Negatives never late

FOR a brief moment yesterday, the Coalition's joint partyroom meeting on the ETS looked in danger of losing its sparkle when Barnaby Joyce missed his plane to Canberra.

FOR a brief moment yesterday, the Coalition's joint partyroom meeting on the ETS looked in danger of losing its sparkle when Barnaby Joyce missed his plane to Canberra.

Sure, his Nationals colleague Ron Boswell was perfectly capable of keeping things humming along in the style to which we've become accustomed -- for example, "[the ETS] will always be a dog" -- but without Barnaby, it would have been a bit like Roger Moore-era 007: entertaining enough, but haunted and ultimately overshadowed by the absence of Sean Connery. So imagine our relief when Joyce caught the next plane and arrived in time. It came as even more of a relief to see Wilson Tuckey (or Dr No, if we may extend our James Bond analogy) also arriving safely in the national capital. Just as well, as going by what we could see in the bulging shopping bags he was lugging (cheese, little cartons of milk, assorted nibbles), the tea break would have been stuffed without him.

Moscow to Mosman

MEANWHILE, Joe Hockey has been tweeting about the prospect of a congestion tax piled on top of tolls, fuel taxes and whimsically poor public transport. He says he's been getting good feedback, then finishes with this observation: "Oh, and Soviet-style congestion is more tolerable with a Moscow version railway ... chandeliers and all!" Ah, the Moscow metro re-created here; is it too much to dream? When your Strewth correspondent lived in the Russian capital, we came close to taking the metro for granted: beautiful stations, trains every 50 seconds or so during peak hour, a network designed to get you just about anywhere in a city of 10million. When we returned to Sydney and found ourselves on a pretty-as-an-ashtray platform, waiting and waiting and waiting, we wiped a tear from our eye. (This also happened when we came back from Melbourne.) So good work, Kilimanjaro Joe; Strewth seconds the motion.

The wrong impression

NOW for our occasional (and just-named) segment, Top of the Malaprops. When Rod Pearse and Stephen Page accepted the award for partnership of the year at the Australia Business Arts Foundation awards in Brisbane last week, there was goodwill all round. After all, the soon-to-retire Boral chief executive and veteran artistic director of Bangarra Dance company have been doing an elegant pas de deux for the past seven years. So there was some confusion when Pearse described their relationship as the "antithesis of everything AbaF stands for". We're pretty sure he meant epitome, but hell, deeds beat words. Congratulations to them both on a well-deserved gong.

Who's yer father?

STREWTH'S nearest and dearest shares a surname with legendary cricket commentator Alan McGilvray, and many an introduction to a new person will eventually find its way to the question: "You're not by any chance related to Alan?" So we have plenty of sympathy for our colleague Andrew Colley, who is forever being quizzed about any possible family link to cricketing all-rounder and later commentator David "The Fox" Colley. When our Colley was introduced to one Dan Colley the other night, he couldn't help himself. Once the initial discussion about the surname and its relative rarity was done, our Colley pounced: "Let me guess. Everyone asks if you're related to David Colley, right?" Dan answered: "I wish they would; he's my father." The moral of this story? For the purposes of conversation, it's probably better to have a surname such as Colley or McGilvray rather than, say, Himmler.

Shoot for the moon

JON Landau isn't one to underestimate what a mammoth undertaking it is to make a movie. Here's the Hollywood producer on making Avatar with James Cameron: "When we started it was a little like the people at NASA who first went to the moon. When John Kennedy said they were going to put someone on the moon, they didn't really know how they were going to do it, and when we started we had an idea but we had no idea how we were going to do it either." The key word in this statement is "little". Still, at least they kept an Australian actor -- Sam Worthington -- in employment.