Barnacle Bill

BILL Shorten is thrilling crowds with lines that all but burst with effort, but tank anyway.

SIMILAR to the way comedian Tommy Cooper created real magic for his audiences with tricks that didn’t work, Bill Shorten is thrilling crowds with lines that all but burst with effort, but tank anyway. Standing out like gonads on the dog that is Australian politics, they’ve earned their own segment — called Zingers — on Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell. It’s a segment Shorten was happy to reference this week, and we’re starting to suspect he’s crafting his lines with an eye to getting them on. If this is the case, he presented Micallef with a bulk delivery yesterday during a joint press conference with the state Labor member for Melbourne, Jennifer Kanis. There was no holding back Bill: “When you’ve got world leaders in the room, the Abbott government are pussycats. As soon as the world leaders leave Australia, then they turn into lions.” Furthermore: “You can see the fingernail marks in the concrete in Canberra as the Abbott government is being dragged back to deal with the domestic issues.” Also: “Tony Abbott is maintaining a profile lower than a submarine in terms of the Victorian state election.” Some delirium was setting in for us by the time he got to: “This budget has had more reboots and more barnacle removals than the Titanic.” Questions swirled in our head, not least: How did a ship that sank on its maiden voyage have time for either barnacles or reboot? But Shorten simply marched on: “The problem is it’s not the barnacles on the budget, on this unfair budget, which are impeding it, it’s that this unfair budget has sunk without trace. Tony Abbott should stop worrying about spin. He should start his budget again. It’s not a question of rebooting the PM, I think it’s now come to the point of booting the PM out and him taking his unpopular budget with him.” Somehow this failed to flush Abbott out into the open.

Light under a bushel

STREWTH was ready to hoist a white flag and surrender at this point. If Kanis, who was standing right next to the epicentre, was feeling a bit overwhelmed, we cannot blame her. Certainly she didn’t seem quite ready to make the most of a live TV moment:

Journo: “Is your profile high enough to withstand this Greens assault?”

Kanis: “I’m the sitting member. I think people do know who I am and what I stand for.”

Journo: “What is your latest polling suggesting?”

Kanis: “The only latest polling I have is what I read in the paper. As it says, the poll that counts is the poll on election day.”

Shorten felt obliged to do a sales pitch on Kanis’s behalf.

Out the door

WHATEVER else can be said about Clive Palmer during his time of trials, he is getting the whole storming-out-of-interview routine down pat. Watch his harrumphing exit from Thursday’s Lateline (“agenda-driven in a bid to save the show’s declining ratings”, the dinosaur farmer later opined) and note how he now disentangles himself from his earpiece in two swift, neat movements while making his terse farewells. Probably his best premature exit yet and a tribute to the power of practice.

Showing promise

WE were perhaps a touch snotty this week when we described Christopher Pyne’s online petition to save the ABC’s Adelaide production facilities as akin to a Death Star office hanging a “Keep Alderaan tidy” poster near his desk. Anyway, the laugh’s on us as the petition has now attracted more than 2500 names. Sure, many of the accompanying messages attached are rude to Pyne, but it’s still impressive work. There’ll be no stopping that young man if he ever gets into government.

Ballooning with Wayne

IN his tribute to Wayne Goss yesterday, Deloitte Australia head Giam Swiegers gave a textbook example of an inauspicious beginning: “My first few months in this country were quite blurry. And I went to my first meeting with Wayne. Those of you that know Wayne’s obsession with preparation for meetings and the standards he sets will appreciate that my choice of opening line, ‘So Wayne, what party do you belong to?’… ” — cue seismic laughter — “… went down like a lead balloon. And it was a rather short meeting.” Things obviously picked up from there.

No puff piece

YESTERDAY we suggested some ABC staff may be taking drastic measures to cope with cuts, citing this tweet from ABC News 24: “LIVE: Stephen Smiley on medical cannabis in Hobart …” On the off chance anyone took this as a sober and considered suggestion, Smiley yesterday tweeted, “To clarify, I’m not taking medicinal cannabis to cope with ABC budget cuts ... To further clarify, I’m not taking cannabis — medicinally or otherwise — at all.” In case you were wondering.

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