What a surprise

This is as close to rage meltdown as I think I've ever seen the Prime Minister come, which is to say not very, but you can see it churning away there under the pastels. She's clearly not happy, and if I were Tony Abbott I wouldn't want to run into her on a dark night. He could have put Mark Latham on his arse fairly easily, but I don't like his chances with an enraged Gillard one bit.

I assume that as we speak he's gleefully dancing around giving Crabbe and Goyle and the rest of the Slytherins high fives, like the schoolyard bully he is.

Surely, though, she can't be surprised. It's not as if there's no precedent, from that quarter, for weathervane behaviour, spoiler behaviour, plotting, scheming, lying and deception.

June 24th, 2010

(Photo: AAP via the ABC website)

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

Not content with having introduced a magnetic tag/toll system that so baffles the bejesus out of hapless non-Victorians (me, for example) that they are too intimidated to drive there any more (me, for example), the Victorians, I see, have now introduced a public transport ticketing system so complicated that they have to spend five million bucks hiring six hundred people to explain it to confused commuters, as reported in today's Age.

Dudes. If your bus tickets require an interpreter, perhaps you need a new Transport Minister. And if you just had to have such a system (as a character in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury puts it: 'Why? Because the technology exists.'), could you at least have picked one whose name's pronunciation can be deduced from the written word? Is 'myki' pronounced Mickey, Mikey, my-ky, or (yes, I fear this is the one: trust a state government department -- any state government department; SA is just as bad -- to embrace a bit of incompetent wordplay) My Key?

Never mind, look on the bright side: at least it's a reversal of the usual classic Industrial/Digital Revolution pattern of technology putting people out of work. Still, that's five million bucks you could have spent on not killing the River Murray. There's not much point in having a job if you die of thirst while you're doing it.