Hot Flashes

INTIMATE thoughts of the man whose Speaker's chair Julia Gillard ordered her troops to defend.

Remember, sheep, Tony Abbott is the real sexist pig. Just keep repeating that.

Slipper and the Shrew

HERE'S a riddle:

Q: What's the difference between Julia Gillard and Peter Slipper?

A: Slipper had the decency to resign

and here's another:

Q: What does a strong woman sound like?

A: A shrieking fishwife.

and a final one

Q: If Gillard were to resign (ha-ha), could Labor find a similar, but somewhat more presentable substitute?

A: Yes.

The Parson's No's

SAINT PETER of the Cross has declined to shed light, sanctified or otherwise, on his wee-hours cab-crawling about Kings Cross and Taylor Square. A dogsbody in Peter Slipper's office has told the Australian that the midnight marathon man is preparing for his debut in the Speaker's chair and is just too busy to comment.

Busy? Wait until Tuesday, when the Reverend Slipper must try to impose order on what promises to be one of the most riotous parliamentary sessions since Federation. Then he will be busy, very busy indeed. He will need to expel not just Christopher Pyne, whose ejection is a given, but every single member of the Opposition if he is to keep the mystery of his travels under wraps.

Tuesday is going to be so much fun.

Not Safe In Taxis

AS new Speaker Peter Slipper seems disinclined to explain his extensive and extraordinarily expensive use of taxpayer-funded taxis, the curious can only speculate how one man could run up a $750 fare in the course of a single day. Suspicious minds might wonder, for example, if those many and various cabs were left waiting outside certain establishments while the hirer attended to pressing business.

This thought is unworthy and should be banished. As is well known, Slipper is actually the Reverend Slipper, ordained priest in the congregation of self-proclaimed Buggered Bishop John Hepworth, head of the breakaway Traditional Anglican Communion. Would a man of the cloth haunt bars and bordellos? Perish the thought! While Hepworth's schismatic flock has its differences with Anglican orthodoxy, the embrace of loose living is surely not amongst them.

So how to explain those astonomical charges? Well, one entirely theoretical point to consider is taxi vouchers' potential for fraud. It is a simple scam: The hirer sells the voucher to a crooked driver, who makes it out for an exorbitant sum which is then split between them. The hirer gets a fistful of dollars while the driver scores a "fare" without ever having to turn the ignition key. It is a common practice, a gentleman who owns several cabs tells the Professor, and has been mentioned in a NSW report on, amongst other things, the transition from paper vouchers to smart cards:

It became obvious during the trial that the smart card itself provided an opportunity to abuse the scheme through the use of taxi emergency dockets. These are dockets provided to drivers to be used in case of the EFTPOS system being out of service/range. In some cases drivers are using the smart card manually to generate an emergency docket rather than use EFTPOS, even if the vehicle is fitted with EFTPOS equipment and it’s working effectively.

In some cases trial participants used a disproportionate number of taxi emergency dockets using the same taxi driver. This has lead to 20 individual cases of suspected misuse being identified and referred to the Ministry’s Compliance Branch for investigation.

The high percentage of card transactions being processed manually has a suspected correlation to the level of fraud....

While it is impossible -- indeed, absolutely inconceivable -- that an elected representative of the Australian people would engage in something quite so tawdry, cheap and crooked, it is perhaps just a little easier to imagine a member of the Traditional Anglican Communion being so tempted.

After all, the Reverend Slipper's spiritual leader went down for robbing his own church of $1,200 to pay for a jolly celebration.

No doubt Australia Police will put these dark notions to rest when their expanding investigation is over and the Reverend Slipper is cleared, as the Australian people expect. After all, who could imagine the Gillard government elevating a thief, liar and nest-featherer to one of the most august offices in the land?

The Peter Meter

JULIA GILLARD has been given quite some grief of late for appointing Peter Slipper to the Speaker’s chair, with gossipy sorts quite keen to learn how he managed to run up a $300+ cab charge in the course of a single night’s travels about Canberra. Now this really is a remarkable achievement, the ACT being a pocket handkerchief roughly 50 kilometres from border to border at its widest point. As the current tariff for cab trips after 9pm is $2.19 per kilometer, Slipper would have required three full trips from end to end in order to present taxpayers with such an invoice. The new Speaker has pointedly declined to explain where he went and what he was up to, a stonewall that can only lead the curious to wonder if the waiting-time tariff of $49 an hour might have contributed to the total sum. In the absence of a word from Slipper, speculation that his cab and driver sat outside some establishment or other until he had zipped up whatever business propelled him into the evening remains valid. While there are few certainties in politics – other than that Michelle Grattan will always find something to admire in our “devilishly clever” PM – it is the surest bet that Slipper’s nocturnal mystery mission will continue to be raised.

An ongoing headache for the government? An open sore subject to painful probing? Yes, that is likely, but it need not be. If our PM were to hunker down with spin-gali Bruce Hawker it would take but a few minutes to produce a strategy that could only enhance Slipper’s standing while doing the government that slipped him into the Chair a world of good.

First, there is the need to settle on a destination. Gillard and Hawker might persuade the Speaker to reveal that he is a pokies junkie, spent the evening losing money in Queanbeyan and is proof positive of the need for the state to regulate inappropriate individual behaviour.

The problem with that scenario, of course, is that Slipper would object to being identified as a degenerate gambler.

So why not sell him on the virtues of casting himself as a simple, straightforward, old-fashioned,  garden-variety degenerate?  If it were put to him that the cab was left waiting while he engaged in a de-briefing session with a carnal consultant, relativism would be his shield. Indeed, if judged against some parliamentary colleagues, he would emerge the very picture of probity.

Unlike, say, Craig Thomson, there would be no need for tall tales of a priapic doppelganger (with an identical signature, no less) who lingered in houses of pleasures while hospital floor-moppers and toilet-scrubbers picked up his bill. Who could object to the taxpayer covering transport costs if the remainder of the evening was drawn on the Speaker’s own pocket?

And it gets better. With earnest hand on heart, Slipper might then avow to never having bumped groins with a 12-year-old, as Tasmanian colleague Terry Martin was yesterday convicted of having done, apparently as a result of being exposed to medications for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. The judge declined to incarcerate Martin, thereby establishing with the full authority of the bench the lower limit of what these days is deemed acceptable conduct. If Slipper were to say all his girls were 18 or older, even the dirtiest of his sheets would come with a wonderfully clean smell – relatively speaking, of course.

None of this is to suggest that Slipper was gambling or schtupping. Indeed, for all we know, he might just as easily have been overcome by the sudden urge to find sacred ground, rattle of a quick rosary, say novena or two, perform an act of contrition and stuff a fistful of unused Commonwealth taxi vouchers in the poor box.

But it would be a mistake to admit as much. Just ask Tony Abbott how the press feels about Catholics.