Lachlan Heywood of The Courier-Mail, come on down! The kid’s done well! Treasurer Peter Costello was in Brisbane yesterday selling the Budget, and the local lad actually got him to stand for something:

“Treasurer Peter Costello says heads should roll if a closed-door inquiry examining Vivian Young’s deportation finds wrongdoing by Immigration Department officials,” he writes in today’s Courier Mail. “If somebody is found to have failed in their duty, yes (they should be sacked),” he quotes Costello as saying.

But don’t rejoice prematurely. This is a senior member of the Howard Government talking. The yarn continues: “His comments came as Prime Minister John Howard raised the prospect of a royal commission into immigration detention. Mrs Young, 42, a Queensland woman, was wrongly deported to the Philippines in 2001.”

And Costello finishes “You don’t jump to a royal commission every time something gets on the front page of a newspaper.”