Julia Gillard, and a roll call of Oz pundits chattering away into their coffee ...

Naturally the chattering classes and the punditocracy are in the middle of a field day, and as always, we turned to The Australian for a guide to all the fair and balanced opinions doing the rounds.

Where better to start than with Dennis Shanahan, and Puppet tag and past errors loom for leader.

By golly, the puppet tag for Julia Gillard was fast out of the gate. And it turns out that everything that went wrong when Chairman Rudd was in charge wasn't his fault - Julia Gillard was the master tactician in the cabinet gang of four, her spirit infusing every mistake and error, as the puppet chairman did her bidding. And yes by golly, it wasn't long before the "faceless men" line also gets a trot, more like a canter, even though last night I swear I distinctly saw Bill Shorten on the mobile organising the charge.

The idea of "faceless men" deciding the Labor leadership is a powerful and damaging image and the Opposition Leader pounced on it yesterday to paint Gillard as a captive of factional warlords and union bosses.

Indeed. The faceless men of Labor parliamentary performers. No doubt thanks to the lack of coverage by The Australian. Well there are many things you might say about Bill Shorten, his conduct as a minister, his marriage, his way with relationships, and his height, but faceless? Is he trying out to replace Nicholas Cage in the sequel to Face/Off? And ditto the rest of the rat pack on their mobile phones ...

Is it just by chance that Tony Abbott is on radio this very minute talking of faceless men and political patronage? One thing you have to say with respect - as an echo machine, Dennis Shanahan makes the perfect bit of mountain rock.

Hey ho, nonny no, on we go, and lordy, I see that they've wheeled out Janet Albrechtsen for a special edition OK, let's take a reality check.

Okay, let's take a reality check. What do you expect Albrechtsen to say, apart from bitch and moan and whine? While lading in the standard cliched talking points, perhaps over a coffee in a quiet up market inner urban retreat?

Here again we have a lesson about the disconnect between the so-called progressive class and the rest of Australia. While the former will love Gillard for the gender factor, outside the cafes of Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney, gender may not be an ace card.

Yep, it's an elitist, a lawyer no less, lecturing the elite about their elitism in an elite way in an ostensibly elitist "leading the way on the national debate" rag not worthy of fish and chips.

Albrechtsen is quick to add to Shanahan's strategies for attack dog Abbott. As well as Gillard being one of the gang of four, with all the errors and mistakes that involves, she was also part of the Mark Latham fiasco.

Here, the crosses against Gillard start to mount up. Gillard, as deputy prime minister and a member of Rudd's gang of four, played a central role in the Rudd fiasco. While, she has acknowledged the mistakes, there's no getting away from the fact she is part of the overspending incompetence of the school buildings program, the debacle of the delay of the emissions trading system and the mining tax miscalculation.

And so on and so forth. Albrechtsen allows Gillard's mother a gin and tonic in celebration - why she even permits Gillard to have a gin and tonic or a beer - but never a latte, heaven's to betsy, never a latte - but the claws are out. They're called "cold, hard policy outcomes" but let's just cut to the chase and call them claws.

Who's next? Why lordy lordy there's Arthur Sinodinos, as fair and balanced a worker for John Howard as can be found, and he offers up Can Labor's tigress change her stripes?

Indoodie. Can pundit leopards change their spots, can zebras lose their cross hatching, and can the chattering commentariat class ever exhaust the meaningless, implicitly demeaning, metaphor?

Sinodinos distinguishes himself by breaching Godwin's law, in as exemplary a fashion as can be imagined:

Labor powerbrokers saw the polls and blinked. It became save-the-furniture time. Imagine this lot running Britain in 1940, when Adolf Hitler looked unstoppable. Gillard will now rise or fall according to the polls.

Dearie me, did Sinodinos even bother to check that it was Neville Chamberlain, a conservative politician, who ran Britian during the "phoney war" stage, and as late as April 1940, after putting together a war cabinet, enjoyed ratings of almost 60%? It was only in May 1940 that Chamberlain left the stage, but let's be fair in our analogies - when it was save the furniture time, and Adolf Hitler looked unstoppable, it was a conservative that had to be toppled.

Meanwhile, Sinodinos handily outlines an attack strategy for Tony Abbott to pursue. So much free advice for Liberal party tacticians in the pages of The Australian, along with the thought that Tony Abbott will offer more "light and shade". Dearie me, is that code for heaven and hell?

Turn to Niki Savva, and you get Red Maggie's rise raises great expectations.

Uh huh. You know on the pond we often make jokes about things like hairdos. Like calling the presenter of the 7.30 Report a carrot top. It's a simple minded thing, the kind of juvenile humour you expect from a simple minded blogger addicted to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. No harm is intended, but also surely no insight is expected from such stupidities. Certainly it's not the level of opinion-making you'd expect from the Oz punditocracy.

Tough, charismatic, articulate, ruthless, razor sharp in tongue and mind, undoubtedly effective. And to top it all off, an immaculate hairdo. Red Maggie.

Can I just do a Jon Stewart double beat here right now? Can you see the way he looks at the camera like a mournful puppy as the words Red Maggie appear on the screen next to him? Along with a picture of a red and white magpie?

Go on Nikki, hit us with another insight, preferably feminist:

Gillard will disband the kitchen cabinet. She's not very comfortable in kitchens anyway.

Calling Jon Stewart. Come on down ...

Moving right along, why here's The Australian's editorial column Julia Gillard's job is to rebuild Labor:

The Prime Minister must return the party to the Centre

Oh yes, the dangerous extremist socialist radical communist Chairman Rudd had swung the party out to the extreme left, what with his mingling with conservative Christians, and offering up the agrarian nationalists a broadband network which will roll out in country areas first, and planning a gigantic filter to keep the children safe, and refusing to outbid Tony Abbott in how much he would pay stay at home moms ...

Hey, hang on, that sounds like he was pursuing some kind of insidious radical right wing agenda ...

But if Gillard returns the party to The Australian's centre, won't that be a centre somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan? Out in the dead heart, where if a bleeding dole bludging boat person asks for a drink of water, they'll be kicked in the shins for being lazy and scruffy and ... threatening ...

Oh dear, I can see that I'm not one of those ordinary Australians who scribble for and buy the rag - circulation for the weekend edition around the 300,000 mark (here), weekdays hovering around the 130,000 mark (here) - and am utterly like the other 20 million dinkum Aussies who couldn't give a toss what's written in the rag and would rather spend their hard cash on a useful box of tissues.

No, I guess I'm one of those progressive out of touch with the vast majority of the electorate - unlike The Australian's rampant circulation figures - contaminated by moral opportunism and only too ready to allege that anyone who doesn't agree with me must be morally corrupt.

Yep, it's another day in The Australian's alternative universe. What a pity so few Australians bother to fork out hard cash to take a holiday in that universe.

You buy The Australian? Really?

Please explain. When did you stop asking questions?

Be warned. The advertisement below is about as hard core and sickening pornography as you might be confronted with anywhere in the known universe, so outrageously shocking and yet so insidiously twee, you might well be forced to rush, barfing as you run, out into the corridor, startling the public servants around you as they suckle on the teat of the taxpayer.

Alternatively you could resolve to take out a fatwah on Phillip Adams ...