Much to the horror of many sitting ALP councillors and a couple of Federal and State ALP MPs who are former councillors in the western suburbs of Sydney, the recent scandal and murky development dealings will eventually lead to right to their doorsteps.

While not directly connected with the McGurk incident, a thorough investigation into development dealings around Eastern Creek and Badgerys Creek will no doubt pour cold water on the rising careers of some young guns on Rudd’s team. It seems the Young Labor trained MPs didn’t think of the future when it came to a lot of the decisions they made in local government.

It appears many managers, past and present, for several western Sydney councils are just itching to sing like canaries.

Can the four independent directors of Fairfax Media be so media-ignorant that they had to hire public relations outfit FD Third Person (which has John Mangos providing media training!) to write a 39-word letter?

And who paid for the letter-writing lesson? Hopefully not Fairfax shareholders, especially after the four directors collected a total of $692,765 in directors’ fees last financial year.

Is Peter Costello lining up for an ambassador posting? That’s the big question exercising the minds of many Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade boffins — that the current High Commissioner to London, perennial bachelor John Dauth, may be looking over his shoulder. Dauth was put there by Rudd but the word is that Rudd doesn’t want Costello around for much longer — his presence gives the Liberals a modicum of class and credibility and with him out of the way their stocks, if possible, will be even lower than they are now. Watch this space.

Australian Hotels Association NSW CEO Sally Fielke, who already had her hands full dealing with an internal plot to dethrone her, hasn’t helped her cause with this bizarre video.

You will notice she has notes on her desk, clearly an advance set of questions were supplied to her. In other words, she thought about her favourite book and decided the best answer was Mein Kampf. She justifies it by saying it’s not the best but probably the most interesting. Lucky she isn’t working on breakfast radio else she might be off air for a considerable period…

Not so secure, SecurePay. Yesterday afternoon, online payment merchant SecurePay sent out this notice to its customers:

ANZ Merchant Facility Outage.

Dear Merchant,

Please be advised that ANZ is currently experiencing an outage.

The outage started at approximately 15:05 today (21/09/2009) and is still unresolved..

Transactions processed during this period will have received 910, 923 and 926 errors.

Thank you for you support.

The only problem being that they didn’t BCC the email addresses and the almost 2000 email addresses were there to see for all and sundry.

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