THERE was a delicious moment in the history of sport yesterday when the tsar of Sydney morning radio, Alan Jones, introduced Australian Olympic Committee chairman John Coates to the stage at a breakfast to mark the 10th anniversary of the greatest-ever Olympics.
STREWTH admires a man with a sense of mission that never flags through the ages (and no, not just Rob Oakeshott).
IT is with sublime timing that freshly minted Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd will be returning to the US.
GIVEN that he’d just bagged himself the arts portfolio, Simon Crean found himself facing something of a dilemma on Saturday night: pointe shoes or pigskin?
JOHN Howard, it seems, is no longer sore at Maxine McKew for ousting him from his seat of Bennelong, if he ever was.
THE rainbows over Canberra were dimmed yesterday and the unicorns gently but firmly shooed from the lawns of Parliament House as the Coalition, at least, tried to get us back to regular programming.
IN the time it takes light to travel from the moon (about 1.5 seconds, according to Strewth’s mental arithmetic), South Australian Liberal MP Christopher Pyne has plunged into the new paradigm, that earthly political paradise promised by Queensland independent Bob Katter and quickly adopted by Julia Gillard as a catchphrase to match forward movement.
AS a natural spectacle, Bob Katter’s momentous address yesterday was up there with a wildebeest migration.
ABC News 24 has put down its foot and decided it’s simply not going to show anything involving the three independents until they make up their blessed minds.
IT’S nearly half a decade since Ben Cousins’s celebrated booze-bus dodging escapade.
WE tried to fight the urge (really, we did) to read anything into the fact that Julia Gillard’s press release yesterday on the official resignation of Lindsay Tanner clocked in at just 164 words.
TO sit in the Jubilee Room of NSW parliament yesterday was to witness one of the titanic struggles of the early 21st century: Bob Ellis and his barely controlled mancrush on Tony Abbott.
AS unlikely as it was beautiful, the dream of politics without focus groups was lifted into the light by a journalist at the National Press Club in Canberra yesterday, and there it sparkled for roughly three seconds until Julia Gillard snuffed it out.
THERE was a period of gloom, brief but profound, that descended once it was confirmed Wilson Tuckey had been given the flick by his electorate.
BOB Katter’s overdue ascent to the pinnacle of power makes us tingle with excitement, not least after his magnificent return to Canberra yesterday.
BACK in our federal parliament’s pre-hung days, there was some amusement to be had from the Liberal Party’s decision to give its ousted leader Malcolm Turnbull a pew in the blast zone of heckle-happy Wilson Tuckey.
ONE of the more comically cruel spectacles of Saturday night was one television station after another pulling the plug on Kevin Rudd’s victory speech; rumour has it he’s still going.
WE could, we suppose, get sentimental about the campaign that now lies in the past.
THE men and women of Australia have spoken on who they really want to lead the country.
DISTRACTED as we are by Zsa Zsa Gabor’s parlous health, we were relieved when a reporter in Townsville brought things into focus.
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