Julia is of course first and foremost a career politician, and therefore has indeed faced up to the big boys and all the bullying that goes with it. More than most, so she is at least a survivor. I know that sheer intelligence can’t substitute for whatever it is that lets some women gain power. No surprise then that she has ‘obligations’ in her ‘provisional’ role to the same groups that run the ‘permanent’ government, ie industry and unions. (that description is from John Raulston Saul)

As for apparatchik? I’ve got just a speck of self-knowledge, since you choose to play the woman, to understand that there is no place for me in the power structures, especially not the public service. I got let go from my last contract because I kept asking for work, and then doing it quickly. Totally embarassing, for them.

My attention is elsewhere. For example, the day long workshop on carbon accounting I attended yesterday,with instruction from a forestry economist and a carbon accounting researcher, among others. There I learned in greater detail about the sad intertwining of forestry policy and government blunderers. As a civic duty I’ll tell you more about that in due course.

And you surely have been missing the point of much of my little essays: I am against immigration (except for a few refugees, and I think that and the resources it requires to be done well would be better spent on international arrangements to prevent the need for refugees). My views on the Aboriginal welfare state are certainly not printable.

PS: I can post the lyrics to my song, it brought down the house. Just ask.

Check out Thatchard’s relationship to Big Coal, Jambe: AU has now outdone Saudi as an exporter of imputed C02 emissions.

For female readers: note that Julia Thatchard, at the top of her post-Clyde Cameron and Jim Cairns party, wears chalk pinstripe, whereas French female Parti Socialiste politicans such as Segolene Royal or Martine Aubry would not dare. Their voters would rightly smell a neoliberal rat.

By your clothes shall ye know them.

In closing, the business management-speak of this wannabe femocrat Jambe betrays her nicely: she “has dealt with the same career challenges”. Get your head out the income statements and rental returns on your property bubble real estate, Jambe, and ponder what Nobel prize winner JM Coetzee recently meant when he talked about the degradation of English in Australia due to businessspeak in the last ( as I recall) 15 years.

I am looking for a firmer policy on population, with a holistic look at our refugee and education policies as part of that. If we let people in, especially horribly stressed people, we are obliged to look after them, and train them in language and work skills.