• Well here's a little snippet from a Corinne Grant article published in The Hoopla 2012. ..N.b. peeps, . not MSM. . No denying our Germaine has street cred, as eloquently outlined by Tony W, but this is an example of how her remarks were interpreted when they were made on Q&A.There seems to have been a lot of backtracking since .....By all means vote for JG but don't do it just because GG says so , or worse just because JG is a woman. Extract from Corinne Grant article Hoopla Aug2012 Germaine Greer was allowed back on Q&A and made a dick of herself. Again. Nowadays, being Germaine Greer means being an expert on a few things and pretending you’re an expert on everything else. Her current tactic is to keep talking for long enough that people forget she didn’t answer the original question and is actually spouting complete bullshit. Given the chance to explain why she focussed on the Prime Minister’s jackets and body instead of her achievements and work the last time she was on the show, Greer claimed that, thanks to her, Gillard has changed her wardrobe. She hasn’t. Germaine then banged on about Julia’s arse again and gave it the thumbs up. The weird thing was, she appears to believe she’s doing Gillard some sort of favour. Outrage level: If you’re opinionated, have poor reasoning skills and lack the ability to form a logical argument and you haven’t had a go on Q&A yet, you have every right to chuck a massive wobbly that Greer keeps taking your spot. - Pea
  • hahaha! Thank you, helen b. Just as my work colleague predicted, one of the nasty little terriers comes out snapping with a insult that a year 6 would be ashamed of. How about, 'takes one to know one, no returns.' Reading the comments here is a study in cult mentality. If your Great One is defeated on September 14, will you all be donning red wigs and ill fitting robes and waiting for her to lead you to the promised land? Do you have a Plan B just in case brainwashing women into voting for her doesn't work? - Vote Liberal
  • This parliament isn't "hung". It is a functioning, working, collection of elected members going about their duties. The idea of "hung" comes from those who insist that they were cheated....those unable to negotiate for the betterment of the Australian people. - PA
  • @ Vote Liberal In answer to your question 'How stupid do you think we are' Response: very - helen b
  • You've redeemed yourself, Ms Greer! Love all the women who are showing solidarity and support for one of our own, one of the very best, who's after all the most powerful person in the land, and she's made good use of that power, whereas her opponent has done nothing but fail: http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/politics/tony-abbotts-catalogue-of-failures/ Team Julia all the way!!! - Bridget
  • This article is the kiss of death. A raving hypocrite rallying women to vote for an incompetent PM, a Party ruled by factions, unions and faceless men, a Party that has driven the economy of every State to the wall and raked up a debt of 300 billion dollars and stuffed up every single policy they've touch, just for the tokenism of having a woman as Prime Minister? How stupid do you think we are? We're out here working our butts off in an ever shrinking economy and living in fear of our jobs and you're carrying on like a group of vacuous cheerleaders. Copies of this article and circulate throughout the office and branches all day. I think it fair to say that decent men have had enough of the man-bashing and women are sick to death of being treated like easily manipulated airheads. Thanks, Germaine and The Hoopla. - Vote Liberal
  • Hear hear, John B. I certainly don't want to reward all the malevolent, malicious haters who've hated our PM for no good reason. Our PM is so brilliant. It would also be a travesty to replace her with a man who can barely string two words together much less have one serious policy that makes any sense in the real world. A man who will royally screw them over too once he's in power, for who does he truly care about but only the uber-rich media tycoons and mining magnates and those earning over $180,000 a year at the very least, and those "women of calibre" that he speaks so highly of (the rest of us are just poop-kickers of course), but when they find themselves sacked from their jobs to be replaced by 457 visa holders thanks to Tony's policies and getting on the dole queue only to be told by Centrelink that they can't get anything because he got rid of their welfare benefits, then they may regret the day that they wanted to get rid of our brilliant PM. Tony Abbott's entry in Wikiquotes gives a fascinating insight about this man that may one day be our PM (I shudder at the thought) that women might be especially interested to know about, as our MSM is sadly neglecting to tell us these things: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tony_Abbott I'm with Team Julia all the way!!! - Bridget
