Norfolk Is administration collapsed? Yesterday in the Norfolk Island Assembly the Finance Minister tabled a letter to Brendan O’Connor indicating that the Norfolk Island has effectively collapsed.

Does Brumby have a smoke screen? With Victoria’s Bushfires Royal Commission due to report this Saturday, be on the lookout for hot issues that get released by Premier John Brumby on Friday…

More bat problems for Garrett. The matter of the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens flying foxes and the Botanic Garden Trust attempts to get rid of them gets curiouser and curiouser and, as a consequence, it looks like Peter Garrett’s going to be carrying some bat problems into the election. A challenge to his approval of the dispersal has been filed in the federal court on the grounds he failed to take into account a number of matters that he was obliged to consider when assessing the proposal.

And what of the rumour that the dispersal was postponed this year because the NSW DECCW Animal Ethics Committee called a halt to the project as a consequence of the animals being in such a poor state of health after this year’s statewide food failure? Many are wondering how the Trust can justify having ignored ecologists’ advice, delivered at the end of May, to cancel the dispersal for exactly those reasons.

Entsch’s audience participation. Liberal National Leichhardt (re)candidate Warren Entsch is struggling to get noticed in the federal campaign, so much so that he resorted to interjecting during the opening night of the new Cairns-based play, The Impossible Dream. The dinner and play show started its season on Saturday at a black-tie function with more than 200 identities enjoying the love story surrounding the building of local tourism attraction Paronella Park. The trouble was Warren, obviously feeling his re-election bid is turning into ‘the impossible dream’, felt the need to continually interject with corny one-liners and overly loud guffaws to prove to all in the room that he was there. He was definitely noticed, but not in a good way. Someone needed to tell Warren the play wasn’t an audience participation event.

Woods campaign from bad to worse. Poor beleaguered Liberal MP for the outer eastern electorate of La Trobe Jason Wood has had a shocker of a week in the main due to the infighting and lack of party support. Firstly was the fact Tony Abbott was in Melbourne and spent his time in Deakin and Aston rather than Wood’s electorate (which he holds onto by only a handful of votes). Then came this gem from the Facebook site of the Victorian Young Liberals: apparently most of the “party’s bright young things” are proffering excuses that they are needed in Deakin rather than being available to help Wood letterbox parts of his electorate this weekend.

But the ‘in joke’ at the Young Libs was that they chose to use a pic from Wood’s embarrassing ‘modified orgasm’ YouTube clip rather than use an official campaign pic (as they did for Phil Baressi in Deakin) to promote his planned letter-boxing. Today he only has himself to blame, being forcibly evicted from railway stations on the Belgrave line. My daughter tried to purchase a ticket at the Tecoma station only to find the ticket machine completely blocked by one of Wood’s supporters who did not seem to care that no one was able to get past him. Wood’s attitudes show signs of his performance in 2007 when he illegally erected billboards on VicRoads property and when caught out claimed he was ignorant of the law. One would think an ex-policeman would understand fully the laws of trespass.

Supermarket gouging in Germany. Which large Australian supermarket chain dispatched a delegation to Germany to attempt to purchase large capital expenditure refrigeration equipment direct from the German manufacturer? They were asked how many thousands of these they purchased each year. When the answer was 700, they were sent packing and told to purchase their requirements through the Australian company which is 100% owned by the German company anyway. No wonder Australian dairy farmers and other suppliers are doomed…