Charity and peril

BY now we’ll probably know whether the Canberra press gallery’s Midwinter Ball was a night of jollity for all, or whether it left some regretful.

BY now we’ll probably know whether the Canberra press gallery’s Midwinter Ball was a night of jollity for all, or whether it left some regretful they hadn’t kept in mind the warning Admiral Ackbar gave in the presence of an altogether bigger ball: “It’s a trap!”

Yes, it’s raised a mighty pile of cash for charity, but it’s also been the scene of some serious career mishaps, whether it was that Sophie Mirabella staffer who hampered his career with a grope-a-thon, or Kevin Rudd delivering a “humorous” speech so unfunny it surely contributed to his political demise a few days later. Then there was Malcolm Turnbull sowing the seed of what would soon blossom into Utegate. At least the chemistry sounded right last night: Turnbull and Anthony Albanese at the Fairfax table, Peta Credlin at the News Corp table and, most importantly, Clive Palmer at the ABC’s. Incidentally, dinner with Turnbull and Julie Bishop ended up attracting $10,600 on the Ball’s charity eBay auction. This was eclipsed only by Tony Abbott’s dinner ($15,100). Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek fared more modestly ($3950), pipped by Palmer ($5200) but besting the Greens, who got one bid of $3000 and so will dine with loggers.

Tale of the unexpected

THERE was a moment in question time yesterday when Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss sounded excited.

Rupe is all around him

WHEN The Australian Financial Review’s Neil Chenoweth looks at the stars, he sees Rupert Murdoch. When he hears the breeze in the trees, he hears Murdoch. When he crosses the street, smells the sea air, feels the cool mist off a waterfall, espies a kookaburra, hangs his coat on the back of a chair or steps in chewing gum, he thinks Murdoch. While some might fret and or ponder an intervention, or at least suggest he expand his number of hobbies to two, we stand in (apprehensive) awe of his devotion to our uberboss. Dependably, he was at it again in his only ever so slightly stalkerish way yesterday, tweeting, “18 days since Rupert Murdoch tweeted. Last time he was silent this long in Jan he had taken a tumble.” To this he added a link to Murdoch’s Tumblr murdochhere.tumblr.com — by the time we got to it, the site had been updated with a fresh photo of an apparently unharmed Murdoch reading The Wall Street Journal. We would suggest Chenoweth take up Murdoch Here’s invitation to sign up and “Never miss a post!”, but something tells us he already has.

Departure lounge

WE belatedly bid farewell to senator Ron Boswell, the only pollie broad spectrum enough to have (a) fretted about whether the sons of lesbians get taken to the footy (your sports dunce Strewthist would surely show up on the Bozza radar as an honorary lesbian), and (b) stuck up for Vietnamese songwriters jailed by their government.

A bob each way

AS the Fairfax Media empire shrinks, the rate of talent-sharing goes up. Yesterday, as part of their NSW budget coverage, The Australian Financial Review and The Sydney Morning Herald featured near identical photographs by the same photo journalist of NSW Treasurer Andrew Constance and his partner. And yet, possibly to maintain an air of diversity even in straitened circumstances, the captions contain a crucial difference. The SMH goes with “Constance and his partner Jennifer Clarke”, while the petite financial organ plumps for “Constance and his wife Ainslie”. No, Constance isn’t coming over all French president — it’s the same woman in both shots — so who’s right? In this case, the SMH; they should give themselves a Tim-Tam. (Mystifyingly, neither paper acknowledged Constance’s sterling work on the word-coining front when handing down the state budget on Tuesday, namely this bit: “Sydney is chocked with congestion and we are tackling the problem.” If there’s a city where the traffic is crying out for a marriage of inconvenience between choked and chockers, it’s Sydney.)

Ashes to ashes

IN what ultimately proved a temporary triumph of mind over matter, Strewth’s mother — who is generally to cigarettes what Pacman was to small, glowing dots — gave up smoking for three years. Alas, she then got back on the gaspers with such a vengeance, it’s like she’s trying to smoke every cigarette she missed, stoically undaunted by the ever more lurid medical horror her vice comes illustrated with. On which note, a thought from Victorian Strewth correspondent Bernard Slattery: “Pictures of diseased lungs, rotten toes and clamped eyeballs — and they call it PLAIN packaging?”

strewth@the australian.com.au