If you read what's on the picture above, taken from the News Limited website — a merde-och enterprise of lies and concocted misinformation — one can see a few doozies... The first one that come to attention is the headline "Tara Moss portrait wins Archibald"...

 

No it has not... The Tara Moss portrait was awarded the packing room prize at the Art Gallery of NSW... There is a big dif. The packer's prize is awarded by the great team of dedicated people who removes the bubble wrap and the pine boxes from dead paintings...

Sorry I mean many paintings that have been over-licked by eager artists in search of perfection, and their subjects start to look like dead mullets — or Zombies on a lifeless day under a spotlight... I've met Tara Moss a few times and I can say she is far prettier and livelier than this. Sure, the dress and the belt are finely crafted under the full frontal lighting system from Bunnings and so is the dark background exquisitely tonal black... Beyond this, I fail to recognise Tara... But who am I, a sarcastic cartoonist with such a moderate artistic talent that I could not be accepted as a second rate student in a second rate private local art school, even for a full non-refundable trimester fee...

As usual, the Archibald Prize and its derivatives (the Wynne and Sulman Prizes) seem to be full of BIG heads with each skin pores magnified like two cent coins — and long time dead social concepts and flower-bed vistas — resurrected for the occasion by Art School pimply students on a government grant — or well-known artists who paint with a dunny-brush for a stir, as runner ups.

There must be some real artists somewhere about to shoot themselves for failure to make the cut...

 

But hey you, you know the drill, the Archibald is a glorious controversial circus, a circus designed to promote the Art Gallery for its savvy media PR, not to actually grasp the true artistic merit. Artistic merit of say Picasso and Dali would not make the cut in this place where the sad sadist clowns are in charge of the rings...

 

So, don't swallow that tin of turps yet. Don't take that ecstasy pill. There is still next year and the year after that... for other entertaining circus arty-farty performance full of dead fish on canvas... That's the fun of it all... Knowing you'll be rejected for being ... a great artist.

Meanwhile we discover that the new pope cooks his own meals and rides on buses...  I did not expect any less as we're told by his wikipedia entry that:

 

 

On 15 April 2005, a human rights lawyer filed a criminal complaint against Bergoglio, as superior in the Society of Jesus of Argentina, accusing him of involvement in the kidnapping by the Navy in May 1976 (during the Dirty War) of two Jesuit priests.[19] The priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics, were found alive five months later, drugged and semi-naked. Yorio accused Bergoglio of effectively handing them over to the death squads by declining to tell the regime that he endorsed their work. Jalics refused to discuss it after moving into seclusion in a German monastery.[20] Horacio Verbitsky, an Argentine investigative journalist and former montonero, wrote a book about this and other related events titled El Silencio: de Paulo VI a Bergoglio: las relaciones secretas de la Iglesia con laESMA.[21] Verbitsky also writes that the Argentine Navy with the help of Cardinal Bergoglio hid the dictatorship's political prisoners in Bergoglio's holiday home from a visiting delegation of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.[22]

According to the book, after their release, Yorio accused the then-Provincial of his Jesuit order San Miguel, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, to have denounced him. Father General Pedro Arrupe in Rome was informed by letter or during the abduction, both he and Orlando Yorio were excluded from the Jesuit Order.[23]

Bergoglio told his authorized biographer, Sergio Rubin, that after the priests' imprisonment, he worked behind the scenes for their release; Bergoglio's intercession with dictator Jorge Rafael Videla on their behalf may have saved their lives.[24] "The cardinal could not justify why these two priests were in a state of helplessness and exposed," according to Luis Zamora, who said that Bergoglio's testimony "demonstrates the role of the Church during the last military dictatorship."[25]

In 2010, Bergoglio told Sergio Rubin that he often sheltered people from the dictatorship on church property, and on one occasion gave his identity papers to a man who looked like him, to enable the recipient to flee Argentina.[26]

Bergoglio stated that adoption by same-sex couples is a form of discrimination against children. This position received a rebuke from Argentine presidentCristina Fernández de Kirchner, who said the church's tone was reminiscent of "medieval times and the Inquisition."[27]

 

A new pope with a new sauce to sell the same old dish.

 

Australian Securities & Investments Commission reports record company closures, many blame carbon tax

