Strewth: sleighs & tradies

As we start the downhill run to Christmas, here’s Bill Shorten Instagramming his encounter with Santa Claus.

As we start the downhill run to Christmas, here’s Bill Shorten Instagramming his encounter with Santa Claus. As Shorten wrote, “There’s only one pole that counts — the North Pole.” Who knows if one asked the other, “How are you getting on without Dasher?” Now let’s turn to Coalition backbencher Andrew Broad, the only MP inventive enough to speak in the same-sex marriage debate via the medium of musical home invasion metaphor. Broad’s Christmas message finds him retelling the story of Jesus’ birth: “The angels didn’t tell the politicians, the angels didn’t tell the socially important people, they told the Sheppard’s (sic), the farmers, and the night shift workers.”

He goes on to describe how the Lord went on to work as a “tradie”. It’s like an even newer New Testament. We thought this would be a nice note to start on before we eased into the horror of the next item.

We can only wonder what Bill Shorten asked for.

Sorry, George

News that Attorney-General George Brandis will leave the Senate and these fair shores to be become our next high commissioner in London is about as surprising as Weetbix. (Ditto the response from his shadow, Mark Dreyfus: “There will be few in the legal community, or indeed in Australia, who will lament his departure.”) But it has been a long time coming, and it’s tempting to ponder what planted the germ of the idea in Brandis’s head, what spurred him to first have the thought, “I’d like to leave this place.” One strong candidate is a travesty that occurred right outside Brandis’s office window while the poor bloke was hard at work preparing himself for a less than entirely happy session in Senate estimates. Strewth regrets to say it involved yours truly and Mike Bowers, the fair host of the Talking Pictures segment on the ABC’s Insiders program. We were about to film that week’s Talking Pictures in the sun-smooched Senate courtyard. For the all-important throwback to Barrie Cassidy, we were to stand up, drop our strides and reveal our red budgie smugglers, each pair emblazoned with the message “Back to you Barrie” (pictured, with profound apologies). As per our default position, we blame Bowers. Anyway, as we were getting ready to film, we spotted Brandis’s bonce and, reasoning that practise makes perfect, walked over to his window and dropped our trousers. It was hard to tell in the immediate aftermath if the Attorney-General was convulsing with tears or laughter. Either way, we think we can trace his desire to leave parliament and Australia to that moment. Though we could be wrong.

James Jeffrey and Mike Bowers: shirts tucked in only to ensure clarity of message.

The triggering cycle

Back to the festive season. Greens senators Nick McKim and Peter Whish-Wilson, ably assisted by staffer McKim’s spokesfella Pat Caruana, had a jolly jape posing for a photo with a banner declaring “Merry Christmas!”, only with “Christmas” rudely crossed out and replaced with “non-denominational seasonal festivity”. They were taking the pee as surely as a doctor armed with a specimen jar, but many took it seriously, drawn like tiny magnets to this lump of irony. Not least Treasurer Scott Morrison, who stirred from the gentle air of self-satisfied hostility he exudes around journalists and deployed a warhead: “What a bunch of pathetic muppets. The Greens are actually opposed to Christmas!” Declared McKim on Sky News, “We’re entirely stoked with the number of nibbles we got to the bait that we set.” Remember, we still have a few trolling days left until Christmas.

Monkey business time

It’s not so obviously Christmas-themed, but National Public Radio has a story about monkeys getting it on with deer. It includes this top line: “Japanese macaques are known to ride deer like humans ride horses, for fun or transportation … But these monkeys were up to something different.” Which rather redefines the concept of “stag night”.

[e-mail]