The odd couple: Josh Frydenberg moves in to The Lodge with Scott Morrison

The Lodge has an unlikely new resident. Scott Morrison has welcomed his loyal deputy leader in the prime ministerial abode.

Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg will work together more closely than ever. Picture: Adam Taylor

The Lodge has an unlikely new resident: Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Strewth can reveal that Scott Morrison welcomed his loyal deputy leader into the prime ministerial abode with open arms, just before Andrew Barr sent the territory into a snap lockdown. Morrison made a few members of his cabinet envious when he joked about the exclusive bubble within the Canberra Bubble™, where the pair have been passing the time by playing pool. Will they also (com) car pool the 2km to work together in C1, we wonder? Frydenberg will hunker down at The Lodge until the end of the sitting fortnight, when he can finally head home to Melbourne after more than five weeks away. Whether he will have to quarantine for two weeks on arrival in Danistan is still TBC. Parliament has been given the green light to sit, with ScoMo and Frydo among the small number of masked-up MPs and senators allowed into the building. Politicians and their staff are classified as “essential” and permitted to travel between their accommodation and work. Frydenberg doesn’t own a permanent base in the ACT, just a house in Hawthorn which he bought with wife Amie, a partner at independent workplace relations law firm Lander & Rogers. Our spies report nothing but positive news from The Lodge pyjama party, with ScoMo and Frydo both seeing sporting wins this weekend by their respective NRL teams (the Cronulla Sharks and Melbourne Storm) but losses in the AFL (Western Bulldogs and Carlton). It’s not the strangest Liberal frathouse that Strewth has come across. Former treasurer Joe Hockey had a Bart Simpson bedspread at the Manuka home he shared with Jamie Briggs, where Brendan Nelson infamously slept in a small, heating-free room off the detached garage. They were known for staying up late at night eating Paddle Pops and watching Jerry Springer. Morrison has previously claimed his perfect partnership with Frydenberg is the closest between a prime minister and their treasurer since Robert Menzies and Harold Holt. To which Menzies’ daughter, Heather Henderson, responded: “No, no, no – it’s much better than that!” We can’t imagine John Howard and Peter Costello, or the bickering Billy McMahon and John Gorton, happily cohabiting at The Lodge, that’s for sure.

As time rose by

What other activities will the odd couple embrace during their isolated time together? Morrison lifted the lid on a few of his favourite locky d activities, during a KIIS FM interview last year – cooking curry, daily callisthenics, watching all of Star Wars and Ozark (plus one episode of Tiger King – “it didn’t work for me”) and completing a Disney Princess puzzle with his former deputy prime minister Michael McCormack. The 53-year-old Prime Minister could throw a belated Zoom birthday for his heir apparent, who turned the big 5-0 last month. Floriade may be Covid-cancelled for the second year in a row, but with bulbs already in the ground around Canberra suburbs and a sliding Newspoll performance, perhaps the pair could literally stop and smell the roses?

Queue-beyan

“Canberrans do like to queue,” ACT Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith boasted in response to long wait times at testing centres last week.

Hair today

Desperate times call for desperate measures at Chris Bowen’s house. The western Sydney Labor frontbencher shared a snap of himself on the receiving end of a coronacut, while wearing a T-shirt featuring his favourite fictional Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch (from To Kill A Mockingbird). “It’s not OK to go out for a haircut,” Bowen advised his 113k Twitter followers. “But it is OK to hand your wife the clippers in the backyard and say ‘away you go’. Things you don’t want to hear her say while cutting your hair ‘Ooops. Ah well, It’ll grow back’.” If worse comes to worse, a young person recently inform Strewth that the mullet is making a comeback!

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

It’s not OK to go out for a haircut.

But it is OK to hand your wife the clippers in the backyard and say “away you go”.

Things you don’t want to hear her say while cutting your hair “Ooops. Ah well, It’ll grow back” pic.twitter.com/Bg4gSQJ7m3

— Chris Bowen (@Bowenchris) August 22, 2021

Lord of the memes

Victorian health deputy secretary Kate Matson wants someone from generation Z to make a GIF of her STAT, so she can go viral on the line. “We continue to see cases in younger people,” Matson said on Sunday. “I remember being under 30, although I’m not going to pretend that I understand exactly how people in that age group communicate. If you’ve got TikTok on your phone, if you’ve got Snapchat on your phone, if you have Binge on your phone, if you do online gaming, feel free to make a GIF or a meme of what I’m saying.” Matson’s message? “Isolate, minimise transmission, communicate with your friends through your phone, through online, through phone calls, but please, don’t catch up together until we get out of this.” Maybe she needs a dance to go with it?

Kate Matson.

Satanic slip-up

Is someone at the ABC trying to subliminally tell us something? During a news story about proposed Queensland laws that would put police animal abusers behind bars, Aunty accidentally showed vision of the Noosa Temple of Satan declaring: “Hail Satan!” Hats off to ABC presenter Yvonne Yong, who managed to remain straight faced after the three-second demonic interlude. The red-hot footage was taken from a live stream of the Temple’s Satanic Black Mass in 2020. According to Media Watch, the ritual footage was previously used in an ABC yarn about the Lucifer lovers legal battle with Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Education Department, over their desire to teach religious instructions to students in state schools. But Brother Samael Demo-Gorgon, aka founder and former Sex Party candidate Robin Bristow, blames a lower power … the devil himself! He told Strewth: “Satan intervened to bring our message to Australia.”

ABC's satanic slip-up. What was going on here? @abcnewspic.twitter.com/D1dWfjOYhM

— Media Watch (@ABCmediawatch) August 19, 2021

Temptation iso

Angus Taylor and Joel Fitzgibbon’s weekly collab on 2GB radio continues to prove the gold standard. The latest topic du jour was the surge in online shopping during Operation Stay At Home. The cycling Energy Minister confessed to buying mostly parts for his bikes. Fitzgibbon, it seems, is a sucker for targeted ads. “You Google something and the next minute you’re getting all these ads popping up and reinforced in my mind, you only get what you pay for,” Fitz said. “I had a bit of a sore foot, a thing called plantar fasciitis … and I was desperate to fix it and I bought these, a pair of joggers online. And they were so cheap and nasty that I didn’t even put them on, I threw them straight in the bin. I learned a lesson.”

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