Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

. The Liberal Party of Australia is currently undergoing a purge. It is quite spectacular. A technicolour yawn of conflicting principles, ideology and power lust is being spewed out across the pages of the press , on the current affairs programmes and in the 'sphere . Just over a year ago the Party Room removed Brendan Nelson from the leadership in favour of Malcolm Turnbull, ostensibly because Brendan was more circumspect than Malcolm about the pace at which or whether Australia should introduce an Emissions Trading Scheme. Brendan wanted to wait until after Australia had seen what the other nations of the world, mainly the big emitters like China, India and the US, were prepared to commit to before Australia made its commitment. Malcolm wanted to push ahead with an ETS before Copenhagen in the belief that this position would neutralise the electorate characterising the Party as unconcerned about Climate Change. Mal won. Brendan has now been given a gig as ambassador to NATO in fa...

I thought I was confused about Utegate and then I saw this: This apparently is Godwin Grech's home in Calwell, South Canberra. The one the Federal police raided on Monday and that Godwin holed himself up in over the weekend. He is a single, mid-forties, senior public servant who has lived alone in this house for about a decade. That prominent, upright, emblematic thingy thrusting itself at us in the foreground is described in the Daily Telegraph, whence the picture came, as a "palm tree". Although it obscures our perspective of his mock Spanish home, it might not be entirely frivolous to suggest that it could be more telling of Godwin, than his home. Certainly after seeing this for me the whole Utegate affair suddenly took on yet another unexpected and disturbing dimension: thwarted love and revenge gone wrong. The anguish we saw in Godwin's Senate testimony now can be interpreted through the lens of the torn heart of a smart but desperately lonely man being found out...