A salacious South Seas post (part 2)

Reverting back to the story of the first European ship to arrive in Tahiti (The Dolphin) in 1767, a review of another book makes it clear that the sailors did not, ahem, waste any time:

Salmond recounts the moment the trade of sex for nails began in 1767 via the landing of a food-gathering party from Captain Samuel Wallis' ship HMS Dolphin, with "a Dear Irish boy, one of our Marins" having sex with a Tahitian woman in front of his companions. He got a thrashing from his fellow sailors for his lack of decency in not going behind a bush; his excuse was that he was afraid of losing the honour of being the first.

The watching Tahitians may have made a different sense of this public display. Their arioi (a largely male religious and aristocratic society, to grossly simplify their multiple roles in Tahitian society) would occasionally perform ceremonial public sex in their symbolic negotiations with 'Oro, a god associated with thunder, power and consequently sex.

In another of the Tahitians' efforts to manage the assumed ancestral power of the arriving strangers, women of the islands would circle the Westerners' boats, stamping their feet, grimacing, exposing their genitals and yelling. This potent display of unrestricted feminine power was meant to demean and work upon the restricted power of men, but the sailors seem largely to have interpreted it as a simple offer of sex.

I'm sort of interested in the matter of whether any English captains actually ever thought they could control their crew's behaviour.   It seems that Cook didn't try, but a bit to my surprise,  at least the Spanish may have tried to keep their sailors on the leash.  From the same link as before, there's this story of cultural differences causing serious issues when played out in front of others:

Vehiatua, a Tahitian ari'i, visits a Spanish ship whose crew have been forbidden to have sex and whose ceremonial cross has already been planted on shore, and he proceeds to have oral sex with his "servant" (possibly a mahu, a man who lived as a woman) in the sergeants' mess. The pair are discovered and roundly thrashed by a common sailor, setting in motion orders and counter-orders of offence. The Tahitians' dignity is assaulted by their leader being beaten by a sailor; the sailor's dignity is assaulted by a male-to-male exchange so differently managed in ship-board life.

What about these arioi?  A description of their rather charmed life (save for the fact that they practiced infanticide - I gather that having kids around would be considered a drag on their lifestyle) is found in a paper with the hi-falutin' title "Getting Nailed: Re-inventing the European-Pacific Encounter In the Age of Global Capital":

Not entirely sure how one got to join this caste.  Invitation only, I guess?

Anyhow, it's worth at least one more post...

A salacious South Seas post (Part 1)

I suppose we all know of the reputation of the South Pacific as a place of sexual liberty from the (flawed) work of Margaret Mead in the 1920's; and a viewing of Mutiny on the Bounty would indicate that sailors encountering welcoming parties of scores of topless Tahitian women may have pushed its sensual reputation back much further in history; but I didn't really know much about this topic.

So, it's with some interest that I stumbled across this subject yesterday.

Here's an extract from Michael Sturma's South Sea Maidens:  Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Pacific:

OK, time for a diversion.  Can't say that I've heard the story of Jeanne Baret before.   She was, however, the subject of a book that was discussed at NPR.   Unfortunately, it appears that the story of her "outing" as a woman may not be as harmless as Sturma believes:

Glynis Ridley, author of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe, says Baret would have been the obvious choice to serve as Commerson's assistant on the Etoile's journey, except for one thing.

"A French Royal ordinance forbade women being on French Navy ships," Ridley tells Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz. A little theater was necessary.

"The couple formulated a plan for Baret to disguise herself as a young man [and] offer herself as his assistant on the dockside."

After Commerson "accepted" Baret into his service, the couple was able to keep their secret from the crew of over 100 men for some time. Baret's real identity was cruelly revealed, however. The commander of the expedition claims it happened when the Etoile landed on the island of Tahiti.

"Bougainville said that a group of Tahitian men surrounded Baret and immediately identified her as a woman," Ridley says. "Because she was worried about what might happen, she supposedly revealed her true identity so that her countrymen, the French, could save her from what she took to be an imminent sexual assault."

But after poring over the diaries of crew members, Ridley doesn't believe Bougainville's tale.
"That story is peculiar to Bougainville's journal," Ridley says. "In fact, three other members of the crew contradict this story and say that Baret was, in fact, brutally exposed." According to the other journals, Baret was discovered and gang-raped by her crewmates in Papua New Guinea.

