Taking out the trash We wanted to note the news, dumped on the Friday of a four-day weekend, that Western Australian Liberal Ben Small had been found ineligible to hold his Senate seat for the distinctly old-school reason that he holds dual citizenship. Turns out having a TER of 99.75 (which Small includes in his parliamentary bio for some reason) doesn’t make you good at paperwork. We understand it’s all sorted now and Small intends to run again, giving us reason to hope for more of the joy that can only come from politicians using Senate estimates to read deadpan Twitter jokes mocking his colleagues.
Simpsons did it We’re delighted to see the Liberal National Party has finally discovered The Simpsons as posting fodder, something the page “The Simpsons against the Liberals” has been mining for years. Over the weekend the LNP shot back, with a solid-enough gag about the apparent booing of Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese at Byron Bay Bluesfest:
Meanwhile, the Greens, reverting to type after the fever dream of that “sexy Shrek” video, managed to post two Simpsons memes in as many days that managed, almost impressively, to be utterly joyless and joke-free.
Gaffe watch We perhaps didn’t expect to have such a clear test of whether an Albanese gaffe might get hammered a little more that the equivalent from Scott Morrison quite so soon. But here it is. First, the genuinely strange way Morrison slipped into calling a journalist “Mr Speaker” three times during a press conference, as though the muscle memory of question time had kicked in. Then he mistook the daily rate of JobSeeker for the weekly rate (something the PMO had to correct in its transcript of the presser).
When Albanese couldn’t name the cash rate and the unemployment rate, it made the front pages of The Australian, The Courier-Mail, The Australian Financial Review, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Herald Sun, The Advertiser and others, the coverage splayed across three days — finding some grubby places in the process — and prompted panicked Labor figures to tell the AFR and the News Corp tabloids that they were rethinking the whole campaign. For whatever reason, neither Morrison slip-up was considered front-page worthy for any of those publications.
Bookish With thanks to the contributor who pointed this out: who would be the first entrant for an Australian version of Private Eye’s “Pseuds Corner”, the British satirical mag’s collection of pseudo-intellectual quotes?
Who else but Peter Hartcher, who when asked for his closing thoughts on Easter Sunday Insiders noted: “As Francis Fukuyama said in his two-volume Sources of Political Order, democracies have to evolve to survive…” Wow! Democracies have to evolve to survive! We can see why you had to gratuitously cite a weighty tome for such an insight! Was that in volume one or two? But wait it got better/worse. Samantha Maiden responded: “I was reading Jacques Derrida the other day…” Laughter ensued.
