"I mean there's a lot of jokes about, you know, mother-in-laws," he told PM.

"Well they're funny, but they're not really funny. I mean there is a mechanism in there.

"You know, when you've got everybody living on top of each other and getting on each other's nerves, kids get on parent's nerves, parents irritate kids.

"I mean, you've got to understand when you've got 15 people in a house the result is just dreadful ... and that can be fixed tomorrow."

Women at the rally said his lack of awareness was disheartening from a long-serving Member of Parliament.

Domestic violence expert Betty Taylor has written reports for the Government on the issue.

"I love your costume..." "Thank you..."

What a shame the RSL was heavied into abandoning plans to build bridges between Vietnamese and Australian soldiers of the Vietnam war.

The RSL president, Rear Admiral Ken Doolan, had argued that ''we owe it to the future to do all we can to bring former enemies together''. But the Vietnam Veterans' Association wouldn't have a bar of it.

The allegations are horrifying, the evidence credible: massed civilians shelled and bombed, enemy leaders shot down after surrendering, naked and bound male and female prisoners executed by jeering soldiers. All happening just over two years ago in a nearby Commonwealth country.

Politics aside, the Occupy Wall Street movement has given us some memorable imagery: electric-blue tarps, various graphic riffs on 99 percent, the hipster cop.

The anger of the widow of the murdered Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane remains undimmed two weeks after she ended a meeting with David Cameron in which he declined to hold a public inquiry into her husband's death.

The directors of Britain's largest companies were last night condemned as "elite greedy pigs" for pocketing a 49 per cent pay rise in the past year, while average workers failed even to keep up with inflation.

Europe's leaders are claiming a victory in the eurozone crisis after agreeing new deals that halve Greek debt and increase the firepower of the main bailout fund to around €1trn.

Athens will be handed a new €100bn bailout early in the new year. The accord was reached in the early hours of Thursday after hours of fractious debate.

At one stage talks broke down with holders of Greek debt but they ended up accepting a loss or "haircut" of 50% in converting their existing bonds into new loans.

Two entities are more powerful than any individual government in the West. They are the financial markets and the media. We could argue about the latter, but surely nobody would deny the supreme and often malevolent power of the former.

Yesterday in Brussels a room full of 27 European presidents, chancellors and prime ministers was intent on a single task, trying to do what financial power demands.

Specialist detectives from the Metropolitan Police have discovered the existence of a secret mobile phone within News International's east London headquarters that was used in more than 1,000 incidents of illegal hacking.

The Independent has established that the phone, nicknamed "the hub", was registered to News International and located on the News of the World's news desk. Operation Weeting, the Metropolitan Police's hacking inquiry, has evidence that it was used illegally to access 1,150 numbers between 2004 and 2006.

Mr Abbott said he was not making any promises, just a prediction that his party is likely to kill off any mandatory pre-commitment scheme for poker machines that Labor introduces.

But Mr Wilkie says he is not convinced Mr Abbott would rescind the legislation if he was able to.

"He's actually been somewhat ambiguous. It's not written in blood like other promises are. He's talked about a prediction," Mr Wilkie told Lateline.

"And I think, in fact, that when these reforms are realised, he will find it very, very difficult to overturn them because, for a start, they have majority public support.

There's an old rule in journalism that ''man bites dog'' makes a far better story than ''dog bites man''. Dogs bite men every day, making it a less newsworthy event. But when men bite dogs, something unusual is going on - something people might like or need to know about.

Don your newspaper editor thinking hats and answer this: which type of story is it when Business A comes out warning of dire consequences if it is slapped with a new tax?

Is that what you'd expect them to say? Well, yes, it is. Dog biting man. If Business A came out complaining it didn't pay enough tax, that would be man biting dog.