Gillard and pokies:

Andrew Lewis writes: Re Yesterday’s editorial. Your editorial today includes this line on why the Labor Party wouldn’t take the pokies pre-commitment to a vote.

According to Laura Tingle in The Australian Financial Review today, it’s because “… the view at the top was firmly that Labor’s authority rests on the fact it has not lost a vote in parliament, despite its minority status”.

That is about as clear a statement as it gets that this government is completely out of touch. Mind you, I have no doubt that many in the press gallery probably agree with that, and there are the forces of darkness lined up to make a huge deal of it if they ever do lose a vote on the floor.

However, and I can’t say this too strongly, the Australian public couldn’t give a toss. Most of the Australian public still hasn’t got a clue how Parliament works anyway, and have a collective memory that makes goldfish look highly retentive.

Is that the best that they can come up with? I suspect the only thing they can remember, en masse, is that Julia Gillard is untrustworthy, and she has helped that along once again.

All the political nous of the aforementioned goldfish. How did they ever get elected to anything?

John Kotsopoulos writes: Crikey‘s incessant sniping at Julia Gillard is getting very tiresome. Name one instance where a  PM has deliberately put up something for a vote knowing it would be defeated.

Let’s not  forget that the Productivity Commission’s advice was to do a trial of full mandatory commitment before settling on a model so as to avoid worsening the problem.

Criticism of the PM when she is following the recommendation of the Productivity Commission is just political flatulence.

Senator Ludlum’s iPhone:

Neil Hunt writes: Re. “Greens MP fears phone was hacked in WikiLeaks exchange” (yesterday, item 3). Mobile phones lose battery power for a variety of reasons, and oddly enough, iPhones are also mobile phones. I would bet that Greens Senator Scott Ludlum was using his GPS at the time, which will chew through the battery. Did he forget to turn off bluetooth?

The older iOS software will also attempt to constantly connect to your email with an incorrect password if you’ve updated it elsewhere but not on the phone yet. This HAMMERS the battery, and I’ve seen it drain my own battery in under two hours.

Heck, even changing the tower style (3G/2G/GSM-1800/GSM-900) will drain the battery. I don’t know where they were driving, having not lived in Melbourne for that long (less than a year over a decade ago), but did they change from the city to the country with its lower signal power?

While there are interceptions in Australia of meta data, and possibly even listening in on phone calls, in this case, simply because his battery died quickly, there is no indication that this is what occurred. Repeating a story, even for an exclusive from a Greens Senator, does not make it true.

Quite frankly, I expect better from Crikey.