National Interest

The National Interest round-up begins in Brisbane, where talkback lines have been running hot over the issue of advertising on cop cars.

The Brisbane Airport Corporation struck a deal with the police commissioner to plaster its logos on police vehicles as part of a $100-thousand dollar sponsorship deal with Crime Stoppers. The proposal caused public and political outrage. Opposition police spokesman Vaughan Johnson conjured up images of police cars made to look like mobile billboards.

"What will they allow next?" he thundered. "Stickers slapped on the side of breath testing vans saying 'I can feel a XXXX coming on?".

The kerfuffle seems to have caught Police Minister Judy Spence unawares - she knew nothing about the sponsorship deal - but she's approved it anyway, on the basis that it's all old hat. According to The Courier-Mail, it's happened twice before, when police vehicles were adorned with logos for the private security firms Wormald and Chubb under a similar arrangements.

Well, that's all right, then. Perhaps Four X would be interested in those booze buses.

These days, most schools have ugly electronic hooters, rather than real bells. But not in the country town of Terang, in western Victoria.

Terang Primary is celebrating its sesquicentenary this weekend, and the highlight of a party to mark 150 years of chalk and talk will be the ringing of the restored school-bell.

The bell was re-discovered during a recent working bee, hidden amongst piles of junk under an old school building. It's now been returned to pride of place at the main entrance and apparently sounds as sweet as ever.

Originally cast by William Pybus in Adelaide in 1845, according to the Herald Sun , Terang the bell is the oldest ever made in Australia.

It does pip the bell at Wallaroo Primary School on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula, but only by nine years. Last month, thieves nicked the old ship's bell, which is marked 'Almonde 1854'.

The theft generated some intense media coverage - so much so that it seems the culprits were unable to make their crime pay. It appears they ended up dumping the stolen good as too hot to handle.

The Yorke Peninsula Country Times tell us the bell has been recovered and handed in to the Copper Coast coppers and will be returned to Wallaroo Primary.

Forget melting ice-caps and retreating glaciers; don't worry about dry river beds and exceptional weather events... The most controversial aspect of Ross Garnaut's latest report on climate change was his suggestion that we might need to stew more roo.

The Professor's suggestion that 43 million methane-belching cattle and sheep could be replaced by farmed kangaroos made international headlines, and left the Northern Territory Cattlemen's Association calling for 'a return to sanity in the global warming debate'.

Well, we all know what it means to have a roo loose in the top paddock, and according to the North Queensland Register, the Cattlemen reckon that's just the point: "Imagine trying to muster a herd of kangaroos" says executive officer Luke Bowen "And all the extra fuel emissions generated in driving around after them".

Presenter

Peter Mares

Producer

James Panichi