Meantime, holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, accused rapist and alleged freedom-fighter Julian Assange is perhaps deserving of our sympathy. Having gleefully passed on Australia’s secrets to some of her greatest enemies (Political Islam, The board of the ABC, Sarah Hanson-Young, etc), he has complained to the BBC that the Australian consulate has failed to recognise his true greatness by providing him with his full entitlement to consular assistance.

“First the Australian Consulate tells me,” he complains in a rant to the interviewer, “that I have to pay for my own Doctor to help treat the effects of vitamin-D deficiency caused through lack of sunlight due to me stupidly deciding to hide out in this bloody hole [the Ecuadorean embassy.] Secondly, they won’t give me a new passport unless I leave the embassy to collect it. Can you believe that!!? The nerve of them! Now the consulate has further shown their utter contempt for one of its outstanding citizens by refusing to supply batteries for my laptop. In doing so, they are thereby depriving me of my democratic right to continue to dump secrets on the Internet and harmlessly chat with my close buddies, Ed Snowden, Kim Jong-un, Puty-Pute and my smug, lawyer-prick Geoffrey what’s-his-name. It beggars belief!” he fumes at the camera.

Wiping away a tear I switch off the TV and feel suddenly moved to try and help a fellow-Australian citizen out. I decide to ring around a few of his many celebrity (alleged) supporters to see if we can get some sort of fund for his batteries going. Using Google, I come up with the following short-list of likely candidates:

• Michael Moore
• Mary Kostakidis (ex-SBS TV newsreader heart-throb)
• The Sydney Islamist Foundation (trading as ‘The Sydney Peace Foundation’)
• Jake Lynch (trading as ‘An Anti-Semite Prick’)
• “The “Usual Suspects” (i.e, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-un, Noam Chomsky, George Galloway, Oliver Stone, Robert Mugabe, Senator Lee Rhiannon, Supreme Leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei of Iran, the entire population of Waziristan, Al Gore, etc)
• Simon Sheikh (Aspiring Green’s Senator.) Though easily done so, not to be confused at all with Sheikh Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s current leader in hiding
• The Australian Green and Gay Moral Gestapo (trading as the ‘GetUp!’ movement),
• The WikiLeaks Party senators and MPs (none)
• All ABC journalists
• ABC’s Q&A audience (on any night)
• The entire readership of The Guardian (not including myself)
• Assange’s mother
• Lady Gaga

I ring them all, but no luck. From many of them I get “Sure, I’ll get back to you,” but never hear from them again. Others are outraged, saying right up front that Assange already owes them a ‘motza’ and they have no intention of blowing even more money on “that narcisstic little tosser” (my words) anymore.

Finally, I get hold of the famous investigative journalist and arch anti-Westerner, Jon Pilger. Jon tells me that, though he’s already blown more than $20,000 on Assange, he’d be more than willing to toss in the cost of a few batteries. Except for one thing: he needs every spare cent he has in helping out that far, far greater freedom-fighter and replacement-darling of the Left Ed Snowden in Moscow with his supplies of batteries and his supplies of vitamin-D pills.

It seems that Assange no longer cuts it with the celebrities anymore. “His WikiLeaks stuff pales in comparison with what Snowden has contributed to the destruction of the West -I mean, has contributed to the construction of freedom,” Pilger quickly corrects himself. “But I still feel for him.” he adds, ruefully, before hanging up.

I give up.
Switching the TV back on, I’m just in time to see a champion Australian skiier Dale Beg-Smith fall flat on his face. Mildly amusing that this unfortunate mishap may at first seem, I can’t help thinking about how a reckless anarchist and alleged rapist, in his attempt to avoid justice, has completely fallen flat on his face, and how this surprisingly tickles my funny-bone in a much higher, much more satisfying way.