United by Clive Palmer

If there’s one bit of good coming from Clive Palmer and Queensland Nickel, it’s the hint of nascent bipartisanship.

If there’s one bit of good that’s coming from the sad shambles surrounding Clive Palmer and Queensland Nickel, it’s the one, small, bright hint — like a daisy in a radioactive wasteland — of nascent bipartisanship. Specifically during Bill Shorten’s press conference in Alice Springs yesterday, when a journalist springboarded off Palmer (figuratively, we hasten to add):

Journo: “Christopher Pyne says this exemplifies the instability of minor parties. Is that something you’d agree with?”

And lo, the magic words:

Shorten: “Listen, he could be right.”

It sounds less than wholehearted at first blush, but considering it’s Pyne they’re talking about, it is quite a start.

No such luck, though, for Northern Territory Chief Minister Adam Giles, for whom Shorten even managed to drop his Mildly Concerned of Moonee Ponds tone: “I mean anyone who picks up a newspaper — it used to be that some of the coverage outside of the Territory about the Territory was about crocodiles and just that simple image. The truth of the matter is now what Adam Giles does next, what unusual and bizarre thing he does next is now becoming a sort of national story and a joke.”

Never forget, though, that Giles survived an attempt by his own colleagues to roll him simply by saying nah, he wasn’t going.

The game of the aim

Moving on from the Red Centre to the Top End, outgoing NT Treasurer (and former Howard government MP) Dave Tollner went on Darwin local radio to discuss his love of guns and his profound non-love of John Howard’s gun laws, among other things. Of the US National Rifle Association he said, “You gotta love the NRA. Well, I do anyhow. I’m a bit of a fan of them. They speak my language, I gotta admit.” But it was while chatting on-air with independent NT MP Gerry Wood that Tollner reminded us that when it comes down to it, it’s the good times that count:

Wood: “I don’t see anyone being limited in getting a shotgun to go out and shoot geese.”

Tollner: “Try getting a pump-action one.”

Host: “But do you really need one?”

Tollner: “They’re a hell of a lot more fun, let me tell you.”

Beyond hearing

When ALP national secretary George Wright first announced the Labor Herald, he saw it as a way of cutting out the middleman of the fourth estate: “‘You’ve told us that you can see the Labor message isn’t making it through the mainstream media and we have to produce our own news service.” There other ways to cut out the middleman, of course. Take for example the transcript of a press conference by Labor’s Michelle Rowland yesterday. If we take out Rowland’s contributions — which all seem to have been picked up with perfect clarity — we’re left with the journalists’ parts. Here they are in their entirety:

JOURNALIST: [Inaudible]

JOURNALIST: [Inaudible]

JOURNALIST: [Inaudible]

JOURNALIST: [Inaudible]

JOURNALIST: [Inaudible]

Big Kim cometh

Just as Eric Abetz et al are excited by the prospect of Tony Abbott one day rejoining the front ranks, some are aquiver at the return from Washington of Kim Beazley (who we hope will sit down for a quiet chat with Mark Latham). Bill Shorten even used one of Kimbo’s favourite words — “boondoggle” — for the purpose of sinking the slipper into his opponents. But no one seems quite as pumped as Peter FitzSimons who, in a reminder passion sometimes trumps sentence construction, tweeted: “I can say, as his Kim Beazley’s biographer, he as highly regarded by the Americans, as by his fellow Australians in Diplomatic Corps.” Keeping his powder dry for the bio, we’d say.

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