Richard Anderson, Marie Warby, and squawks from a remote area of the pond reported by the paranoid House of Murdoch ...

(Above: this week's reading on conscience votes and the new paradigm. A quick look at this cartoon will save you watching the entire episode of Q&A on ethics and give us the time to head out to the bush for some remote area squawking).

Coming as we do from a remote small part of the pond, a land where the lotos is eaten slowly and in the rhythm of the soil - oh yes, as Kenneth Williams once said, the answer lies in the soil - it was with vast pleasure and amusement that we chanced on Richard Anderson's Moment of truth for Windsor in The Australian, as he muses about Tony Windsor holding an information session for his electorate.

As anybody in the know knows, and in the manner of Paul Keating flying over Darwin in a bid to get to Paris quickly, Quirindi is the hamlet you drive through on the way to Tamworth, as a way of avoiding the radar traps and the cops on the main drag. You should only stop if you want to check out period shop fittings or be reminded why you should be driving to Paris.

It seems, according to Anderson, that the natives in Quirindi are restless, or even mad as hell:

.. Marie Warby, a cartoonist for the Quirindi Advocate, is under no such illusions.

In an open letter in the weekly last Wednesday, she put it plainly, opening with: "Hang your head in shame, Tony Windsor. The people of Australia spoke, they certainly did not want a Labor government."

Before you race off to the Quirindi Advocate to discover what the people of Australia are thinking, courtesy of Marie Warby, who channels the entirety of Australia through the ether and in to her all encompassing mind, forget about it.

The Quirindi Advocate might have a massive 2,100 circulation - as it roams through those villages you know and love so well, like Currabubula and Wallabadah and Willow Tree - but its footprint on the web is the size of a gnat. (here).

She finished in a fury: "So how dare you allow your egotistical mind to speak for those people by completely disregarding their very important wishes. You are a disgrace, Tony Windsor, not only have you betrayed your electorate but you have betrayed every hardworking person all over Australia."

Luckily you can read the full Warby text in the Northern Daily Leader, a big city paper for a big city town, or at least a variant of it, by going here.

But hang on, in that missive to the NDL, Warby gives her address as Richmond.

Richmond? Last time I checked Richmond was up Hawkesbury river way, and dammit there was a Marie Warby scribbling a letter to the Hawkesbury Gazette demanding that people power quash a proposed music festival (here).

Dammit. Is she a furriner, a bloody outsider who didn't even vote for or against Tony Windsor?Which makes it all the more funny and piquant when Anderson scribbles:

I can only guess that if the Advocate saw fit to run the letter, it felt Warby's opinion wasn't unique in the electorate.

Yes, and it probably wasn't unique in Richmond as well.

Which means on Friday night Windsor could have a fair bit of explaining to do. And if he's capable of betraying "every hardworking person all over Australia", he has a fair bit more reach than I realised.

Indeed. And what about his betrayal of all the bludgers all over Australia?

Shameful. Anderson wraps it up thus:

Information evenings can be poorly attended affairs, sometimes attracting only those who think a free biscuit and a cup of rubbish coffee is good payment for their time.

So it will be interesting to see who turns up.

Indeed. I wonder if Warby will be wandering up the New England highway from Richmond. It isn't a hard drive, though with Windsor's new position of power perhaps the push for passing lanes will gather a little more momentum.

Meanwhile, what's equally intriguing is why Anderson's piece has turned up in The Australian.

Is it part of the House of Murdoch's new push for sales in Quirindi? Or perhaps Tamworth?

Or is the House looking to create maximum mischief by quoting any malcontent upset with the independents? And so a Warby warbling is a chance to make hay?

Who knows. No harm done for Anderson, a farmer and a writer, who actually lives in the electorate, and who hopefully copped a few coins for his effort, as opposed to payment The Punch style. Here's an oily rag .. feel free to sniff it.

But as a Tamworth rate payer, I do wish he'd told me that Warby was a bloody furriner ...

Not that we've got anything against furriners and their damned ways. It's just that if Warby is outside the electorate then Tony Windsor can tell her to get stuffed, if so inclined, and it won't cost him a vote ...

Meanwhile, The Australian also dug up Anne Twomey to scribble a piece about Oakeshott and the independents, Independent too risky, strictly speaking.

Rob Oakeshotts flirtation with the role of Speaker has been wisely abandoned. Both he and the other independents had proclaimed their support for an independent Speaker, yet the proposal to pair the Speaker in votes would have had the effect of undermining the Speaker's independence.

The Speaker's independence? It was at that moment I began to think like a commentariat commentator. Bloody academics and their castles in the air theories.

The Australian Speaker independent? And so independent that the independence of the chair could be undermined?

Perhaps if we were talking about the British parliament, where genuine independence is institutionalised (Speaker of the House of Commons United Kingdom), and even then the changing of speakers in recent times has resulted in pure farce

But in Australia? There's no doubt that Harry Jenkins, the current Speaker, has made as reasonable a fist of it as circumstances allow, but baiting and bloodying the Speaker is a sport for opposition parties, and the notion that the Speaker would stray too far from his side of politics in running the show is delusional.

What's the bet then that from the first moment that parliament resumes, so the clowns and the circus will return (absent Wilson Tuckey), and the usual alienating farce will start up once again?

In that context, sad to say Twomey's piece is just a lot of theoretical hot air, and the independents will have failed in their first bid, which should never have been about getting their paws on the Speaker's seat, but instead insisting on the Speaker being given institutional protections in the British manner, and to hell with the difficulties this poses for the two main grasping ill-mannered parties in a 150 seat parliament, where every vote now counts in every way imaginable ...

By golly, I think I might write a letter to the Quirindi Advocate about it all, and who knows it might get picked up in the opinion pages of The Australian ...

Ah The Australian ... parochial one day, and then parochial the next ... and the heart of the nation, if you think a shrivelled dead heart is worth having ... (apology: the real dead heart has life abundant).

But that does bring us to the plaintive reader's plea as to why we've scribbled nothing about The Australian's incoherent rambling editorial rant Embracing high-level analysis. Explanation:

(1) Constantly reading The Australian's editorials poses a serious risk to health, and like passive smoking should be avoided where possible.

(2) When confronted by gob smacking hubris of the most impossible, self-justifying, paranoid delusional, far-fetched kind, sometimes even the most verbose must simply - in awe - fall silent.

(3) It is impossible to sustain good humour or whimsy when confronted by genuine lunacy.

(4) When the object of whimsical review provides deep-throated ,gruff satire by simply being itself, settle back and enjoy the satire. A chuckle or a snort will help alleviate the startled silence.

It has been our forte since the first edition of The Australian on July 15, 1964, and our readers appreciate it. While focused on breaking news, we note the current interest in this newspaper by other media, especially the ABC, and various public figures. However flattering that interest, and their copy-cat reporting of our agenda-setting stories, it is clear that a few shrill critics do not understand our guiding principles. These are as important now as when they appeared on our first front page: ". . . impartial information and the independent thinking that are essential to the further advance of our country . . . It will be our duty to inform Australians everywhere of what is really happening in their country."

Yeay, verily, even what cartoonists in Richmond scribble by way of letters to the editor in Quirindi.

By the way, outright hysterical laughter is also an appropriate response to editorial pomposity and the rag prattling about how only the scribblers at The Oz understand high level public policy coverage ... You know, like their coverage of the science of climate change ...

In the usual way of paranoids, The Oz once again lashes out at perceived and real enemies, along with another histrionic boast about its Greens vendetta, and their capacity for destruction (the Greens, not the House of Murdoch), and the ABC and hippie news letters ...

Truly the rag has become, in its megalomania and self regarding delusional way, in Mr Menadue's brave words, a mad hatter's pernicious tea party, but we can only urge once a week that readers drop their subscriptions, and perhaps take up a subscription to the Quirindi Advocate instead ...

(Below: the sweet hamlet of Quirindi. We understand that as a result of Tony Windsor's betrayal of everyone, a petition is underway in town to ensure that the $343,000 announced in 2009 to redevelop the Royal Theatre, the Nursing Home and the Historical Cottage (here) will now be returned to the Federal Government. Take money from these Benedict Arnolds who've betrayed the workers? No way ...)