Back to the Sturma explanation of the allure of Tahiti:  as we all know, Captain Cook kept visiting the island, and while he was restrained himself, his famous young passenger Joseph Banks didn't:

 ......

There is much more of interest on this topic, but I think I'll have to break it up across a few posts...

Pell, Minchin et al

I think most people would assume that George Pell has, in the past, not been as sensitive to the issue of clerical child abuse as we now expect Church leaders to be.  He may deserve some criticism for that.    On the other hand, as far as I can tell, the worst claims about things he is supposed to have said are from single sources and are unlikely to warrant serious findings against him.  I could be wrong, but in the terrible matter of child abuse, not every claim made by victims recalling events decades ago is necessarily credible.

That said, I am tired of the circus like quality to the media interest in Pell giving evidence again to the Royal Commission.  I don't know, for example, why all media outlets (including the commercial ones, not just the ABC - despite Bolt's silly frothing that they are following the story closely) have given such huge coverage to Minchin's song.

I've never cared for Minchin - he's always struck me as the embodiment of arrogant and crude Left wing comedy.  (And I say that fully aware that virtually all comedians are going to be Left leaning; it's just that some are more annoyingly arrogant and self assured that they understand every issue the "right" way.)

I also don't know why, with cheap and reliable video calls being the norm these days, the Commission did make such an initial issue of Pell appearing in person.

But having said all of this, in a broader sense, the value of this commission has been much greater (in the sense of the public feeling that grave wrongs have had the full airing they deserve) than any of  the politically motivated Abbott enquiries into the Labor government.   It's an absurd Right wing meme that it was called to harm Abbott - a man who left the seminary because he felt it wasn't macho enough, and whose connection with Pell seemed to be largely diminished in recent years anyway.

But it will still be good to get this over with.

A domestic issue

I was wondering:  does anyone know if there is a way to stop an 8 month old Jack Russell/Shitzu cross from sniffing out cane toads, biting/licking them, and then frothing at the mouth and requiring her owners to wash it out and rub her gums with a cloth (being the recommended "first aid" for cane toad poison in the mouth)?  Is our pup evidence for the urban (possible) myth that some dogs like the trippy effect of cane toad poison?

Oh, and for those who have good reason to kill cane toads (such as having an 8 month old Jack Russell/Shitzu pup), this product, of which I was previously unaware, does kill toads in a pretty efficient but not painful looking way:

Available at Bunnings.

Update:  the toad licker in question:

Not your average looking drug user, but you never know...

I'm thinking of sending her to military school to straighten her out.

Gosh

Update: never mind "our knowledge", what about me personally?  I see that according to a post at io9 a couple of years ago, estimates of the storage capacity of the human brain range from 300 MB (ha - too low) to 2,500 TB (seems too much.)  One simple estimate based on synapse numbers is more like 100TB.

Being generous, if we allow 300TB, I expect to be preserved in glass for at least 10 billion years. 

Meanwhile, in Egypt

The extraordinary amount of effort that goes into pursuing people who cause offence in some Muslim countries surely must detract from them doing more useful things?:

Cairo: Egypt’s chief prosecutor on Tuesday issued an arrest warrant for a blogger over his controversial TV remarks against rural women, sparking outrage, legal sources said.

Taymour Al Subki claimed on the TV show Possible, aired on private television station CBC, that wives in conservative Upper Egypt are unfaithful to their husbands who work outside the country.

The remarks prompted dozens of lawsuits against Al Subki. The ensuing uproar prompted CBC this week to halt the programme after making an apology to the nation’s women.

Parliamentarians, representing Upper Egypt, also condemned Al Subki and the broadcaster. Some Upper Egyptian men reportedly threatened to kill Al Subki in retaliation.

A dangerous holiday

Nearly 90,000 hospitalized during three days of Lunar New Year holiday in Vietnam

Apropos of nothing, I decided to look at a Vietnamese news site, and learnt that the holiday season there is kinda dangerous sounding:

The combined number of deaths and fatality prognosis cases was 88, a
one percent drop, while the number of people under emergency care rose
113 percent against the previous year.

Over 17,000 people fell victim to traffic accidents nationwide in the
period, the newswire quoted the ministry as saying. Eleven percent of
the victims suffered brain injury, the ministry said.

Some 2,000 people were admitted to infirmaries in the country due to
physical confrontations, an 83 percent year on year decline.

