WHEN I repeated last Saturday week, at a private dinner of the Sydney University Liberal Club, a comment I had heard only hours before at a birthday party for one of my godsons, as I said yesterday, I was wrong.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard was entitled to an apology, which I publicly offered and repeated yesterday.

My attempts to deliver it personally to her were in vain.

She declined to take my call.

The comments which should not be repeated here were in bad taste.

But party talk of the prime minister's untruths is a measure of real anger out there about Gillard's persistent and unapologetic breach of public trust.

On top of the carbon tax and asylum seeker broken promises, the taxpayer now sees ballooning debt.

And after endlessly talking about the necessity of a floor price for carbon dioxide emissions, come 2015, suddenly everything said in the past means nothing.

The consequences for revenue of this latest about face are mammoth.

The compensation package to taxpayers will remain as if the carbon dioxide price were $29 a tonne.

But the revenue will be based on a price set in Brussels, perhaps as low as $8 a tonne.

It doesn't add up.

But to the Gillard government, it doesn't seem to matter. You see, even the term carbon pollution reduction scheme is an untruth.

It's CO2 that is being taxed not carbon.

And CO2 is not a pollutant.

These are some of the issues I addressed at the dinner last Saturday week in a private room at the Waterfront Restaurant in Sydney, in a 58-minute speech I delivered without notes.

It was a typically under-graduate evening.

Everyone, as we say in Aussie lingo, copped a serve.

The jokes and the songs were all, understandably, about a Labor government which has not only dishonoured promises on so many issues, but also has stood democracy on its head by telling the voting public what it believes is good for them.

I rose to speak at 10.10pm in this atmosphere.

Wrongly, I repeated the offending remarks.

And there could be no justification for that.

That said, there are other issues at work here.

A person, apparently a journalist, represented himself to the organisers as a Liberal student and paid the Liberal student entry fee, but he's not a student.

He registered for the evening with an email address which concealed the fact that he was a journalist.

And without notifying or seeking approval from the organisers or the speakers, he apparently taped the speech.

Where the Listening Devices Act fits in relation to such behaviour is interesting.

But if people at private dinner parties have to wonder whether someone is secretly taping proceedings for reproduction to any media outlet that wants them, then it seems that no one is safe on a Saturday night from details of the evening being later revealed.

That does not mean that comments made privately or publicly should be such as to give offence to another, should those comments be made public. But I wonder if such reporting behaviour occurred at a Labor Party dinner, what the response might have been.

What is more, only last week, the wife of a federal government minister tweeted to the extent that Alan Jones won't have to be endured for much longer as the average age that males live to in Australia is such that he won't be with us for long.

Or words to that effect.

Nice stuff.

And the social media yesterday were wishing my cancers to return, except this time, the hope was expressed that they should finish the job.

I'm not complaining and I'm not suggesting anyone should run to my defence.

What I am suggesting is that some seem to practise the standards they selectively condemn.

As I soon as I learnt my comments would have made their way to the Prime Minister, I determined I must apologise. And I say again, I sought neither to reflect on Mr John Gillard, the Prime Minister's father, nor to dismiss the grief that any daughter feels for the death of her father.

I said yesterday that I have nothing but praise for the John Gillards of this world.

Mr Gillard is an emblem of all migrant fathers who came here to give their families a better life.

I will stand anywhere to deliver a eulogy to John Gillard as a father and a worker and a man. And that applies to his wife. But I will never eulogise what Mr Gillard's daughter and her party are doing to our country.

The public know what is happening and they are angry.

And when they are lied to on grocery watch, fuel watch, carbon tax, asylum seekers, a carbon tax floor price and debt; to say nothing of four young men losing their lives in a pink batts fiasco these issues, amongst others, are the basis for that anger.

I addressed all these issues at the Liberal Club function.

I should never have included in my remarks the words rightly attributed to me.

But if only some of the trenchant criticism directed towards me is inspired by a ruthless determination to silence legitimate comment and condemnation of government policy, then just as comments which strike at the grief of a daughter for her father should be condemned, so too should be condemned the widespread efforts by the Gillard government, and Julia Gillard herself, to silence or punish anyone who dares to articulate one political certainty that this may be the worst and least trustworthy government in Australian history.

Originally published as An apology tempered by anger