A humiliated and wounded Alex Hawke failed to front up to the first Liberal party room meeting following his failed attempt to oust David Clarke from the NSW Upper House. Having defied leader Tony Abbott and boasted that Clarke was a “dead man” who didn’t have the numbers, Hawke had egg on his face the size of the world’s biggest omelette and decided not to show.

Meanwhile, Nick Campbell has ordered the Liberal Party’s secretariat to notch up the heat on members of two Young Liberal branches in Hawke’s electorate, demanding that they swear statutory declarations that they are legitimate party members.

The two branches were, of course, subject to a meeting disrupted by the calling of police in 2009 when Hawke failed to secure the numbers and now Hawke is trying to knock them out on the basis that they are not “legitimate” members.

Old ghosts have returned for the SA state election. Former Rann adviser Randall Ashbourne — sacked by the Premier in the fallout from the Atkinson Ashbourne Clarke jobs for the boys allegations — is back in the city of churches. Randall is happy to talk about some of the lesser-known activities of Premier Rann during his time as Opposition leader and Premier.

Our school in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne has been advised that our BER building template has been altered. We have been told by the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development … that the alteration will save $35,000 on our building and that more than a dozen schools in the area have received similar alterations. So, we didn’t ask for the building in the first place.

We then chose a template from the “take it or leave it” options, now the template we chose is being altered without consultation. The building we’ll receive is not the one we signed up for. Surprisingly, the $35,000 will not be given to the school to be spent on critical renovations and repairs.

Construction was expected to start in the middle of the year if the builder can get contractors in, but there seems to be a shortage of labour.

Regarding the w-nkers in Sydney charging $40 to apply for a room in a share house, I’m pretty sure this is actually illegal based on my interpretation of clause 37 of the NSW Residential Tenancies Act 1987. Perhaps a law-type person could cast some light on this?

I regularly purchase the Australian Financial Review for $3. In an ad in today’s paper they tell me that I can get a subscription that seems to include the paper and their website afr.com for “just a little over $3 per day”. Sounds like a bargain, but they say the price is $1140 pa. Hmm…

Check out their website and a five-day subscription to the paper is $780. So $360 more per year gets me the website. Ignoring public holidays and the AFR‘s “bumpers” and that’s 260 weekdays (52 x 5) for $360 or $1.38 on top of the $3 that I already pay for the paper.

Apparently “just a little” equals $1.38 or an additional 46% on top of the price I pay for the paper. Sounds like creative accounting to me.