Ten people died in the conflicts, six cases more than last year, according to the Ministry of Health.

It added that 2,000 cases of food poisoning were recorded during the three days, the peak of the Lunar New Year holiday.

The National Traffic Safety Committee said in a recent report that over
64 people died in traffic accidents that happened across Vietnam
between February 7 and 9.

Mind you, I see that its population is nearly 90 million (much higher than I would have guessed), so I suppose you have to take that into account.

A complicated political and sex life

Funnily enough, although I have read probably 95% of his books, I've never really bothered digging into the complicated personal life of Robert Heinlein.  

I see that it was summarised in this post at io9 in 2014, which I may have missed.   Strangely, it seems he was clearly on the Left of politics prior to World War 2, then moved to the libertarian right with his second wife.  But both marriages were (apparently) open, with the first one including a 3 way relationship with L Ron Hubbard for a time (!)

He really was a very odd character.

Laser pen menace

How dangerous are lasers to planes? - BBC News

Laser pens are not illegal in the UK and are widely available online,
costing anything from £20 to £500. Those sold in the UK are usually
classified in accordance with the current safety standards.

However, stronger lasers can be imported via the internet. One South
Korean-based website offers to ship the "world's most powerful handheld
laser" to the UK, starting from $199 (£137).

According to David aylor, of National Police Air Service (NPAS), it is "extremely easy" to
pick up lasers on the internet that are about 5,000 times more powerful
than the strength of a typical classroom pointer.

 

At a loose end, Andrew?

Andrew Bolt has lost his TV show (for now, at least), and appears to have additional time to be more aggro than ever on his blog.   (His show had, I take it, failed comprehensively in terms of ratings comparison with Insiders, despite having a good start early on.  This was hardly surprising - even his fans at Catallaxy used to complain about his chronic presenter interruptus.) 

Bolt is enthusiastically joining in with a revival of "the ABC must be attacked at all costs" at The Australian, which is looking more right wing than ever.  But I think his rush to take offence on behalf of Tim Wilson, the recipient of gushing praise from George Brandis, was over the top in the way it decided to talk about the gay relationships of ABC staff.  

Really, Andrew should get out of this commentary business, I think.  It's doing his head in and leading him down an isolated path of unhelpful contribution, to put it mildly.  

Feels like an El Nino summer...

The latest figures from NASA indicate that January was hot globally, especially in the Arctic, where ice extent for winter is at a record low too.  (See the same link.)

As far as I can make out, this summer's been a mixed bag in Australia:  it seems to have been exceptionally stormy in Sydney (but not in Brisbane);  Adelaide and Perth have had heatwaves;  Melbourne I think hasn't been exceptionally hot at all; but back to Brisbane - it's been a summer of stifling humid hot nights which I seem to recall being the hallmark of the last big El Nino summer in 1998. 

It's rather unpleasant, this night heat without the benefit of cooling storms.

Not very encouraging

New NASA data show how the world is running out of water - The Washington Post

 OK, perhaps that headline is misleading, but the article is about water in aquifers, and it seems many of them around the world (often in the poorest parts) are dropping due to overuse.

Douthat does his balancing act

Ross Douthat does a neat bit of balance in this column.  He at least, amongst conservative columnists, talks honestly about Republican economic fundamentalism being a problem:

But the Clintonian synthesis has been orphaned for ideological reasons, not because it was tested and found to fail. Liberals simply don’t want to believe that low-income Americans, black and Hispanic as well as white, might benefit from public paternalism in welfare policy, soft “values” rhetoric on marriage and family, and restrictions on illegal immigration — even though the working class’s best recent decade featured a Democratic president who embraced all three.

They don’t want to believe that soaring incomes for the 1 percent, their great bugaboo, can coexist with real gains for the middle class – even though the two coexisted in the late 1990s.

They don’t want to put any limits on soaking the rich and their investments — even if that means going way above the tax rates that prevailed during the economy’s last impressive boom.

Not that conservatives have been all that interested in learning from Clintonism either. Two decades after the G.O.P. insisted, wrongly, that any tax increase on the rich would devastate the economy, the Republican tax agenda is still founded on a supply-side absolutism the ’90s boom should have laid to rest.

This leaves our politics in a peculiar place. Within the memory of everyone save the youngest Bernie Bros and social socialists, there was an era that delivered something for the many, that put almost every trendline on a better arc.

