Glenn Milne is reportedly paid a large chunk of change by Rupert Murdoch to write a column and report on Sundays for News Ltd papers. Not that it's the highest hurdle to cross but certainly in the past when on Seven he was being paid more than the PM.
And while we offer respek for anyone sufficiently annoyed with Stephen Mayne to launch a public push-jihad against him on national television, we are starting to wonder whether he's still paying his way in News Corp land.
Consider his column today which deals with the Gippsland by-election, expected to be comfortably held by the Nationals who regard the area as their true base in Victoria.
Milne's piece shamelessly borrows from work written by his colleague Rick Wallace who wrote back in May about Mr Harvey Pynt a former Labor patriot who couldn't stand crazies like Labor Socialist Lefty Brendan Jenkins anymore and left the Labor party before the last state election.
Compare Milne's column with Rick Wallace's from May 23rd.
At least when Alan "Scissorhands" Ramsay re-hashes people's work he usually records the frequent occasion by means of quotation mark. It is a polite gesture. Milne instead favours the quick and dirty paraphrase. Not nice.
MILNE REVIEWS THE ADS OF BOTH SIDES BUT FORGETS THERE ARE THREE MAIN CANDIDATES...
Then Milne analyses the ads used in the by-election campaign. He runs through the Lib ads. And then through the Nats. But then oddly skips over the ALP ads, which have focused on the Nationals record in government in cutting services to the area. They might not be enough to win the dyed-in-the-wool Nationals' seat but they've been considered by most to be quite effective.
The TVCs from the Nats and Labor have been quite good but one of the stand-out items was something that arrived in letterboxes last week from the ALP which looked like it was a Nationals flyer until you opened it up.
It shows what looks like a killing fields map of public facilities closed by the National Party.
It's a little unfair in the sense that many of the listed schools were those one-room schools which many parents feared wasn't giving their kids a sufficient quality education. But it makes the point about service delivery very effectively, which is a debate Labor can usually benefit from as it is usually trusted on those issues.
So there it is, the Nats are probably going to win the by-election. Not even Kevin Rudd's or Brendan Nelson's worst foe would honestly believe that this is a big test for either of them. This was always the Nationals' by-election to lose. It's their heartland, a seat with many dozens of booths, some of them so small they'll be able to smell from miles away all the out-of-towners arriving in their student politician driven old bombs, fleet cars, Tory Range Rovers and MP's limos.
MEMORY LANE AND THE OC'S GREEN SHAME
The OC fondly recalls once pulling into a such a small booth in the 2004 federal election in a lovely place called Poowong in the seat of McMillan. Parked the blue X5 (which had previously very rarely actually left city limits) as far from prying eyes as possible, then discreetly as we could pulled the ALP material out of the back of the beast to hop into a day's festivity with the locals, extolling the merits of a Latham government. The things we do.
A joint in the town serves a good burger and the locals were friendly enough to a point so it wasn't all bad. I did though get the impression if we'd lingered longer than the close of the count, we'd possibly have ended up in a burger ourselves such was the view of locals of Latham's hippy love forestry policy.
We had greatly magnified the risk of an old school lynching given that I was required to instruct my crestfallen companion that he had to hand out Greens party HTVs because the hippy scum weren't showing up and they were preferencing our bloke. My mate would have been more popular down there if he'd been handing out fresh and slippery dog turds at the door. Those were the days.
Back to the future, if the Nats do manage to lose this unlosable seat, it will be time for them to plan a decent Christian burial for themselves via merger or whatever. If they win, they'll have beaten their fears about changing demographics and farm economics to live to fight another day.
That's a fair and balanced review of the proceedings. It's easy if you try Glenn.
Game on.
since failed candidate 
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