Brace yourself, Australia, you’re about to have a KRuddectomy … you'll be up and about in no time.. And for once, The Magpie condones that most un-Australian of low acts known as Sinking The Slipper.

Also The Magpie reveals where his vote went, and why.

But believe it or not, there has been life still going on outside this interminable sideshow.

Herein the ‘Ville, the new town plan is up for scrutiny …

…. and is Mayor Mullet turning the traditional tables and promoting a ‘girls club’ power base?

All that and other things that caught the beady eye this week at www.townsvillemagpie.com.au

As The Magpie was standing in line to vote, swapping notes and comparing baseball bats with others in the queue (The ‘Pie rather liked the one  emblazoned ‘Tony’s Suppository For Rudd’), his mind went to the highlights of this grimly unfunny laugh fest of the past few weeks.

Is it just The Pie, or is this the most embarrassing look for KRudd - and Australia?

As the darkness started to descend on KRudd a few days ago, he managed the quote of the week.

‘I’ve been in tougher spots than this before, but I’ve always come from behind.’

Yeah, doesn’t Julia Gillard know it. She thanks you for the return of her cutlery. And our man refused to answer the obvious media question that followed, to wit ‘What spots have been tougher than losing the Prime Ministership, your political career and the respect of the nation?’

But if the writing was on the wall, the evidence was also on the bookshelves in the PM’s office, when KRudd was trying to play grown-ups with a call to Bazza Obama about Syria. 

'Kevin Rudd for the President. R-U-D-D. What? Australia. OK I'll hold.'

Note in the background the empty shelves. Packing up had already started, it seems. Going somewhere Kevvy, and not telling us? His minders couldn’t even get a sympathetic photo shoot right.

The Rudd campaign had an even more unfortunate image, which typifies the shambolic nature of the whole exercise and made him look like Callous Kev, even laughing about 'sleeping rough' when his team didn't have the nous to divert his morning walk.

But that was about par for the course for the Labor campaign, perhaps best typified by an attack ad about education reforms.

The vision had some little snot looking woebegone in a harsh spotlight, the voice-over at one stage gravely intoning that the Coalition’s dastardly plans ‘will mean bigger classes, less teachers, less support staff, less programs’.

 Umm, ‘scusi chaps, but wouldn’t that be ‘fewer classes, fewer teachers, less support staff, fewer programs’? ‘Less’ being for quantity, ‘fewer’ for numbers, if memory serves? 

But the ad ploughed on with this gem, boasting that under Labor ‘…every single Australian school is getting the funding they need.’ Hmmm, shouldn’t ‘they’ be ‘it’? Hope our kids am going to be tort betterer than that.

Oh, well, one is safe to assume that there will be less ads from this single agency, which is what ‘they’ deserve. See that risible debacle here.

Mind you, the other mob had their moments, especially with Jamie Diaz and his inability to answer the campaigning 101 question in a soft interview.

Jayme's mum apparently had trouble with Biblical christian names.

He could not name the six points he said the Libs had to stop the boats. How embarrassment, as Effie says, but it was much to the clever glee of other, who produced this poster.

(A digression: how confusement, when KRudd suggested the navy leave Sydney. A furious NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell promptly started a mini campaign he called 'Keep The Boats.) 

Cartoonists have had a field day. A sampling of same from the inimitable Larry Pickering …

Labor's election night bash.

....and this 

Amen to that.

.... and

And his mate, Paul Zanetti, had a look at another fairyland hopeful.

Gotta love the shoes!

Wingnut Abbott and Joe Hockey had two of the best quotes of the week. 

First, Abbott on Syria. 

"We've got a civil war going on in that benighted country between two pretty unsavoury sides. It's not goodies versus baddies - it's baddies versus baddies."

The Pie will bet that cut straight through to a core concern of the average voter, and one which rightly or wrongly reflected the basic belief of most Australians in relation all Middle East matters.

'We get our foreign aid money from where?'

And then Jolly Joe Hockey announced that foreign aid was being cut by $4.5billion to fund roads here in Australia. Explaining it in the most straightforward terms, Hockey made the best common sense statement of the past six years.

‘We can’t continue to fund a massive increase in foreign aid at the expense of investment in the Australian economy,"

He also said in a subsequent TV interview that Australia was actually borrowing its foreign aid money overseas, and then exporting back out again, still paying interest. Which is a funny way to fly an aeroplane, but then, a plane with only a left wing is going to do funny things.

In the end, a campaign-weary Age newspaper signalled an imminent return to the real issues of life.

But the most astounding idea, one for fiscal improvement, came from our own (quite literally) Lady Gaga aka the demented Gina Rinehart.

This 'lady' really is gaga.

She displayed her deep understanding of egalitarianism and criminal deterrence when she said

‘Let (prisoners) pay to get out of prison or not enter prison (a new source of revenue), and let them be part of the taxpaying workforce.’ 
Maybe the Mafia will lend us their blueprint for similar schemes that they have been successfully operating for centuries. Brown paper bag futures will skyrocket on the stock exchange.

Bentley has treated the political hoopla with the disdain it probably deserves. He was more concerned with the massive crackdown on criminal activity on public transport in Sydney. Scores of arrests have nabbed all sorts of naughtiness, from fare evaders, concealed weapons to drug peddlers. But, cries our anguished doodler, where will it all end?

On the local scene, what’s this The Pie hears? Several MagpieFoners have suggested that Mayor Mullet is showing a very strong bias towards The Fire womens basketball team at the expense of the Crocs. It’s been suggested that she has been actively discouraging certain invitees from joining the Crocs Board, suggesting these particular Crocs will only be good for handbags soon. Some callers rang to ask why the $80,000 the council has agreed to give the Crocs was delayed until just a couple of days ago, when all the required bank deposits and other conditions had been met some time ago. Is something afoot? Maybe Mayor Mullet wants a ‘girls club’ to rival the legendary ‘old boys club’ among the movers and wankers around the place.

......

The new city plan, four years in the making to cover the amalgamated areas of Thuringowa and Townsville was released to the public this week, and the leading spruikers for Townsville Whines went into overdrive. The main issue causing the more excitable to bespoil their dainties was the proposal to lift height restrictions along the Strand and in North Ward generally. There’s been a nice old barney in this blog's comments section this week about that, but the other issue that will get self-interested sectional interests out in force (including our favourite buffoon, Ewen Jones) is that proposed Pinnacles development near Ross Dam.

The council has refused to allow the area proposed for a satellite town into the city’s development footprint. You can expect a lot of southern-funded vitriol from wounded wallets (especially the chook people Steggles, who are the money behind the proposal), but here in a nutshell is why the council believes it is protecting ALL ratepayers by its refusal.

This shows the cost per lot per year for basic council services, a cost the council says will be spread across ALL Townsville ratepayers. On top of that, The ‘Pie is told one reason for that massive cost difference is that the nearest point to hook the area up to water and sewerage is 12kms away, on Dalrymple Road. Hoh boy, cover the kiddies' ears, mum, the air is about to turn blue, you can bet on it.

Other matters.

If Labor was having a problem with its ads, it’s nothing to the furore one has caused in South America. It has been dubbed the ’cruelest prank ad ever made’. The ‘Pie has a life-long abhorrence of practical jokes, and there is surely some case for emotional damages in this one. The makers are lucky someone didn't have a heart attack. there should be a boycott of the product at the very least.

Enough now, it is away to Poseurs Bar where the old bird will bebubble a suitable companion and explain why he voted for the Sex Party – they offered him free samples, and that gave a whole new twist to ‘sausage sizzle’.