Strewth: try, try again

Labor has shown great consistency lately in its quest to exempt tampons and sanitary pads from the goods and services tax.

One thing Labor has shown great consistency in lately has been its quest to exempt tampons and sanitary pads from the goods and services tax. Behold the sheer zest of this announcement alone: “The Government can exempt tampons and sanitary pads from the GST simply by adding them to Regulations still to be tabled in the Parliament … It’s easy to exempt these products. The Government doesn’t have to amend the Act or even introduce new Regulations … All it takes — quite literally — is a stroke of (the minister’s) pen and this glaring anomaly would be fixed. It’s that easy!” You don’t see a lot in the way of exclamation marks in senior political press releases, their paragraphs too arid for punctuation so festive — but this was clearly one of those occasions when nothing less would suffice. Alas, the announcement we quoted is old enough to go to the pub, issued as it was by then opposition Treasury spokesman Simon Crean on January 5, 2000. A handful of years later, Labor won power and formed government for six years, and Crean was a minister for most of that time. And here we are, once more with feeling.

That was then

It’s easy enough to do when you’re in power, of course. In 2014, the government (of which Barnaby Joyce was then a senior member) received a report from the Australian Law Reform Commission recommending a privacy tort. Ordered by said government, it was introduced thus: “In this Inquiry the ALRC was asked to design a statutory cause of action for serious invasions of privacy, and also to consider other innovative ways in which law may reduce serious invasions of privacy in the digital era.” It didn’t happen. Nearly four years later we have Joyce, having decided there’s a time and a place for being harassed on a footpath, calling for a privacy tort. Though as we were reminded during Education Minister Simon Birmingham’s press conference yesterday, his voice is a bit of a lonely one.

Journo: “Barnaby Joyce said yesterday that he’d like to see tougher privacy laws to protect people like himself from the paparazzi. Does the government support that?”

Birmingham: “I don’t see any need for Australia’s privacy laws to be changed.”

Into the dress-ups box

Our illustrious colleague Rachel Baxendale yesterday created one of the more startling opening paragraphs we’ve seen in a while: “LNP maverick George Christensen has donned a revealing one-piece Lycra leotard in a cringe-inducing Beyonce-inspired social media stunt, urging the Turnbull government to ‘put a Ring Road on it’ and guarantee funding for a local infrastructure project in his Central Queensland electorate.” To borrow an expression, that paragraph is like the Galway library: it’s got everything in it. The same cannot be said for the Lycra. Unsettling as it might be for some, it represents a sort of going home for Christensen, who opted for balletic cross-dressing in 2009. Just like Baxendale, local paper the Daily Mercury was also moved at the time to produce a perfect but packed lead paragraph about that particular good cause: “Mackay Regional councillor George Christensen said performing a piece from The Nutcracker Suite in tights, tutu and a blue sequined camisole would be the longest five minutes of his life. ‘Five minutes is a lifetime in tulle,’ Christensen said, ‘but it’s all in the name of art.’ ” For extra points, he and his comrades-in-pumps named their troupe the Ballshai Ballet.

Summit time loos

You just never know what you’re going to learn ahead of the Singapore summit ’twixt Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un (or “the two dictators”, as Fox News host Abby Huntsman briefly called them). The Chosun Ilbo informs us Kim has packed “a portable toilet that will deny determined sewer divers insights into the supreme leader’s stools”. And Singaporean website Coconuts.co has had a flashback to an interview with the late Anthony Bourdain: “Bourdain gamely replied to the TMZ reporter about what he’d serve at a summit between Trump and Kim. ‘Hemlock,’ he said, referring to the highly poisonous plant.” Coconuts rolls on in sunny earnestness to add: “As dramatic as it would be, hemlock will definitely not be on the menu.” Just as well.

Doing the piper work

Britain on Sunday marked the 100th anniversary of women getting the vote with marches up and down the country. Inevitably, the march in Edinburgh featured bagpipes. Always a good choice, in your Strewth scribe’s extremely discerning opinion. It just might have been a good day for the piper to choose a tune other than Cock of the North.

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