Brief encounter

AS if losing Kevin Rudd as his chief opponent in the forthcoming federal election isn't bad enough, Tony Abbott now appears set to face off against Austen Tayshus in the battle for Warringah.

AS if losing Kevin Rudd as his chief opponent in the forthcoming federal election isn't bad enough, Tony Abbott now appears set to face off against Austen Tayshus in the battle for Warringah.

The comedian otherwise known as Sandy Gutman is to be endorsed by the Australian Sex Party as its candidate for the Sydney seat held by the Iron Monk. "I'll be doorknocking in my Speedos, it's just mine will have a bit more content in them," Gutman informs Strewth, explaining he'd chosen the ASP because it is "genuinely into constitutional reform". And while his main aim is to call for a royal commission into sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church ("We've only seen the tip of the iceberg"), Gutman says he'll be campaigning with a sense of humour: "I've been travelling with my show The Merchant of Menace, and I keep seeing people's dissatisfaction in the political process. There's so much bullshit everywhere. People are ready for a bit of humour."

Phrase-off

WHILE floating her non-Pacific solution at the Lowy Institute yesterday, Julia Gillard had a go at Tony Abbott's "shallow slogans", namely "great big new tax" and our preferred candidate, "big bad tax". So how does Abbott feel about "move forward", the almost laxative phrase Gillard is carpet-bombing us with, not least in yesterday's speech, which was even titled Moving Australia Forward? Here's the official pearl to Strewth from the inner cloister of the Monkarium: "We'll leave that one for you to judge."

No, minister

NOW for a dispatch from our That Was Then, This Is Now department. When he was but an opposition senator, Defence Minister John Faulkner doggedly pursued the Howard government over the 2001 sinking of the SIEV X, in which 353 asylum-seekers died. He demanded a judicial inquiry and vowed to never stop asking questions. But Freedom of Information searches reveal since he became minister, Faulkner hasn't asked a question of Defence. This may be a good thing; when a judicial inquiry was requested in 2008, Defence suggested they'd been put under enough scrutiny in the Senate inquiry Faulkner was a part of, even if "the loss of SIEV X . . . continues to generate speculation regarding the role of Defence and other agencies in the subsequent search and rescue for survivors". Faulkner and Attorney-General Robert McClelland say a judicial inquiry . . . brace yourselves . . . is not on the agenda.

Missed connection

NOW that Larrikin Music has been awarded a small slice of the royalties from Men at Work hit Down Under, we wondered if it plans to pay a spotter's fee to Adam Hills and the crew at ABC1's Spicks & Specks. It was, after all, the music quiz show that pointed out the debt the song owed to Larrikin-owned Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, something that had otherwise gone unobserved for 26 years. So we rang, buoyed by what could come of a meeting between a company called Larrikin and a column called Strewth. Alas, our calls to Larrikin's parent group, Music Sales, were received as enthusiastically as they'd been by the office of Paul "Tripping the red light fantastic" Keating (Strewth, yesterday). In other words, not very.

Yesterday's men

KEVIN Rudd may have lost his gig launching Blanche d'Alpuget's new book on husband Bob Hawke to Julia Gillard, and his entry on the ALP website may be sandwiched between plugs for his successor (Strewth, yesterday), but at least the member for Griffith is still mentioned in dispatches (and even displayed on one part of the website as our latest Labor PM). No such luck for former Collectors host Andy Muirhead, whose career was recently derailed by child porn charges in Tasmania. While we cling to that whole innocent-until-proved-guilty notion, we are in awe of how thoroughly the ABC has airbrushed Muirhead out of existence as it plugs the show's return on Friday. Will there be any acknowledgment, or will the remaining Collectors team members simply be getting straight down to business? The ABC publicist Strewth spoke to went for option B.

Resume positions

GET either Craig Emerson or George Brandis in a room, and magic -- as is suggested on bumper stickers -- can happen. Get them together, though, and it can get very unlikely indeed, such as on Sky News' Agenda yesterday, where we witnessed something discombobulatingly akin to civility.

Brandis: "Now, Craig, can I say this to you, and I don't mean to hurt your feelings at all."

Emmo: "You won't [laughs] . . . We've been through lots worse, George."

Brandis: "Well, that's what I was going to say. Because much as I appreciate you agreeing with me, with my critique of [Julian] Burnside . . ."

And then, mercifully, it was back to business as usual. By the time Brandis was deploying phrases such as "dishonestly represented" and Emmo was letting rip with, "This is hilarious from a Coalition", the universe had been restored to its proper shape.