Reference :- Senator Bridget McKenzie commissioned a 160, 000 quid survey .

Reference :-  While the auditors searched for , and found , evidence revealing the LNP  sports grant rort , they also discovered that a 160 grand survey had been commissioned by the good senator .

Indeed , that is a lot of dough for a survey that reached no conclusion.  The purpose of the survey was to determine if Ms McKenzie's favoured sport ,  shooting , was good for one's health .   That would be a pretty hard thing to decide , in my books , because there are so many variables .  You would have to survey people who drove to a gun  club , but didn't shoot , in case the excursion itself was good for your ticker .   And give people guns to clean and look after without going shooting to see if a chemical in the cleaning  material lowered your cholesterol level.  . Or maybe even if you never cleaned it or shot it , having a firearm made you feel safer , and lowered your systolic blood pressure .
 You can see the problem.   Nonetheless , my son Ken junior is prepared to fish out all that kind of data in a fresh survey which he says he can run for a measly ten grand .    He figures he needs about two weeks to make a few phone calls and roneo off the questionnaires .   I trust you will view his tender favourably in view of his professionalism .

 Personally , I figure being a shooter is obviously a lot better for your health than being the one who is getting shot .    And although that is only an anecdotal observation , I think it indicates we are on the right track with this .

                Happy shooting ,    Your comrade , Ken

Reference :- Andy ( I am not a climate change denialist ) Bolt is back !! Sort of .

Reference :-   Yesterday's local newspaper ran a full page of Andy Bolt's cutting edge journalism .   It was impossible to determine whether it was an actual article or a paid advertisement from Sky News , but what a treat it was to enjoy Australia's most read columnist over a morning cuppa .

Thanks Andy . You managed to squeeze two illuminating articles on to the page  , and as usual ,both are worthy of comment .

 I see you are still relentlessly pursuing the truth regarding the genetic heritage of author and experienced  firefighter Mr Bruce Pascoe .  The Australian Federal Police have dismissed allegations against him . I guess they have many more pressing investigations into high level corruption to deal with , so good on you for not giving up.  

Mr Pascoe  may be a nice bloke who has warned us about the importance of controlled burns for years , but it is clearly a danger to the nation if his belief that he has an aboriginal ancestor is mistaken .  He  does claim that only a fraction of a smidgen of his blood contains indigenous corpuscles .  But that may be untrue . It's obviously difficult to confirm  , what with all those massacres and forced relocations over the years  , but a thorough investigation is clearly in the national interest .  I feel certain you are just the man to tease the facts from the wild claims and the racism .  

  I tried to get my son Ken junior to read that part of your advertisement , or column if you prefer ,  but half way through he lost interest and nodded off.    Sadly, unlike us ,  many young ones don't value the truth anymore .

 The bigger headline on your page informed us that global warming is good for us .  The farmers around here are certainly glad to read  that , especially since you referenced the sources leading you to arrive at that conclusion .   I see you are still telling climate scientist  Professor Pitman what he thinks .   It's a bit rich of him to keep claiming you have quoted him out of context . Who does he think he is ?  Nobody has the right to explain that articles written about them don't reflect their actual opinion .  Clearly you know what his opinion is , not him. 

But Andy , I do worry about your relationship with young Rowan Dean,  the prancing presenter of polar proliferation who sneers his way through the " Outsiders " weather reports .    You and Dean have always stuck to your opinion that there is no global warming.    For example , you have told fire chiefs they are crazy for believing it ,  activists that they are unscientific loonies ,  Westpac that they are fools for pandering to the global warming nonsense and so on .

Now that you have changed your mind and believe in global warming , does that mean you and Rowan have fallen out ?    You have to be careful there , because Sky News relies heavily on interviewing it's own employees , so losing Rowan would severely limit your options.

Anyway ,  when Ken junior woke up I told  him about your recent 180 degree switcheroo regarding global warming .  And I told him all that stuff you wrote  about changes in the Indian Ocean Dipole being the cause of the drought , not climate change .  But the silly bugger said that the problem is that the dipole was being altered by climate change .   I ask you , where is the logic in that ?   It's like those ridiculous ads on the television that say drink driving  kills .  Drink driving is quite safe ,  crashing into things is what kills  .         

  Like you, I deplore the way logic takes a back seat in most debates  these days.  

  

        Your comrade ,  Ken .     

Reference :- Sky anchor Paul Murray made a very moving Australia Day speech.

Reference :-  It's now 250 years since Australia was visited by Captain Cook.   How time flies . He would hardly recognise the place now .

 You did your man cave proud with that Australia Day speech Paul.   And focusing as you did on nostalgia and the unflagging passage of time was a wise choice . Nostalgia has been around for a long time now , at least since when I was a kid , and it can always be relied upon to tenderise the hardest of hearts .

