Does anyone know which show on Nine flogged this â??storyâ??:

Laurie Oakes on the news.

The more things change….
“Gold medal liars
After observing the Coalition Federal Government since 1996 and reading or listening to a great
many of its political statements, the following is my sincere opinion.
This Federal Government lies.
It tells small, medium and large lies. It tells whopper, gob-stopping lies. It even tells lies
about telling lies.
It lies on the floor of Parliament, it lies in the media, it lies to the Australian people and, it lies to other sovereign nations.
Of all the federal governments installed since I reached my majority, this Federal Government
publicly lies the most frequently and consistently.
If there was a Commonwealth Games event for liars, then the current Federal Government would win gold, silver and bronze.
JUDITH M. MELVILLE” [Published letter to the editor,23 March 2006,p.6]

“Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd has denied claims he is physically unfit to lead Australia following major heart surgery 14 years ago. The Nine Network on Wednesday aired claims from unnamed anti-Labor sources outside federal parliament, who had circulated rumours about Mr Rudd’s health,”

Outside federal parliament indeed … they must be rattled to pull this sort of thing.

There is a pattern here, though. It is the portrayal of John Howard as the protector of the little children. From aboriginal boogy men, drug crazed junkies and the sneaky on line predators. The Holden Caulfield of Australian Politics.

Yet, he was the one that was ‘caught out’, claiming that small children were thrown overboard, when they weren’t. And we are the ones paying for the propaganda.

“In fact, in a hypothetical situation – I don’t want any other implications – I’m hoping that people might now start to apply the same introspection to their choice of government as they would to inviting a stranger into their home to babysit the kids.”

Is this part of the beware of strangers campaign or is it just Lord Downer reasserting his position of the governor/protector of the lost and vulnerable children, AKA the Australia electorate?

What ever it is, it ir pretty shabby.

Some of the numbers she quotes are uproarious. 37% of children who chat online report being contacted by strangers – but of course, as Mares points out, a stranger might be a fellow gamer, or someone to share music with, and so on. 39% of children report putting a photo online – I don’t understand what the problem is with this. More than half of teenagers report visiting sites their parents would not want them to visit – big deal, so they looked up a bit of porn. 18% of teenagers had been asked to meet “in real life” – I would think that the more important number is how many actually take up this offer, and even so it’s only a concern if they don’t take any appropriate precautions. It would have been nice to hear Mares press Coonan further on these statistics and point out that they aren’t, in themselves, all that alarming. By often saying that he, as a parent, found the statistics alarming, it seems that the point Mares was making was something like “If these statistics are true, then we should be concerned; the problem is whether the statistics are true.” But I think we should also doubt the truth of the whole conditional, not just its antecedent.