10.55 am

I’ve had premonitory feelings for a while now that this strange government would not last, and while I felt sometimes that this may have been, for me, the wish fathering the thought, I now think that I was on the money.

Bronwyn Bishop’s idiot ruling on the epithet ‘Electricity Bill’, her bizarre threat to clear the gallery of the innocent as well as the disruptive, and the stunned faces behind Abbott as he demanded the House let the typhoons rip, gives, now, the Opposition the option of walking out altogether, and the Senate of refusing any bill that comes before it.

I had not thought my old friend could have been, in sum, so stupid. He has done what he need not have done, make a Monkey Trial of the Carbon Tax, declaring science to be the work of the Devil and sacking its adherents, and the only Global Warming that will come will be after Christ with a sharp sickle and a box of matches returns to save the righteous and immolate the damned. He has made a mad bitch Speaker. He has begun a Cold War with Indonesia. He has hailed and embraced the bloodstained Molochs of Sri Lanka. He has, now, no admirer in the world. He has a fellow traveller or two, some corrupt cash-groping bedfellows, but no admirers.

He is doomed, and there is no health in him.

He will be terminal by Christmas, and gone within a year.