Don’t you get it with Christine Nixon? She is the centrepiece, with Janet Calvert Jones, of the Bruce Guthrie versus News Limited case. It is going to court, if Guthrie has his way. They are setting out to destroy her authoritative leadership image before she squeezes into the witness chair. This vilification (such as the photo in The Australian yesterday) will go on for days, if not weeks.

In the wake of the mass defection of The Age‘s real estate clients from The Melbourne Weekly comes word that The Age‘s editorial department is openly speculating about further redundancies and sackings.  Journalists are angry over the loss of millions of dollars of revenue when they have already borne the brunt of cost cutting.

Editorial employees are now asking how long Fairfax can tolerate having a Melbourne Age CEO who appears to have lost the confidence of the entire real estate industry in Melbourne, as evidenced by the mass exodus of real estate clients to a new publication headed by ex-Age manager Antony Catalano.

Do Fairfax and News Limited have a cosy arrangement not to criticise each other? The Age‘s loss of $16 million to a new rival real estate publication and further bleeding to its real estate classifieds revenues — a major story in its own right — has not been touched by The Australian‘s Media section. Why?

It’s bizarre the ABC’s employment strategy is not to advertise positions immediately, but rather employ a head-hunter to go through them and also make individual approaches to possible candidates. Meanwhile, the important and difficult position of head of fiction — which now includes comedy as well as drama — appears not to have been advertised and also remains unfilled.

This is a particular problem given the ABC’s much larger budget for drama as a result of last year’s federal Budget. It needs to get projects into development and production but any savvy producer would wait for this appointment before submitting anything. Otherwise it may be rejected by the outgoing regime or not looked upon favourably by the new appointment.

With the ABC having had four heads of drama since the departure of Sue Masters in 2000, one can only hope the right person — experienced and well regarded by the television industry — is found quickly.

The debacle of Queensland Health’s failure to pay large numbers of its staff appropriately over the past month should surprise no one. The IT services there have been laughable for years. This is just the latest, much more visible, and for many employees financially painful, failure.

How about only supporting an eight-year-old web browser that renders many of even its own web-based information services virtually unusable? An approach to security that cripples many applications but can’t prevent even the most unsophisticated spam swamping corporate email?

Limiting even senior clinical staff to a maximum of 50MB (yes, MB, remember them?) of secure, online storage without gouging dollars from departmental budgets? Rumours abound as to the reasons for this state of affairs. The alarmingly brief tenure of the last CIO might offer some clues.

After four years of negotiation among developers Westfield, the Department of Sustainability and Environment, various wildlife protection agencies, local residents and other interested parties, 21 kangaroos (some females with joeys) were to be re-located  from a Mernda site. Westfield was to be a major contributor to cost.

As final arrangements for capture and transport were being made, a departmental representative telephoned one of the agencies with the news that all of the animals had been “culled” some weeks previously. Their justification? That the roos had no feed and water.

They were being fed and watered by people who cared about them until the Department of Savagery and Execution did what they seem to enjoy most.

Was the hotly contested ballot for president of the Cairns Chamber of Commerce an insight into the local mood in the marginal seat of Leichhardt ahead of the forthcoming federal election? For the first time in living memory (the chamber celebrated its 100th year last year) an election was required to select a president. Current president Jeremy Blockey faced a challenge from former president Bob Norman.

Norman actually had a “ticket” or team for other chamber committee positions and again, in an unprecedented move, they handed out how-to-vote cards before the AGM. Norman is a local property developer with close ties to the National Party and prominent conservatives including former mayor Kevin Byrne and former MP Warren Entsch.

Blockey, while also seen as having Liberal Party leanings, is less hardline and less combative with the federal and state Labor governments. Speculation is Norman and his team where Entsch’s candidates hoping to up the public criticism of Rudd and local Labor MP Jim Tunour in the lead-up to this year’s election.

Perhaps an ominous sign of the mood in the Cairns business community for Entsch and Abbott that Blockey easily won re-election. While the results were not publicly released it is believed Blockey won with as much 80% of the vote.

I was talking today to a contract teacher who is currently on less than half of her previously contracted hours but with an increased workload during the hours at work. The impression that I have been given is that there have been cuts across the board in staff funding in Queensland (how much is state and how much federal?) while the federal government has been rolling out its huge building projects in schools.

From a position of ignorance it looks like what is being given with one hand is being taken away by the other. Hardly an effective way to stimulate an economy.