Bannerman is watching the seven o’clock ABC news bulletin. He notices the ubiquitous and inevitable media whore, John Winston Howard getting his face on the screen yet again at the Tasmanian and Victorian fire fighting fronts.
Blithe and banal, he shakes hands, chortles with firies who fought the blazes in 1985, saying they don’t look that old and makes a general glad-handing display of himself. Personally, Bannerman believes the old man needs a hair cut if he’s going to appear on television every night of the week.
On the Opposition side of the strait, Kevin Rudd makes a brief appearance in Gippsland and what’s the first thing the media do, but suggest to KR that his presence is a distraction for the firies from their important and difficult task at hand, and perhaps he shouldn’t have come. So….Rudd makes a brief call at one base station at Dargo, and he’s a distraction. Howard drops into Whitfield, Wangaratta and across the Bass Strait to north-eastern Tasmania, and he’s not??! Hmmm…..
Let’s be quite honest. JWH has his dial on the box every night of the week. As Bannerman says, ‘Get a bloody hair cut at least!’ To the media, Bannerman says ‘Wake the fuck up!’