Yes, that will help a lot

Julie Bishop was on the radio last night blithering about how the government, which has chartered a special Qantas flight out of Cairo for stranded Australians, wasn't doing enough and was 'too slow' to react. I would have found this marginally less irritating if I thought either she or her leader could organise themselves out of a paper bag, much less hundreds of countrymen out of Cairo.

Whenever anyone says anything like this there's always a chorus of 'Oh but the job of the Opposition is to oppose!' Is it? Is it really? Is that its only job? And if it is, what kind of idiotic half-arsed world are we living in, where all society-regulating structures are oppositional and adversarial (the justice system gives me the heebs in this respect as well) and that is deemed only good and right? Is it really the Opposition's job to obstruct and whinge and quibble about every single thing a government tries to do, even something at this level of detail and transience? If they're going to oppose, why don't they oppose, say, the choice of budget sacrifices to the levee levy (no argument from me on the levy as such), nearly all of which seem to be to do with climate ch-- Oh, wait.

Kevin Rudd's in the paper (I wonder when we'll stop saying 'the paper' about something we read online)  this morning defending the government's actions on Cairo. Talking to the media about this stuff in response to Bishop's self-righteous whingeing took up time he could have spent doing something actually useful, and I bet nobody's more aware of this than Rudd himself.