  • @ Claire: "I have always considered you to be a right royal pain in the arse." You don't need to like her Claire, nor even agree with her, but if you'd lived through the '50s & '60s you'd realize there have been few more influential Australians ever born. As a radical thinker and writer she showed us a view of ourselves we'd never seen before, and which we now take to be self-evident. Nor was it restricted to gender issues - she challenged our preconceptions on a wide range of cultural and political fronts, including what she termed "Aboriginal apartheid", and we invariably learned something about ourselves as a nation. She is possessed of an extraordinarily powerful and incisive intellect, and whilst it may not be immediately evident in the mental kindergarten of a Q & A forum, it's there for all to see in her writings and no doubt in the lecture halls of Cambridge. Moreover, unlike so many public figures these days, she has always been prepared to say exactly what she thinks and damn the consequences. Throughout her life it has been her power to shock and make us think which has changed us for the better. That's her style, and she executes it with humour - hence the "fat arse" exhortation to Gillard, which in the juvenile atmosphere of a Q & A panel was perfectly appropriate. It may have offended some of the younger feminists, but Greer is the real deal, and political correctness is not in her lexicon. Nor does she care what anyone thinks of her - this is someone who as a young woman called out misogyny in Australia 50 years ago, and what she copped back then makes the abuse heaped on Gillard seem like a gentle rebuke. Small wonder she remained in the UK to escape us rednecked colonials. 50 years later there's still no place here for intellectuals, we're even attacking scientists now. Britian sniggers at the way we conduct politics here, that's how they see us, a bunch of illbred hicks to be laughed at. Greer herself on the other hand will never be heard to "denounce and denigrate Australia" as you charge Claire. It's called "constructive criticism" - like pointing out that 47% of Queenslanders are illiterate, a figure she described as "shocking and frightening". She raised that concern as a Queenslander herself - where amongst other things she pursues environmentalism on her partially cleared rainforest property. She raised the matter at the Brisbane Writer's Festival, where literacy rates would be of primary concern one would hope. When the current generation of Australian women can match Greer's lifetime literary achievements and walk the feminist walk like she has always done, they may be in a position to criticize her. Meanwhile, I for one am heartily sick of seeing politically correct young "feminists" bagging her, whilst enjoying the freedoms she helped win for them. Call her eccentric, call her impolite, call her outspoken, call her controversial, but Greer is a proud Australian and Australia should be proud to have her. - Tony W
  • Thanks helen b. I know what you mean about The Hoopla - it's like a bit of fresh air in the putrid sea of MSM sewage that we find ourselves in these days. Sorry for the gross analogy but it really feels that way sometimes! As for people looking to Kevin Rudd, lol I read someone said that he's not the Messiah, he's just a very naughty boy! Lol. But a big part of this thing of people thinking that he is Labor's messiah is that it's precisely one of Murdoch's propaganda messages in his campaign to bring down Prime Minister Gillard's government (she who won't toe the line) - how the only hope for the future is a leadership challenge. Naturally it doesn't help that Rudd also happens to be a proven self-serving narcissistic traitorous self-sabotaging egomaniac who refuses to work under a woman and so we have the situation where such a character is seriously being considered as someone who can do a better job than our PM, when he already demonstrated that he was completely hopeless at the job http://www.brw.com.au/p/leadership/kevin_need_rudd_talk_about_kevin_5ZX8lSS05BEXZMxtB6CaTO. All I can say is I would certainly never vote for a traitor for PM, and if Laborites' ideals are about putting the interests of the majority over the individual, Kevin Rudd is not doing a good job of having that quality at all (Exhibit A: himself). So what on earth does that make him? Not Prime Minister material that's for sure. Why am I starting to believe the idea that many Aussies are brain-dead retards for believing that this guy is any good? Going back to Murdoch's propaganda, his other two messages apart from how the only hope for the future is a leadership challenge are: how appalling the Government is; and how disastrously it is doing in the opinion polls. I guarantee that those three are the only three things that appear in our MSM's front pages every single day, on newspapers, TV news, digital news. No policies, just these 3 pieces of garbage everyday. Because it is garbage, it's not based on any facts at all whatsoever. And there you have Murdoch's method of brainwashing the unsuspecting masses into believing his sewer-full of lies. Propaganda 101! - Bridget
  • Be careful with the tampons if you have young children. My sister and I were driving around dural when my son was 3!/2 and her daughter was a bit oder. We were busy talking and paid no attention to them in the back seat. They had ratted out bags, unwrapped a couple of tampons and each was holding them out the car window by the string. My bag has sanitiser, tissues and panadol, actually nurofen in the small plastic container. Less messy that a packet. I do clean out handbags fairly regularly. This organising does not necessarily extend to the rest of my life. Like Bec, I have emergency knitting, usually a sock. - Jan
 
