“We are expecting roughly 85,000 attendees who have never been to a football match before,” said Harold MacMillan, State Transit’s Manager of Special Events.  “Perhaps even more if there’s fair weather. So we need to be sure that we have enough bandwagons for them all to jump on.” MacMillan said that bandwagons left over from the Swans’ Premiership win last week could be used if necessary.

British model Kate Moss has bounced back from the loss of four modelling contracts this week with a lucrative new promotional deal for diet coke. The deal, rumoured to be worth up to twenty thousand grams per year, will see Moss model the drug cartel’s latest lines of low-calorie cocaine. “Kate did some magnificent work popularising the heroin chic look in the early 90s,” said a diet coke intermediary. “And we believe she can do the same for cocaine chic now.”

Australian Guantanamo Bay inmate David Hicks has applied for British citizenship in a bid to avoid a US military tribunal and the ignominy of Australia’s recent Ashes defeat. “If there’s one thing I hate more than the whole of western civilization, it’s getting whipped by the Poms in the cricket,” Mr Hicks told his lawyer Major Michael Mori.

The Australian Football League has announced plans for a first Victorian team to be included in the Grand Final in as little as three years' time. “This will never truly be a national competition until the Victorians are part of it,” said AFL chief Andrew Demetriou. “And not just as hecklers.”

The Australian Labor Party has taken a lead from News Limited’s legal action against the ABC, seeking a permanent injunction to stop Mark Latham from doing any more publicity interviews for The Latham Diaries, or from ever speaking in public again. If granted, the injunction will force Latham to stop sabotaging Labor’s chances in the 2007 election – a role the party claims is the exclusive right of Kim Beazley.