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Australian Prime Minister in no hurry to "bone up" on curse

JOHN Howard has been cursed - not in the polls, but by a bone-wielding woman clad in possum skin.

After sharing tea and scones with an acquiescent crowd of 500 locals in the west Victorian town of Colac yesterday, the Prime Minister was faced by a woman known as Moopor, who began waving a small bone at him.

Flanked by sacked ATSIC chairman Geoff Clark, Moopor, a member of Colac's traditional Tjap-Whuurong people, placed a spiritual curse on Mr Howard over his decision last week to abolish the indigenous elected body.

Mr Clark warned that the symbolic statement could produce two significantly different outcomes for the Prime Minister: it could enlighten him or bring him bad luck.

He warned that unless Mr Howard commenced a dialogue with the nation's indigenous population, he would be cursed.

"It's a two-way thing, a message really," Mr Clark said. "He (Mr Howard) has a lot of unfinished business before he leaves office and we believe that's a distinct possibility if he doesn't come to his senses. He'd be a fool if he ignored this."

Mr Clark warned that Mr Howard would be met by a group of protesting Aborigines at every public engagement until the election.

But Mr Howard was unbowed as he raced across the recently redistributed electorate of Corangamite with federal Liberal member Stewart McArthur.

"I don't think Mr Clark speaks for indigenous Australia," Mr Howard said when asked if he feared the curse of the bone.

The Prime Minister spent most of the day basking in the glow of a three-percentage-point primary vote gain for the Coalition in the latest Newspoll, delivering a wide-ranging election-style speech to the gathering in Colac before opening a nursing home in Geelong.

"I like giving wide-ranging speeches," he told a throng of reporters in Colac when asked whether it was an election pitch.

"I think it's important that when you come to a community you talk about a range of issues ... that audience, they're Australians before anything else and they want to know about the strength of the economy, they want to know about these international issues."