In therapy

PERHAPS it's the approach of Christmas, but ABC1's Insiders host Barrie Cassidy seemed keener to act as therapist than inquisitor with Tony Abbott yesterday.

PERHAPS it's the approach of Christmas, but ABC1's Insiders host Barrie Cassidy seemed keener to act as therapist than inquisitor with Tony Abbott yesterday.

After playing a highlight from the Julia Gillard performance that prompted Abbott to suggest the PM was in need of anger management classes, Cassidy looked concerned: "It's not getting to you is it? You can take it?" Abbott put on his best Travis Bickle "You talkin' to me?" expression and replied: "Do I look hurt? Do I look upset?" Together, they revisited some of the hit parade of this year's slogans, namely "dead, buried and cremated" and "stop the boats", which is being reincarnated as the far less snappy "stronger borders". (Labor responded yesterday by subtly recalibrating its strategy of attacking the Coalition for three-word slogans to attacking the Coalition for two-word slogans; this perhaps counts as moving forwards.) Alas, they never got around to "great big new tax", the undisputed titan of the lot. The Iron Monk compensated for this oversight with a pleasing turn of phrase. Of his ill-fated post-election negotiations with the independents he said, "I think that I put my best foot forward but they didn't want to dance with me." Labor, on the other hand, was indulging in an "orgy of navel gazing" (as opposed to naval gazing, an activity related to stopping the boats). Touchingly, he also accused the ALP of using "the Goebbels technique; I mean, you know, keep repeating the big lie and people will eventually believe it". (No one's been quite the same since Glenn Milne compared Gillard with the Khmer Rouge a couple of months ago.) Alas, he mispronounced the Nazi propaganda minister's name, but not quite as entertainingly as Julian Assange's, which had become Ass-an-gi by the time our Tone was done.

Father of the bride

CONGRATULATIONS to Daisy Turnbull, who has finally put her self-confessed "verging on bridezilla" tendencies behind her by getting hitched in Sydney on Saturday. Such developments always cause a happy degree of warming in the cockle region of Strewth's heart, but it's all that tiny bit better knowing that her soldier husband is called James Brown, which means Malcolm Turnbull is now the father-in-law of the namesake of the godfather of soul. And Daisy? She tweeted yesterday, "Post-wedding recovery yum cha fixing all manner of hangover. Am a very happy little wifey."

Not quite cricket

WHAT wounds Strewth most about last week's World Cup fiasco (one vote!) is knowing how hurt Frank Lowy is. But what can we do? Rave about that diabolical video? Spit on FIFA's name? Say we didn't want a bloody soccer jamboree anyway? At least Britons, who also missed out, have a more readily identifiable lightning rod: the BBC. With carefully thought out timing, the Beeb screened a documentary about alleged corruption at FIFA just days before FIFA announced the winners. Now many of the Blighty's natives are blaming the public broadcaster and The Guardian reports emails of complaint have been rolling into the Beeb at the rate of 100 a minute. As for Australia's cruel snubbing, perhaps we're better off; we got to host the Ashes and look how that's worked out.

Moving stories

SELF-deprecation isn't necessarily the first quality (or even the second or third) that springs to mind when contemplating the force of nature that is Baz Luhrmann, yet it was on display yesterday as he spoke at the launch of Keith Bain on Movement. Keith Bain is the dancer, choreographer and teacher who was the inspiration for Luhrmann's first big flick Strictly Ballroom. As Luhrmann said, "He was just a great storyteller. This is how the big lessons came to us." But His Bazness seemed eager no one try to put him in the same class: "I won't take up too much time; my stories can get a bit long."

Sludge sale

WE salute the bleak yet symmetrical Hungarian sense of humour after learning the nation's government is to auction off piles of communist art and propaganda to raise money for the victims of this year's flood of toxic red sludge.

Crime bopper

ONE of the few subjects that appears to perplex our learned colleague Errol Simper is the cult of Justin Bieber. True, Strewth is mystified as well, but not to the apoplectic degree the otherwise gentle Simper is. So we are in two minds about whether to show him a story on Splash News that opens thus: "One of Brazil's most feared drug lords shocked police when they raided his Rio de Janeiro home, and found an entire room dedicated to teen pop sensation Justin Bieber." Combing the residence of Luciano Martiniano da Silva, the wallopers also found plenty of more run-of-the-mill drug-lord material, but the Bieber shrine, with its mosaics and portrait-plastered walls, was something else. As police spokesman Marcos Vinicius Braga declared: "I've never seen anything like it." If Simper's regular column is in our Media section today, it can only mean he hasn't read it. At least, not yet.