Strewth: A song in her heart

We’re sure it was just the joy of music that put a smile on Tanya Plibersek’s face rather than the doomsday clock thumping away.

If you’re happy and you know it spin a tune or two, with your host DJ T-Plib. Picture: Instagram

We’re sure it was just the joy of music that put this look on Tanya Plibersek’s face rather than the sound of the government’s doomsday clock thumping away like a jackhammer on Mogadon. Behold the deputy Labor leader, Instagrammed here at the Sydney Festival, stepping on Anthony Albanese’s turf and DJ-ing her heart out. That said, it’s possible her playlist did allude to the flaky government frontbench, given it included: Murder on the Dancefloor (Sophie Ellis-Bextor), Peanut Butter Jelly (Galantis), Don’t Leave Me This Way (Communards), Tainted Love (Soft Cell), and Don’t You Want Me (Human League). Though we could be overextrapolating again.

Apocalypse Nowra 2.0

The goings on in the NSW south coast federal seat of Gilmore recently gave us an excuse to run a bit of Paul Keating invective — for what is Strewth but the Wimbledon of tenuous? Anyway, we wrote about PJK swooping into Gilmore in the wake of John Hewson’s famous cake/GST/Mike Willesee fiasco only to find the local bakery owner seized his own media opportunity with strong views on payroll tax and support for Hewson’s policies. Doh! Strewth had PJK referring afterwards to the owner as “that c..t from the pie shop”. We only have to type that word — even in this bowdlerised form — and our spiritual adviser Jack the Insider stirs inside his darkened cloister, eyelids parting at this tremor in the Force. (His eyes must have been permanently open when our old mate Elisabeth Wynhausen was still with us. But we digress.) Jack informed us it was the Labor candidate — and subsequent MP — Peter Knott who was forever known to Keating by the above epithet, due to the fact he was the one who’d lined up the bakery owner. Some records plump for a slight variation — “that c..t from Gilmore” — though it lacks the blunt lyricism of the other. Knott sounds like he was a tremendous character and surely would have appreciated the PJK approach. As he reflected once to a journo: “Nice guys get their teeth kicked in and used for landfill.”

Call to action

Speaking of combat stars, Steven Seagal arrives in Australia today for a couple of events. “One of the greatest and most loved action hero movie stars of all time,” bugles his publicist Max Markson, who adds Seagal is also known “as an environmentalist and animal rights activist. In fact he was an environmentalist before people even knew what they were through his 1994 movie On Deadly Ground.” Indeed, On Deadly Ground — in which Seagal battles a corrupt oil magnate played by Michael Caine and a pot of black hair dye — had the working title Rainbow Warrior. Let’s turn to Caine’s words from 2010: “The wait for a decent movie makes you desperate, and I got desperate to the point that I accepted a picture in Alaska with Steven Seagal, the martial arts expert. The movie was called On Deadly Ground and the title was to prove apt. Although Steven and the rest of the team were great to work with, I had broken one of the cardinal rules of bad movies: if you’re going to do a bad movie, at least do it in a great location. Here I was, doing a movie where the work was freezing my brain and the weather was freezing my arse.” Seagal is a Russian citizen these days, his passport handed to him by Vladimir Putin who, clearly deciding the 21st century wasn’t already sufficiently peculiar, went on to appoint him as his special envoy to the US last year.

Phil space

Three cheers for The New Zealand Herald’s website, which ran a photo of the Duke of Edinburgh with the headline “Grand jury indicts white Dallas police officer with murder” and the standfirst, “Prince Philip apologised to a woman who broke her wrist in a car crash with him”. Five stars.

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