New around here

Donald Trump cracked the mystery Labor has struggled with at every question time since Malcolm Turnbull departed.

Scott Morrison, left, meets Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires. Picture: AAP

Given Australia’s sushi train of prime ministers, Angela Merkel could be forgiven for checking her notes on Scott Morrison at the G20 in Buenos Aires — even as she sat next to him. But Donald Trump cracked the mystery Labor has struggled with at every question time since Malcolm Turnbull departed. As Trump put it: “You’ve done a lot of the things that they’ve wanted over there and that’s why you’re sitting right here.” Which sounds like the Trumpian version of: If you have a go, you’ll get a go.

Kelly country

The festival of Craig “Bye-bye curious” Kelly has become quite the bewitching affair. Labor’s Graham Perrett didn’t seem in any rush for it to end when he was on Sky News with Kelly the other day. Host Tom Connell bravely embarked on a mission to get Kelly to clarify his position, and was rewarded with slabs of the quote magic for which Kelly is renowned. For instance: “Look, I’ve tried not to play a rule in, rule out game but when you’re completely misreported in the media I think you have an obligation to clarify these things and perhaps rule a couple of things in and out.”

And this.

Kelly: “I was elected as the Liberal member for Hughes and I believe all of us, every single member that sits in that parliament, when you put your name on that ballot paper you are asking people to enter into a contract with you. You’ve got a contract to run the full term as a sitting member and as a member of that team.”

Connell: “But you’re quoted today as saying that could include leaving the Liberal Party and becoming a crossbencher even though you’d vote for supply and confidence.”

Kelly: “Oh, Tom, that’s another one of those hypotheticals upon hypotheticals.”

How could anyone fail to respond to the beauty of such a moment? Certainly not Perrett, whose poetic sensibility is sharpened in the presence of the sublime.

Kelly: “I was elected the Liberal member for Hughes. I’ll be the Liberal member of Hughes for this term of government.”

Connell: “All right. Well, that seems pretty clear, then. We’ll keep talking about this but I don’t want to leave Graham Perrett entirely out of the conversation.”

Perrett: “Feel free to take my time, Tom.”

Sorrow drowner

During the 2016 federal election campaign, Strewth helpfully provided a different cocktail recipe nearly each of the bazillion days it seemed to last. We’re not officially in a campaign yet but it seems as good a time as any to crack out Death in the Gulf Stream, the cocktail Ernest Hemingway invented in 1937 to help in hard times. Take it away, Papa: “Take a tall thin water tumbler and fill it with finely cracked ice. Lace this broken debris with four good purple splashes of Angostura, add the juice and crushed peel of one green lime, and fill glass almost full with Holland gin … No sugar, no fancying. It’s strong, it’s bitter — but so is English ale strong and bitter, in many cases. We don’t add sugar to ale, and we don’t need sugar in a ‘Death in the Gulf Stream’ — or at least not more than one teaspoon. Its tartness and its bitterness are its chief charm.”

The co-stars

Moving right along, here’s Christopher Pyne and Richard Marles on the Sky News show that bears their names.

Pyne: “Well, Richard, being lectured by the Labor Party about delivering a surplus budget …”

Marles: “It must hurt.”

Pyne: “ … is like being lectured by Freddy Krueger about kindness to children.”

Marles guided it to a happier realm: “And that brings us to the question of the week. There was a remarkable picture this week of a big cow — I think actually technically a big steer — and it clearly was a very big cow, but it made us think: What is your favourite big thing? So, Christopher: what is yours?” For the record, Pyne plumped for the Big Lobster of Kingston, and Marles for the petite Sphinx of Geelong.

Joined at the blip

It may be a while before we see a glitch as heavenly as one in this august organ when a rogue spellcheck altered “senator Brandis” to “senator Barmaids”. Nevertheless, we are quite taken with this Wall Street Journal correction: “Vladimir Putin is president of Russia. An editing mistake misidentified him as Vladimir Trump in an earlier version of this article.”

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