Labouring away on a holiday Monday can lead to aggression ...

So what news this holiday Monday?

What's that, you don't have a holiday?

Oh go and sob into your weetbix you sandgropers, and sundry other states, here in the east we still celebrate Labour day. You labour, and we bank the profits ...

Never mind, the good news is that after his epic dummy spit, it seems legendary grump Paul Sheehan is off on another junket, or is maintaining the silence and the rage.

But the pond was so impressed by his presentation by the Fairfaxians, above, that we thought it worth preserving in digital aspic ... hinting as it does that Paul Sheehan wrote the immortal line Paul Sheehan is a right-wing wanker ...

What else? Well the hagiographers at the lizard Oz are strangely, unnervingly silent. They must not like holiday Mondays, or school ...

Or perhaps no one seems to have worked out a satisfactory explanation as to why Tony Abbott might get to repay a six year old expense for attending Sophie Mirabella's wedding - presumably without interest at two points above prime - while poor old Peter Slipper, who disgraced himself with remarks about female genitals, should get hauled before the courts for arranging sundry junkets ....

There is however a challenge arising for any intrepid taxpayer - claim all the expenses involving attending weddings as a necessary work-related expense, what with all the mingling, and the contacts, and the wheeler-dealing and the deal-making, and and such like, and see how the Tax Office responds to the notion that they're deductible.

If you get away with it, let the PM know. He'll be ever so pleased at the success of a soul mate.

If you get to re-pay the ATO, with interest, don't blame the pond.

Naturally the Murdochians are silent about this nasty business, and it's left to the Fairfaxians to dust off the moths and drag John Hewson and his mouldy old cake out of the closet:

Abbott's warned?

But Sophie has been hitched - and ditched by her electorate - Slipper tossed out like a worn slipper, and Dear Leader now as favoured as North Korea in his special relationship with China ...

To the victor goes the complete shamelessness and the spoils...

It is of course a nonsense, and both sides of the aisle have strayed, with hapless Queensland Labor MP Bernie Ripoli forced to explain why he too is a lycra-clad lout - MAMIL if you will - on a study tour in MP explains tour de good luck.

But surely that top MAMIL, Tony Abbott, must scoop the pool for sanctimonious hypocrisy ... watching Sophie Mirabella get hitched is work?

Oh wait, when you put it like that, he might have an excuse ...

As usual, we can rely on Peter "send in the hounds" Reith, "here son, have a use of the phone" to plead the case for junkets:

"Since when is that not being part of being a politician, you know, going out for lunch with a shock jock or going to his wedding? You'd be a mug if you didn't go to a shock jock's wedding if you're invited.''

Oh yes, you'd be a mug not to go, and to screw the taxpayers for the pleasure of gong. What a very fine model of a modern day scribbler for the ABC's The Drum Reith makes.

Never mind, while we're on the Labor side of the aisle, let's pause to consider the complete and utter gormlessness of John Robertson, leader of the NSW opposition, certain to be unknown outside the state, and generally completely unknown inside the state.

Robertson is the latest victim of the Daily Terror, but this time it's completely deserved. It's alleged that Roberson received a $3 million bribe offer when he was a union boss, but failed to report it to police ($3 million bribe revelation has Labor vultures circling NSW Opposition Leader John Roberston)

It's a quintessentially Sydney story, rum and the lash and all that, and murdered heavy Michael McGurk and the sale of Currawong, a union retreat long lost to workers - yes, the pond once stayed in this idyllic quaint spot, but oh so long ago, it feels like another country.

Quoth the Terror:

Mr Robertson again defended his actions yesterday, saying: "I immediately rejected the offer outright . . . and therefore I was satisfied that was the end of the matter."

Now the pond might have flinched a little at crossing the line with McGurk, but in the world of the law, it's never the end of the matter. Indeed as any bush lawyer knows, in New South Wales, the effect of section 316 (1) of the Crimes Act 1900 is that a person who fails to report conduct which amounts to a serious indictable offence is liable to imprisonment for two years.

Indeed Clayton Utz - that upstanding law firm which behaved so abominably during the matter of Rolah McCabe and BAT, as you can read here in End to a 10-year wrestle with smoke - provides comprehensive general legal advice - please seek your own hugely expensive personal advice on particular matters - as you can read in Conceal or Reveal? Reporting White-Collar Crime:

The elements of the section are: 

•  a person (including a company) has committed a serious indictable offence; 
• another person (including a company) knows or believes that the offence has been committed; 
• that other person has information which might be of material assistance in securing the apprehension of the offender or the prosecution or conviction of the offender; 
• and that other person fails, without reasonable excuse, to bring that information to the attention of a member of the Police Force or other appropriate authority.

