DFAT off the hook on staff towels; Matt Kean’s startling leap to Climate Change Authority

The Canberra headquarters of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which has fallen short on decent change room facilities in recent times.

It’s so rare for scandal to leak from Canberra’s RG Casey building, home of the nation’s diplomatic corps and headquarters of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Now word has reached us of a minor disgrace developing within, all the result of a terrible miscalculation by the peacemakers in charge of the agency.

An email disseminated to all staff this month brought news that the hooks and racks had been removed from the office change rooms, leaving no space for anyone to hang a towel after jogging or cycling to work.

The union repping DFAT’s employees steamed with indignity over this abomination. No consultation at all, they fumed, outlining a very short list of solutions to resolve the matter.

If there can’t be “a towel drying room/area” then at least DFAT should provide a towel service for its employees.

“Neither of these options have been put forward,” the Community and Public Sector Union wrote of DFAT management.

DFAT’s counter-solution was frankly gross. It seemed to think staff could “leave their towels in plastic bags” for drying and cleaning each night or, even better, to “dry their towel at their desks”.

At their desks? Not very hygienic but, sure, if you like sitting in a room that reeks of something like a wet dog.

But for all these offers and counteroffers, it seems a rapprochement has been reached with the union, with DFAT ­basically caving after consultation with its staff.

The plan was always to install lockers in place of the hooks but now, to avert further crisis, each locker will come with a hook, for a towel, or whatever.

Kean to help

Former NSW Liberal MP Matt Kean startled everyone on Monday when he appeared in the prime minister’s courtyard with Anthony Albanese, the PM there to name him as the incoming chair of the Climate Change Authority. What followed was spontaneous combustion from a raft of coalition MPs in multiple jurisdictions, the most spectacular involving Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, who appeared on Sky News to call Kean a traitor.

Matt Kean. Picture: Tim Hunter.

“He should have joined the Labor Party in the start when he left school and signed up. That’s his natural home,” Joyce said.

Given that Kean was still a sitting MP up until a week ago – he delivered his valedictory speech in NSW parliament on Friday – it stands to reason that he’d been in dialogue with the Albanese government about this appointment for weeks, if not months. An inducement to leave parliament? We wouldn’t quite say that, just yet.

Anyway, spotted among parliament’s shadowy nooks was none other than Kean’s trusted former adviser and chief of staff Sean Berry, these days a director of strategy, risk and reputation at PwC Australia, a role that isn’t based in Canberra.

What was Berry doing there? Assisting with the political fallout?

Apparently not. Kean and Berry are close pals and we hear Berry was merely rubbing shoulders in a supporting role rather than doing actual work.

Which is cute, but we aren’t buying it. Attempts to put that to Berry himself were unsuccessful.

Mashed-up Greens

Know someone with a hyphenated surname?

Their numbers are small, according to the social demographers at McCrindle, who reckon double-barrelled names account for just 3 per cent of the population.

That factoid was noted by a loyal reader who’d been perusing a list of Greens MPs in the federal party room (for reasons we won’t go into).

What’s worth noting is that a whopping 47 per cent of federal Greens have a mashed-up surname – seven out of the 15 currently in parliament.

That’s a bloody high number (and barely representative of the broader community, as McCrindle noted).

For those wondering, federal Labor has two MPs with hyphenated surnames (Michelle Ananda-Rajah and Louise Miller-Frost), so roughly 2.56 per cent of the caucus.

And the Coalition party room? Zero. Hyphen free.

Shadow of herself

Nicolette Boele earned a mention in Margin Call a few months after the 2022 election when she stood as a candidate in Bradfield against Liberal MP Paul Fletcher – and lost. Not content with the result, Boele immediately styled herself as Bradfield’s’ “shadow representative”, which was kooky enough.

Nicolette Boele, who has rebranded herself as the ‘shadow representative for Bradfield’, with Simon Holmes a Court.

Things got weird when she went further and opened a “shadow” electorate office, like an actual bricks-and-mortar office dressed up like that of a working MP.

She used it to launch a campaign party for her election, even though a ballot wouldn’t be held for years. Climate200 founder Simon Holmes a Court even turned up to cheer on this silliness. “I love this chutzpah,” he tweeted at the time.

We bring this up now only to note that Boele seems to have scrubbed her website of all the ridiculous “shadow representative” mentions (but not this one) and is now dubbing herself the “independent candidate” for Bradfield, presumably because an election is close at hand.

No problem. Well, actually, one.

Teal independent Kylea Tink appears to have lost her seat in North Sydney and could theoretically try to run in Bradfield to stay in parliament.

It’s not an outside chance, either. A test for Holmes a Court: how nicely will the teals play when a shot at power is at stake?