The Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, now has the task of selecting a suitably conciliatory song list.

Advance publicity for next month's bushfire benefit gig suggests that headline bands will play "20 minutes of hits".

But can Midnight Oil field 20 whole minutes of material that wouldn't get Mr Garrett sacked if he were to read it out in Parliament rather than shrieking it while twitching violently to guitar music?

Most of the Oils' hits are problematic for one reason or other. US Forces, obviously, is right out. So is Beds Are Burning, albeit for very different and much sadder reasons.

Power And The Passion? With its references to Uncle Sam and Pine Gap? Best left out, on the whole. And as for Truganini - "I see the Union Jack in flames; Let it burn", well - are you kidding? The Dead Heart looks OK for a bit, but disqualifies itself in the final stanza: "Mining companies, pastoral companies, uranium companies. Collected companies; Got more right than people."

This is very off-message stuff here in Ruddland.

One pictures the Environment Minister working his way through the Midnight Oil discography with a despairing red pencil, and eventually opting for a few Veronicas covers. Perhaps the best idea would be to enlist the aid of a guest vocalist, someone who does not feel at all constrained by questions of party loyalty.

How about Tony "People Skills" Abbott? Always wild and unpredictable, People Skills is going through a phase of compulsive truth telling.

Last week he declared Australia couldn't afford to pay pensioners more, and yesterday he made some unkind, if broadly accurate, remarks about the Prime Minister.

"The guy is a toxic bore in the Parliament," he began, in an interview with Sky News, then volunteered that Mr Rudd was "the worst parliamentary performer as Prime Minister since Billy McMahon". A nice touch, with McMahon's widow ill in hospital.

Not much of this will overly trouble Kevin Rudd, who is hovering somewhere between chocolate ice-cream and labrador puppies in the popularity stakes, in a devastating hint that perhaps voters like bores.