Comment

Early in his presidency, or perhaps just before it, a video circulated of Donald Trump grappling with an older man on the edge of a wrestling ring.

We’d almost entirely forgotten about Fabulous Mitch Fifield, until there was a brief grab of him on the telly, beamed in from New York, where he has landed softly as our ambassador to the United Nations. It’s pleasing to see the Human Toilet Brush still maintains his bristling, brush-like qualities, yet it’s to be wondered just what he’ll be doing at the UN Summit on Biodiversity. Nothing much, it seems.

‘The first thing Josh Frydenberg should do in next Tuesday night’s budget speech is say sorry,’ says Wayne Swan, the man whom the Liberals cut no slack after he failed as treasurer to deliver Labor’s promised budget surpluses. Neither a global financial crisis nor a massive collapse in export revenues were acceptable excuses to the Coalition back then.

The boundaries of what is politically possible have shifted, rapidly, during this pandemic. The conditions have been created for the most significant policy reforms in our history. No one wants to see what we are now weathering repeated. There is an appetite for change.

It’s strange to watch Ross Garnaut talk about a carbon price so many years after Tony Abbott succeeded in tearing it apart.

Isn’t it terrific that Fishnets Downer consistently lends his talents to the betterment of nations? According to reports, he’s signed on for a three-year gig to assist Gibraltar in free trade negotiations with Australia. In his new job, “The Knee”, as Paul Keating memorably christened the great global statesman, has to unravel the complexities of the Rock’s movements of goods and services, in and out.

Tony Abbott has a lot to answer for. The former prime minister’s judgement on the national broadband network, climate and energy have led to costly and embarrassing failures. Now Scott Morrison is left to pick up the pieces – trying to reposition his government to be more in tune with the situation contemporary Australia is facing.

I bought John Kehoe a coffee in 2016, when we were both in Washington, DC. Too late now for a refund, and there was, as far as I can remember, no hint of any latent Oedipal drive behind his small talk, nothing to indicate that on April 9 of this year, I would open The Australian Financial Review and find him making the case for his father as a human sacrifice.

We cannot print his name. We know he has been in immigration detention for seven years. We know his weight has dropped to 45 kilograms. He could die within weeks. The government’s medical contractors say his condition is critical. Their assessment is plain: “at risk of death from sudden cardiac death, organ failure, overwhelming infection or other effects of prolonged starvation”.

An emotional nation has been moved by Schmo Morrison’s humanity as he fights for the freedom of citizens to cross state borders to attend funerals. Funerals and their role in salving grief over the loss of a loved one is something dear to the Coalition. Government Finance Minister and Turnbull quisling Mathias Cormann announced gutturally that Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is “so cold-hearted and so harsh and so nasty”.