Jumbo’s jumbled agenda – yes, the Jones boy is at it again – Typo gets a touch-up from Media Watch – the gush-o-meter goes off the dial for the royal circus – and the final frontier: voting in America is only for the brave – and persistent.

Jumbo Jones has again lumbered inappropriately into a policy thicket where he has no place being … but wait, there’s more, as the steak knives man used to say – the Member for Herbert has penned a letter to a constituent in which allows his tortured mind processes to somehow link live sheep exports with Muslims extremists beheading hostages.

And the numbers game: for one Townsville family, their numbers came up, for the Townsville Bulletin – alas – their numbers went down. Again.

All here in this week’s bag of illicit booty in the nest at www.townsvillemagpie.com.au

NEWSFLASH:

Viagra have come out with a new pill to help promote the new James Bond movie Skyfall. They call it Viagra 007. Apparently it doesn't make you last longer but instead makes you Roger Moore.

And on a less coital note, a quote The Magpie reckons is the Quote of the Year, from one of his correspondents named Grumpy. (This is just in case you missed it in the comments on last week’s blog.) Grumpy is not impressed with tweeting.

Quoth he, ’If the eyes are the window of the soul, then Twitter must be the open roller door to the intellect – you can easily count how many empty bays there are in the shed.’

Another quote that caught The Magpie’s eye was in Hugo’s Weekly and was one for the ages from Albert Einstein.

"If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got."

Which swings us right back to the local scene. Sort of from Skyfall to pratfall.

You can’t beat Dumbo Jumbo Jones for a laugh when he gets up to his addled pranks and penchant for off-colour jokes in what passes for polite company in this neck of the woods. But it seems he’s expanding his horizons, and wants to be seen as serious.

Well, Jumbo, you’ve achieved that – your most recent efforts have elevated you to a serious problem. Perhaps that should be seriously silly.

If Ewen was the right man at the right time when he was elected, he has again proved to be the wrong man in the wrong place in his latest quest to be all things to all people.

Take the stoush about the proposed Pinnacles satellite city out Thuringowa way. In a nutshell, a big Sydney developer wants to build a northern version of the stalled Rocky Springs super-suburb, but can’t because the land is outside the allowable council boundary for such a development. A group of locals want the council rules changed to allow the project to go ahead; they cite the developer’s promise to spend mega-millions of dollars worth of sorely needed roads and bridges for the area, money that the council couldn’t and wouldn’t provide. Those seeking such an enticing outcome (you believe developer’s promises, don’t you, kiddies?) has so far failed to mention that the development would likely see land prices skyrocket and there would be many a financial killing to be made with land sales, smaller housing projects and unit developments in the area. And nothing wrong with that, on the face of it.

The other side of the coin - one that the council and Local Government Minister Kid Crisafulli have adhered to staunchly over the years - argues that if and when the promised infrastructure is in place, the cost to the council for on-going maintenance could not be covered just by those benefitting directly, but would have to be underwritten by all Townsville ratepayers. Needless to say, if this is correct. ratepayers across the city aren’t too keen on such an unfairly narrow outcome.

But the proponents have pressed on, and held a meeting to see if they could pressure the council to change the boundaries. Appropriately, Mayor Mullet sashayed along but wisely said she couldn’t make any comment at the time. Les Messagebank Walker  - he’s from distant Wulguru – apparently told the meeting they had his backing. No doubt the ratepayers in his division will thank him for that.

But then who waddles in but the Federal Member for Herbert, desperately seeking love. So when an almost unanimous sea of hands went up to approve a motion that a resolution be put to the council, he couldn’t help himself, volunteering that such a resolution could be handled through his office.

Eh? Err, couple of questions, mate. That’s a federally-funded office of which you speak, and this is wholly a local government matter – possibly going to state level if push comes to shove but no further. What the hell are you doing there, there is no way this is a federal matter?  And don’t you dare come on with some flapdoodle that this development would benefit the military, and is therefore in the federal sphere – any such suggestion from you would pong more than Via Vomitorium at 5am on a Saturday.

