A sure sign the ship is sinking: SA government press secretary looking around for a job in the media because “he’s tired of it all”. If they lose there will be scores of them a bit “tired”.

Anthony Chisholm announced on Monday that nominations for the seat of Herbert are to be called Wednesday.

Westpac has sacked consultants Cap Gemini from a key part of its integration of St George Bank and outsourced the work to cheaper “consultants” from India.

Consultants from Cap Gemini were sacked last Friday from the Consumer Mastering contract, which involves transferring St George data customers across to Westpac’s data systems. No reason was given, except that Westpac and the relevant executive were unhappy with Cap Gemini.

But the real story is that senior executives underestimated the cost and complexity of the data transfer and have opted to try and lower costs to complete the project on time and budget. Let’s hope the Indian consultants know the difference between Brighton in Melbourne and Brighton-le-Sands in Sydney.

Big problems for Principals Australia, the peak organisation of the government, independent and Catholic principals associations. The NSW/ACT branch expressed a lack of confidence in the federal chair at its recent meeting and protested it is no longer sent minutes from head office.

The NSW/ACT branch is obviously the largest in the country but has been cut off as the chair, Neville Lyngcoln (retired boss of a minor Victorian private school), centralises power via a compliant/complacent board that has no NSW/ACT rep. Lyngcoln has recently overseen the tipping out of the CEO and COO and it is rumoured there will be other sackings before long.

The Melbourne International Comedy Festival has angered a large number of local Australian comedians by severely cutting back on the festival participant passes given to people involved in shows. In previous years a show’s door staff, techies and designers would get passes that allowed them to see many shows that hadn’t sold out for free (participants still had to pay to see shows selling strongly and each individual show decided whether it allowed participants in for free or not).

The free passes meant that smaller shows might get some of their often empty houses filled with support crew from other shows, making slow nights at the festival a lot more enjoyable for both audience and performer.

This year the festival has denied most shows passes for their crews without any consultation. Angry Aussie comedians have set up a Facebook page to organise an alternative pass system and there is a great deal of ill-feeling and offline talk that the festival has become too corporate and anti-competitively favours its own in house-produced acts and the internationals brought in from overseas.

Comedians who each pay a  $500 rego fee to participate and many of whom can’t afford to pay their staff are asking what their taxes and fees are paying for when a publicly funded festival seems to care so little for the local acts that make up the majority of its program. Rumour has it that crews hired by the festival to staff its own venues are being treated differently and will receive participant passes as well as their wages.

I was on a jury when these comments were made from a couple of members in the jury-room discussions: 1. (after the first session address by the prosecution in a three-day trial) “He must be guilty — otherwise why is he here?” 2. (during the deliberations for a separate four-day trial) “How could he be guilty? No one has that much evil.”

There is enough sentiment and general ignorance among jurors already. Their judgements are clouded enough already without the additional burden of prior convictions. Most have not got a clue about the place of logic in arguments. Trials can be so complex that it’s a joke to ask a group of mainly non-professional people to assess the arguments properly.

Last Friday South Australian ABC TV Stateline viewers were perplexed by a sudden (and unexplained) truncation of a debate between Treasurer Foley and Shadow Treasurer Griffiths. In the last day or so the ABC has updated the Stateline SA website and posted a significantly different version of the segment, which appears to include the part of the debate that did not go to air on Friday. Some of the introductory material shown then has also been removed or edited.

The ABC does not seem to have posted any notification or acknowledgment of the changes. Is it standard ABC practice not to alert viewers and listeners when programs are changed after going to air? Does it have any policies about how and when changes can be made?

I’m not suggesting that there’s anything sinister behind the changes but if this creates a precedent there’s plenty of potential for future abuse.