THE carbon tax is contributing to a record number of firms going to the wall with thousands of employees being laid off and companies forced to close factories that have stood for generations.
Soaring energy bills caused by the Government's climate change scheme have been called the "straw that broke the camel's back" by company executives and corporate rescue doctors who are trying to save ailing firms.
New data from the corporate regulator reveals insolvencies have hit a record high over the past 12 months, led by widespread failures in manufacturing and construction, which accounted for almost one-fifth of collapses.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/business/companies/
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Now can you see something wrong in this report? First it comes from News Limited and unfortunately, this business is not amongst those that have bitten the dust yet... We wish!... Anyway, one has to take this article with a gigantic grain of salt. 
The high Aussie dollar is hurting some Australian exporters/manufacturers. No point denying this. But many smart operators have found ways around this. As you may have noticed, ASIC DID NOT point the finger at anything in the statistic, but nasty anti-Labor News Limited chose to add that "many blame carbon tax" in the same heading as if ASIC had said so....
I believe ASIC did not say so because if it had, the merde-och press would have gone ten times more ape-shit about this carbon pricing effect. That some business blame the carbon tax is one thing, some others might as well blame floods, fires, heat-waves and drought conditions.
The carbon pricing is "an insurance premium" to mitigate the effect of anthropogenic climate change... It's planning for the future. Do we need to plan for the future? Of course we do.
If Australian (still British at the time) "forefathers" had had no vision we'd have not a single national parks around Sydney. I know, don't tell me, the north shore rich liberals (conservatives) living near the bush in their large mansions on acreage may not like possums from the parks raiding their manicured lawns and prissy flower beds...
With the carbon pricing comes a cleaner environment, less CO2 human emissions in the atmosphere and lower insurance premiums in general. Win-win on the merry-go-round.

Second, the number of Australian companies going under varies up to over 10,000 in any calendar year depending on many factors — most of these factors related to the parameters of the business itself (location, product range, competition, planning, finances, etc.) rather than any other single influences such as "carbon pricing". 

As a matter of fact, the "10,632 business collapse" is reasonably in line with Australia's growing population. 
As well, a good proportion of these collapses happened in Queensland where Premier Newman killed-off a lot of job. 
As far as the statistic of "with the number of firms being placed in administration more than 12 per cent higher than during the global financial crisis." this is an excellent point.

During the global financial crisis (still running amok in the US and the European countries, if you don't mind, ask the Cypriots) the LABOR GOVERNMENT spend money to create some employment programs (which have been poopoo-ed by news Limited and the opposition) that were successful in keeping many business afloat and maintaining employment. As well, the LABOR GOVERNMENT protected savings in banks... and gave people below a certain tax threshold a $900 tax refund. All good stuff.
What would have the Liberal (conservative) opposition done? It would have made the same mistake that has been done in the US and in Europe: give money to the BANKS rather than to the people...
The housing insulation program was 97 per cent successful, while the BER was nearly 90 per cent successful. In regard to the speed of implementation of these programs, one can only be amazed that they worked so well. The only few draw backs were that a few vulture businesses milked the offer and employed untrained people to do the job. BUT ON THE WHOLE, BUSINESSES WERE HONEST ENOUGH and the projects were VERY successful.
The NBN is also part of these programs but the opposition want to scrap it and replace with tins of bake beans technology.
Keep the opposition out of business, please... and stop buying the lies from the merde-och press.

 

...

Thirty-two of us gathered in an airy News Limited studio for what turned out to be a really enjoyable couple of hours. Network rivalries were put to one side as the jokes and laughter flowed.

The competitive spirit really only reared its head when a football was tossed into the line up for a couple of really good action shots.

Before and after the shoot we were all taken aside and asked individually about how we got into journalism, our most challenging assignments and where we all thought the industry was heading. They were all perfectly reasonable and relevant questions.

The Sunday Telegraph reporters and photographers were all extremely professional and a pleasure to work with.

Fast forward to last Friday, two weeks after the photo shoot...

The paper, planning to run the story on Sunday, approached the ABC and the other networks wanting some extra quotes from the presenters involved. Specifically it wanted to know our views on the Federal Government's contentious media reforms.

Fair enough. It had been one of the biggest stories of the week and the Telegraph was within its rights to seek the views of some of the country's most prominent TV news figures.

Our comments were sent off and we all thought nothing more of it.

Then the bomb dropped on Sunday morning.

There we were on page 9 laughing and joking in one of Justin Lloyd's great photos but the headline above screamed:

The Men Of TV Vent Free Speech Outrage

Readers could easily be forgiven for thinking we had, as the paper put it, 'united to share their… concerns about the Government's controversial media reforms.'

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03-18/rowland-media-regulation-stitch-up/4578648

Yes, strange indeed the Telegraph of all papers overlooked that particular insight.

So not only was the story misleading but the slant of the piece also buried, until page 112, some really good insights and experiences of men, like Hugh, that I personally hold up as industry role models.

In a Twitter exchange with me yesterday the Sunday Tele's editor, Mick Carroll, said Senator Conroy didn't need to defend his media laws as he had the ABC to do that.

No, Mick. Just like you, I believe in media freedom and free speech. I also, like my colleague Joe O'Brien (who was quoted), believe the media has a responsibility to report fairly and accurately.

In this case, Mick, you haven't.

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STRANGE THAT THE TELEGRAPH OVERLOOKED THAT PARTICULAR INSIGHT? 

Hello!!!!

Slanted news, news manipulation, spruiking anything against the Labor government and the "lack of insight" is the dumbing formula of the merde-och press... What did you expect?