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Strife after death

FEDERAL parliament does condolence motions well, and sadly, Afghanistan is providing plenty of practice.

FEDERAL parliament does condolence motions well, and sadly, Afghanistan is providing plenty of practice.

Alas, the dignity visited upon the house at the start of question time yesterday lasted only as long as the talk of death did. Before the first question was done, Speaker Harry Jenkins was shovelling MPs out the door by the job lot. Matters weren't helped dignity-wise when Wayne Swan opened his mouth and let the words "battler's buffer" fall out. We prefer the idea of Baffler's Butter, a line of dairy products that could be flogged by Martin "Kill the fatted syllable" Ferguson.

Shower of hits

LET'S go to South Australia and an estimates hearing performance from Sports and Walloper Minister and former treasurer Kevin Foley. It's so good, it's like when a band puts out an album so stuffed with gold (say Crowded House with Woodface), it feels like a greatest hits collection:

Liberal MP Dan van Holst Pellekaan: "Can the minister explain what component of the project this money is for? I understand the project is not yours."

Foley: "It is not mine."

Van Holst Pellekaan: "But the budget is yours."

Foley: "Well, it is software, hardware, kitchenware -- I don't know. It is just whatever else they have to buy for the project. It would be the stuff that you have with this thing to make it work and go live on October 25. You see, I never used to be a line minister; I have always been the treasurer. These in-depth forensic questions are blowing my brain apart. I am struggling."

And a little later from Foley: " I know this is very complicated, it is cash v budget; they are two different things. Do not worry, it confuses me and I have been treasurer for nine years."

Bobbing for trouble

ALMOST-but-not-quite Liberal Party president Peter Reith has got off to a solid start as a contributor to the ABC's The Drum, opening his first piece thus: "If the Liberal rank and file do not take back ownership of their broad-based organisation party soon, then it may not survive in its current form. It would be a huge loss if the Liberals ended up as a right-wing version of GetUp!" An arresting vision, yet without quite the impact as Bob Ellis's piece -- "The Strauss-Kahn moment: Has feminism gone too far?" -- on The Drum one day earlier. "They closed down responses to my piece after 24 hours," Ellis complained to Strewth. [For the record, the final comment before the essay was hermetically sealed inside its biohazard bag was No 344 and began with the words "What the?" and finished with, "This article makes no sense whatsoever unless either the author is senile, or is just trolling for reaction." Tough crowd.] Continues Ellis, "A curious decision. The wowser-feminists' theory lacked logic, I thought. They believe, I think, that Strauss-Kahn should not go to jail but I should be punished for saying he should not. They said I defended rapists, but I mentioned none in my piece. I did defend first-time groping, which we used to call wooing. Many marriages began that way." At least he didn't hack into any mobile phones, so that probably counts for something.

This one's borrowed

RECYCLING, as we've been taught, is a good thing, so it's good to see Liberal MP Josh Frydenberg recognising it in a speech to parliament the other night: " 'We had proclaimed 1999 as the 'year of delivery', a phrase that somewhat came back to haunt us.' Sound familiar? These are the words of the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair [in his memoir] . . . But we could be forgiven for thinking this was the voice of our own Prime Minister who late last year mimicked the phrase declaring 2011 the year of 'delivery and decision'." Very thoughtful of Frydenberg to try to protect Gillard from going down the Blair route. In the meantime, in the same spirit, Tony Abbott appeared to borrow from Bob Hawke (and surely, ultimately, Mao Zedong) with his let-an-as-yet-to-be-specified-number-of-trees-bloom idea.

True blue

STREWTH had a good old chortle on Saturday at the Exocet missives being fired back and forth on this august organ's letters page between the Sydney Institute's Anne Henderson and the Liberal Party's Michael Kroger. For those of you who've been carelessly failing to pay attention, the debate is over which government had the biggest majority: Joseph Lyons's in 1931 or Malcolm Fraser's in 1975. At the time, we made a World War I-style "it'll all be over by Christmas" gag. Then we learned this: the duel is still going. Time to call for a truce. Or a car park.

Day with benefits

FOR the purposes of enriching your lives, we will point out that today is the Northern Territory's Hump Day, in other words the middle Wednesday of the year and just a few days shy of the hump-rich Alice Springs Camel Cup. Incidentally, the Hump Day message came to us from a public relations person called Rob Lowe which, for those of you familiar with the history of frisky celebrity home videos, is kind of apposite, in a double entendre kind of way.

strewth@theaustralian.com.au

Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/strewth/strife-after-death/news-story/b036081672b1369dce1988ab7e2b0895