Strewth: Sharing the joy

It was a truly wondrous thing seeing Murray Watt and Peter Dutton together in the one place and smiling.

Labor senator Murray Watt and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton joined forces yesterday on behalf of Football Federation Australia. Their mission: to present framed Socceroos and Matildas jerseys to Dom Calabria, proprietor of Aussies cafe in Parliament House, to hang on the wall. A lovely gesture on its own, but the truly wondrous thing was seeing Watt and Dutton — Queenslanders who, it would be fair to say, don’t see eye-to-eye — together in the one place and smiling. Captured for posterity by our esteemed colleague Kym Smith, this is one of those images that, once you’ve seen it with your own eyes, lets you believe so much more is possible.

Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Picture: Kym Smith

In cold blood

While Bill Shorten was out doing his bit to provide extra product differentiation between himself and Anthony Albanese, Scott Morrison was bravely taking on the task of portraying Shorten as something like that tree of the Garden of Eden. To this end, he concluded his presser in what we’re sure was an unprecedented combination of words: “Bill Shorten cannot be trusted to deliver a stronger economy. He doesn’t know how to deliver a stronger economy … Bill Shorten cannot give you that. He will just give you his snake of envy. Thank you.” (To see how ScoMo then built a whole serpentarium, visit The Sketch on page seven.)

Get yer skates on

Malcolm Turnbull’s invitation to press gallery types held the promise of a different sort of drone action to what Parliament House denizens are used to: “Viewing of MQ-4C Triton model with Mr Wes Bush, Northrop Grumman chairman and CEO, The Hon Christopher Pyne MP, Minister for Defence Industry and Senator The Hon Marise Payne, Minister for Defence.” Very exciting. The time for this event? Twelve noon. Email received: 11.56am. He’s probably just trying to improve everyone’s reflexes. If the PM was working at hyper speeds, opposition Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen was working the other way, waiting nearly three hours after the Treasurer’s press conference to respond. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and all that. Indeed, Bowen’s response bears the signs of careful consideration: “Scott Morrison said at a doorstop: ‘I don’t consider tax relief a cost to the budget.’ What a truly bizarre and loony tune comment to make.” Meanwhile, Pauline Hanson’s line on company tax cuts: “I haven’t flip-flopped. I said no originally, then I said yes, then I said no and I stuck to it.” A-plus.

The thrill of the Hunt

Just as Australia has a Hunt in charge of the health portfolio, so does Britain. But unlike our federal Health Minister, Greg Hunt — who mainly has to cop fun at his surname’s expense in the form of miscreant Labor MPs calling him “Yorrick” (explained in detail in this space previously) — British Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is obliged to endure a blunter form. We’ll hand over to The Guardian’s sober reporting of the latest: “It is a verbal landmine that has gone off at Sky News, BBC Television and the BBC’s flagship morning radio show. And once again, Jeremy Hunt’s name has been taken in vain, with a presenter on the Today program mispronouncing his surname by replacing a crucial consonant.”

Global rodent

After Coalition MP Scott Buchholz posed the question “Who gives a rat’s how much Malcolm Turnbull is worth?” Strewth referred to it as an Australianism. Luckily reader Warwick Ruse has steered us right: “The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first citation of the phrase from Leon Uris’s Battle Cry in 1953. But if it appeared in print then, it would certainly have been around for a while before that. They also give a possibly related phrase, “don’t give a dead rat”, from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884.”

Fresh in our memories

Speaking of rodent mentioners, yesterday was the fifth anniversary of Kevin Rudd’s overthrow of Julia Gillard. The Ruddstoration, if you like, or the Kevenge. How time doth flit.

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