The filibuster is a technique used by
minority parties to frustrate the passage of laws: they simply talk
non-stop until it’s time to go home. Labor is trying this old gambit in
the Senate in an attempt to slow down the Telstra sale legislation,
currently being pushed by the Government with indecent haste through
parliament.

The record of 36 hours of filibustering is held by a
US Senator who was finally told by his doctor that he was about to have
a heart attack, and so sat down.

This record is unlikely to be challenged in the current debate. But last night the Prime Minister treated viewers of the 7.30 Report to a world-class filibuster of his own. First, viewers had to endure a six minute delay to the program, caused by a sound glitch.
And if that dead airtime was frustrating, it was nothing compared to
the live verbal arm wrestle between Howard and Kerry O’Brien they were
treated to when the show finally got on the air.

In the time
honoured annals of the Red Kerry-John Howard antagonistic interviews
over the years, this was a low watermark. While there was none of the
snarling personal animus we’ve witnessed in past years, O’Brien
couldn’t get a sensible response from the PM about the key question:
why didn’t he and the communications minister twig that the information
they received in their briefing from Sol Trujillo on August 11 was
share-price sensitive and should have been disclosed to the market?

Howard
had no intention of addressing that question; much less giving an
intelligible answer. The permutations were extraordinary, with Howard
constantly falling back on the line that it was “against the law” for
him to reveal that sort of argument – the line he’s been running all day.

The PM’s website is usually updated with lightning speed. But late this morning, the 7.30 Report interview was still not up. Yesterday’s probing but less combative interview with John Laws is.

And
this morning, Howard and Nick Minchin were all over early morning TV
and radio trying a fresh story; they had discovered that the news of
Telstra mining its reserves to pay inflated dividends was not news at
all.

According to the PM and his finance minister, this
information had been disclosed previously and was in the public domain.
We look forward to finding out how far news had travelled about the
other significant revelations from that August 11 meeting: about the
black hole in infrastructure investment and the failure of 14% of lines
and more than 14 million fault calls.