Bad luck comes in threes, they say, and fate's cruel blows cannot have had a greater recent impact than on the sports-minded residents of the Sunshine Coast. Hot on the heels of Queensland's loss to NSW in the State of Origin, the first time that unnatural state of affairs has manifested itself in eight years, the Socceroos went down to defeat in Brazil. And just to cap off the litany of misery visited upon residents in the seat of Fairfax there can be no consolation off the pitch. After all, having sent the antic Clive Palmer to Canberra last September, every day's headlines are reminder that the ballot box will suffice for a net when voters are determined to kick own goals

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Pity the stressed and overworked jihadi in Iraq at the moment. So many prisoners to shoot and so little time to do it. And those brazen women, getting about without their imam-mandated head-to-toe coveralls. The fractious ones will need shooting too. There are books to burn, infrastructure to trash, banks to loot and, of course, the obligation to honour Allah and "the religion of peace" by praying five times a day. Still, even a seventh-century fanatic has to take a break every now and again....

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"So nice to draw Pauline again," rejoices Zeg, who suspects those four freshly minted PUP senators might more than fill the void over the next six years.

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A little less in the way of disposable cash might have inspired the ABC to review priorities but, alas, Joe Hockey stayed his budget axe, Aunty remains unreformed and hot-talking phone-sex granny 'Gloria from Warburton', a lifelong member of the ratbag left and regular ABC talkback caller, is presented to the Prime Minister as entirely representative of aggrieved Australians everywhere. But there is a possible solution ....

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Old habits can be very hard to break. After six glorious years of digging deep into other people's pockets and showering that harvest of cash on pet projects like pink batts, moral crusades against hot weather and Their ABC's presumed right to frame the events of the day in the monocular perspective of the left eye alone, Bill Shorten is having a lot of trouble adjusting to the harsh realities of life on the opposition benches.

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Was it only a year ago that Team Rudd occupied the government benches? Actually, it wasn't. Back then it was noted home renovator and power-of-attorney drafter Julia Gillard who was leading the nation, but Rudd was waiting and plotting and scheming and preparing to demonstrate how a real PM goes about the nation's business. Out of power and out of Parliament, Rudd was mercifully out of mind until the Pink Batts Royal Commission put him in the witness box this week. But don't fret. Testimony concluded, he'll soon and once again be no more than a self-important and rather unsettling memory.

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After much bally-hoo and to the accompaniment of knees, mostly left ones, knocking in terror, Treasurer Joe Hockey has finally revealed where the state will spend stupendous sums and from whom and how it proposes to extract them. The ABC has been less-than-minimally trimmed, the arts crowd will barely see the scissors and middle-class welfare has not been materially crimped, just re-arranged a bit. Still, some grumble-bunnies cannot resist the opportunity to whine, as Zeg notes

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With Bill Shorten, the workers' mate, going to bat for the right of "the rich" to retain their earnings and Christine Milne speaking up for fossil-fuelled motorists, Zeg hopes neither bumps into a party of visiting schoolchildren. They can be very annoying, those kids, often voicing the sort of questions adults are just too polite to utter.

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There is no fuel like an old fuel, and don't Canberra's revenuers know it! While silicon sunshine sponges have been blessed with subsidies in the name of a solar-powered future, wind farms score tax breaks and tidal energy prototypes sink, rust or drift into salty oblivion, old-fashioned hydrocarbons -- the oil, literally, on which jobs and prosperity depend, is slugged .. and slugged ... and slugged again. Why encourage economic growth by slashing fuel taxes when it is so much easier to shake down motorists at the pump?

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That little misunderstanding that inspired James Packer and David Gyngell to engage in a two-fisted exchange of views and teeth, it hasn't been the only stoush in the news. Former Treasurer Peter Costello and Joe Hockey have also been shaping up in their quest for an exalted title

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