But a more interesting question is: why take sides in an issue which is, or may be, opposed by a greater number of people who voted for you (ie, Townsville ratepayers) than a highly self-interested group of a couple of hundred? You were elected to represent ALL of us, and not stick your beak (yet again) into local government matters where you have no influence and no right. But then again, The ‘Pie supposes you’ve nothing to lose. Oh, except votes, that is.

The second matter involving the member for Herbert is a bemusing letter he wrote to a Greenie=type constituent John Nutting, who had called for action against the company which exported the sheep that ended up in a pit in Pakistan, and asked that his member to vote to end live animal exports from Australia.

Mr Jones disagreed with criticism directed at the exporter, but his initial opposing – and reasonable - point of view seemed to suddenly spin out of control into a bizarre off-message conclusion.

Here is the reply to Mr Nutting from the man one unkind reader calls ‘Spewin’ Jones’.

John,

Thank you for your email.

I watched the 4 Corners programme on Monday night and I saw a different side to the argument.

What I saw was the exporter doing the right thing. You certainly do not want sheep on the boat for an extended time. They were well cared for on the journey and were healthy when they got there.

What I saw was a bureaucratic bungle, not a live export bungle. As a country, we export over 4 million animals every year. This does not excuse what happened here, but it gives it some context.

I appreciate your point of view, but can I offer a story in reply. A constituent sent me a video of the Taliban beheading a number of people. I don't know how many, as I did not watch it. The constituent wanted all Afghan refugees expelled from the country as any race which could do that to anyone did not deserve to be in this country. I disagree with them on that as well. I do not believe that the vast, huge majority of people should be punished for what a very small minority has done - no matter how horrific.

Ewen

Ewen Jones

M e m b e r  f o r  H e r b e r t

Two valid points for debate, but linking them? 

Other matters.

The travelling royal roadshow is mercifully chuntering off to patronize some other unsuspecting citizens elsewhere in the world, but not before providing a few unintended guffaws. The royal couple may be a pointless anachronism but they themselves behaved with impeccable dignity, forebearance and even some – ‘haw, haw, jolly good, that’ – humour.

It was that media gush-o-meter that bemused The ‘Pie, along with the po-faced official instructions to the local vassals and serfs. Much was made of a printed Miss Manners-style instruction sheet circulated around Longreach before the royal couple arrived. One gem was when to speak only when spoken to, and in the case of The Duchess, the first reference is Your Highness and thereafter ‘maam’ which the circular helpfully instructed ‘maam rhymes with jam’. At least one ABC bod was mightily miffed at The ‘Pie’s suggestion that Aussies should insist on our egalitarian tradition and call her Camilla - ‘rhymes with gorilla’.

The Headless Chook Award goes to ABC Radio’s weird overkill coverage of a two hour visit to Longreach, - and literally hours of lead-up guff - where the crossing between the million or so reporters they had there for the most part managed to be too early or too late. (Female reporter to child: ‘What can you see? Child: ‘Just cops.’) But the prize bit of reporting was the breathless intelligence that ‘it has been reported that at this afternoon’s barbecue, the Prince may remove his coat! And although it hasn’t been confirmed, it is rumored that he may actually roll up his sleeves’.  They sure teach ‘em tough down at Timbertop.

And no, The ‘Pie did not make up that piece of priceless reporting.

However, the most pause-giving moment came at the Melbourne Cup coverage, when Bruce McAvaney announced out of the blue that ‘The Prince and Camilla are now entering the mounting yard’.

Goll-ee, now that’s really is pre-race entertainment, thought The ‘Pie, his fevered mind wandering back to 1992 and the secretly recorded Camillagate tapes. But, bugger it, all they did was look at some horses.

In America, that two horse race has been run and won, with Bazza Obama sentenced to another four years in the White House. Bentley thinks it might have been a good one to lose.

Now we are treated to the spectacle of the Republicans and Rupert’s far right Fox News gnawing at their own political entrails, with one of the most vicious blame games since Donald Trump had words with his hairdresser.

Heath Robinson's potato peeler.
Seems he may have designed the US voting system.

But it’s a wonder there was a result so swiftly, given the confusing and disparate voting regulations, which vary from state to state and even district to district and town to town. It is a situation which would’ve inspired pommy cartoonist and designer Heath Robinson, who came up with impossibly complicated machines for simple purposes.

There are many fascinating and bewildering aspects to voting in the United States.

