Best Chaser stunt ever! Julian Morrow smuggles himself on to the panel of Q and A, and stays the entire hour.

M’colleague Keane has already detailed some of the juicier submissions to the Productivity Commission’s “Report on Abolishing PIRs” (original title, which rather gave the game away) — and an enterprising publisher could probably get a good book out of some of these. There’s four hundred or so of the things. Did every writer in Australia put one in? Wouldn’t 20 have done? Couldn’t the rest of you have, I dunno, organised a public meeting or something? Oh that’s right, would meant picking up the phone, leaving room, leaving cats.

Anyway, you need to pick and choose — but you just know that some are going to be gooooooood. Here’s the beginning of Frank Moorhouse’s:

Copyright is not just a commercial boundary — it is the boundary of a distinctive part of the human condition, closely related to nationhood, to culture-hood.

It is a historical and cultural border within which many forms of creativity gain protection especially the distinctive human activity called the arts.

It is a legal recognition of being creatively human: both about the universal preoccupations of the species and about the localized and particular preoccupations of cultural groups within the universal.

And that is why you should never accept less than six figures for the film deal, with Adam Sandler. Proposition: a petit-bourgeois is a libertarian who’s been mugged by reality.

Gerard Henderson was deeply exercised about SBS series The Liberals this week, claiming it as piece of leftist propaganda for its omission of senior Liberal talking heads such as erm Gerard Henderson, who got one appearance in the first ep. Why oh why oh why Hendo moaned did the show include people such as Judy Brett, one time editor of leftist magazine Arena? Who would reckon she knows anything about the Liberal Party?

Who indeed? Well, during the time that Brett was co-editor of, and frequent contributor to, Arena Magazine, its subscribers included one J.Howard, of Kirribilli. Maybe he suggested her to the producers. You might be on your own with this one, GH.

When the reply to a casual blog post is published as an article in the actual magazine the blog’s attached to, you know that the editors got the lawyers’ letter from hell. Ultra-zionist ‘Mad’ Melanie Phillips had published an attack on ultra-zionist Alan Dershowitz for supporting Obama — who is a Marxist and a nihilist, and wants to destroy Israel – and damned the whole of American Jewry for being sentimental, ignorant and basically letting zionism down (‘Damn! If only we had less Jews in this movement!’). Dershowitz’s reply was in before Phillips’s diatribe had been uploaded. Musta had a good lawyer.

News Limited is, as we know, a thrusting piledriving etc vamp till ready old-fashioned news organisation which breaks stories, but how does it fill so much acreage every day? Quoting itself and others in the cut and paste remedial therapy unit is one, and recycling stuff in blogs is another.

Kudos then to the Bolter, for taking it to the next level. In a blog piece on the appointment of Robert Hill, the cartoon dog fills the space by excerpting the whole of cut and paste, itself an entire collection of old quotes. If C and P then quote the Bolter, the entire organisation will then vanish up its own fundament.