By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
The Australian can’t get enough of Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Price was a beloved News Corp talking-head long before she landed in the upper house and became Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s secret weapon during the Indigenous Voice to parliament referendum last year, regularly gracing the pages of the national broadsheet and popping off on Sky News.
News Corp favourite: Northern Territory senator Jacinta Price.Credit: James Brickwood
We’re hardly surprised, then, that Price was among the influential crowd of old and new money that gathered in Sydney to celebrate 60 years of The Australian in July.
Hosted by the empire’s heir Lachlan Murdoch at the Australian Museum, guests included Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his deputy Richard Marles, Dutton, former PM John Howard, shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, greenwashing mining magnate Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar, Merivale pub mogul Justin Hemmes and racing and rugby league honcho Peter V’landys.
At the time, our correspondents reckoned it was “one of the richest rooms Australia has ever assembled”.
Price, elected as a Country Liberal in 2022 before quickly making her way into Dutton’s shadow cabinet, was probably the most junior politician in the mix.
But News Corp clearly wanted her there, so much so that the media empire paid for her flights to Sydney and accommodation specifically for the event, according to her register of interests. None of the other politicians lucky enough to score a golden ticket had their expenses covered, as far as we can tell.
We asked The Australian’s owner News Corp if it had put Price up at the Vibe Hotel Darling Harbour but didn’t hear back, while we were still waiting on the senator’s people.
MEAT LOAF MARK
To Macquarie Street, where the taxpayers of NSW continue to foot the bill for one-time Labor leader Mark Latham to say strange things under parliamentary privilege.
Latham’s latest ramble came as part of his ongoing beef with Legalise Cannabis MP Jeremy Buckingham, who’s had a good crack at trolling the former One Nation man since getting elected last year.
When Buckingham was late to the chamber last week, Latham decided to move his colleague’s latest motion on the goodness of ganja on his behalf. Which came with plenty of snide commentary about Buckingham himself. Choice quotes from Latham’s tirade included “when he jumps into the cesspool the maggots jump out” and “a cruel and sad man denying a village its idiot”. We’re really not sure where he gets this stuff.
Buckingham took all this in his stride when he returned to finish moving his motion (which was comprehensively rejected by the Reefer Madness types in parliament), before hitting back at his upper-house sparring partner.
Calling Latham a “rank hypocrite”, Buckingham tabled an article from 2005 in which the former Labor leader expressed regret about smoking a joint in federal Parliament House early in his career.
The weed incident, which Latham also wrote about in his own memoir, was said to have occurred sometime in the 1990s after he’d first been elected as an MP.
In the same article, Latham for some reason admitted to being more into Meat Loaf than rap music. Buckingham has since taken to calling him “Meat Loaf Mark”, a nickname Latham isn’t thrilled with.
What would those two do without each other?
CRY ME A RIVER
Political staffers cop it in the neck from all directions – sometimes even from us. So we feel it’s only fair to draw attention to an appreciation post for these beleaguered folk from an unexpected source: CT Group co-founder Mark Textor.
“The backbone of government”: Mark Textor has come to the defence of political staffers.Credit: Wolter Peeters
Textor, the “internationally celebrated campaign pollster and communications strategist” (according to CT Group), took to LinkedIn to lament the rough time dished out to the worker bees.
“Political staffers take a mountain of B/S from all sides, including their own, but they’re working under pressure most wouldn’t even dream of … all while facing the constant threat of being out of a job after the next election,” wrote Textor, who helped John Howard to election victories here and Boris Johnson to election victories in Britain.
“But critics, comfortably sitting at their keyboards, don’t understand the realities of life in politics.”
That would be us. So we are more than happy to give staffers some credit and “drop the 360-degree cynicism”, as Textor puts it.
“They’re the backbone of government, getting their hands dirty making sure the wheels don’t fall off. They deserve recognition for it,” he wrote.
And some of them make for excellent sources. So, recognition over, normal mockery shall resume tomorrow.
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