What a sad, breathtakingly simplistic, and tellingly typical attack on a fellow Australian who happens to play a role in maintaining stable government in Australia. Unforgivably for Mirko, it's just not the minority government of his choice.

What gall pretending to speak for sex workers in order to enlist them in his assault on the notion of presumption of innocence.

And how monumentally outrageous to argue that people who've been refused bail by a court process have lost the presumption of their innocence. The need to prioritize court processes for those refused bail, and to address how they serve any custodial time, should not be confused with some foolish assertion that they have forfeited any presumption of their innocence. Mirko you are way off.

To suggest that any parliamentarian should be judged in a House split along party lines is arrant humbug. The conservative side of politics and its media allies, constantly attack basic assumptions of the Westminster Parliamentary tradition, anything to undermine the Government. Sadly they are in fact doing little more than undermining our parliamentary processes. Their contemptible attacks on the Speaker were a direct attack on key conventions.

Watching Christopher Pine and Julie Bishop's disgraceful personal attacks on Craig Thomson is like watching the Parliament being reduced to a lynch mob. It's gross and unseemly to watch such blatant abuse of Parliamentary Privilege.

The totally biased conservative Murdoch media repeatedly calling for Abbott and his market extremists to be put back into government, has shown itself as singularly incapable of putting social policy analysis ahead of tabloid sensationalism - both here and around the English speaking world.

Serious reporting in Australia has been reduced to telling us how bad Julia Gillard looks on any given day in any given jacket and how good Tony Abbott looks on a bike. Anything to deflect from the reality of where Labor's exemplary leadership has taken us over the last four years, a reality recognized by commentators overseas as bleedingly obvious: for all its faults Labor has been outstanding in its economic management and in many areas of progressive reform.

Tony Abbott is being sued for defamation - all the honking geese will demand that he is not innocent at all and must step down, won't they?

The presumption of innocence is a feature of "common law", not "statute law". Guess which type of law we get these days, in almost all forms of legislation?

The presumption of innocence does not exist in Family Law and domestic violence cases, for example. Oh hang on, "balance of probabilities" dictates many magistrates decisions, and that does not presume innnocence either.....

Rusty

Well there you go Mirko, good thing you don't get a say.

FWA claimed without evidence that Thomson stole or didn't declare $270,000 in funds used for elections to the AEC.
'
FWA were dead wrong.

'Watching Christopher Pine and Julie Bishop's disgraceful personal attacks on Craig Thomson is like watching the Parliament being reduced to a lynch mob'

Maybe but not nearly as sickeneing as seeing a desperate people speaking about higher standards in Government and having its party pay legal fees to protect this man despite the findings (look up the dictionary) of FWA. This feminist led Government has shown the country how low people are willing to grovel in order to cling to power. There obviously are any real men in the Labour party or certainly among the so called independants who have an ounce of integrity. That is what I call sickening. Emasculated men nodding their heads alongside a PM who changes her mind every week. They are shameless which fits well with secular/feminist dogma.