Thomson acted outside any reasonable standard of behaviour. Sure, there weren’t any union financial rules saying “Don’t spend union money on prostitutes,” but THERE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO BE!

I agree that Craig Thomson is a political football, but only for those who see government as like a game between two teams, one of which they support and the other one they hate.

For the swinging voters, this is not the case, and it’s the swingers who will cast the ultimate judgement. Few, if any, believe Thomson’s story.

Gillard certainly doesn’t. She threw the “presumption of innocence” away when she forced him out of the ALP. She’s now just mouthing statements she doesn’t believe, and it’s not winning any hearts and minds. There’s a lot of confected emotions around, but only from those of whom you’d have to say, “Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

You are backing a lost cause here Marilyn and endorsing a former Union heavyweight who has become a dead weight that is dragging down the Gillard government. In fact if the state of the house were different he would have resigned his seat long ago but Gillard needs his tainted love to survive and there in lays the real scandal.

The Jacksons and Michael Williamson have.

Thomson moved to the coast, he bought $2,000 of goods in a memorabilia store, therefore according the shop owner, he bought the goods to increase his profile for politics.

Come on now, no federal court judge is going to read that bullshit and fine anyone, they will laugh.

It assumes that Thomson did not have the go ahead to set up a branch office in Sydney – what? If he didn’t have the go-ahead they would have called the police and stopped him doing it wouldn’t they.

the problem is all the media know this is a Jackson battle for the top job that goes back 20 years, if they read their own papers they would know that.

If something does not exist it cannot be breached.

I would suggest you dive into the arcane and deranged “”reasonings”" – the fact is FWA has no jurisdiction here and Kathy Jackson is a raving lunatic stirring up crap for nearly 20 years to be head of the union.

There is no scandal, just confected outrage.

Her problem is that she does political deals which might work fine in a union headquarters or party room, but don’t resonate in the real world, where voters get to express their opinion. The carbon tax is a disaster because the world price of carbon credits is a fraction of what it would have to be to create change, and no foreign government in their right mind is going to follow Julia’s lead, given the poor level of popular support the tax enjoys.

And did you see Wilkie today? He’s just itching to land a kick right where it hurts.

I’d love for Julia, our first female PM to be a raging success in the polls. I don’t particularly like Tony Abbott. But Julia’s low support means that she is stuffing up big time. The voters are now just itching to demonstrate where the real power lies.

The Gillard government’s major failing is not that it does nothing. It’s that it fails to comunicate its achievements and plans well, and lets the Opposition have far too much air. Keating’s government would never have let Abbott grab so much of the media that he appears more often than the Prime Minister – he would have taken the fight to Abbott and damn the torpedoes.

Whoever’s giving Gillard the advice to stay away from media and ‘play nice’ with the Thatcher-ite persona is way off base. Under Rudd she was a forceful and effective communicator, and more than a match for any Opposition attack dog. Now, she’s attempting to be above it all, and failing miserably.

If the LNP is demanding people start standing down wrt to allegations, one wonders what is going to come out of the woodwork and whether the LNP can manage a triple back-flip with turn and pike to avoid their own suggestion.