Mum the dancer

IT'S a mystery why some people imagine Pauline "I have no intentions of selling my home to a Muslim" Hanson has issues with people of different faiths and race.

Barry O'Farrell

IT'S a mystery why some people imagine Pauline "I have no intentions of selling my home to a Muslim" Hanson has issues with people of different faiths and race, but it's something her offspring has to deal with on a regular basis. As Hanson's son Steven explains in this week's issue of Woman's Day, "When I'm out, I'll get the occasional person who is derogatory and says, 'Oh, your mum is a racist'. But we know the truth." What did put a strain on the family was Dancing with the Stars. Daughter Lee relives the horror: "I remember mum getting up and attempting to dance on live TV and me sitting there going, 'Aww, no! Aww, no, mum!' . . . So of course she made it all the way through to the final." Her brother Adam laments, "There were comments like 'Your mum looks hot' . . . And I'm like, 'This is my mum you're talking about'." That would be awkward.

Ah, to be famous

IT'S important to recognise an artist's many facets. At the Annie Leibovitz exhibition at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art on the weekend, Strewth stood before a portrait of Mikhail Baryshnikov and pondered his defection from the then Soviet Union and his esteemed place in ballet's pantheon. Then our neighbour observed brightly, "Hey, it's the guy from Sex and the City."

Hair's to Barry

ONE thing NSW Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell isn't generally accused of being is a fountain of memorable quotes, but one that does stick out like a baboon's bum in the zoo of recent history is this one from a lower-ranking time years ago when he was altogether larger and more hirsute: "When I lose weight and the beard, then you'll know I'm after the Liberal leadership." Now that he is leader, he doesn't need to send these signals anymore. While we're not suggesting he hit the pies, BOF may want to give some thought to reinstating the beard, as seen in this pensive snap (above) from his days as Lib state director in 2007, back in the days when it appeared he was buying his spectacles from the same place as Labor senator John Faulkner. Just looking at this photo helps smother our disappointment that Premier Kristina Keneally kept the promise she made to us last week that she wouldn't deliver her campaign launch speech in the manner of Raymond Chandler.

Kipping in style

WE hear that while in Beijing last week, Parliamentary Trade Secretary Justine Elliot and her media adviser, Maree Duffy-Moon, got to kip in style at the Park Hyatt; $426 a night, according to Expedia. Not for them the brand new China World Hotel, where Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd was obliged to slum it last November ($304), nor the fading charms of the Peninsula Hotel ($259), a favourite of ministers such as Chris Evans and Simon Crean. What is this if not a very public display of support for the Chinese economy? Still, there was the price of inconvenience to pay: most of Elliot's events were either across the road at the lowly China World Hotel or at the Australian embassy, several kilometres away.

Dying to get in

OUR current favourite press release: "Caskets Direct have today opened the nation's first retail 'bricks and mortar' coffin shop in response to consumers demanding that online shopping simply won't suffice . . . Heads are turning on the streets of Melbourne to get a glimpse of everything from pure wool eco coffins and high-end solid timber caskets, to memorial jewellery, which is used to carry ashes around one's neck. 'It's not exactly the kind of shop you just duck into when out doing the weekly shopping,' comments owner Asha Martin." That there's no mention of where in West Footscray the shop is, is but a blip.

The new word

READER Trevor Farrant feels let down: "I shelled out my $2.60 for the weekend Oz in full expectation that today's Strewth would be entirely devoted to Kevin Rudd's new word, complete with commentary from comparative philologists and Nobel laureates. Its first utterance was in his press conference endorsing the UN Security Council decision on Libya: 'Operationalisation'. O, the grammatic specificity. So stunned was Muammar Gaddafi by this one-word, shock-and-awe campaign, he immediately declared a ceasefire." Alas, we can't claim it as a Rudd neologism; operationalisation features in a distressingly large number of entries on Google, among the first of which is: "One of the major challenges currently facing memetics is the issue of how to successfully operationalise the emerging paradigm." We're starting to understand why Rudd was drawn to it.

James Jeffrey