Short Kicks: Br'er Abbott and the IR patch

Spending more time on work lately so don't have mental bandwidth for feature length posts on a single subject, or proper sentence structure. Dot point time!

- Tony Abbott's War On Workers continues apace, with a raft of rightwing lies about SPC's industrial relations which were summarily shut down by the company, the stupidity of Judith Sloan telling the orchardists to have a cow or two, and continuing with Paul Howes trying to come across all Hawkey-esque with talk of a grand bargain. Howes is playing Br'er Rabbit: please don't throw me in the IR patch! Only fools could pretend that Abbott has anything like the power and skill of Hawke to achieve anything like the Accord. While Howes looks like a shag on a rock, Abbott's swift repudation of any sort of deal with unions only highlights how little of substance he has to say on industrial relations.

- Regarding SPC, SPC is Shepparton in certain respects. I have relatives around the Goulburn Valley (I was born in Shep), and they tell me that the northern part of that region has been forgotten time and again due to it being so uncontested. Seymour is included in the Federal seat of McEwen so it gets some attention (bugger all really), but even in the regional movement in which Jeff Kennett failed but Steve Bracks succeeded for so long in state politics, the battlegrounds were always Bendigo and Ballarat, with Shep not featuring. There is no Cathy McGowan in that area, though Sharman Stone is being pushed to emulate her through her own party's abandonment. Now she knows how it feels to be a National MP.

- Tom Sizemore, so flakey that he spent most of his appearances on the Celebrity Rehab reality show obviously still on drugs, made up the story about Liz Hurley having an affair with Bill Clinton which was passed around the wingnut blogs... because he got high. Hillary is going to have a field day with this crap.

- The Kouk has been acting like a jackrabbit who found Sizemore's stash lately because he's got it in his head that the RBA are going to hike rates due to the economy heating up again, and he's excited to be going against consensus predictions. He is quoting insanely short-run market fluctuations as if it's a herald of the Second Coming. Koukoulas' theory seems to be that Joe Hockey has already nobbled Treasury and that Treasury's forecasts are significantly lowballing reality, which along with the RBA grant money possibly being refunded at an opportune moment, means that Hockey will be able to build some sort of war chest for the next election. Empirical testing of economic assumptions is always good, I suppose.

- Is it just me, or does anyone else not remember the dressup scene in Groundhog Day at all? Did the Australian censors cut it from all those times I watched it?

UPDATE: Stephen Koukoulas has confirmed the nature of his conspiracy theory.