Strewth: Out of the shadow

The opposition Treasurer seemed disappointed at the lack of limelight at this year’s Outlook Conference.

The 2018 Outlook Conference taking place in Melbourne, hosted by The Australian and the Melbourne Institute, is obviously a serious and important affair, featuring speeches by Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten. But it’s not without jokes. Introducing himself yesterday, Christopher Eyles Guy Bowen noted that he was making his fifth appearance at the conference as opposition Treasury spokesman. “And I’m hoping it’s my last appearance as shadow treasurer,” he said, before hastily assuring the crowd that no, no, no, it wasn’t that he didn’t want to be invited back. “I’m hoping to be back next year in a different capacity,” he said, cheerily. Treasurer Bowen, redux.

Stability, Italian style

That said, the real highlight of yesterday’s conference was an address by Peter Costello, who really let fly at the Coalition. No, he said, it’s not the 24-hour media cycle, it’s not the hostile Senate, it’s not the recalcitrant crossbenchers, it’s the sheer inability of anyone to articulate an agenda that is holding the government back. “You have to tell people what you want to do,” the former treasurer said, adding that in his day it was crystal clear what the Coalition stood for: taxes that were lower, not higher; government that was small, not big; competition that was good, not bad; and budgets in surplus, not deficit. Costello also had a joke up his sleeve: just recently, he said, he was in Italy, where a politician sidled up to present him with a package designed to encourage investment in Italy. One of the key reasons? Stable government, unlike in Australia.

A reporter recycled

Today Eli Greenblat is a senior reporter in the business section at The Australian, but way back in 1998 he was a cadet in The Age newsroom. He recalls the day that some old hands — Mal Maiden, Christopher Webb and Jude Heywood — were working on a story about a stockbroking scandal. They needed a picture of an unidentifiable stockbroker, so they asked Greenblat to pose in shirtsleeves and braces.

Eli Greenblat poses as an unidentifiable stockbroker back in 1998.

Greenblat tells Strewth he was amused this week to see said picture illustrating a story in The Australian Financial Review about why it’s always best to use the phone, not email, when having a juicy conversation, not least because the picture originally was used to illustrate a story about brokers being caught out making anti-Semitic remarks about “Diamond” Joe Gutnick, not by email but on the phone. Also, he could hardly believe that 20 years on, that picture, seen here, was still in use, as fresh as if it were just taken. Greenblat should ask for royalties.

Grammarian gripes

Annabel Crabb is as mild-mannered a person as it’s possible to be, except when it comes to grammar. Chief among things that get her goat? According to her tweets yesterday: “inventing words that don’t exist” and “making adjectives into nouns. Looking at you, chicken tenders.” That last prompted one wag to respond: “Actually Annabel, ‘chicken tenders’ is perfectly OK. These were the smaller boats that went out to collect the chickens from the bigger boats.” Ha ha! But her tweets also prompted a flood of responses from frustrated grammarians. According to pictures posted yesterday, the University of Western Australia has banners up that read: “Pursue Impossible.” Tasmania’s tourism slogan is “Feed Your Curious”. Murdoch University’s new slogan is “Free Your Think”. What next, Get Educate?

A toast to book covers

This may not be obvious to book buyers but, as with fashion, there are trends in book covers: one minute everything’s a muted pink, next it’s all TyPE in DifFerenT sizes, or hand-drawn illustrations. Bet you didn’t predict toast as a trend? First on to the shelves was our own James Jeffrey, whose My Family and Other Animus had a piece of Vegemite toast over a small boy’s face. Now comes the rival offering from the ABC’s Richard Glover, whose The Land Before Avocado also has a piece of toast on the cover. Alerted to the similarity, Glover proudly offered a dad joke: “We’re both in it for a slice.” If that weren’t bad enough, he added: “Both books are the best things since sliced bread.” And then: “We are both top crust writers.” That’ll do. No, really. Please make it stop.

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