Yet the politics of that era are orphaned — so much so that not even a Clinton will defend Clintonism anymore.

Piketty on how American policy has changed

The Guardian is running another fascinating piece by Thomas Piketty, putting historical perspective on American tax rates.   Read it all:  like Krugman, he really knows how to make a very plausible argument:

Let’s glance back for an instant. From the 1930s until the 1970s, the US were at the forefront of an ambitious set of policies aiming to reduce social inequalities. Partly to avoid any resemblance with Old Europe, seen then as extremely unequal and contrary to the American democratic spirit, in the inter-war years the country invented a highly progressive income and estate tax and set up levels of fiscal progressiveness never used on our side of the Atlantic. From 1930 to 1980 – for half a century – the rate for the highest US income (over $1m per year) was on average 82%, with peaks of 91% from the 1940s to 1960s (from Roosevelt to Kennedy), and still as high as 70% during Reagan’s election in 1980.

This policy in no way affected the strong growth of the post-war American economy, doubtless because there is not much point in paying super-managers $10m when $1m will do. The estate tax, which was equally progressive with rates applicable to the largest fortunes in the range of 70% to 80% for decades (the rate has almost never exceeded 30% to 40% in Germany or France), greatly reduced the concentration of American capital, without the destruction and wars which Europe had to face.

A mythical capitalism

In the 1930s, long before European countries followed through, the US also set up a federal minimum wage. In the late 1960s it was worth $10 an hour (in 2016 dollars), by far the highest of its time.

All this was carried through almost without unemployment, since both the level of productivity and the education system allowed it. This is also the time when the US finally put an end to the undemocratic legal racial discrimination still in place in the south, and launched new social policies.

All this change sparked a muscular opposition, particularly among the financial elites and the reactionary fringe of the white electorate. Humiliated in Vietnam, 1970s America was further concerned that the losers of the second world war (Germany and Japan in the lead) were catching up at top speed. The US also suffered from the oil crisis, inflation and under-indexation of tax schedules. Surfing the waves of all these frustrations, Reagan was elected in 1980 on a program aiming to restore a mythical capitalism said to have existed in the past.

The culmination of this new program was the tax reform of 1986, which ended half a century of a progressive tax system and lowered the rate applicable to the highest incomes to 28%.

The bold is mine, because it reminded me of Trump (and Cruz), the two appalling lead contenders for the Republican presidential candidacy.

Meanwhile, I wonder what Australian right wing, small government economists are talking about?

Oh, they're blaming Obama for Muslim inspired instability throughout the world, and still fretting obsessively about numbers on a government website to do with plain packaging of tobacco.  (To be fair to poor old Sinclair, I think he has given up on Kates as having any political sense whatsoever.)

Update:  look at the appalling tax plans of the Republican candidates.  As the article notes about Cruz in particular:

...the plan would cost more than Bush or Rubio's proposals but somewhat less than Trump's. Including both lost revenue and interest, Cruz's plan would cost $10.2 trillion over 10 years. Bush's costs $8.1 trillion, Rubio's $8.2 trillion, and Trump's $11.2 trillion. In its first decade, Cruz's plan would increase the debt by 35.7 percent of GDP; over two decades, that figure rises to 68.7. The current level is about 100 percent of GDP, so Cruz would spike it dramatically. And even more than his rival's plans, Cruz's concentrates its benefits heavily among the richest Americans....

The sheer cost of Cruz's plan is also worth dwelling on. If unpaid for, it increases the deficit by more than $1 trillion a year, and would require about $860 billion a year in spending cuts to avoid that. And Cruz has said he wants to balance the budget, so spending cuts are how the plan would have to be paid for if he keeps that promise.

Those are truly epic spending cuts. Again, Cruz needs $860 billion less spending every year. By comparison, eliminating Medicaid entirely would only save about $500 billion a year. Eliminating Obama's subsidies would only save $92.5 billion.

The biggest economic menace to America is Republican economic ideology.

When will they come back to some common sense?

Current dissatisfactions

A list of things I am currently dissatisfied about:

1.  My shoulder.  It still hurts from a simply executed backwards wrench in the surf on New Year's Day.   Maybe worth a post of its own...

2.   The new X Files - last week's episode ("Home Again") was unnecessarily violent, overly dramatic with Scully, and had a stupid, utterly unrealistic monster with no proper explanation.

