Frydenberg reveals his net worth

As a man who knows his way around a tennis racquet, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg sounded right at home as a guest commentator.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg won two blues for tennis at Oxford as a young man.

As a man who knows his way around a tennis racquet, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg sounded right at home as SBS guest commentator as Bernard Tomic took on Jack Sock in the Kooyong Classic. But despite having been good enough to beat Mark Philippoussis in doubles back in the day, the member for Kooyong was self-effacing: “When I was playing, my ambitions were far greater than my talent.” As for whether he’d rather be PM or a grand slam winner: “It is very easy. Wimbledon or Australian Open champion. Every kid who picks up a racquet … dreams of that and I fell short of that dream, for sure.”

Josh Frydenberg is flanked by tennis greats Neale Fraser (left) and Frank Sedgman after he won the Pat Cash Cup as a young player.

Frydenberg still swings a racquet — indeed he’s been on court this week with former professionals Sally Peers and Richard Fromberg — but rarely gets the chance in Canberra due, one imagines, to being Treasurer. (There’s a nice little court right in the gardens next to Parliament House. We can’t confirm if it’s good to play tennis in because frankly we have no idea, but we can say with certainty it’s a nice spot to tune up one’s bagpipes in an emergency, should the need arise. But we digress.) Asked if he was the best player in parliament, Frydenberg quietly pointed to his colleague John Alexander: “You have raised a very sore point. (There is a) former Davis Cup champion and world No 8. (But) JA has gone scared. He avoids the challenge whenever I raise it.”

Strange bedfellows ... Josh Frydenberg takes a nap with his tennis racquets.

Before Agassi, there was Frydenberg ... playing in Swiss Juniors in 1989.

There for the asking

Someone who hasn’t avoided challenges from colleagues is Kevin Rudd. He was on Reddit yesterday, offering himself up again for one of its Ask Me Anything sessions. “Hi folks, Kevin Rudd here,” he began in familiar style, then hinted at his preferred theme by mentioning “Murdoch” eight times in two paragraphs. Not quite angels on a pinhead, but impressive. We paid a flying visit to his last time doing a Reddit AMA and it was a broad church, ranging from this:

Question: “What would you do differently if you had your time as PM over again?”

Rudd: “ … I’d be less trusting of some of the folks I worked with.”

To this:

Question: “Do you still hit up Yarralumla Turkish Pide when you are in the area?”

Rudd: “Not only do I visit for a kebab when I’m in town, my son Marcus has been one of their biggest customers in history.”

Tierra del fuego

The tweet from Nine News Sydney packed no linguistic surprises in its headline: “Man pleads guilty to bizarre speed camera attack”. It was only in the fleshing out that the words were arranged less conventionally: “The man had used a sock to destroy the speed camera after his previous attempt to bring the device to flames had failed.” He could have tried setting fire to it, he could have tried lighting it, he could have even gone down the attempted ignition route. But “attempt to bring the device to flames”? That unites poetry with a hint of hastily translated instruction booklet. We look forward to Nine bringing similar turns of phrase to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Faux-tality blues

Following yesterday’s mention of Billy Connolly and Olivia Newton-John rising to deny reports they were at death’s door, we were reminded of one of our favourite examples of the genre. Let us step back to 2014 for this Strewth report on faux-tality: “The autumn years are meant to be the final stage of our lives before, inevitably, we succumb to the bleak, permanent winter of death — so it must have come as some surprise to Mungo MacCallum when it was Summers that got him instead. It was a single, simple message from writer Anne Summers that dropped like a depth charge into the duckpond of Twitter yesterday afternoon: ‘Vale Mungo Macallum (sic). Journalist and gentleman. His words and wit will outlive him’ … Word spread and a vortex of mourning began slowly swirling like a willy-willy of grief.” Let’s skip ahead to the robust yet uplifting denouement: “The final word, for now, belongs to MacCallum’s partner, Jenny Garrett, who responded philosophically to our colleague Simon King when asked about rumours of Mungo’s demise: ‘Look, it’s absolute bullshit. He’s sitting beside me at the Poinciana cafe in Mullumbimby. He’s wading through some scrambled eggs and he’s perfectly all right. He’s rather alarmed at this. As one of the friends sitting with us here said, You could lie low and see what the obits are like. It’s greatly exaggerated is the way the classics would talk about it.’ ”

Credit where it’s due

Speaking of erroneous reports, we yesterday credited the Australian Electoral Commission with the “Get paid to deliver democracy” ad. The AEC may have retweeted it, but it was the NSW Electoral Commission wot dunnit.

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