Strewth: Giving a fig

Bill Shorten was invited to respond to a tasteless Father’s Day tweet, and Scott Morrison’s less than happy response to it.

As another sign of where we’re up to politically as a nation, Bill Shorten was yesterday invited to respond to a tasteless (and subsequently deleted and regretted) Father’s Day tweet by the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union’s John Setka, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s less than happy response to it. “I don’t condone the tweet. It’s not the first time I’ve disagreed with that union official’s comments in public,” Shorten said, his tone giving no hint whatsoever he was limbering up for the first truly great mixed metaphor of spring. “But I think that what we actually see, and let’s call it as it is …” And without further ado, the federal Opposition Leader laid it upon the nation: “Mr Morrison has leapt on the tweet like a drowning man will sort of grab at a fig leaf.” Fig leaves, it should be noted in a sort of public health and safety way, are not noted for their buoyancy. But if it’s about gaining a little cover in the face of doom, making sure you’re afforded a degree of modesty in death is surely the modern version of your mum making sure you’re wearing clean undies in case you get hit by a bus. (Had he been there, Labor frontbencher Brendan O’Connor, who has more than a few Irish songs under his belt, could have chimed in with a verse from I’m Here Because I’m Here: “Never throw a brick to a drowning man / If you’re close to a grocer’s store / Throw him a bar of Sunlight soap / Let him wash himself ashore.” Then again …)

All roads lead to Paris

Yesterday morning brought one of Morrison’s most important prime ministerial debuts: a chat on 2GB with Alan Jones. Happily it lacked the pyrotechnic truculence of some of Jonesy’s encounters with Malcolm Turnbull, but what it lacked in broadcast biff it made up for by opening with a wonderful moment in course correction.

Jones: “I put on my Facebook page last night just to notify everyone that you’d be on the program this morning, and there’s been a stack of comments such as, ‘Turnbull’s man, I’m afraid, committed to Paris. More of the same left-wing rubbish, little has changed.’ Another, ‘Out of Paris, or is it the same old, same old?’ Another: ‘If he hasn’t ditched Paris for a start, then nothing has changed. That’s the litmus test.’ What do you say to these people?”

ScoMo: “They’re going to give me a go, because they want Australia to be stronger. I’ve said what I wanted to.” (Then, many, many words later …) “You know, Alan, people say they love Australia, but I want them to love all Australians too. If you love Australia, you love all Australians. I think that’s an important part of ensuring we deal with all the challenges we face as a country together.”

Jones: “Paris. They’re asking about Paris.”

Skin in the game

The two men also put in some hard yards in jargon creation.

ScoMo: “I want more dispatchable power in the system and that’s what …”

Jones: “Could you stop using the word ‘dispatchable’? Out there they don’t understand that.”

ScoMo: “Well, real power. OK?”

Jones: “Real power.”

ScoMo: “Real. Fair dinkum.”

Kevin Rudd, eat your heart out.

And then — springboarding into the topic of the PM’s daughters and role-playing exercises in schools to teach kids empathy as they enter the minefield of developing sexuality — Jones road-tested a new expression: “Just to make your skin curl …” While Morrison presented the novel spectacle of a PM at pains to put some space between public schools and his own educational choices, Jones pushed on: “Does that stuff make your skin curl?” We understand skin being made to crawl, but curling? The closest we could find was in the icy sport of curling. To wit: “The Skins format differs from regular curling in that a marker is awarded for each end won, with the value for each end increasing as the game progresses … This results in a very exciting offensive style of play where every end is like the final end of the game with teams going all out to win.”

Gut filling

Former prime ministerial contender Peter Dutton was meanwhile trying to tie together the disparate topics of Labor and au pairs: “I’ve kept a very good list … of MPs who have come to me with quirky cases.” Hopefully a more successful list than the one numbering his supporters the other week. On which note we come to Labor’s Jason Clare: “The Australian people hate this stuff. They have had a gutful of the backstabbing in Canberra.” It takes a pretty impressive backstab to fill a gut. Clare then segued to gas policy, a topic that at least afforded Resources Minister Matt Canavan the opportunity to venture what, so soon after the spill, was a courageous phrase: “There is division, distraction and uncertainty in Team Labor.”

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