The Abbott Government’s first budget, like most federal budgets, is based on a confidence trick. But this one has been executed with such bumbling incompetence that it won’t fly with the electorate.

Boardrooms are willing to pay large sums of money for this goldplated access. The money is shared neatly: the lobbyist takes a commission – of say 30 per cent – and the rest becomes a party donation. Everyone’s a winner, with the exception of kept-in-the-dark voters. I don’t know the going rate for a meeting with the PM, but covering NSW Parliament 10 years ago lobbyists were asking $50,000 to arrange a meeting with a minister.

A few weeks ago, Prime Minister Tony Abbott breached tradition and civility by accusing the ABC of ‘instinctively taking everyone’s side but Australia’s’ in its news coverage. Thirty years ago, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher brought the dark art of media intimidation to the Western world when she accused the BBC of being unpatriotic and aiding the enemy.

Karl Marx once observed that England was saved from ‘rural idiocy’ in the eighteenth century by the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The emergence of the first working class in history ‘saved’ Scotland and Wales from the same threatening condition as well. Because there was no Industrial Revolution in Ireland, it was condemned to bovine backwardness for the next two centuries.

In The Hawke Memoirs, published in 1994, former Prime Minister Bob Hawke described Nelson Mandela’s visit to Australia in October 1990 and the adoring public reception he received. The key paragraph read: ‘Nelson Mandela’s generosity of spirit was quickly evident as we settled down in my office. He said, “I want you to know, Bob, that I am here today, at this time, because of you.”’

Rupert Murdoch thrust his way into the newspaper industry in 1960 when he bought Sydney afternoon tabloid the Daily Mirror from John Fairfax & Sons. The conservative publishing aristocracy sold the Mirror (and Truth) to the 29-year-old ‘boy publisher’ for the bargain basement price of £600 000, with another £1.6 million to be paid over six years.

As the Australian Government – in the form of Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Attorney-General Nicola Roxon and Foreign Minister Bob Carr – is cooperating in the extradition of Australian citizen Julian Assange to Sweden, I thought it was time to put the spotlight on the plucky Scandinavian kingdom.

It was entirely predictable. Australia’s oldest newspaper group has been run by dolts, social climbers, profit gougers, chancers and failed business types for at least 30 years.