A blue jean movie queen. She admits herself that it’s a bit embarrassing but Julia Gillard used to have a crush on David Essex.

So you youngsters can judge the Prime Ministerial taste for yourself here is the Pommy pop star vintage 1973 whose poster Ms Gillard told Hobart radio this morning she probably had on her girlish bedroom wall.

It deserves a big black border. It’s a day of shame for the Australian Reserve Bank. Australia has its first ever prosecution under foreign bribery legislation — the maximum penalty for which is ten years’ imprisonment and/or a $1.1 million fine — and the Bank is at the centre of it.

The bank should never dare lecture anyone about the responsibility of directors again.

He’s not always wrong. I could not have said it better.

You will find my verdict on The Stump blog.

A few dollars for journalists on the side. Good for old newspaper political hacks like me to see that some politicians still think we are important enough to bribe! From this morning’s Bangkok Post:

No late opinion polls. They don’t permit the publication of opinion polls in the week before an election in Thailand but I doubt that matters much. Those from earlier this month give anything but a clear picture of what will happen on Sunday but Reuters reports that most of them put the opposition Puea Thai Party, controlled by ousted former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, ahead of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s ruling Democrat Party.

The power of radio. No one has ever won the Nobel Peace Prize twice but if anyone is to do so it will surely be Aung San Suu Kyi who has just been banned again by a Burmese government from meeting “foreign organisations.”

Listen to her recent BBC Reith lectures and you will realise why the Irish bookmaker Paddy Power has her as the Peace prize favourite.

(Australian author Peter Carey, incidentally, is a $67 outsider with Paddy Power to win the Nobel Prize for literature.)