She’s lucky they said no. Julia Gillard should be thankful that the television station said “no” and the grand final of Dancing with the Stars will go ahead on Sunday night as scheduled. Pushing aside the nation’s most popular program for a Prime Ministerial address on the carbon tax would have been a sure fire way to lose votes.

Now down to the serious business. The final looks like being a very close run affair with The Crikey Dancing with the Stars election indicator finding very little between the three finalists.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the night’s television will be to discover how many more people watch a Gillard free network than those that show her address to the nation.

It’s not meant to be thus. Popular wisdom has it that the resource rich states of Western Australia and Queensland are the ones which are at the vanguard of the new mining led boom but Australian Bureau of Statistics figures this morning suggest that it is Victoria and New South Wales that are responsible for the growth in engineering construction activity.

The national trend estimate for the value of total engineering construction work done rose 3.8% in the March 2011 quarter with NSW up by 9.1% and Victoria by 4.5%. In WA the trend growth was 0.3% with Queensland at 1.3%.

Don’t blame us. We are just the management in charge of the company. When dirty deeds are done we take the credit for the profits made by them but don’t blame us for the deeds themselves. We are innocent because we had more brains than to ask what was going on.

That seems to be a common theme in business scandals these days. From Australia’s Reserve Bank to Rupert Murdoch’s News International via the Australian Wheat Board, Visy Board and Alcatel, the message from directors is the same. Directors are not responsible when things go wrong.

Bob Brown’s chance. In Britain at least they are debating the ethics of the Murdoch empire.

Over here the only politician with the courage to openly question the media baron’s power is Bob Brown. Now the time is surely right for him to insist that the Labor Government stop the nonsense of considering giving a News Limited company the opportunity of presenting a view of Australia to the world via international television.

Something worth dying for? So victory in Afghanistan is coming down to this: the Taliban could share power in Afghanistan just as former IRA terrorists do in Northern Ireland. British Prime Minister David Cameron gave this redefinition of what “victory” in the so-called war against terrorism might mean while visiting Kabul yesterday.