Strewth: marble marvel

Joe Hockey has been painfully reminded of an incident with a certain prime ministerial table.

Give or take a suddenly wheelchair-bound Jamie Briggs, the most famous physical damage following Malcolm Turnbull’s ouster of Tony Abbott was the marble table smashed during an apres putsch party in Abbott’s office. Fingers were pointed at several culprits — well, mainly Briggs, who repeatedly and accurately protested his innocence. In the end it fell to our colleague Niki Savva to clear up matters in her book The Road to Ruin: “Different people jumped on to an expensive marble-topped Italian table to speak or dance, but when Joe Hockey hopped on to it, the marble cracked. Hockey fell straight through the middle.” The former treasurer eventually was dispatched to Washington as our ambassador for his troubles/to clear the way for Scott Morrison (delete where applicable). But any hope he might have had that the table incident had been swept away like so much rubble were laid to rest when Turnbull went on Triple M yesterday:

Mick Molloy: “I’d just like to thank you and your government for hosting me on election night at the Australian embassy in Washington. Joe Hockey was an exceptional host.”

Eddie McGuire: “We want you to sign the expense forms, Prime Minister.”

Molloy: “We had a wonderful evening.”

Turnbull: “No breakages, I hope?”

At which point, we could only imagine Hockey scowling, unhappily amending the punchline to a certain old joke and saying, “but you break one table …” Turnbull chucked this in after: “Joe is doing a great job.”

The road to Warne?

Up the road from Hockey is the temporarily New York-based Cory Bernardi. Earlier this year, he was on a quest to get his hands on the sacred marble shards from the Hockey-wrecked table. “It’s a piece of history, our very own Berlin Wall,” he told Strewth at the time. More recently, he’s been spending time with Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager for Donald Trump, who wants to build a wall that would knock Berlin’s old one into a cocked hat. Even more exciting is the bit in his latest Weekly Dose of Commonsense where he links approvingly to a story about Shane Warne “hit(ting) political correctness for six”. Suddenly, the prospect of a new power bloc emerges: Bernardi and Warne. Now that would be the most exciting time to be an Australian.

PJK v the truckers

With the launch of our colleague Troy Bramston’s biographyon Paul Keating just days away, we thought it worth giving delicate readers a heads-up on how spicy it is linguistically. The C-word gets seven mentions — one every 100 pages, Bramston informs us. The F-word in its various permutations clocks in with 40 mentions (though the one that rhymes with truckers surfaces just once). “Shit” and its relatives (not least the bovine one) are scattered through the pages 14 times. In the meantime, here’s a story about the time PJK was cracking it over protesters and the energetic comrades at the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union who’d ringed Parliament House with 350 trucks, a problem to which he wanted a military solution. Over to Bramston: “Keating planned to phone (attorney-general Michael) Lavarch directly on the internal secure phone line to find out. (Kim) Beazley, who had been made aware that Keating was on the warpath, raced upstairs to Lavarch’s office just as the secure phone rang on the attorney-general’s desk. ‘Don’t touch it,’ Beazley blurted out. Lavarch, who was in a meeting with an adviser, was stunned. Beazley picked up the phone. ‘Kim? I thought I was ringing Lavarch,’ said Keating. ‘No, no, mate. I was just passing in the corridor, and I thought I ought to pick it up.’ Keating was not impressed. ‘Oh, right,’ he said. ‘Well, you find him, and you tell that little (bad word that rhymes with punt) that if he doesn’t have that ordinance on my desk within one hour he is sacked.’ Beazley absorbed the prime ministerial spray. ‘Yes, mate. I’ll pass that on,’ he said, and hung up the phone.

‘What was that?’ asked Lavarch.

‘Nothing, mate. Wrong number,’ replied Beazley before walking back to his office.”

Another Lazarus rising

Given John Howard has already used the line about Lazarus with a triple bypass, what does the more recent Lazarus use? Behold this hint of hoped-for resurrection on Facebook yesterday: “Join the Glenn Lazarus Team today. We are rolling out across the country, seeking candidates, members and supporters in all states and territories!”

Getting a bit behind

Meanwhile, Adelaide is hosting “O Bum! an artistic exploration of the human posterior”. Let us consider the arse ceiling broken.

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