What an incredible, hilarious waste of time this week has been in the House of Representatives. Has there a more ridiculous non-scandal than Utegate - a stupid, absurdly Australian moniker that befits the stupidity of the whole saga. Here's my Player Ratings on the winners and losers among the Utegate Dramatis Personae:

We live in a truly golden age of politics.

An federal election contest in Australia between Me-One and Me-Two. A state government in New South Wales where the treasurer knows more about fictitious conspiracy theories than he does about economic globalisation. In New Zealand, when parliamentary debates get boring, they step into the foyer for a bit of biffo. And of course there's America, where the President creates a whole new language to speakify in, and inventorates whole new meanings for existicated words such as "torture".

In an astonishing set of coincidences, political advertisements placed in three Tasmanian newspapers early in 2006 condemning the Greens on behalf of the Exclusive Brethren were recorded as being paid for out of Liberal Party electoral accounts.

Three separate and entirely unrelated "administrative bungles" at the Hobart Mercury, Launceston Advocate and Devonport Examiner caused sales records to give the totally and utterly absurd impression that the Liberal Party was colluding with the Brethren.

"Innovations such as YouTube are just one of many reasons why technology and time are making a nonsense of the current media rules."

- Senator Helen Coonan, addressing the conservative Millennium Forum, Sydney, 3.10.06

One week after the Minister for Information and Communication Technology cites Youtube as an example of contemporary media diversity, we are greeted this morning with the following news: Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock.