Bless you, Barnaby, for your misguided bush wisdom brings joy to my life.

Cash handouts from the Federal Government’s stimulus packages have been likened to a madman at a pub handing out free beer.

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“It’s like a madman giving you free beers at a pub – you’ll drink them but you won’t respect him,” Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce told reporters.

Now I don’t know about you, dear GrodsReaders, but any publican who gives me gratis booze earns my deep and everlasting respect.

With only two years until Steve Fielding and his party of shame depart Parliament for ever and ever amen, the lone Family First Senator has set up a new website and blog to keep him busy in his political twilight.

Steve’s latest blog post contains YouTube video of his self-declared “impassioned” speech in Parliament about the government’s proposed stimulus package. Fielding reckons the speech is impassioned because it’s full of the faux-emotion employed by the second speaker for the negative in a grade eleven debate, except even grade eleven debating students know not to do fake tears because it’s just one step too far and a bit embarrassing.

However, Fielding’s speech about the stimulus package is a pretty good stimulus for a drinking game. Press play on the video, open a bottle of vodka, and take a shot every time Steve says any of the following.

• “having trouble sleeping at night”
• “war on recession”
• “casualties of the war on recession”
• “sure as heck”
• “go into bat for my fellow Australians”
• “deadset serious”
• “kid from Resevoir”

Still sober?

But seriously for a moment, why does Fielding feel that his single seat in the Senate (built on about 50,000 primary votes) means that the government should do everything he asks for? What a stunning sense of entitlement this man has. And he accuses the government of playing politics — because Fielding would never play politics. And then he says he’s “not in anyone’s pocket”, which is probably true if you don’t count the Pentecostal Church.

So if I had to give the fillum a star rating I’d probably give it one star, Margaret. One star because I laughed at the graphic that declared Fielding to be the “leader” of the Family First Party. Leader of one.

Andrew Bolt gets all teary when naughty people criticise Malcy and not Kevvie. Bolta doesn’t like it when evil journalists form opinions, based on experience, analysis and other journalistic shit, that make Malcy and the Liberals look silly.

The Canberra press pack had a quick count of heads and declared the public hated Malcolm Turnbull’s plan to block Kevin Rudd’s $42 billion spending spree.

See, it’s the journalists who are wrong here and not Malcy. These journalists wouldn’t know public sentiment if it spat in their faces. Andy, on the other hand, has his finger on the pulse of middle Australia from the comfort of his air conditioned tenth floor office at Southbank. (Sometimes Bolt even goes for coffee in the food hall and he sees heaps of plebs ordinary people while he hurries through with a hanky over his nose.) Bolta provides six examples of journalistic anti-Malcy sentiment, five of which come from the “hard left” Fairfax and ABC, with the remaining example from News Limited’s Courier Mail.

Michelle Grattan, The Age:
(The Opposition) expects its stand to be immediately unpopular — getting between the public and buckets of money could hardly be anything else… Turnbull did not make a very convincing argument …

Mark Colvin, AM:
You (the Liberals) are standing between a large section of the Australian middle class and a bucket of money. As you say, it’s not going to be popular.

Dennis Atkins, Courier Mail:
The Coalition’s hardline stand was cheered by the parties’ MPs, who saw it as getting the debate back to their “strong suit of economic management”. This may happen eventually but in the short-term they’ve dealt themselves out of the argument.

Tony Wright, The Age:
It brought to mind the image of the band playing uplifting tunes on the deck of the Titanic… (O)verwhelming approval and applause would likely be scarce in the streets for anyone attempting to deny the promised largesse.

Peter Hartcher, Sydney Morning Herald:
MALCOLM TURNBULL has decided to arrange himself casually on the railway tracks in front of the onrushing Rudd money train… It’s a bid for relevance on a point of irrelevance… At worst, it is an act of suicidal braggadocio.

Annabel Crabb described the scenes in Parliament when her colleagues heard the news:
Commentators gasped. Ladies fainted. The weak of heart covered their eyes… Indeed, debate raged around Parliament House yesterday about the political implications of Tarzan’s actions. Was he committing political suicide? Was this an incredibly beady-eyed act of political cynicism…?

After comprehensively proving perncious lefty groupthink with these examples, Bolta moves on to a much more authoritative gauge of public sentiment than journalists: online polls run by newspapers.

But much of the public seems, so far, to have failed to read the script written for it by the Canberra media.

The Herald Sun’s on-line poll has 53 per cent of more than 11,000 votes agreeing with Turnbull. The Australian poll has an already healthy 47 per cent of people saying he’s right to want to wait.

These are the same polls that ask hard-hitting questions (such as today’s Hun pearler: “Has red carpet fashion gone too far?”) and collate reliable statistics from a representative cross-section of the community.

But hang on, isn’t there an Age poll on the same question that should be included in Bolt’s analysis for fairness?

True, The Age poll is wildly against Turnbull, but if you believed all The Age wrote you’d think Rudd a saint and all who doubted him deserved hell.

And this man has the balls to call himself a journalist.

Now, I’m no economist but I know that $42 billion is a lot of money. (Gumby Bertrand QC isn’t an economist either — he’s not even a lawyer — but it doesn’t stop him from commenting on the stimulus package.) $42 billion dollars is so much money that I have trouble comprehending just how much it is. In fact, it’s more than I’ve ever had in the bank. And because I’m not an economist I can only read what real economists have to say about the package and the consensus seems to be cautious optimism, with qualifications.

It’s great to see that a massive chunk is being spent on school infrastructure, as it should, and other projects that will provide long term benefits to society and the economy. However, something strikes me as NQR about another lazy $10 billion worth of cash handouts to basically everyone so that they can stimulate the economy at the same time as stimulating themselves with plasma TVs and the like.

The thing is, this is the first time ever that I will receive pork from the Australian government. I’m in my early thirties, I don’t have a family, and I earn an average income. But in a few months it looks like I’m going to get an envelope from Kevin Rudd with $950 in it. About freakin’ time, I reckon. Just because I don’t have a sprog doesn’t mean I can’t stimulate as effectively as somebody with a sprog.

There’s lots of chatter amongst my friends on Facebook about how they’re going to spend the $950 bonus. There’s talk of liquor and steak dinners, paying off the credit card, air conditioners and hookers and blow. One hard-core Liberal acquaintance of mine on the site noted in his status that he was going to save the payment instead of spending it just to spite Kevin Rudd. My question to him is, why not give the money back if you’re that opposed to it? Oh, that’s right: you won’t let principles get in the way of a good bit of pork.

Personally, I’m going to put my $950 in the bank for the rest of the year and use it to stimulate the Indian economy during my overseas trip in 2010. Now that’s unAustralian.

Who or what are you going to stimulate with your pork, and how?

The Rudd Government last year splurged $10.4 billion on a package designed to stimulate the economy. After initially noting a rise in sales, unAustralian Of The Year nomination, Gerry Harvey, now reckons that sales are such that it’s like the stimulus “never happened.” (Mind you, it could just be the kind of rhetoric that makes it easier for Harvey to shut stores and shed jobs.)

In other news, Australia spends about $1,000 less per year, per public school student on buildings and equipment than Britain and the USA. For the relatively paltry sum of $2.2 billion per year we could bridge the gap and — dare I say? — start an education revolution that would deliver strong and positive long term benefits for this nation.