 Those lovely films of multicultural Australia enjoying a day of celebration under a smoke  free sky were well chosen .  Although Ken junior's mate  Gabbo ( the aborigine ) said he looked , but couldn't see an aborigine or even an individual of non european ethnicity anywhere in the footage you chose .    I told him that it was not intentional , and that sometimes in our enthusiasm for celebrating with our mates we subconsciously forget the folk with whom we are less comfortable .

 All that stuff you said  about time was a bit confusing , but time is like that .  At first you referenced the things from our past you are proud of , since these are what define us .  But then you quickly skipped over a few appalling atrocities from the past and said the past did not define us and the future is unwritten.

Ken junior pointed out that saying the future is unwritten contradicts the block theory of time elaborated by physicists as a natural consequence  of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity , but I told the annoying little bugger to shut up .  And just as well he did , or we would have missed the bit where you explained that not just us , but every country in the world throughout all of history has committed appalling atrocities because that is what humans do.   Brilliant observation Paul , and what a relief to hear .  We will all sleep better tonight  .

Anyway , can I ask a favour ?    Would you be able to post us a copy of your speech ? It is destined to be a classic , and I would like to staple it into the back of my copy of the fourth edition of
 " The Worlds Greatest Speeches "  by Lewis Copeland .   It is a magnificent compendium of 292 speeches , and yours deserves a place as the 293rd .   

  Ours  is a second hand paperback copy that I picked up at the Kooralya school fete for two quid , and most of the pages are dog- eared but to my mind that only adds dignity to the brilliance of it's contents . 

   Happy man caving  .   Your comrade ,  Ken .

Reference :- Sky News hasn't said much about the death of Mr Morrison's father .

Reference :-  The Sky anchors have been rather quiet on the occasion of Mr Morrison's bereavement . Why is that ?

 Hello there at Sky News.  You all seem a bit shy about discussing Mr Morrison's loss of his father .   It can be awkward trying to work out something to say , but it looks a bit rude if you say next to nothing .  Maybe you can get Alan Jones to do an obituary ?  He had lots to say when former Prime Minister Julia Gillard lost her father .   But though Jonesie is a sensitive and well meaning type , it might be wise to remind him to leave out that bit about fathers dying of shame because their child is  a liar .

Julia herself handled that accidental remark of Jonesie's with dignity , but I think that Mr Morrison may not be so courageous .   Whatever you do don't broadcast the segment live, so you have a chance to edit out any unintended heartless attacks that can occasionally slip in when a presenter is anxious. 

 Also , if you are chatting with Mr Morrison, remind him to say little about his father to the press.  Another former Prime Minister , Mr Bill Shorten was pilloried by the tabloids after he made a few remarks praising his deceased mother .   Sadly , we really seem to have a problem dealing with death here in the advanced nations .            

 Your comrade , Ken

       
   
 

Reference :- The Sky Reply enjoyed a night of hilarity .

Reference :-   Ken junior reckoned we were all getting a bit too serious and needed to chill, so he roped us all into helping him cook up a batch of his special herb cookies .  We ate quite a few in the process, and  had so much fun we forgot how to do our usual bizarre punctuation .

We all ended up in Monte's home made Balinese hut munching on cookies like a puppy on an expensive sandshoe because last year Monte went to Bali on an excursion organised by one of his teachers  and says he had the best time ever and couldn't wait to knock up his own Balinese hut when he got home and initially the teacher was going to help out but then the teacher had to go to a state of the art urology facility in Sydney for some reason and we never saw him again but Monte did a great job using empty beer cans and lots of those styrofoam boxes that mangoes come in because you can carve those boxes any shape you like then glue them together slap on some orange and green paint and you'd swear you were out the back of a pub in Seminyak so Ken junior put a Hendrix album on the turntable and in no time the onerous responsibility of editing The Sky Reply was forgotten along with the abilty to punctuate and Gabbo started telling dreamtime legends and before I knew it the lads were expounding theories like wild things all about the state of the nation and it really made my heart sing then Monte said Andrew Bolt has been gone for so long because he's been visiting the cave so I said do you mean Paul Murray's new man cave but Monte said he meant the bushranger's cave up near Tenterfield where Andy's great grandad Thunder Bolt used to hide out and he said he thought Andy might be worried about it during the bushfires but Ken junior said it is probably a family tradition and each generation of Bolt males has to go there every Christmas to meditate and elaborate the following year's cruel neoliberal agenda then I said that maybe Andy was there to dry out after hitting the bottle too hard in the lead up to the joyful Christmas shopping jamboree but Gabbo said he believed Andy was actually Bender from Futurama in disguise and that he runs on alcohol but can't take too much and the aliens have taken him to a distant galaxy to spruce up the dark matter that cranks his hard drive and he will come back darker than ever then Gabbo laughed his head off picturing Andy in blackface but went on to say that he thinks the entire LNP is actually made of cloned aliens which is why they can travel all over the world in a flash because there is more than one clone for each of them and that's why the prime minister can be in Hawaii one minute and at a bushfire the next but sometimes the clones wear out and run haywire like the clone of Scott Morrison that wandered around the bushfires like a zombie scaring people and or that one of Angus Taylor that went to Spain and spoke gibberish at a climate conference and almost gave the game away so it looks like people are getting suspicious but will they work it out soon enough to stop the world being destroyed by free market capitalism leaving us unable to resist the impending alien invasion anyway man I think I might just chill and groove on the implications of that while I munch on another cookie your comrade Ken .

