Strewth: Just flagging it

It would be understandable if Scott Morrison was feeling a up against it, even his trusty old distress signal was issuing warnings.

On the plus side, when Scott Morrison wears his flag upside down, it looks the right way up when he looks down at it. Picture: AAP

It was just as August was ending and his prime ministership beginning that Scott Morrison issued a message: “Today I gave each of my ministers a lapel pin with the Australian flag on it. I’ve been wearing this for many years now. The reason I wear it is because it reminds me every single day whose side I’m on. I’m on the side of the Australian people.” Not all of the troops have been diligent, but ScoMo has been. However, there are days when it can go awry. Days such as yesterday, when his MP Ann Sudmalis announced she was quitting, tipped a bucket in the process and prompted ScoMo to point the finger at some of the Liberal Party himself. To wit: “I stress that these are complaints that do not relate to the parliamentary wing, but to the organisational wing of the party.” It would be understandable if the PM was feeling a bit up against it. To this end, he turned up yesterday morning with his lapel flag upside down — the trusty old distress signal. All well and good, except the flag protocols sternly laid out by the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet include this: “Do not fly the flag upside down, even as a signal of distress.” Ahem. Then again, there are also strict rules against misusing parliamentary footage — such as, say, overlaying a question time clip with a bit of risque hip hop. Say what you like about ScoMo, but he’s a loose unit.

Chalk and cheese

Former minister Craig Emerson, meanwhile, has amusingly taken issue with a journo drawing a line between the ScoMo hip-hop clip and his most notorious bit of performance art: “A comparison of the PM’s tweet and my ‘No Whyalla Wipeout’ is unfair. Not once did my rendition of Horror Movie allude to anal or oral sex or prostitution. Just good, clean, poor singing.” Emmo’s too modest to mention his experimental dance moves.

Down Wentworth way

Life as a political candidate can be a whirlwind, as Tim Murray is finding out. As Labor’s man running for Malcolm Turnbull’s old seat of Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, his life is a kaleidoscope of interviews and flesh-pressing and running from between events. Clearly there are times when attention to more prosaic matters, such as looking after important personal belongings, can slip. Murray arrived to say hello to ferry commuters yesterday. He set the scene for Strewth with an economy of words and maximum tension: “I’d just paid at a parking station and left my wallet on the dashboard.” To complete the picture, Murray left the car unlocked as he went to do his duty. As he conceded to Strewth, the wallet — exposed and undefended — may as well have had a “Hello, please come steal me” sign on it. And so it came to pass that Murray returned to his car a couple of hours later and observed the wallet was gone. “I thought, ‘Oh (bad word), I’ve done a bad thing.” Having absorbed the reality of the theft — credit cards, a couple of hundred bucks — he pootled home, rustled up a back-up credit card and went to put it in the satchel he keeps in the car. As his hand entered the satchel, it bumped into the familiar shape of his wallet; a passing Wentworther had clearly seen it and moved it somewhere safer. So whoever did it, your ALP candidate is grateful. So is your Strewth columnist, albeit a bit grudgingly because we were keen to work up a Mean Streets of Wentworth angle.

Correct channels

Finally, good luck to Bob Katter’s chief of staff, Anne Pleash, who is swimming the English Channel. “She reckons there aren’t any crocodiles in there,” Katter told us, then — with the face of a man satisfied all the safety criteria had been addressed — walked [e-mail]