Try, try again

HAVING got used to the facial expression of Sussan Ley, it was quite a novelty watching Other Emotions on her visage during her Medicare rebate presser.

HAVING got used to the facial expression Sussan Ley points at Labor during question time — three parts indignant rage, two parts contempt, and one part “Let’s sort this in the carpark NOW!” — it was quite a novelty watching Other Emotions playing out across her visage during her Medicare rebate presser yesterday. Not least when one reporter inquired, “Have you inherited a bit of a mess from your predecessor, Peter Dutton?” What went through Ley’s mind? An internal debate over whether it’s now the ship that’s being scraped off the barnacles? A gentle pondering of whether the French would term what she was dealing with as a baguette de merde? Or perhaps, pro that she is, Ley restricted herself to a cool appreciation of the Malcolm Tuckerism “omnishambles”. Whichever way, it turned out that Dutts was safe. Replied Ley in tones of epic self-control: “I’ve been sworn in as Health Minister, this is the approach I’m going to be taking and I stand by and stand up for every single one of my colleagues in the ministry and throughout the parliament and we’re working hard and we’re going to continue to work hard to deliver a health system that protects all of Australians.” Change we can believe in.

Last stop, all change

SPARE a thought for the true victim in all this: Bruce Billson. The ever cheery Care Bear of the House of Representatives who never fails to bestow a verbal cuddle on whichever backbencher has been kind enough to bestow a dorothy dixer, Billson has taught the nation what gratitude is all about. His reward? Sent out to defend the Medicare rebate cut just a couple of hours — Tony Abbott got a lot more of a buffer than that — before Ley overturned the lot.

Perhaps the way forward for everyone involved was most neatly demonstrated by ABC News 24 weather presenter Vanessa O’Hanlon during a minor glitch yesterday: “I will start again. I just got confused.”

Shunting season

NOT that the day was entirely straightforward for Bill Shorten. At least not when he went on Melbourne radio station 3AW with Nick McCallum:

McCallum: “You certainly appeared to indicate in December that you were quite favourable to ideas to reduce the shunting in and shunting out, and there are quotes of you here talking about how you would encourage people not to be shunted through in six minutes for a doctor, and that you were considering …”

Shorten: “Let’s be really straight here, you know the opposition can’t win either way. If we say when the government comes up with an idea that we’ll have a look at it, then subsequently we form the view that it’s a bad idea which this is …”

McCallum: “So you’ve changed your mind?”

Shorten: “Well, no, not changed our mind, we said we were open to look at what the government says.”

McCallum: “Well, yes, it was announced in, or certainly details of it were announced before Christmas but you did appear …”

Shorten: “We said we would look at the idea, absolutely mate.”

Mate. Hmm ... Shorten still has some work ahead of him, though, if he’s ever going to match Kevin Rudd’s splendidly miffed admonition of Kerry O’Brien back in the day: “Now it might be easy for you to sit in 7.30 Report land and say that was easy to do. Let me tell you, mate, it wasn’t.”

Empire struck at

POSSIBLY the greatest sentence uttered yesterday came from Scott Loxley, who was bitten by a mulga snake (aka king brown) in the course of raising money for charity walking around Australia dressed as an imperial stormtrooper. The serpent may have had considerably better aim than the poor stormtroopers did in the Star Wars flicks, but the fangs didn’t make it through the plastic, prompting Loxley to tell Aunty, “So all those people who rag on the old stormtroopers, you know, ‘the armour doesn’t do this, it doesn’t do that’ … it stopped the snakebite and probably saved my life today.” And speaking of biting things, here’s a droll introduction that went to air on ABC 891 in Adelaide yesterday: “Peter Goers here, filling in for Ian Henschke who, we are told, will be back next week. Ian has unfortunately suffered an injury during a gathering of his very large family at the Botanic Gardens. A Patagonian toothfish had washed up and was believed to be dead until Henschke went and touched it and it bit him. We won’t tell you where it bit him.” His first guest was senator Nick Xenophon, who we gather suggested the ABC Fact Check unit may find problems with Goers’s intro.

Not a river in Egypt

NSW parliamentarian Fred Nile managed to offend another shedload of people with his comments yesterday about the masculinity of the male hostages in the Sydney siege. But as far as we can tell, the uptake for the Twitter hashtag #JeSuisFred has been bewilderingly minimal.

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