Reference :- The world's most admired Prime Minister , our very own Mr Scott Morrison , is taking control of the tourism crisis.

Reference :-   At last Mr Morrison's peerless expertise in marketing has come in handy for something besides pulling a fast one on nervous voters .

This is more like it Mr Morrison .   This is your big chance to regain credibility by getting something done with an enterprise you understand .  Yes , tourism , that wonderful industry devoted to building the expectations of the gullible and then mercilessly fleecing them .

But first there is the annoying sports grants scandal to deal with .  Don't worry ,  Attorney General Mr Christian Porter will have that under control.  Sports fans in his own electorate raked in more spondula than a crooked casino , which doubled his margin in the last election .  He is hardly going to implicate himself is he ?    A sensible outcome , quickly achieved , is to have him send Ms McKenzie packing , mumble a few excuses and move on .   These days blatant peculation is quickly forgotten .

The independent communist press has gone to great pains to uncover figures revealing that the most expensive clubs ,where elite members enjoy ocean views and fine cuisine , scooped up bigger grants than those struggling clubs with fibro walls , no air con , and a squeeky ceiling fan .    You can run the excuse that obviously it costs more to polish chandeliers made from bohemian crystal at a top class venue , than it does to put an " OUT OF ORDER  " sign on the door of the  WC  in a venue frequented by the great unwashed .

I reckon just say something like that , and move on to talking about the 70 million going towards tourism .   But beware .   After Mr Turnbull shovelled 500 million of  "save the reef " cash to some dodgy privateers , sans tender , and sans checking their bonafides , you had better be sure that those 70 million end up in the sweaty palms of plausible advertising experts ( assuming such experts even exist ).

 The last thing you need at this time is more awkward questions being asked .    Luckily for him , you managed to betray and usurp Mr Turnbull before he had to answer too many questions about that shady "save the reef "  deal.  Those 500 million quid have never been heard of since . Maybe some of it is paying for that plastic reef they a building at the Gold Coast to suck in the tourists when the real reef finally curls up it's pinkies?

  And Mr Morrison , sir .  I hope you don't mind receiving advice from The Sky Reply .   We do it as a public service , financed by small local donations , so as you can see ,we are in no way political .

 Your comrade , Ken 
 

Reference :- The kids are feeling a bit guilty about giving Sky anchor Paul Murray a hard time .

Reference:-     The kids just saw some photographs of Paul Murray proudly ensconced in his new "man cave " studio , and he looks so happy that they feel sorry for their recent remarks and wish to make amends .

Great "man cave " Paul.   Personally I don't have a " man cave "myself , just a shed full of tools and equipment for performing useful tasks .   I call it a workshop , although these days that often means a place where people gather to discuss the minutiae of gender bias in holiday brochures , or  group therapy for self help , or something similar .  But that is not meant to take anything away from your man cave with the charming fake industrial look and the various momentos you hold dear . 

It's an interesting  moniker  ,"man cave ".   It has a no -nonsense neanderthal flavour that imbues the
concept with a certain anti -intellectualism .   Well done .    The kids are impressed by your collectors items , and the artwork .   They like the picture of the Harbour Bridge free of soot . I pointed out that it looks like an image on a flat screen powered by electricity ,which is doubtless your subtle way of saying that access to cheap electrons is a basic human right .

 Monte loves your model of the hot Kingswood  , and tells me he thinks it is a HJ model , probably with a 308 and a Holley four barrel.   They may guzzle gas , but they don't make them like that anymore . Remember when the more petrol futilely wasted by your conveyance , the more impressed  your mates were ?  Those were the days .

 Ken junior wants to know if that is a lute on the bottom shelf , and what kind of songs do you play?

And Gabbo wants to know if the model ship is Captain Cook's bark   "Endeavour " .   He cant quite see if it has three masts or only two , in which case he says it is a brigantine and not captain Cook's vessel .

You don't really have to reply Paul, the lads are just trying to be friendly after having a go at you in the last post .    I daresay you probably do the same when you unfairly castigate a celebrity on the spur of the moment and later regret it .   Its all a learning curve for the young ones .

Happy man caving . 

 Your comrade , Ken