Bishop takes Kween We are simply staggered by the post-politics history of Teflon-coated former foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop. She barely seems to take a breath — from hopping on to the board of Palladium, a company that reaped millions in government during her time as foreign affairs minister, to hocking cars on Insta like a low-rent influencer, to the Frocktober campaign encouraging women to “get loud” on the subject of ovarian cancer, to definitely not lobbying on behalf of failed supply chain finance firm Greensill, to Estee Lauder spokesperson to the following Lynchian nightmare spruiking WA miners Mineral Resources:
Whatever your sponcon needs, Bishop will be there, a book of girlboss aphorisms in one hand and some gaudy shoes in the other — something that, amazingly, doesn’t seem to have stopped since she took the ANU chancellor gig. ANU, by the way, divested from mining and resource companies back in 2014. One wonders if it has any views on her consistent shilling for the same.
A few stray points. Actor Kate Walsh has clearly not been careful with that Grey’s Anatomy cash, and it’s particularly dispiriting to see veteran Seven Network WA newsman Rick Ardon show up, doing a fake news report about skyrocketing lithium prices and pausing to compliment Bishop’s shoes. Only in WA would such a move not be hopelessly compromising for a journalist — hell, he implies he’s representing Seven in his bit.
Finally, how Bishop — who got her start as a lawyer for CSR in the 1980s fighting against claims by workers who caught mesothelioma at the Wittenoom asbestos mine — is able to spruik mining companies — and tell their workers to “get loud” about cancer — without anyone raising an eyebrow might be the perfect summation of her relationship with the media.
Courting disaster A quick follow-up to our item yesterday on Scott Morrison’s visit to Margaret Court’s Perth Prayer Tower. First, one tipster got in touch to point out the tower itself — maybe not quite as effective an architectural rendering of the divine as, say, Notre Dame, but on the plus side it does possibly represent the apotheosis of Perth’s unslakeable lust for fuck-ugly buildings:
Not for the first time, I ask my home state: why are we so obsessed with brown panelling? It’s pathological.
Another tipster mentioned that given Court didn’t specify in her speech what Wimbledon fans had done to start down the “highway to hell”, maybe she wasn’t damning anyone to hell. Maybe she was trying to find converts among the big chunk of WA that claims AC/DC as its own.
Crikey Crikey Crikey As we have already covered, Twitter handles can cause all kinds of issues. So as mad as we are at the Irwin family’s finagling of the name Crikey! for its magazine — which frankly should be a national scandal — it does sometimes work in our favour:
Thanks to a slightly inexact piece of tweeting, it’s our Crikey that’s tagged in the news that Robert Irwin is launching a wildlife photography competition. Robert, thank you. We look forward to teaming up (we’re fairly sure that this is legally binding).
Look up at the Sky There is simply nothing UK’s branch of Sky News loves more than pointing a camera at a static and meaningless but news-adjacent situation. It may have finally reached perfection in this pursuit. During the heatwaves blanketing the UK with 40-degree days, the rolling news station has, for remarkably long periods, had an inset image prodiving viewers with up-to-the-minute knowledge of the doings of the actual sun:
