Jacques Chester for Solomon

My day started with a 5.30am phonecall from 6PR radio in Perth. They scheduled me for an interview at 7.15am — I wound up talking to them on my mobile phone, sitting in a car at Perth airport.

They had a few good questions, then they got me good: they asked me what the mortgage rate is. I didn’t know. Neither did I know the average wage. I ventured that perhaps that they might next ask me the price of bread and milk. They said “but you’re not standing for Bennelong”.

It was only after I got a copy of The Australian that I realised what they driving at: John Howard stuffed it up. Mixing up numbers and names of nominees seems to be the order of the day for both parties it seems. The mortage rate is 6.5% by the way.

I also rated a mention in NT News. The story was inaccurate, as it turns out; but my email to the journalist at the paper came too late for him to update the story. Never mind, it gave them a chance to talk about me again

I flew to Darwin and got in a 1pm local time. After dropping off my luggage at a mate’s place I drove into town to sort out errands. I needed to update my enrollment, get some phone credit, update my phone message and talk to the journo at the paper.

It was after I got to the NT News that I found that I was a stooge for David Tollner. Or at least, this is what the Australian Labor Party have alleged. I’d link to the press release but it’s not on their site yet.

They trotted out a list of almost-truths about me in order to present the case that I’m just a “feeder” candidate. If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s a candidate who stands under false pretences in an attempt to capture additional votes for another candidate. So for example John Conservatron might run on punish-gay-people platform, pretending to be independent, then feeding their second preferences to a major party unsure about the punish-gays vote.

I guess Labor figure that I am supposed to capture the small government types who, like me, are fed up with Howard’s Big Government Conservatism. In doing so they’re thinking like politicians — suspicion is guilt, guilt is sin, and in any case the other guy is a heretic.

The short answer is: it’s not true. I haven’t talked to David Tollner for years. I haven’t spoken to anyone in the CLP in I don’t know how long — a year or more at least. Nick Calacouras at the NT News asked is “that a categorical ‘no’?” to which I said that it didn’t matter. Categorical, emphatic, express, you pick the adjective. The answer is “no”, in the old sense pre-politics, in which “no” means “the opposite of yes”.

Late in the day I was interviewed on ABC Radio Darwin. Leon at the ABC was friendly and was kind enough to help put me at ease. Then the “On Air” light lit up and he gave me what-for. I got a chance to point out that I’m the LDP’s man, not the CLP’s. Leon had also read the LDP policy page and — guess, you’ll never guess — yes, picked out the guns policy.

That’s OK too. It was always going to stick out like a shiny bauble for journalists trying to whistle up a simple controversy. The simplest narrative is that LDP = guns = we hate babies. Or something like that. In any case I pointed out that I specifically disagreed with that policy. There are more important issues and I have lectured the LDP at tedious length on why talking about guns is a distraction, a waste of time which gives journos an easy way to refuse to take our other policies seriously.

Lastly, I got a 5 second spot on ABC TV news. They took an outtake from the radio interview with me saying I wasn’t part of any Operation David Stooge. In any case, such a plan is daft: what David needs is bodies. This isn’t James Bond, David doesn’t have a white cat and I am not that Chess Master guy who gets knocked off in — is it the third? — the third movie.

And that’s all for today.