Categories:  Lifestyle, Wellbeing

FROM WAR ZONE TO BABY LAND

NEWS UPDATE, August 6… Nick joyfully announced on Twitter this morning that his wife Fleur Wood had given birth to a beautiful baby girl. Mum and baby are doing well. Congratulations from The Hoopla.

******************************

 

When the tsunami unleashed by last year’s Japanese earthquake turned much of the country’s north-east coastline into a scene that looked like the mouth of hell, I knew that it would not be long before the call came through from the news desk in London.

In adherence with the drop-everything-and-go rules of foreign correspondentland, I would be expected to make the usual crazed dash to the airport in the hope of catching a late-night flight to Tokyo – throwing a few clothes in a bag, kissing our newborn baby goodbye and making hurried apologies to my wife.

Nick’s wife, fashion designer Fleur Wood with Billy.

This time, however, I uttered a word that I have used very sparingly during my career as a BBC foreign correspondent: “No.”

Early last year we had already covered the floods in Queensland and the earthquake in Christchurch, and I would have struggled to cope with more loss, suffering and destruction, especially on such an immense scale.

But the reason I said that I could not travel to the quake zone was because I was due to accompany my wife on a business trip to New York, where I was down to play Mr Mom.

I explained all this to a colleague in London – an Australian, oddly enough – who had packed me off on hundreds of assignments in the past.

“Don’t worry, mate,” he deadpanned. “She’s only your first wife.”

I am glad to report, however, that the next flight that I boarded was to America rather than Japan, where I spent a delightful week spending more time with my family. In doing so, I had taken another step in my phased withdrawal from the frontline of news, just as the Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib climbed down this week from the barricades of Canberra politics.

Fifteen years or so of saying “yes” has taken me all over the world, from the White House to the Kremlin; from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay; from Kashmir to the Gaza Strip. But I reached the point about five years ago, after I had met my then Australian girlfriend, when I decided I needed a break from the sapping relentlessness of covering the post-911 beat.

I suspect that most foreign correspondents reach the same moment of realisation, when the thing that they once enjoyed most about the job, which is to say its unpredictability, becomes the very thing that they start to most resent.

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6 Responses to this article

  1. Jane Waterhouse February 29, 2012 Reply
     
     

    Your piece did make me choke. I saw very little of my father due to his work commitments. I accept he was “working” for the income required to school, feed and clothe us but knowing what I know today as a parent, I would have traded material things for time with him in a heartbeat. My father died suddenly at 53, still working long hours. Funnily I need him around just as much today at 48 as I did at 4. We very rarely hear the dad’s side of the story and I thank you for that.

     
  2. janine fitzpatrick February 29, 2012 Reply
     
     

    Children change our lives in so many ways. I agree with Jane it is good to hear the dad’s perspective. I think children benefit enormously from having time with both parents – and I think we grow from the experience of taking some “time out” to devote to our families. People will tell you the time goes so fast – I didn’t believe it when I was drowning in the baby years but now we’ve hit highschool it is true the years are flying by at warp speed and we are seeing clearly a time when they will be gone, off to do their own thing so to avoid the whole “cat’s in the cradle” scenario it’s important to take the time now.

     
  3. Pauline February 29, 2012 Reply
     
     

    I agree that ‘spending more time with the family’ is a worthy excuse for resigning but whereas the author has probably taken a pay cut, I don’t think Arbib will be much worse off financially.

     
  4. Helen O'Connor March 1, 2012 Reply
     
     

    Thanks Nick for this article. like Jane I felt very teary as I read and reflected on the years that I didn’t see my dad due to his job that had him travelling for up to 6 months of the year, and because of that how distant I felt from him while growing up. I know now that he also deeply regrets what he missed, but I have to say to his absolute credit – he is one hell of a grandfather because of it! One phonecall and he is jumping in his car – or even on a plane – to help out one of my 5 siblings with his 14 grandchildren.
    Its never too late, but good on you for doing it now.
    We need our dads.

     

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  • Pea: Well here's a little snippet from a Corinne Grant article published in The Hoopla 2012. ..N.b. peeps, . not MSM. . No d...

  • Vote Liberal: hahaha! Thank you, helen b. Just as my work colleague predicted, one of the nasty little terriers comes out snapping wit...

  • PA: This parliament isn't "hung". It is a functioning, working, collection of elected members going about their duties. The ...

  • helen b: @ Vote Liberal In answer to your question 'How stupid do you think we are' Response: very

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