Tips and Murmurs: LNP's cross borders ... ScoMo mute ... Swanny's appeal

U-turn with a screech for the Queensland LNP, no zoom-zoom for Scott Morrison, and who's smiling now as Quadrant says 'cheese'.

Making hay in the sunshine state In the lead-up to the state election in October, Queensland’s Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington tried to make political hay from recent breaches of Labor’s closed border.

“A third person has now allegedly entered the state with coronavirus through Labor’s border controls,” she tweeted yesterday, before reinforcing the need to “to protect lives and livelihoods” and calling for “mandatory maximum penalties for those who break the rules”.

She may want to have a word with a few of her party members: calling for strict enforcement of the closed border would land a little more convincingly if the Queensland LNP didn’t still (at time of writing) have an active petition calling for Queensland’s border to be reopened.

Ready, aim … shoot yourself in the foot A sponsored Facebook video of national Labor Party president (and former treasurer) Wayne Swan shaking the can, asking for recurring donations, is doing the rounds.

He talks of the social architecture put in place by Labor governments (Medicare et al) and his government’s response to the global financial crisis.

He may wish to talk to the opposition leader about this. Anthony Albanese has spent much of the crisis obsessed with the debt and deficit created by the Coalition’s stimulus spending while being extremely cagey about how much support for the unemployed (of which there will be more and more) Labor was willing to fight for.

Word choice The Cairns Post and other Queensland News Corp outlets ran a story last week about “Five of the worst inmates in the far north’s Lotus Glen Correctional Centre“. So far, so tabloid. But check out the excerpt, which describes convicted killer Klaus Andres as “perhaps FNQ’s most recognised bad-ass”.

In case you need reminding, the article goes on to say Andres was found guilty of killing his wife then dissolving her body in hydrochloric acid. “Bad-ass” mercifully isn’t in the article. So what subeditor decided it was an appropriate way to describe him?

Uncontaminated by sense Quadrant, the right-wing journal once funded by the CIA, is organising corporate boycotts. In the online “essential readings”‘ section, under the heading “Insights from Quadrant“, online editor Roger Franklin urges people to steer clear of Saputo, the owner and renamer of Coon cheese.

Franklin notes:

It would be a mistake to put any of the cheesy brands below into the shopping trolley, as they are also owned by Saputo. For future refence [sic]:
Cracker Barrell [sic], Devondale, Great Ocean Road, King Island Dairy, Liddells, Mersey Valley, Millell Parmesan [sic], South Cape, Sungold, Tasmania Heritage, Warrnambool Heritage Cheddars.

Did you start to hear the bouzouki too? Yes, poor old Rog has gone the full monty. A slight improvement, we’ll concede, on musing on the positive effects a terrorist nail bomb would have on an ABC Q&A audience.

Scott Morrison’s Zoom faux pas The prime minister’s “I’m just a regular guy” act might hide a calculated and organised agenda, but sometimes it really is authentic.

Morrison was addressing the Aspen Security Forum over Zoom this morning, alongside such figures as Condoleezza Rice and John Bolton. While being interviewed by CBS host Margaret Brennan, he managed to get quite a way into his answer before Brennan was forced to ask: “Mr prime minister, can you unmute your line …”