We all know that Brendan Nelson likes to formulate policy on whiteboards minutes before releasing it publicly, but how does he do it when there’s no whiteboard available?

QUESTION: …how do you frame policy like this? I mean you take a while to come up with a pension policy, so how do you frame a policy? Do you take an amount of money and divide it by the number of people who benefit and you come up with a figure? Or how do you do that?

DR NELSON: Well terms of looking at it – by the way, you don’t need to have a committee to do this – there are pensioner organisations and… there’s plane (sic) common sense to be applied and I think what you’ve got to do is look at the cost of living pressures that pensioners face. You look at what you think is reasonable for people to try to survive on a pension, and then I think you need to look at obviously the finances of the country and what it can afford reasonably to do so, and then a decision has to be made.

Got that? No? Well, don’t worry — Bren-doc just steals Greens Party policy anyway.