First of all, why always a Tuesday? This falls in to the category of those foolish and outmoded ideas, the folly of which won’t be changed because the passing of years gives it an aura of acceptability (a bit like The Saint graffiti on Castle Hill). It was in 1845 that Tuesday was selected as voting day, when America was largely a rurally based society. Farmers needed a whole day to travel to town and home again to vote. The weekend was set aside for worship and Wednesday was market day, so Tuesday was chosen.

Then there’s the question of who is in charge of voting. Unlike Oz, hundreds of local authorities in counties and states throughout the land control polling, in part because you’re not just voting for a president, senator and representative, but also the local sheriff, dog-catcher, librarian, police chief and just about any other elected official in the neighborhood. There is no single over-arching regulatory body like our electoral commission, which the Americans would see as signs of a socialist bogeyman.

Then there’s the method of voting, which follows a democratic policy of whatever suits a particular place … pencil an X on a paper ballot, touch a computer screen or punch holes in a pre-printed ballot full of choices before everything is handed over to whoever has been chosen to count the bloody things.

So what happens in New York (named for the then Duke of York and Albany in 1664) and in Twin Forks, Wyoming (named in 1833 by an early Irish pioneer who got lucky with identical sisters in Lil’s Saloon one night) is a very different process.

Indeed, it is a fascinating situation which is entertainingly reported by gal-about-the-globe Annabel Crabb in this article in The Age.

Back to the local scene,  great numbers for one Townsville family this week – more than 27 million good numbers – but the same can’t be said for The Daily Astonisher aka the Townsville Bulletin. The latest Roy Morgan readership figures out yesterday show a catastrophic drop in numbers for the flagship Saturday edition – the Saturday Bully in the last year has nose-dived from 102,000 weekly readers in 2011 to 86,000 in September this year, a hanky-wringing drop of around 14%. Monday to Friday average readership also continues a snowballing slide, down from an average of 71,000 readers in September 2011 to 64,000 in September this year. 

Don’t these numbers – which are well beyond what can be expected because of the changing media landscape – tell those in the Ogden Street bunker that they have got something dreadfully wrong? After all, these numbers going down while the population is steadily and rapidly going up is a dead giveaway. They could start by looking at the skewed stuff that Anthony Simpleton regales us with regularly, like today’s totally dishonest and twisted story about council credit cards. Absurd, intelligence-insulting twaddle which continues to influence public opinion – against the paper.

And a couple of notes on media ghosts from the past. Down on the Coast, Typo Gleeson got a nice little touch-up on the ABC’s Media Watch program, for allowing his star motoring writer Brett 'Crusher' Murray to use his column and motorsport features to operate his own print version of Cash for Comment, naming and plugging only those V8 racing teams which have signed up to his private PR company. There was the usual weak-kneed and evasive reply from Typo, which he won’t be able to get away with when he faces court shortly over a few atypical Typo front page headlines during the recent mayoral campaign. The term 'love rat' apparently featured prominently. Charming.

Yes, yes, The ‘Pie knows he does go on about Typo, so he has now decided that his attitude to Peter Gleeson will be that of Mark Twain to Cecil Rhodes – Twain was asked what Rhodes was like, to which he replied ‘ I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes, I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake’.

Mick Carroll bags a plum job.

On a happier News Ltd note, sincere congratulations to Mick Carroll, former Daily Astonisher editor who was the last editor responsible for keeping the paper’s readership and circulation steady – it even went up a bit a few times. Mick has been appointed editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Australia’s largest circulation newspaper (million plus circ) after four years as deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph. Mick, whose shambling and cheery presence at The Bulletin belied a sharp eye for populist connection with the community, is tailor-made for the Sunday Tele. More power to him – hey, Mick, maybe you’d like The ‘Pie to return as your restaurant reviewer, an onerous task the old bird did for a couple of years on the Sunday Tele in the late 80s? No? oh, well ….

Enough now, it is away to Poseurs’ Bar, perchance to have more luck than Mongrel the Barrister last week - he sadly relates that just when thought he was closing in on some close companionship, our aging and rotund roue suggested he'd died happy if he could her naked. She declined, because she suggested that if she saw him naked, she'd die laughing.