Brenden Nelson stuck his cone-shaped foot in his simple-minded head this morning on ABC774 when trying to justify his intra-class quartile rankings and recent comments about Australian values. Check out some of these pearlers:

“But for some parents, Jon, the only thing that signals that there’s a problem is if their child falls, say from the second quartile to the bottom quartile. And as your listeners know, I, perhaps, have a medical background and one of the things we do in the early years of life is we plot growth, for example. And what always concerns you is not a child who starts, for example, at the bottom… say the bottom tenth percentile for hip circumference or weight, but rather if they’re falling through it. So it’s one of the things that is a condition of funding.”

“But I’ve said to them, surely it is not beyond the wit of man and intelligent people, to actually write some explanation such as that on the report. There are some parents, Jon, parents who themselves are educationally impoverished who… they’re extremely busy, who themselves have great difficulty understanding reports. Sometimes the only thing they understand is that their child is not performing well compared to other children in the class.”

“For some parents, Jon, who get a report at home, they look at it, they’re busy preparing food, they’re waiting for a husband to turn up, they can often be quite demanding and they get a report card and for some parents the only thing that alerts them to a problem is the fact that, hang on, in the last term my son was in the second quartile, now he’s moved to the bottom, what happened.”

And this brilliant exchange just needs to be quoted in full:

FAINE: But values aren't something that are stuck and immutable; they're fluid and they change. I mean, for instance…

NELSON: Well–

FAINE: …you used to wear an earring.

NELSON: [Laughs] Well, I wouldn't say–

FAINE: That was regarded, at the time, as being outrageous…

NELSON: I wouldn't say that's–

FAINE: but now it's not.

NELSON: I wouldn't say that's a value, Jon.

FAINE: Well, it was.

NELSON: Times–

FAINE: It was an affront to values for some people.

NELSON: Times change, but we must have–

FAINE: And so do people.

NELSON: We must have enduring values, the foundations upon which our society is based. And it's interesting you know: when I was playing footy at school, Jon, it would have been unthinkable for a parent to verbally, let alone physically, abuse an umpire, and yet today something's happened in our society, over a generation, that gives some parents licence to think that they can do that. And one of the things– What happened was, three years ago when I was put into this job, this great privilege, one of the things I started looking at was why are parents who frequently come from low-income families increasingly bypassing good public schools to send their kids to a whole variety of Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Islamic, Aboriginal community, and so on, schools. And what I discovered through a lot of research – which reinforced by intuition – was that parents, apart from wanting their children to learn how to learn, are looking for values that are explicitly taught, they want a school that gives identity and meaning to the life of their child, and they're looking at discipline. And–

FAINE: Well, it sounds to me as if it's more talking tough to appeal to people within the Liberal Party so that it can further your political rankings when John Howard retires.

I think Jon Faine just got to the bottom of Dr Nelson's fucktardness right there.