Mucking out

CELEBRATE Greens senator Lee Rhiannon's arrival in Canberra with this gem from the Ten Network's Meet The Press yesterday.

CELEBRATE Greens senator Lee Rhiannon's arrival in Canberra with this gem from the Ten Network's Meet The Press yesterday, as Hugh Riminton springboarded off our colleague Christian Kerr's weekend article to quiz her about her past when she was a bit more hammer-and-sickle than hammer-and-tong:

Rhiannon: "I'm quite proud of my history. I've always been very open about it."

Riminton: "If you're proud of it, why isn't it part of your official Senate biography?"

Rhiannon: "Not everything is part of my official Senate biography. When I was young, I also worked at Regent Park Zoo."

If nothing else, it's the first time we've ever been able to picture polar bear dung and rampaging Soviet tanks in the same mental breath, and for this, we're grateful.

Roar deal

A WEEK may be a long time in politics, but it must look like an eon in budget aviation circles. To wit, this missive - almost elegiac in retrospect - from Tiger Airways late on Friday morning: "Tiger Airways Responds To Overwhelming Demand On 'Fastest Growing' Australian Domestic Route New Daytime Flights On Sale Soon Between Melbourne and Cairns From Just $99.95* [All those unnecessary capital letters, mysterious inverted commas and asterisks were surely a worrying sign of things to come.] Friday 01 July 2011: Australia's only true low fare airline, Tiger Airways, is turning up the heat on the 'hottest air link in the country' with revised flight times." Perhaps things didn't pan out quite as envisaged, but it is true that Tiger's flight times have been revised.

Known knowns

LAST Friday's session in South Australia's estimates hearings almost reached the levels of verse. For example, this exchange (best read aloud) 'twixt Walloper Minister Kevin Foley and Liberal Michael Pengilly:

Pengilly: "Point of order, Madam Chair."

Foley: "No, there is no point of order."

Pengilly: "There is a point of order. Point of order, Madam Chair."

Boat of hope

NSW Treasurer Mike Baird was on official champagne duty on the weekend, swinging a bottle over the bow of a yacht being raffled off for a good cause, namely Bear House, a children's hospice in Sydney's Manly. As our predecessor D. D. McNicoll would probably like us to note, it's a 35' Hanse 355 yacht (we trust this means something to you) called Harry's Story, in memory of a young boy who died there recently. Bear House, incidentally, doesn't charge families who use it, but nor does it receive any government funding, its annual $2.5 million budget being raised by the community. Among Bear Cottage's donors is Dell, which chips in $60,000 a year. Baird secured a commitment from Dell's head of philanthropy, Paul Bell, to visit Bear Cottage next time he's in Australia. As Baird told Strewth yesterday, "I said to him, 'Please go and see it, you'll have a really good story to tell'." Details at 355forbearcottage.gofundraise.com.au.

Send in the crowns

READER Art Raiche has been following Strewth's sporadic debate (if one may deploy so strong a noun) on the subject of constitutional monarchies, and contributed this thought: "Although constitutional monarchy appears to be an excellent form of government, a single heritage monarchy is simply inadequate for such an ethnically diverse country as Australia. For that reason, we should switch ruling families every half century or so. There are bound to be lots of Bourbons, Romanovs, Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns about, to say nothing of former Ottomans Safavids, Mughals, Tangs, Qings Mings and Jins, possibly even Shangs. I'm sure that there must be a few well-behaved heirs among so many former royal families. Maybe we could reignite dynastic wars to replace street violence."

Writing a Ron

HOT on the heels of Budapest's naming of a city square in honour of Elvis Presley, the Hungarian capital has unveiled a statue of Ronald Reagan on Szabadsag ter (Liberty Square), its bronze gaze alighting on a Soviet war memorial. A tip of the hat to The Budapest Times for reporting the event with this delicious non-sequitur of a paragraph: "President Reagan was praised for his efforts to bring down communism and the Soviet Union, calling it 'the evil empire'. As a Hollywood actor he is remembered for his line in the 1942 film Kings Row, 'Where's the rest of me?', after waking from anaesthesia to find that a sadistic surgeon has amputated both his legs." The end.

Pox on your trousers

ACROSS the pond, meanwhile, The New York Times was ticking all the right poxes on Saturday: "Correction: The article on Page 22 this weekend about marital infidelity misidentifies a disease contracted from prostitutes that men in the 18th century could write or talk freely about. It is syphilis, not smallpox."