Bad altitude for Canberra airport

Vale Canberra International Airport, we hardly knew thee.

Vale Canberra International Airport, we hardly knew thee.

Singapore Airlines has pulled out of the former sheep paddock indefinitely after only four years of direct overseas flights.

The airline, which laid off 4300 staff last week, doesn’t anticipate reinstating the service even once pandemic restrictions ease.

“This is not surprising given the international travel bans put in place by the Australian government and the global collapse in tourism and the aviation sector,” a grounded ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr reasoned.

“When the time is right we look forward to working with Canberra Airport and Singapore Airlines to return international flights to Canberra.”

Fingers crossed there’s only an airline fracture in the relationship.

Andrew Barr.

Go the social distance

Tony Abbott is back down under after a much publicised tour of his British birthplace, during which he was anointed an adviser to the UK Board of Trade.

Tony Abbott in quarantine.

Unlike certain celebs — such as movie star Tom Hanks who scored an exemption to normal quarantine and is serving his mandatory two-week isolation in a luxury Broadbeach resort — Australia’s 28th prime minister was put straight into a standard Sydney hotel alongside other recent arrivals.

“Brisk, professional and efficient,” is how he described the transit from the plane to secure bus to this paper.

“The staff at the hotel are ­efficient, friendly and professional, and the accommodation is clean and well run,” he said.

We understand the self-funded two-week stay will cost Abbott $3000.

During his downtime, the Howard government health minister has had time to reflect on the “mind-boggling bureaucratic bloody-mindedness” of Queens­land’s hard border closure.

While Abbott supports the “health security” fortnight of enforced solitary confinement, he ironically described Annastacia Palaszczuk’s refusal to allow people to cross the border or skip quarantine without permission as “heartless” and “a moonbeam from the larger lunacy”.

Abbott hopes rules requiring Quiet Australians to seek permission before they leave the country are “liberalised as soon as possible”.

Wonderful to catch up with former Australian Prime Minister @HonTonyAbbott this afternoon.

🇦🇺🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/OUKxcmEaGe

— Priti Patel (@pritipatel) September 2, 2020

Re-Turnbull

Did you remember to put out your onions on Monday?

Malcolm Turnbull on a Sydney train.

September 14 marked five years since Malcolm Turnbull defeated Abbott 54-44 in the 2015 Liberal leadership spill to become the nation’s 29th prime minister — perhaps the first for whom The Lodge would represent a step down.

What better way to reminisce about the knifing ennui than to dig into the Strewth archives and remind ourselves that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Or to borrow from the Abbott lexicon, “shit happens”.

Taking a spill

September 15, 2015: Amid all the emotional hurt of the latest spill, no one expected things to take a turn for the physical — hence everyone’s surprise when Jamie Briggs arrived yesterday in a wheelchair.

Jamie Briggs in a wheelchair.

Clutching crutches and wearing an expression of amusingly acute self-awareness, the Assistant Infrastructure Minister was pushed by his colleague Andrew Southcott — and straight into internet immortality.

Even Parliament House denizens hollow-eyed from lack of sleep were promptly re-energised, laughing almost to the point of bursting capillaries.

Even more so when rumours began circulating Briggs had acquired his injury during the long night before — as television news crews set up their broadcast spots on the lawn and cars zipped past Parliament House honking — falling off a marble table.

Upon which he’d been dancing. With Joe Hockey. During the joint partyroom debrief yesterday, one government figure, who might have been expected to be wearing a sombre expression, cracked up like one of Australia’s Funniest Home Videos’ target audience.

On the waters.

Despite the persistent rumours of tabletop dancing, Briggs said it was nothing of the sort.

“Unfortunately the truth will always ruin a good story,” he told Strewth. “I was running, changed direction and I heard a big pop. It seems I’ve done an anterior cruciate ligament. I’m heading home to see an orthopaedic surgeon.”

Table of contents

Which is where the plot thickens. Briggs later confessed how he really injured his knee that infamous night. Suspicious Minds was playing — a dedication to Abbott’s deputy then defector Julie Bishop.

“I went to tackle (Abbott),” Briggs recalls.

The marble table.

“I ran, I missed and the rest is history. Everyone knows Tony Abbott is a very fit man, a very strong man and I’m not at the peak of my powers as far as fitness and strength is concerned and I lost.”

Leave it to this paper’s own political gum shoe Nikki Savva to solve the mystery of the marble table.

“Different people jumped on to an expensive marble-topped Italian table to speak or dance, but when Joe Hockey hopped on to it, the marble cracked,” Savva wrote in her page-turning tome Road to Ruin.

“Hockey fell straight through the middle.”

In the end, Abbott forked out $2027 to pay the in-house repair bill to fix the “minor fracture” on the table top.

The marble table.

The same vein

Queensland Health is investigating a nurse who works for the 13 HEALTH hotline, after she told a patient with severe abdominal pain to, shall we say, pleasure herself under the shower and rub oil on her, err, perineum — instead of sending her immediately to the emergency department.

“We apologise for any distress caused to the patient, which is why we took immediate action within 24 hours of the incident,” a Queensland Health spokesman said.

Believe it or not, the nurse who offered the advice allegedly has five years’ experience.

Saving time

Paul Keating without context.

“Superannuation is the grease that lubricates the wheels of people’s lives later on, where no such lubrication would exist simply by reliance on the age pension,” Australia’s 24th prime minister told the aged-care royal commission on Monday.

PJK.

Fair go

We may be throwing stones in glass houses here, but Strewth thoroughly enjoyed Monday’s edition of the Sydney Morning Herald.

In the spirit of Wagga Wagga — so nice they named it twice — the Nine paper printed double-ups of not one but two stories.

“Family hits out at PM for ‘politicising’ dad’s death” scored significant column inches on page 8 and again on page 11, and “ABA extends credit easing on late loans” was such a cracker it appeared twice on the same spread.

Talk about a creative solution to filling the Sunday-for-Monday yarn void!

whoops pic.twitter.com/UghaVPIGor

— Alice Workman (@workmanalice) September 13, 2020

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