Role reversal

A SMALL sequel to that outsourced crack about Julia Gillard "looking like a poor man's Tilda Swinton (Strewth, yesterday).

A SMALL sequel to that outsourced crack about Julia Gillard "looking like a poor man's Tilda Swinton (Strewth, yesterday).

Not long after the 2007 federal election, our esteemed film critic David Stratton was interviewing Swinton at a film festival and was struck by the resemblance. He shared this thought with Swinton and said she could play Gillard. "Man or woman?" asked Swinton, who has portrayed both sexes (and in the case of Orlando, both in the same flick). A woman, Stratton replied. Commanded Swinton, "Send me the script." Anyone?

Pyne's pitch

THE ABC may smear him from time to time, but Christopher Pyne responds instead by gracing Aunty with good vibes*. Take this moment from ABC1's Q&A the other night: "I think credit where credit is due. Kevin Rudd was well ahead of the curve with respect to the no-fly zone in Libya . . . I think he deserves a lot of credit for showing real leadership . . ." Fellow panellist and former Rudd flack Lachlan Harris commented: "Whenever Christopher Pyne starts complimenting a Labor minister I get very nervous." Still, there was only so far the bipartisanship could go. That "so far" proved to be a theory by Defence Materiel Minister Jason Clare:

Clare: "I think we've also got to get rid of this misnomer that John Howard stopped the boats. I'll tell you who stopped the boats: it was George W. Bush who stopped the boats. When he invaded Afghanistan in 2001 that caused four and a half million Afghanis over the next few years to go back to Afghanistan. That's why the boats stopped coming to Australia because there was peace for a little while in Afghanistan and Afghanis from Europe and all around the world went back to Afghanistan so . . ."

Pyne: "This is fabulous. That's a fabulous new theory that no one has ever heard of before. That's wonderful."

Pyne isn't intellectually inflexible -- yesterday he united climate change deniers and Holocaust deniers in one sentence -- so Clare may yet talk him around. (*And the occasional lawyer's letter.)

Pull out the stop

THE difference punctuation would have made. Here's Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young yesterday, tweeting one thing while, we suspect, meaning something else: "Mandatory detention has never worked as a deterrent in my GenGreen blog today."

Ghostly prescience

FOR those addicted to the ebb and flow of opinion poll numbers, one invaluable resource is someone who tweets under the moniker Ghost Who Votes. GWV is something of a an early warning system, gaining (and sharing) an early glimpse of poll figures just before anyone else does. Indeed, in an interview last year with our colleague Sally Jackson, blogger William "Poll Bludger" Bowe said, "They've been emphatically reliable. When Ghost Who Votes comes up on Twitter saying, 'These are the results', I don't wait around to check it. I write a blog post about it." So it was a rare blip from the spectral tweeter late on Monday night when s/he declared emphatically, "There is no Newspoll tonight." Not so; someone had sneakily withheld it from the first edition of The Australian, only to let it roll out into the world in the second, unnoticed and untweeted by GWV. Bloody spoilsports.

Famous first words

IN one of his previous professional incarnations, reformed political adviser (and Strewth's Bette Davis specialist) Russell Grenning toiled for the legendary and almost topographical Queensland minister Russ Hinze. Drawing on that experience, Grenning says he's running a competition to provide the new NSW premier -- let's for sake of argument call him Barry O'Farrell -- with a comment for journos as he walks into the tallyroom on Saturday night. Says Grenning, "In the 1986 Queensland election, Hinze was the first minister to enter the tallyroom and I had given him a comment, which he gleefully used. It reflected the generosity of spirit, the graciousness in victory and the sympathetic understanding of our opponent's desperate plight that was so typical of the Queensland National Party at the time. The result had been Nationals 49, Labor 30, Liberals 10. The quote: 'What's left of the Liberal Party can all go home in a taxi.' " Suggestions to the address below. Any further Raymond Chandler-esque contributions from Premier-for-now Kristina Keneally welcome.

Weird, wired world

THERE were even more sources of discombobulation than usual about yesterday, not least the exciting new remote-control leadership situation in Queensland's Liberal National Party and news that a man in Melbourne had been arrested for allegedly helping himself to a vacuum cleaner dumped on a rubbish pile on a nature strip during council clean-up. (We tried to work in a gag about nature strips abhorring a vacuum cleaner, but it just wouldn't come out right. Besides, all we really wanted to do was scream EVERYTHING HAS GONE BARKING MAD, RESIST THIS LUNACY!; we resisted, however.) Amid all this, we learned a new mini-series about the sinking of the Titanic (already snapped up by the Seven Network, apparently) is being filmed in, of all places, landlocked Hungary. It wasn't much, but it did allow us to keep some faint grip on reality.

James Jeffrey