What a pity it doesn't apply to the destruction of incriminating documents, or to persons who prepare rorting claims for PMs to attend weddings, or else we might see the splendid sight of Abbott standing alongside Slipper, and clapped into irons and given a good solid Port Jackson lashing ...

The local mob may as well dust off Nathan Rees and give him another run, if only as a reward for his immortal line way back when:

''Should I not be Premier by the end of this day, let there be no doubt in the community's mind, no doubt, that any challenger will be a puppet of Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi.'' (Discredited, despised, but still pulling all the strings)

Hello Kristina Keneally - goodbye Kristina Keneally.

But enough navel-gazing - golly how you can spend endless hours plucking fluff from the navel when thinking of NSW Labor - because the pond has to note a sense of personal desolation and loss.

Devotees of Miranda the Devine will recall that at one period of time, the Devine was infatuated with Susan Greenfield. No, more than infatuated, devoted and alarmist and completely dazzled and blinded by the light.

But now it seems that she has dropped the brain scientist like a cold potato, even as the tireless self-promoter does another tour of the antipodes.

These days the bee in the Devine's very small brain involves "needless illiteracy" - remarkable, really, when you consider how reading the Daily Terror, or the Daily Mail, provokes a kind of simian illiteracy. (Daily Mail is setting poor example to children, says top headteacher, and please keep enjoying The Guardian's coverage of the Miliban-Mail frolic by clicking on the tag Daily Mail).

Never mind. The tireless self-promoter recently launched a novel, 2121, which was dismissed by Colin Steele here:

2121 often reads more like a lecture than a novel, as Greenfield expounds her well-known concerns, such as ''mind change'', the deleterious effect of internet use on young minds, and the links between computer use and obesity. Greenfield wants a debate on where society is going: ''What do we want people to do? To be? We've never asked this before.'' Many surely have? Greenfield's constant references to the problems of contemporary society slow the plotline, itself burdened by characterisation that verges on caricature.  

With the Devine out of the game - will "Lord" Monckton ever recover from the same cold shoulder? - it was left to the ABC to carry the flame.

Elizabeth Jackson distinguished herself by starting off:

ELIZABETH JACKSON: Psychologists say there is now irrefutable evidence that the human brain can be changed in unprecedented ways by playing violent video games.

But by the time she got through all the half-baked equivocations and rambling Greenfieldian modifications, we actually came to this:

SUSAN GREENFIELD: Oh, I know a lot of people will say there's no evidence, and a I refer your listeners to my website, where under the screen technologists section I've put about 500 references from all different types of areas of study. 
So of course it's not exhaustive or conclusive or definitive - no paper ever is - but it's just not the case that there's no evidence. There is evidence. (Video games on the brain)

Yes, it's not exhaustive or conclusive or definitive, or even bloody irrefutable ...

But well done, Elizabeth Jackson, the new Miranda the Devine, working for AM on the ABC ...

It so happens that Susan Greenfield even has her own tag at The Guardian here, and the latest piece on it is Teenagers and social networking - it might actually be good for them ...

What gets the pond is the way that Greenfield, in a way that used to suit the tabloids and now suits the ABC, gets away with this sort of vague smear:

The data at the moment is pointing to, as we've been saying at this conference, adaptions that we might not find necessarily altogether desirable - really, a large amount of evidence suggesting that that can lead to aggression and can lead to compulsive ways of behaving that we should start to think about how we deal with.

Indeed. Pointing ... might ... really ... can ... should start to think ...

The first and second world wars, as brought to you by Grand Theft Auto V. Who'd have imagined that all that video game aggression should have led to such compulsive ways of behaving? We really need to start thinking about how we deal with it ... and there the pond was, thinking it was silent movies and comics and pulp novels, and it was the intertubes and video games all along ...

Never mind. It's holiday time - oh go cry into your porridge, NSW doesn't stop for a horse race.

To fill in the day, the pond is off to do a tour of Sydney weddings - how people love to get married in the spring - and give guests Peter "send in the hounds" Reith-inspired advice on how to claim the costs of attending these tedious work-related events ...

I mean, you'd have to be a mug not to go, and an even bigger mug not to stiff the ATO.

And so to a final confession.

On the weekend, the pond watched The Insiders. For a moment there, we were thinking that Malcolm Turnbull's devotion to the Roosters, who monstered vile Abbottian Manly, might in some way be an indication of things to come.

Could big Mal do the same thing to Abbott in the year ahead?

Sadly big Mal has an albatross, rather than a chook around his neck, and it's Tony Abbott's vision of the NBN, and big Mal will be done like a flailing, failing dinner before next year is out ...

So we settled for the cartoons, while you can endure the show here, all fluff and navel-gazing as it is: