Strewth: JBish flying high

Julie Bishop used her beloved West Coast Eagles as an opportunity to remind everyone she is kind of popular.

Chris Bowen looks up from reading album reviews in the 1990s. Picture: Instagram

Julie Bishop watched her beloved West Coast Eagles get into the AFL grand final live on Saturday. But the Eagles’ No 1 ticketholder also used the game as an opportunity to remind everyone she is kind of popular. The former Liberal deputy leader shared this tweet from ABC Brisbane newsreader Karina Carvalho: “Watching the footy at a pub in Sydney. Crowd goes absolutely WILD when the camera focuses on @JulieBishopMP.” Bishop replied to Carvalho with a wee smiley face and an emoji of a woman putting her hand up. While Bishop was cheered at Perth Stadium, Scott Morrison was loudly booed when the Prime Minister watched Richmond v Hawthorn at the MCG on September 8. Not that we’re suggesting Bishop was pointing out this difference. But if Morrison is planning to make her our next governor-general, as is rumoured, he might want to get the appointment locked in with The Queen before the Eagles face Collingwood this weekend.

Shorten savours Pies

Collingwood’s victory over Richmond on Friday pleased two of Melbourne’s most powerful people. Labor leader Bill Shorten wrote on Instagram: “An unbelievable game last night. And a great crowd at the MCG. Pies are in the grand final!” Shorten, of course, was not always a Pies man. He backed South Melbourne before they became the Sydney Swans. Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp, the first woman to sit on Collingwood’s board, also tweeted her delight throughout the night

Bowen Labors point

Chris Bowen went home yesterday. Well, if anyone could ever call the NSW Young Labor conference home. The opposition’s Treasury spokesman addressed the tiny tots of the Labor movement yesterday and reminisced about his days as a student activist: “A lot has changed since I was lurking this conference as a delegate,” he told the audience in the Sydney Town Hall. “When I started in Young Labor, the internet hadn’t been invented. We were informed of Young Labor meetings by calls on a landline or letters in the mailbox. And social media was a copy of Rolling Stone.” Bowen was a Young Labor delegate from 1988 to 1999. Also hanging around the youth group at that time where NSW Opposition Leader Luke Foley and federal frontbenchers Tony Burke, Jason Clare and Michelle Rowland. We’re struggling to see a baby-faced Bowen reading Rolling Stone, though. After all, he became mayor of Fairfield, in western Sydney, at the sweet age of 25.

Club mentality

John Howard called for more women in the parliamentary Liberal Party last week. That sentence would be uncontroversial if he hadn’t made said call in a men’s-only club. The former prime minister’s address to Tattersall’s Club in Brisbane reminds Strewth of that bizarre period when Dame Quentin Bryce (well, a mannequin of Dame Quentin)got flung over the wall of the Melbourne Club by the ABC’s Chaser gang. She was the first governor-general not to be offered a membership to the Melbourne Club, the nearby Athenaeum Club, or Sydney’s Australian Club. Tattersall’s Club has famously not offered either Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk or Treasurer Jackie Trad an entry pass. At least Howard wants one old boys’ club, the Australian parliament, to change its ways. He was the first PM to have more than one woman at a time in his cabinet, after all.

Historic vote

The world’s attention rarely turns to Peru’s Yungar District, but not every town can say their mayor is Hitler. No, the conspiracy theories about Adolf Hitler hiding in South America have not be proven to be true. Former mayor Hitler Alba Sanchez is running for the job he last held in 2014 and he has told the Peruvian media during his re-election campaign, “I’m the good Hitler.” He says his parents picked the name because it was “foreign-sounding” and they did not know of the Nazi dictator. His rival in the mayoral election is Lennin Vladimir Rodriguez Valverde. Yes, Hitler is opposed by someone named after Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.