the new tax -- Julia Gillard went to Penrith in outer Sydney to see the winners, lots of families. Who'd have thought they'd each go to the winners and the losers? Gillard was accosted during the compulsory supermarket visit by Penrith's "scarf lady", who placed a hand-painted scarf around the neck of the Prime Minister. Then Gillard went to the Cochrane family home at Emu Plains, where one of the Cochrane children told her that she had once been prime minister of her class during a mock parliamentary debate. All this was recorded for posterity. That's showbiz, we guess.

Canberra's sex mad

THE big winners out of the new tax will be those who administer it; that is, federal public servants. The website of the public service's house journal, The Canberra Times, was instructive on this point yesterday. The most-read item was "More pay for public servants", followed by "Canberrans -- Australia's most selfish". Even with more pay? The latter story, based on a survey conducted for the insurance industry, found 94 per cent of gen Y Canberrans (aged 16-31) said they could be selfish, compared with 85 per cent gen Xers (aged 32-47). Both ACT groups were the most selfish in their age categories Australia-wide. The survey also found that only 18 per cent of Canberra's gen Ys had had sex with a stranger compared with 28 per cent of our national capital's gen X population. Of course there'd be more gen X in this category -- they're older, so they've had more opportunities to have sex with a stranger. But the survey also found that Canberrans were happier than the rest of the country. Guess it's all that sex with strangers. It's hardly the prospect of implementing the carbon tax.

Gaga flashes

BEING in the media, this column gets a lot of unsolicited emails, but two celebrities whose every doing is chronicled and faithfully sent out by minions are Donald Trump and Lady Gaga. Gaga's PR machine must be huge, as another email arrived yesterday from PR Plus in Sydney telling us that "the peace of suburban Dover Heights was broken on Sunday night by the whirl of Hollywood and the crush of paparazzi" when Gaga showed up for dinner at the Moebius House, owned and designed by local whiz kid architect Tony Owen. The dinner was part of a reality show for British television. Apparently Perez Hilton was there, too, cooking Gaga a meal. Strewth doesn't live in Dover Heights, so we can't vouch for whether there were paparazzi and the whirl of Hollywood flashing around at radically designed houses. We would ask Gaga herself, but as Tony Blair would put it, we haven't been granted an audience.