Strewth: minister for Albo

Defence may be Christopher Pyne’s official portfolio but that doesn’t mean he neglects his other, slightly less official, one.

Defence industry may be the portfolio officially attached to Christopher Pyne’s name but that doesn’t mean he neglects his other, slightly less official, one. Indeed, as the government’s roving Minister for Talking Up Anthony Albanese Almost If Not Entirely For the Purposes of Stirring the Labor Leadership Possum, Pyne displays an energy that is admirably, almost unnervingly, unflagging. He does it in parliament. He does it in press conferences. He does it on television and radio. And if he could invade your dreams and talk Albo, he probably would. At his press conference last weekend, the official portfolio almost didn’t get a look-in.

Australian Minister for Defence Industry and part time Minister for Talking Up Anthony Albanese Christopher Pyne. Picture: AAP

“Well, thank you very much for coming this morning,” he said, bringing the non-Albo content to an end. “Anthony Albanese has fired the starter gun on the Labor Party leadership contest last night in his speech. He very clearly has contradicted Bill Shorten on three seminal messages that Bill Shorten has been crafting since he was the Leader of the Opposition.” Praise for the Marrickville Messiah took various forms. “Anthony Albanese made it very clear that he intends to be the holder of the flame in the Hawke-Keating legacy,” Pyne said at one point, and there’s nothing quite so Liberal Party these days as weaponising Bob Hawke and Paul Keating against Shorten. And there was the personal touch: “I get along well with Anthony Albanese, we do quite a bit of television and radio together.” After a while of this Albo love, one question takes shape: would Pyne consider defecting to an Albanese-led Labor Party? After several nanoseconds of careful contemplation, Pyne delivered his answer to Strewth: “Not even in a month of Sundays.”

Not so easy

Things being what they are, Pyne eventually was quizzed during his presser about why Albo’s latest bit of oratory (or Alboratory, if you will) was a big deal but Tony Abbott tipping the bucket on the government was a non-starter. The crux of Pyne’s reply was that Albo was a frontbencher but Abbott was not. “Backbenchers in the Liberal Party are entitled to have different views about policy issues,” he said before uttering these courageous words: “Nobody has thrown down the gauntlet to Malcolm Turnbull in the way that Anthony Albanese has thrown down the gauntlet to Bill Shorten.” We’re sure no one will take that as a dare. Moving along, the press conference eventually made it to the topic of defence. Frigates, to be specific.

In response

For his part, Shorten described his apres Alboratory conversation with Albo as an “amicable chat”. A worthy endeavour would be for someone to pull together a sort of Pantone chart of Shorten’s responses, a spectrum given its most beautiful treatment so far by Sam Dastyari. When he was still a senator and very much in the thick of his travails, Dasher characterised it thus: “I’ve been very, very strongly counselled by Bill Shorten.” (Ably assisted by a little extra emphasis and the subtlest shift in tone, that second “very” did some heavy lifting.) And then with the benefit of healing time, Dasher went on radio and put some meat on those elegantly bare bones: “I get this call from Bill Shorten. And Bill just f..king goes nuts on the phone to me, right? Like rips me a new one like you would not believe.” Something for everyone.

No filling available

Late last week, Pauline Hanson gave a tax cut speech so long we like to think of it as a Rob Oakeshott Plus. The One Nation leader scored bonus points for not actually revealing which way she was going to vote — unlike Oakeshott, she can defy the gravity of expectation. But she did ask some pertinent questions. To wit: “My dilemma is, yes, we have a black hole. Are we going to actually fill that black hole?” But the bigger question about filling black holes is: can we? We turned to Australian National University astronomer and black hole-discoverer Christian Wolf, who eased us over the event horizon as gently as possible. “The more you fill it, the bigger and the more massive, to be precise, the hole gets,” Wolf told Stewth. “So, in my personal opinion, this is an entirely pointless undertaking; anything you throw in is lost for nearly ever, way beyond the budget horizon or indeed lifetime of any galaxy. And the more you throw in, the more the hole attracts everything else — the hungrier the hole gets. So you give it a finger, and it takes the whole hand.”

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