Strewth: A time to Bill

Scott Morrison has been in a free-flowing mood these past few days — not least on Kerryn Phelps’s bill on offshore processing.

Scott Morrison has been in a free-flowing mood these past few days. Not least on Kerryn Phelps’s bill on offshore processing, a subject that has afforded him the opportunity to mete out multiple elbowings to the bloke circling the Lodge. “I thought it was an important opportunity to make this very simple point to Bill Shorten: there is no form of this bill that is acceptable” was one. This was another: “If Bill breaks this, he owns it. If Bill breaks this, he has taken Australia into this position and it will be on his head in terms of what follows from this.” Then there were multiple lines where it felt like it was left to the observer to determine whether it was a capital or lower case ‘b’ that was in play: “This bill is folly”; “There is no form of this bill that is acceptable. This bill is not only a bill that will undermine the government’s successful border protection regime. It is also a completely unnecessary bill”; and “You can’t fix this bill, you can’t fix it. You can’t make it better, it’s an unnecessary bill. It’s time to bin it.” But lest this leave you under the impression the PM spent his days calling out “Bill” like he was introducing speakers at a William convention, we can assure you he’s been speaking on other subjects. Among them: the floods in Queensland; the detention in Thailand of refugee footballer Hakeem al-Araibi; the fallout from the banking royal commission for NAB’s Ken Henry. ScoMo tended towards lucid, thoughtful answers. Only once did he take the short route.

Journo: “PM, were you warned about Scott Buchholz’s behaviour on his defence trip before you promoted him?”

ScoMo: “No.”

And on this note, the official transcript concludes on a faintly ominous “(Ends)”.

For the defence

Defence Minister Christopher Pyne did not exercise his right to one-word responses when he went on Insiders yesterday. But unlike the ABC’s, Pyne’s transcript of his tete-a-tete with Barrie Cassidy meticulously puts a little “interjecting” next to Cassidy’s name each time the host broke the minister’s voluminous flow. Yet despite such attention to detail, Pyne’s did miss this one of Cassidy’s contributions: “That’s not an answer.” But as any artist worth their salt will tell you, the most important thing is knowing what to leave out. But we digress.

Cassidy: “If this bill passes, and you’ve said that it would virtually open the floodgates, the minister yesterday said it would mean substantially all of the 1000 people on Manus Island and Nauru will come to Australia, how is that? Why would almost all of them come to Australia simply because of ill health?”

Pyne: “Well, because two doctors in Australia would be able, maybe Bob Brown and Richard Di Natale, could sign a certificate saying that they think they’re suffering from mental health issues and they need to come to Australia.”

One of the small hitches here is that neither Di Natale nor Brown are registered as doctors these days. Bit of an oversight on their part, really.

To coin a phrase

That aside, Pyne introduced the expression “weeds of hysteria”. This was new to us, and our Googling got us only as far as Reefer Madness, and “Marijuana and the lung: hysteria or cause for concern?”, an article in a 2018 issue of Breathe, a magazine for respiratory professionals.

Funnily enough, respiration was something we had momentary difficulty with after Pyne finished on this brave but efferverscent Shorten-themed flourish: “So he’s just inside the Canberra bubble, wanting to fight on every issue. We know that and the public know it too, that’s why he’s so miserably unpopular. Because he’s just a politician in the Canberra bubble, whereas Scott Morrison is seen to be, because he is, someone who wants to make the country better.”

Toy library story

The genre of Labor pressers that so thoroughly cover the issues that no journo asks any questions was added to yesterday by Amanda Rishworth, who was out with Nadia Clancy, the ALP candidate for Boothby: “It is really great to be here at the Mitcham Library, particularly in their toy library, to make Labor’s election commitment.” Yet despite such a joyous yet mischief-inviting opening, not one query cam. She must have ticked all the boxes.

The hex of Joy

An insight into a proper fan’s mindset on the weekend, courtesy of Michael Koziol’s Tony Abbott profile in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age: “(Joy) Latos has a simple message for any Zali Steggall volunteers thinking about knocking on her door. ‘I’ll say: get off my property or I’ll call the police. I don’t want to hear it’.”

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