Tonight I went to the Ernies. It was held in the NSW Parliament House. I haven't been there before, but I must say they have a great art collection in the various foyers. Our event was in the Strangers' Dining Room.

The way the Ernies operate is that people nominate the worst remarks they've heard over the past year. These are read out and for each category there are two "boo monitors" who decide which sexist remark has earned the highest volume of boo-hiss-and other noises. Sometimes there has to be a "boo off" when the boo monitors can't decide.

I can't say who won the Ernies this year or why. There were so many nominations in each category and they were all perfidious. I can only say that Germaine Greer missed out, by a narrow margin, to win the Elaine (for women who fail to support the sisterhood). Miranda Devine won it - not for the first time - but I'm not sure why. I was too busy booing . The Gold Ernie - given at the end of the evening for the most sexist remark in all categories - was won by Pastor Danny Nalliah (who also won the Clerical/Celebrity/Culinary award, known as The Fred, after Fred Nile). Nalliah's chief claim to fame is that he issued a statement after the 'Black Saturday' bushfires in Victoria saying that the bushfires were a consequence of Victoria's decriminalisation of abortion. Even Gordon Ramsay couldn't beat that. But honestly, it's difficult to distinguish him from the other cretins.

The author, Daniel Connell, has spent many years working in the Murray-Darling Basin Commission and as a journalist and local historian, before writing a PhD thesis on which the book is based. I found the early parts of the book, on the history of the wrangles over how to manage the Murray after Federation, most fascinating. I understand a lot more than I did before about why it has been so impossible to reach any kind of institutional arrangement that would look after the health of the river system - even long after all parties know and agree that the rivers are in critical danger. The book also has a lot of interesting detail about the salinity problem, the relative importance of flows in the Murray and the Darling, the relationship between groundwater and surface water and so forth. Up to 2007 when the book was published, water trading tended to exacerbate rather than relieve the problem as a result of different jurisdictions (water entitlements meant different things in different areas). Connell tries to be optimistic - he points to the rising power of the Commonwealth relative to the states and an increasing tendency to resort to the law rather than to politics to resolve issues. The Commonwealth, of course, is the only government that can take a basin-wide view. More power to its elbow!

It is widely known that the DoD is fairly incompetent. Defence procurement has been particularly bad and this year there was a major scandal about non-payment of wages to SAS troops. But even before the SAS row broke out, in which the Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, described his department as "incompetent", they had done a spy job on him. Yesterday they leaked a story about his "friendship" with a Chinese-born Sydney businesswoman from whom he rents his Canberra flat. They'd been into his computer and got her bank details (unsurprising really, since he pays rent to her, but what were they doing in their boss' computer?). He says his family has known her family since the early 1990s. She has some business links with the Chinese government. No doubt further details will emerge. The SMH has done it's best to hint at a 'honey trap' without actually getting libellous.

Malcolm Turnbull says Fitzgibbon has lost the confidence of his Department and must go! What??? That should read 'the Minister has lost confidence IN his Department and the Department should go.' It is the public servants who are accountable to the Minister not the other way around Malcolm.

The Defence intelligence organisation (DSD) is not allowed to spy on Australians anyway. That privilege is reserved for ASIO.

I don't feel good about this. I think any government that sets about trying to reform the Defence Department is going to get a lot of shit thrown at it. This reminds me of what happened to the Whitlam government. I hope I'm wrong.

As far as I'm concerned, there are three things wrong with the appointment of Tim Fischer as Ambassador to the Holy See:

• We've managed without such a person before. The position has been filled part-time by the Ambassador to Dublin. This appointment will cost the taxpayers a lot of money (diplomats get to live at a much higher standard than they could afford at home).
  
  
• He's a practising Catholic. We would never appoint a Shiite to respresent our interests in Teheran or Beirut. We might appoint a Zionist to represent us in Tel Aviv. But there's a clear conflict of interest and it shouldn't be done. They have a policy of not appointing fluent Indonesian speakers to Indonesia (in case they 'go native'), etc.
  
  
• Apparently the idea of having an Ambassador is based on 'shared interests' in human rights. Well given the Vatican's death-promoting policies on HIV and abortion and its grotesque attitude to victims of its own abuse, that won't wash.
  

In short, it's nothing more than a sinecure in the sunshine for a retired deputy prime minister. The media seem to think the only thing odd about it is the fact that he's from the former government side, not the current one.