It has been a bit nippy in Melbourne of late, so when City of Melbourne officers received a concerning report about a distressed dog, they jumped into action.
A caller told the council on Monday that a dog was lying still on a Southbank street, seemingly frozen solid from overnight chilly temperatures.
The City of Melbourne wants to reunite this lost taxidermied dog with its owner.Credit: City of Melbourne
The council’s animal management workers found the animal in Clarendon Street. The brown Labrador cross was cold, stiff and, in fact, very dead. But fear not; this isn’t a story of neglect but quite the opposite.
It seems the pampered pooch had departed this doggone life many, many years ago and then been stuffed.
“Our animal management team thought they’d seen it all, until yesterday,” the City of Melbourne joked on Facebook.
It told CBD it had never encountered any taxidermy pets before but confirmed the lost canine was safe at the council’s offices and eager to be reunited with its owner.
KEEP ’EM KEEN
Those of us – OK, most of us – who can’t avert our eyes this week from the spectacle of Moira Deeming versus John Pesutto in the Federal Court, won’t be surprised to learn that the defamation case between the exiled Liberal MP and the party’s leader is attracting overseas interest.
Now it’s true that the most outspoken international observer, Kellie-Jay Keen-Munshull AKA Posie Parker, has what you might call a special interest in the case; Pesutto was forced to apologise in May to the UK anti-trans rights activist, after she sued him over comments he made in the wake of that ill-fated March 2023 Let Women Speak rally.
Moira Deeming (left) and Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull in a video posted after the Let Women Speak rally in March last year.Credit: Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull
Indeed, Keen-Minshull’s name has come up a good deal in this week’s proceedings.
But still, she appeared quite gracious back in May after Pesutto clarified that he didn’t think, or mean to say, that she was some sort of Nazi sympathiser, with Keen-Minshull telling the ABC afterwards that she was delighted with “such a full and magnanimous apology”.
So CBD was saddened to note that spirit of rapprochement seems a distant memory, if this effort from Keen-Minshull on Tuesday, the second day of the case, is anything to go by.
“I’ve heard I’m on trial in Australia,” she wrote on X.
“A silly little upstart at the end of his career has chosen my reputation as his hill to die on.
“Let me know when the wake is, I’ll get the champagne.”
Pesutto’s dance card is full for the next week or two, so we doubt if he’d be able – or willing – to join Kellie-Jay and the gang for that glass of bubbles.
We did ask his people on Thursday what they made of Keen’s barb. If we hear back, we’ll let you know.
BOYS, BOYS, BOYS
We thought something was up when Jamie Briggs, the former Liberal junior minister turned corporate affairs head at government consulting firm Scyne Advisory, was liking federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s LinkedIn posts. Scyne, which was spun out of PwC last year after that firm’s tax scandal disgrace, is in the business of winning government contracts, not cosying up with Dutts.
By mid-morning, CBD, and about everyone else, realised this was because Briggs will soon be working with the opposition leader as a chief adviser on politics and campaigns.
An injured Jamie Briggs after Tony Abbott’s toppling in 2015.Credit: Andrew Meares
Now, usually the conveyor-belt that delivers most of our bland, cookie-cutter politicians from the major parties to parliament goes something like this: staffer, to fuzzily defined government relations role at big corporate, to smarmy backbencher warming a safe seat, to (if very lucky) junior minister.
Briggs is doing it all in reverse, eight years after his stint in federal parliament was up. And what an awesome time it was.
The morning after Tony Abbott was knifed by Malcolm Turnbull, Briggs infamously rolled into parliament using a wheelchair. After insisting he’d hurt his knee running, the soon-to-be-demoted junior minister later admitted the injury was the result of “high jinks with the former prime minister”, whom Briggs had tried to crash-tackle during a wild spill-night party. Guys being dudes, as they say.
He would later quit as a junior minister in 2015 after an incident with a female departmental staffer late at night in a Hong Kong bar. The married father of three had tried to kiss the 26-year-old staffer on the cheek and commented on her “piercing eyes”. Within months, he’d lost the safe Liberal seat of Mayo to Rebekha Sharkie (who’s held it ever since). What a legacy.
Now, Briggs has been drafted by Dutton to help win an election in which the opposition must stop giving female voters the ick, and reclaim former Liberal seats where locals have abandoned the party for more-independent types.
LABOR TACKLES ABC DIVERSITY
Such is the Albanese government’s permanent state of crank towards the Greens that it’s rare to see them on the same page these days.
But it seems like both parties have come around to the blinding whiteness of the ABC board. Much like senior leadership in media companies across the country, the board of the national broadcaster is entirely white. Modern Australia is not.
Senator Mehreen Faruqi took aim at the “unacceptable” lack of diversity on the ABC board.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland took some baby steps towards changing that this week when the government updated the selection criteria for the appointment of non-executive directors to the board. The new criteria include a direction that board members must possess “an understanding of, or the ability to credibly represent, the communication needs of Australia’s diverse society”.
This update came just weeks after Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi wrote to Rowland slamming the “unacceptable” lack of diversity on the ABC board.
“The ABC board is completely and embarrassingly bereft of diversity,” the senator thundered, adding she had no doubt this contributed to the treatment of Stan Grant and fill-in presenter Antoinette Lattouf.
Grant, a Wiradjuri man and former Q+A host, accused the broadcaster of “institutional failure” over its lack of support when his analysis of King Charles’ coronation prompted a deluge of racist abuse. Lattouf was sacked after sharing a post on Instagram from Human Rights Watch, with a subsequent dispute with the ABC headed to the Federal Court.
So had Faruqi’s scathing letter pushed the government to make the change? Surely nobody would want to hand a win to the Greens Political Party (as Labor is wont to call its progressive rival).
We hear the government had been working on the changes since well before Faruqi’s letter.
“The changes were informed by the government’s review of options to support the independence of the national broadcasters, and in consultation with the ABC and SBS,” a spokesperson for Rowland told us.
Faruqi, meanwhile, told CBD the changes were simply a step forward and “still only a nod to diversity”.
“There should be an explicit requirement for the board to include members from marginalised diverse communities. And I will keep pushing for it,” she said.
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