Prime Minister Albanese’s Murphy of the People
There are Canberra bubbles, and then there are Canberra microbubbles so intense that they can’t absorb anything not directly Canberra-related. By her own admission, Katharine Murphy lives in such a microbubble.
A few months ago, Murphy – a former Guardian press gallery bore who’s shifting to the Prime Minister’s propaganda department – noticed Victoria's then-premier Dan Andrews on her office TV screen.
This led to a few stray Murphy-style thoughts, but she really didn’t pay too much attention – because, as Katharine wrote:
Victorian politics is outside my wheelhouse, so I had zero intelligence that Andrews was on the brink of quitting.
She’s a political obsessive in a country of only 27 million people, but Murphy can’t process politics beyond a federal sphere. She can’t even properly follow political events in a state just three hours away.
Talk about a narrow professional bandwidth. If Murpharoo worked at McDonald’s, she’d be solely in charge of Big Mac sesame seed arrangement – but only for a strictly defined five-centimetre central bun zone. Perimeter seed location would be, one assumes, “outside her wheelhouse”.
Murphy, then, isn’t exactly the first person you’d pick to market a national figure. Nor is she someone aligned with broad Australian opinion. For example, she's got a certain hankerin':
I still hanker for the carbon price we lost because of rancid politics.
— Katharine Murphy (@murpharoo) November 22, 2023
But evidence based policy nostalgia is pointless.
This is a big deal 👇
- with â¦@adamlmortonâ© https://t.co/RntGhopVJq
Worth examining, too, is Murphy’s response to Hamas’s October 7 massacre. It’s entirely, almost obscenely Canberra-centric.
More than one thousand Jews were variously raped, slaughtered and kidnapped, so Murphy came up with a piece headlined: “Peter Dutton is Australia’s figurehead of fear and fake news.”
A final thought: what does it say about Labor’s economic management when, as a number of readers have observed, it puts someone on the public payroll for work previously generated by the private sector?
Seems inefficient. And potentially hilarious. Keep watching.
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Today’s noticeboard is brought to you by a daring public experiment. In Sydney this week, intrepid social engineers attempted to discover what happens when you combine feminism, comedy and an audience of sad wokens.
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