Party girl in an Aston Martin is a 'bingle' waiting to happen

Sydney

Offending the Australian public is not the easiest of tasks. Thick-skinned, tolerant and easy-going, this is a nation that famously extols the benefits of personal freedom and abhors killjoys, teetotallers, puritans and other 'wowsers'.

Hats off, then, to Lara Bingle - the bikini girl who starred in those 'Where the Bloody Hell Are You?' tourism commercials - who has caused uproar by tooling around town in an A$300,000 (HK$1.59 million) Aston Martin. The sports car, an early Christmas present from cricket-playing fiance Michael Clarke, has provoked a tsunami of abuse from Sydney's news media.

How could the pair be so vulgar when the Australian economy has been placed on life-support and thousands of ordinary wage-slaves are battling to stay afloat? One news hound calculated that the money spent on the flashy motor could have provided 'a warm bed' for 10,000 homeless people over the Christmas period - or sent 3,750 disadvantaged children off to holiday camp. One columnist labelled the Clarke-Bingle faux pas the 'PR doozy of 2008'.

Things went into overdrive when the sometime model and full-time party girl was spotted climbing into her new toy wearing 'steamy stilettos' and skin-tight jeans.

'Lara Bingle's mile-high heels may be the height of fashion, but how on Earth does the glamour girl drive in them?' intoned the gossip columnist from The Daily Telegraph.