Howard swings in from the trees

Hairy friends … Daniel Clarke and his brother, William, at home in Terrey Hills, which the PM visited
THE Clarke family home in Sydney's northern suburb of Terrey Hills had never looked so neat as it did last Monday, when John Howard came to visit.
The day before, the Prime Minister's media adviser, David Luff, had called to say his boss wanted to visit - and would be bringing a video camera.
Mr Howard wanted the family to appear in his latest YouTube salvo. "We were up cleaning until 3.30 the next morning," Rodney Clarke told the Herald. "Ten mates also turned up that afternoon to landscape the garden."
Yesterday the Clarkes - and especially their 11-year-old son, Daniel - were the stars of an online policy announcement, providing $500,000 to help save the orang-utans of Borneo in Indonesia. "We didn't know he was going to be on YouTube," said Daniel's mother, Penny. "But we were excited when they called on Saturday afternoon to tell us."
Daniel, who has cerebral palsy, met the Prime Minister during a visit to the dressing room after a
Wallabies' match against Wales last May. He was trying to raise $10,000 for a campaign in primary schools to publicise the plight of the orang-utans, who are threatened by the loss of their rainforest habitat, and he appealed to Mr Howard for help.
On August 10 the Prime Minister wrote to him saying the Government would donate $500,000 over four years to the Australian Orang-utan Project, but he held off making the official announcement until yesterday, just two weeks before the election.
Daniel, who has amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of primates since seeing two reports - one on Channel Ten's 9am show, another by STEVE IRWIN - is now planning a trip to Borneo to meet the two orang-utans he and his brother, William, have adopted.
And while all this top-level lobbying and prime ministerial attention is heady, Daniel has a higher priority. He has requested a meeting with Bindi Irwin.