50 People Who Stuffed Up Australia

There is a need from time to time, to take stock of where we have been and where we are now, and wonder where it all went wrong ...From Rinehart to Bob Brown, Abbott to the Rainbow Serpent ... our once-great land has had its fair share of nitwits. Come on a trawl through them all, with Guy Rundle (and Dexter Rightwad), on the bin night Australia had to have. Guy Rundle is a writer, editor, producer and journalist, inter alia. A frequent contributor to the Age, Sydney Morning Herald and all media except the 70 per cent owned by the Murdochs, at time of writing he was a co-editor of Arena Magazine for many years. On the stage he wrote four shows for Max Gillies: Club Republic, Your Dreaming, The Big Con, and Godzone. In television, he claims joint responsibility for Get a Life, Backberner, Comedy Inc., and more doomed pilots than the World War Two Japanese air command. His books and monographs include The Opportunist: John Howard and the Triumph of Reaction, Your Dreaming, The Happy Phrase (with Shamed Malonkey), the prize-winning coverage of the election of Barack Obama Down to the Crossroads, and The Shellacking: The Obama Presidency, The Tea Party and the 2010 Mid-terms, as well as, most recently, as co-editor, the laugh-a-minute On Utoya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe. He is currently correspondent-at large for Crikey online daily.Dexter Rightwad has been a warrior for righteousness ever since his days as a student politician, when he was responsible for the Hang Nelson Mandela campaign, and went on to be a special advisor to Warworth Bailliwade, minister assisting the Minister for Aviation Support in the Dean Brown government, during the golden days of South Australian regional aerodrome servicing. He has had many roles in the great cultural struggle, including diverting Catholic school grants to political slush funds or B A Santamaria, founding the Australia-Suharto Friendship Society, and fathering Billy McMahons children. In 1974 he blew Vince Gair for three hours in his office, thus preventing him from handing in his resignation, hence putting paid to the Whitlam government. In 2003 he created the Newton Society, dedicated to gravity-scepticism. His books and other works include Right Up Em A Memoir, Knopfelmacher! The Musical, Sex Lives of the Austrian Economists, Milan Kundera: A Phenomenological-Semiotic Approach (with Richard Wilkins), and Where to Eat on the Run (Australian edition). He is currently researching links between extreme weather events and gay marriage.