Roo the day

GREENS senator Lee Rhiannon put out an electronic poster calling for the end to roo shooting. Only, these aren’t kangaroos.

Senator Rhiannon's poster.

GREENS senator Lee Rhiannon has put out an electronic poster (pictured) featuring three macropods standing with red crosshairs across their faces under the message, “Stop killing kangaroos for profit”.

The only thing is the animals in question aren’t kangaroos but wallabies. More specifically — and Strewth is happy to be corrected — they look like Bennett’s wallabies. It’s a species with which we once spent quality time on Tasmania’s Bruny Island; among them, looking adorable amid the bracken, were a small number of white ones, just like in Rhiannon’s poster. Fingers crossed our initial impression is wrong and that Rhiannon isn’t, against expectations, suggesting that the way to stop shooting roos is to start popping wallabies instead. In other words, the Greens’ version of the small-target strategy. Here’s hoping the senator can get the right animal on her poster next time. And, for bonus points, Glenn McGrath.

Clive line

CLIVE Palmer, widely assumed to be wild with grief at the untimely and fiery passing of his animatronic tyrannosaur, Jeff, concluded a point about the government’s higher education changes with the suggestion, “So commit suicide, Tony Abbott”, and a hearty chuckle. He explained he meant political suicide. Phew. Carry on.

Trumpet voluntary

WITH the GP co-payment gone and the defence pay issue backed down on, Tony Abbott seems like a man who has finally made peace with fate’s random forces. When he was quizzed yesterday about a Courier-Mail story on the — ahem — incongruity of the Liberal National Party hosting its International Women’s Day event in the blokes-only Tattersall’s Club in Brisbane, he just let go: “This is just how wonderful this broad church that I lead is. Just how wonderful the broad church that I lead is. Obviously they’ve now broken down the last barrier and they’ve made the men-only club admit women! Admit women. Isn’t that fantastic at last! They’ve admitted women and they’ve done it on International Women’s Day because of the Liberal National Party, smashing the glass ceiling yet again! Yet again we’re smashing the glass ceiling. I say congratulations and thank God that bastion of old-fashioned chauvinism has finally collapsed like the walls of Jericho at the trumpet cry of the Liberal and National Party. Good on you!” Yea verily, this was delivered with a gesture like a hand gripping an invisible trumpet, though an invisible conch shell would have done the trick. This may well be how many people hoped it would pan out when Abbott appointed himself Minister for Women.

Log in, flog on

WICKR, the messaging service Malcolm Turnbull uses to send self-destructing emails, is now flogging itself with the line, “Be like Malcolm — just Wickr it!”

Bucking the trend

A BIT of Twitter fun courtesy of former Liberal Party adviser Grahame Morris, who’d either sat on his phone or was going through the throes of a fairly lucrative negotiation. He started with a solitary tweeted “K”, which given the tweets that were to follow may have represented a thousand. Then the race was on, the tweets coming in quick succession, starting with “$” and “$$”, then escalating quickly to “$$$$$$$$$”, dropping back momentarily to “$$$$$”. But then Morris got the upper hand, or at least upper buttock, and sent this: “$$$$$$$$$m$m$m$$$$$$$$$$m$m$m$m$m$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$m$$$$$$$$$$$$$$m$”. Looks like a triumph.

Sea you later

AS someone who put a poem on a boulder, Gina Rinehart somehow seemed like the right person to come to the rescue of Sculpture by the Sea at Perth’s Cottesloe Beach, riding in at the last moment with a “substantial six-figure sponsorship”. That, alas, was then. This year, Rinehart’s sponsorship dollar is going elsewhere. As Sculpture by the Sea’s David Handley notes philosophically, “Sponsorships come and go from one year to the next.” They’re hanging on to Alcoa for the 11th year, though.

[e-mail]