Strewth: Maybe driver

Michael McCormack showed utter fearlessness in the face of an obvious visual metaphor when he sat in a driverless car.

Before we get on to the latest prime ministerial ding-dong, let’s pay a quick visit to the altogether happier realm that is Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack and his utter fearlessness in the face of obvious visual metaphor. He has been at the Driverless Vehicle Summit, sampling the goods and gamely offering himself up for photos. Such as this one, where the leader of the junior party in the Coalition is aghast to discover there is no one at the wheel.

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There’s no frisson quite like the one from the proximity of Malcolm Turnbull’s name to Alan Jones’s eardrums. Even better is the proximity of Turnbull’s voice. Hark back to 2014, when Turnbull paid Jonesy a visit, resulting in an instant trove of brutal treasure. “Alan, I am not going to take dictation from you. I am a cabinet minister,” Turnbull said at one point. Jones posited: “You have no hope ever of being the leader. You’ve got to get that into your head. No hope ever.” Turnbull mused: “Alan, the problem with you is you like dishing it out but you don’t like taking it.” Anyway, during his interview with Scott Morrison yesterday, Jonesy had to make do with just the thought of Turnbull and his recent mission to Indonesia. (Amusingly, when the Prime Minister’s office transcript of this 2GB interview reaches the sentence with Turnbull’s name, it changes font. A small enigma, of sorts.)

Jones (alluding to the Israeli embassy talk): “As a person that is allegedly an emissary, or was, of the government, have you pulled Mr Turnbull in and indicated that you don’t support his repetition of the pronoun ‘I’ and he was there to represent the views of government? The views he represented were in contradistinction to your own views as PM of Australia.”

Morrison: “Well, I got the report back from his visit. He was there to actually attend an oceans conference. The issues of trade and other things, of course, were not really part of the brief.”

Then there was this:

Morrison: “But I do think the exemplar of previous prime ministers, about how they go about things post, on our side of politics is obviously John Howard and on the Labor Party side is Julia Gillard.*”

Jones: “Will there be more missions for this man to be able to go to and sprout his own discredited views?”

Morrison: “No.”

Jones: “Right, are you aware of the ‘like’ that he entered (on a tweet) laughing at the fact that in the latest opinion poll you had fallen, your ratings had fallen and your predecessor ‘liked’ that?”

Morrison: “Yeah, I’m aware of it but I just brush it off, Alan.”

Jaw jaw beats war war

This done, Turnbull availed himself of his Twitter account to issue an au contraire — “a simple statement of fact”, as he later called it —and drag Indonesian President Joko Widodo into it for good measure. Then ScoMo back-pedalled in a way that only could be called “agile”. Hopefully Bill Shorten is getting enough oxygen during his fits of laughter. An even greater hope is that for the benefit of the mood of the nation ScoMo turns up in the audience for Turnbull’s special ABC Q&A episode next week.

(*How do our former PMs stack up on the ScoMo naughty-or-nice scale? Visit our Sketch back on page 4 and find out.)

Small change

A short-lived headline online from The Mercury yesterday: “Australian War Memorial to undergo $500 expansion.” There’s a high chance it was just a slip of the keyboard, but we don’t want to let go of the idea they were just trying to provoke Brendan Nelson into pulling out his guitar and singing a doleful song. That said, if it is only $500 they can always go to Costco.

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