You may have thought our Treasurer, Joe Hockey, was copping enough flak from his own backbenchers without dragging in one of Paul Keating's heavy hitters to have a shot at him.

During question time on Wednesday, Hockey signed a deal with the Swiss gnomes to ensure our tax office could get better information on Aussies with Swiss bank accounts.

"I bet there are a few people in the Labor Party shuddering at that thought," he told parliament.

"There is a former minister for communications who has a television program who might have had a Swiss bank account. But I will leave that to another day."

By coincidence, there was a former Labor minister for transport and communications with his own Sky TV show, Graham Richardson, who decided to spray back Wednesday evening.

"When it comes to getting criticism of you, I don't have to go far," he told Hockey via his viewers.

"I don't have to ring up the Labor party, I can ring anyone in your party room and I can get someone to bag you," he said.

"You are regarded, amongst your own show, as a joke and you ought to know it."

The scandal-prone Richardson is not unfamiliar with Swiss accounts. Some of the profits from a $52.3 million insurance payout for a 1993 fire at Offset Alpine Printing Group found their way into a Swiss bank account operated by Richardson.

Bond villain

At the earlier signing of the agreement in Canberra, Swiss ambassador Marcel Stutz was complaining about the image problem his country faced thanks to James Bond.

"One of the problems with James Bond is ... if the bad guys have to put the money somewhere, they put it in Switzerland," the ambassador said.

And here we were thinking it was all that account secrecy stuff that was giving them a bad name. So that's where HSBC's Swiss private banking arm got the idea to engineer client tax dodges. They're James Bond fans.

And, presumably, so are the executives from Australia's money-printing operation, Securency.

Inflated numbers

AGL, it seems, can't take a trick when it comes to coal seam gas.

New chief executive Andrew Vesey, who recently ordered a review of the company's entire upstream business, woke to the news on Thursday that its relatively successful Camden gas field has been slugged with a $15,000 fine for failing to maintain a well "in a proper and efficient condition".

Uncertainty extends to how much unwanted methane leaked over Sydney's south-western residents back in the August mishap. According the Office of Coal Seam Gas, it may have been as much as 100,000 cubic feet.

AGL, though, seems to be operating in a parallel universe. According to its media release, the gas leak was 10,000 square cubic feet – perhaps shown as 10,000 feet⁶?

When pressed, the long-suffering flak conceded standard cubic feet was the more common measure.

Bullshit happens

After it's recent exodus of talent from the boardroom and broadcast room, it's good to see that Southern Cross Media has unearthed an executive who could easily fill both roles.

Southern Cross Austereo's Perth boss, Linda Wayman, told the Mumbrella Perth Conference that notions of easily achieving work-life balance was "bullshit" and she keeps a "big jar of condoms at work" to stop staff having babies.

She also has an "Angela Jolie Award' for staffer who benefited from colleague being on maternity leave.

No word on what Wayman has planned for on  International Women's Day, which takes place on Sunday.

Not that Wayman has not been supportive of staff needing a little bit of help with their work-life balance.

"We had a breakfast host who had a huge work ethic. She had a baby, then another one. She used to do breakfast, then the house cleaning because her husband wanted to go surfing. I offered to go and shove a vacuum cleaner up his arse because that's how supportive I am of our female staff."

Opium dealers

While sporting code crosser Karmichael Hunt has been grabbing the headlines, one of the biggest drug deals in Australian history was quietly being transacted behind the scenes.

Australia's oldest opium processor, GlaxoSmithKline, announced the sale of its Australian opiates division to India's largest pharmaceutical business, Sun Pharmaceuticals.

Sun is owned by Indian billionaire Dilip Shanghvi, who is second on the latest Forbes list with a fortune estimated at $US20 billion.

Got a tip? ckruger@fairfaxmedia.com.au