Mates rates
IT seems like hardly any time since Kevin Rudd told Ray Hadley he wouldn’t go on the naughty 2GB broadcaster’s show until “you start behaving yourself”.
Strewth
Big on smalls
STREWTH may count among its great achievements persuading Shane Warne to show us his undies at the Ivy in Sydney yesterday.
Gillies to the max
MAX Gillies has put in more than his fair share of time playing other people.
Good-news Kev
CONTINUING his tradition of fronting up to hard-hitting TV programs, Kevin Rudd will be appearing on tonight’s Good News Week on Ten.
Bird in the hand
SOMETIMES Strewth thinks back to the days when Tony Abbott’s nether regions didn’t have such a starring role on the public stage.
Bias count
POLITICAL bias is not always an easy thing to measure. But blogger Gavin Atkins has attempted to discover whether the perceived left-wing slant of the ABC’s Lateline program actually exists.
Who’s that man?
THERE’S a school of thought that says Kevin Rudd speaks like a robot on his good days, like an anaesthetic canister on his bad ones.
Bad boy
2GB broadcaster Ray Hadley has been doing a bit of reflecting since his encounter with Kevin Rudd at the weekend.
Healed with a kiss
DURING a visit to Sydney’s St Vincent Hospital yesterday, Tony Abbott gave a Valentine’s kiss to Paula Ward, in hospital for diabetes treatment.
Morning glory
WITH Valentines Day almost upon us, yesterday got off to an appropriately steamy start when Tony Abbott revealed that he finally got around to learning how to iron only this week.
Woebegone
Strewth is still in two minds about whether yesterday’s shark incident was a media debacle or a PR coup for a species whose tassle-fringed gob has hitherto prevented it from being taken seriously.
Off-message
SHOULD he ever forsake the joys of being a mining billionaire, Clive Palmer could have a wonderful career on the stage.
Bets on Barnaby
WITH Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner yesterday gleefully noting the emergence of “Oh no, I’ve done a Barnaby” as a way of indicating a slip-up of some magnitude, ALP national secretary Karl Bitar took to Twitter: “Time for Centrebet to start taking bets on who will replace Barnaby Joyce in finance before the federal election.”
Elevated debate
PERHAPS it was just the sub-zero temperatures affecting our brain, but while your Strewth correspondent was trudging through the snow in Europe during the past fortnight, surrounded by architectural grandeur and the legacy of great thinkers (by which we mean cake shops), we began to have a strange fantasy: that Australian political discourse could one day elevate itself beyond its present level and reach for something greater.
Bolt moves left
ONE knows the year proper has begun when the ABC’s television programs head back to air, a process that got under way yesterday with the return of the popular Insiders.
PM’s on-air raid
IN this age of political spin and media manipulation, it is always a pleasant surprise to witness a pollie get caught off guard by an ordinary punter.
Tickets, please
REMEMBER the story recently about US lawyer Tareq Salahi and his wife Michaele, who managed to get past Barack Obama’s security to gatecrash a White House state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh?
Trooper M.I.A.
FRESHLY anointed Young Australian of the Year Trooper Mark Donaldson can count himself one of the nation’s all-time heroes.
Carr’s US tour
BOB Carr’s obsession with all things American is well known, but now the former NSW premier has combined his love of US history with a penchant for colourful prose, emerging in the Spectator Australia as a history-obsessed flaneur roaming the length and breadth of the land of the free.
Rudd or Raphael
A LONGTIME Strewth operative was browsing in a bookshop in Melbourne’s Bourke Street yesterday when he happened on a certain classical music-loving former prime minister.
Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/strewth/page/126