3.  Scully's centre hair part in the X Files.   Sure, she's supposed to be smart, but seeing what looks like 15 cm of forehead is just too much.   Bangs, Scully:  bangs.

4.  How long it is taking for Malcolm Turnbull to get his act together.   Feels like we're watching a drifting ship of state, with a slowly increasing rate of escapees on life boats.  (Except for Abbott, who actually deserves to be tossed overboard, perhaps with a life jacket if I'm feeling generous.)

5.  My inability to read books due to:

     a.  the "I'm sure I'll find something interesting soon" stream of new information on the internet;
     b.  getting sleepy pretty quickly when I try to read.

I used to deal with the latter adequately by doing things like reading books in a park during lunch times at university, or on the beach during school holidays.   Now that I mainly try to read while in the house, it's harder.

6.  Aging men who chant "the war on drugs has failed", and  shrug their shoulders about the dance party drug culture scene.  Last night's Four Corners was as po-faced as it comes with ex federal police, Nicholas Cowdery, and (of course) party doctor Alex Wodak all saying its hopeless to try to stop it.   All instead of doing what older men and women are supposed to do:  decry a culture of self indulgent, hedonistic, extended adolescence that mature people in past times would have said is bad for society and individuals and should be stopped.    Just ban dance parties:  with the lock out laws we're already half way there to crushing this degeneracy, aren't we?    And seriously - it is degeneracy.  Can't convince me otherwise.  

7.   Channel Ten doing its utmost to ruin the viewing experience of The X Files.   It's appalling, the ads that take up at least a quarter of the bottom of the screen while Scully is mourning (with unconvincing acting) the death of her mother.

8.   That my list of dissatisfactions is full of X Files related complaints.

9.   The lack of good, intriguing new UFO cases.   The last one I can recall was the really weird incident at O'Hare airport in 2006.   Ten years is a long time between good UFO sightings.

10.  Reading newspapers on the net.  Last Saturday, I found myself the only person in a South Brisbane bar, enjoying a craft beer and reading a Sydney Morning Herald that had been left there.   I subscribe to the SMH digitally, but I had forgotten how much more satisfying, and better informed I feel, after spending 45 to 60 minutes reading a physical paper, compared to the digital experience.   Firstly, with digital subscription it still feels like you're only getting half the articles that appear in the hard version.  Maybe I'm wrong - but there seems to be a lot more in the hard paper.   Secondly, digital reading is all about the eye scanning mere snippets of information and moving on in a way that reading a hard copy discourages.   You just feel smarter for the experience of spending time with an actual newspaper.   I really wish we had something such that we saw on Minority Report:   a flexible plastic large format reader which could download any paper and present it in tabloid format sized pages.   Perhaps such a reader does exist, but is considered too specialised a use to ever market.  (And certainly, it could be a pain to carry around all day just to be able to read it on the train on the way to work.   Maybe it needs foldability?)  But yeah, I think we're losing something valuable by going purely digital with newspapers, even with tablets.
          

Noted at The Onion

Obama Compiles Shortlist Of Gay, Transsexual Abortion Doctors To Replace Scalia

 WASHINGTON—Moving quickly to begin the process of filling the unexpected
vacancy on the Supreme Court bench, President Obama spent much of the
weekend compiling a shortlist of gay, transsexual abortion doctors to
replace the late Antonin Scalia, White House sources confirmed Monday.
“These are all exemplary candidates with strong homosexual values and
proven records of performing partial-birth abortions, but am I missing
anyone?” Obama reportedly asked himself while reviewing his list of
queer, gender-nonconforming, feminist Planned Parenthood employees, all
of whom were also said to be black immigrants. “I definitely have enough
post-op transsexuals on the list, but it is a little light on pre-op
candidates. And I should probably add a cop killer or two on here just
to round out my options.” Sources later confirmed that Obama was
attempting to rapidly narrow the list down to the single best nominee to
submit to the Senate in hopes of wrapping up confirmation hearings
before his choice had to leave to attend the Hajj pilgrimage.

 Of course, about 20% of Tea Party voters will believe this is all true.

Mice in the news

*  Important research news from Japan:   

A trio of researchers working in Japan has found via experiments they conducted, that male virgin mice prefer to watch videos of other mice fighting with one another, than videos of mice having sex.

