Homophobic Religious Extremists For Howard

Damn. The Poll Bludger has "inside dope" on Turnbull, but his site is down. I can't help wondering if it's related to this little out-of-nowhere snippet from SMH today:

Mr Cousins's campaign against Mr Turnbull comes amid growing calls by the sizeable gay community in the minister's eastern suburbs electorate for the Government to extend equal legal and financial rights to same-sex couples. Mr Turnbull is pushing to have the law changed but cabinet shelved a decision when it met on Tuesday.

Labor has promised to end the legislative discrimination, which exists in 58 areas of law, if elected.

Is that what all this is about? I was trying to work out what Cousin's motivation is here - could it be pure homophobia?

In other news today, we learn that staff from the PM's office and Dept Defence have been making massive edits to Wikipedia, including adding sentences such as "Freemasonry is the work of Satan", "Mormonism is the work of Satan" and "Jesus is god".

Could it be that Cousin's Turnbull-bashing is just another manifestation of this sadly outdated mindset?

UPDATE: Labour polling shows Turnbull is likely to lost his seat. The Libs have now doubled the number of seats considered "marginal". Howard is going to have to find some more fish.

UPDATE: The Tassie mill issue gets international attention, with the UK Independent noting that Tasmania is "regarded as the birthplace of the global environmental movement ". Turnbull is now backing down, saying he has only given draft approval to the mill. It seems likely that a compromise will be reached by moving the mill to another location:

"We've always suspected that the only real reason they (Gunns) opted for the Tamar was that it was $60million cheaper," Senator [Bob] Brown said.