By Jorian Gardner

Does size matter?
LONG and the short of the Liberal Party… candidates Andrea Tokaji (Ginninderra) and Gary Kent (Molonglo) graciously agreed to pose for this photograph.
Tokaji, who stands at 6’3” (1.91 metres) and Kent who is 5’1¾” (1.57 metres) laughed about how in politics, size doesn’t matter – it’s what you do with your policy that counts!

Shhh, Val’s busted!
ON Friday, September 5 the Community Alliance Party has an Awfully Big Announcement planned. All terribly hush, hush, you see. Not a word, Fawlty, old boy. Surprise candidate eh?
Busted custard: the left hand doesn’t seem to be in touch with the right hand.
In an affable, open letter to probably hundreds of Canberra’s business leaders, party vice-president Scott Rashleigh goes and scoops president Ric Hingee’s announcement that well-known fire fighter and Canberra bush-fire activist Val Jeffery is standing as a CAP candidate.
So how did the good Dr Rashleigh blow the cover (and misspell the candidate’s name)? By inviting our editor to a lunch at Royal Canberra on August 28 to meet him, Norvan (“I wanna be leader”) Vogt and “Mr Val Jeffries (sic), two of our candidates”.

Hospital pass
WHEN bad economic news looms, blame the diary and push out the Health and Childrens’ Minister. Katy Gallagher found herself with a hospital pass when she, oddly, came to be deputising for Treasurer Jon Stanhope launching the bad local economic news contained in the Chamber of Commerce’s latest quarterly survey. When asked why no chief minister, Katy blamed a diary clash (oh, well, that explains it) saying: “When you can’t get a number one, you get a number two?” Um, yes, well, we think we know what she means.

Sizer’s shots
BRINDABELLA’S Community Alliance Party candidate James Sizer crossed the line of good taste when he described the Government as having “blood on its hands” following the death of a 15-year-old girl after a head-on accident in Lanyon on a stretch of Tharwa Drive that, he says, the Government had promised to duplicate as part of its 2004 election campaign. All very sad, but he’s drawing a loathsome bow with comments like: “The Chief Minister and his team conspired to withhold the essential services like roads needed by this community so that they could have expenditure announcements in the run up to this year’s election” and testing the laws of libel with “this tragedy sits squarely” in the lap of Municipal Services Minister John Hargreaves. Even “Bites” blanched.

Zed’s hopin’
NOT that we can draw too many conclusions from the governing Labor Party’s shellacking in That Other Territory (NT), but it didn’t escape the attention of ACT Liberal leader Zed Seselja who whispered into the “Bites” dog and bone: “The result in the NT is certainly encouraging.  I mean, they (the Country Liberal Party) were written off as late as Saturday… so you just never know.” All quiet from the Stanhope bunker.

Molonglo party
WHEN facing the media for the first time, new Canberra Party candidates for Molonglo Ben O’Neill and Joanne Allen, earnestly shook off questions by “Bites” that they were dummy candidates to help get Richard Mulcahy MLA over the line. The Canberra Party is not expected to field any other candidates for the other electorates making it more the Molonglo Party than the Canberra Party. Then Allen confirmed what we all knew when she opened with “I am involved in the Mulcahy Party because… I mean, Canberra Party”.  Whoops: Just as we thought, dummy candidates.