 *  Nature.com, which seems to run a lot of stories about the relatively recent realisation that a lot of mice based medical research has been stuffed up for decades by the researchers not housing or caring for their furry subjects in the same way, has another story about this.   (It's funny how long it can take smart people to realise they are overlooking something important.)

*   Mice seem to have an odd brain structure that "throttles" violent rage:

New evidence shows mice have a brain structure that throttles rage.
The structure is called the lateral septum. It’s physically connected to and receives electrical signals other parts of the brain that control emotions, learning, aggression, and hormone production.
Damage to the lateral septum can trigger a cascade of activity in other brain regions that produced “septal rage.” These sudden, violent acts, mostly attacks on other mice, have long been seen in rodents with a damaged lateral septum, and in some birds, researchers say.
“Our latest findings show how the lateral septum in mice plays a gatekeeping role, simultaneously ‘pushing down the brake’ and ‘lifting the foot off the accelerator’ of violent behavior,” says study senior investigator Dayu Lin, an assistant professor at New York University.
Lin emphasizes that septal rage is not known to occur in humans, but that studying male aggression in mice might help to map the circuitry involved in controlling other forms of aggression, including violent behavior in humans.

*  Another Japanese mice study indicating that staying hungry may help with better ageing:

Researchers in Japan have showed that stimulating secretion of the ‘hunger hormone’, ghrelin, in mice using the traditional Japanese Kampo medicine rikkunshito had beneficial effects on aging-related diseases. The article was published in Molecular Psychiatry. ...

Previous studies have shown that caloric restriction (CR)—reducing calorie intake without incurring malnutrition or a reduction in essential nutrients—slows aging and delays functional decline as well as the onset of some diseases. Ghrelin, which regulates energy metabolism, is secreted in the stomach in response to CR and fasting.

Insecure

Lawrence Mooney harasses.... female journalist for Adelaide Fringe review

I think Mooney can be somewhat likeable as host of Dirty Laundry Live, but I did see him do some live stand up show on TV recently, and I didn't care for it at all. 

[By the way, why do so many comedians, when it comes to doing stage comedy, have to dramatically increase the swearing and ribaldry compared to how they present in other forums?   Mooney wasn't the worst in this regard, but he did spend an awful lot of time discussing his regret at his infant circumcision in a way that wasn't particularly funny, or made much sense.]

And to be honest, I didn't sense that the theatre audience was into it as much as he might have thought they were.

So I am inclined to think that the short review linked above may be about right, and that by his reaction Mooney has shown himself up as an insecure guy (or jerk, if you will) who should get out of that form of performance.

Goodbye Tim

What have I said about Tim Wilson before?  That his primary talent and interest is self promotion?

Nothing much changing, then.   But has he got his head screwed on right?   When you look at the work experience of his main competition for the seat:

Ms Downer is a lawyer turned diplomat who served in Australia's embassy in Japan for four years. The mother of two has a Masters in Public International Law from the London School of Economics and degrees in Law and Commerce from the University of Melbourne. She is fluent in Japanese and French.
A member of the Victorian Liberal Party's administrative committee, she also made regular appearances on The Bolt Report...

Versus "I used to work for the IPA, got an ill defined job with the HRC with lots of travel with the primary purpose of annoying Lefties, and take a selfie at least every second day"?  I mean seriously, if the Liberals select him over her, they'll want their head read.

But, in a spirit of generosity that I don't like to show him, he at least made the right call on the matter of the government's unwarranted attack on Save the Children staff on Nauru.

Suddenly sounded credible on tax

Chris Bowen and Bill Shorten are currently on the front foot.

I happened to see Shorten in Question Time last week before Stuart Robert got dumped, and he looked really confident and impressive.  (The government benches decidedly glum, as they do when they know the inevitable will happen, just that they have to wait for a bit of process to finish.)

Chris Bowen is also sounding very on top of his game, too, on the new negative gearing/CGT policy.

This is looking like how policy development and announcement should be done, for a change.

And Rupert's hobby paper The Australian is showing signs of being worried, wheeling out Sloan and Ergas in the one edition today to attack Labor for daring to have a policy other than merely "cut spending." 

(I don't subscribe, so it's hard to tell for sure, but I think by the looks of its website, the paper has become more like the Daily Telegraph since Whittaker took over.  And we all thought Chris Mitchell was bad...)