Pauline Hanson
Pauline Hanson (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

The Dark Knight On Pauline Hanson’s Facebook page, our Pauline is offering Christmas cards in the spirit of “the season to be jolly, not too serious with ourselves”. They have been designed, we are told, by a “local cartoonist”. That cartoonist appears to be the Herald Sun’s Mark Knight — or someone so blatantly plagiarising his style that they’ve even stolen his signature and the pig snout that’s always turning up in his work:

(Image: PHON/Facebook)

We asked Hanson to confirm it was Knight, and the Hun whether this risked affecting Knight’s reputation as an unbiased satirist, but neither answered. I suppose they thought that his previous work probably answered both questions.

A very Katter Kristmas Kennedy MP Bob Katter has put out a Christmas message that even by his high standards is a brimming bowl of Froot Loops.

Headed “What 2020 can learn from the Christmas Truce of 1914”, Katter appeals for us to put Christ back into Christmas. At least we think that’s what he’s doing.

The piece has the cadence of performance poetry, recounting how the German and British soldiers who emerged from the trenches on Christmas to play football “understood the message of Christ of Christmas. The monarchs of Europe did not”.

Slamming “evolutionists”, he points out that “evolution gave us Adolf Hitler” — not technically untrue, we suppose? — contrasted against the many achievements of Christianity, such as abolishing slavery and giving us the Magna Carta.

A reassuring reminder that, however strange the times, Bob Katter will always find a way to be stranger.

Reliving 2020 (for some reason) For those of you unable to join my colleague Amber Schultz and me for Crikey’s end-of-year round up last week, don’t think you’re getting away that easy. This week, Tips and Murmurs will look back over this most relentless of years (part of the healing process, I’m told).

First up, January. The phrase “everything is on fire” became fairly commonplace this year, but at the beginning of 2020 it was both vivid and literally true: Australia was burning.  

After deciding the worst bushfires in years was an appropriate point for a little “me”-time, Prime Minister Scott Morrison returned from Hawaii; focused, tenacious and truly determined to force people to shake his hand.

Navigating the crisis with all the grace of a clown try to rollerskate up stairs, Morrison truly united the communities he visited, in that they all, in one voice, came out to call him a dickhead.

Meanwhile, it was revealed that Nationals senator and expert room-reader Bridget McKenzie had overseen massive rorting of the $100 million Community Sport Infrastructure Program to help the government’s 2019 election campaign. This would be the first in a series of integrity scandals to face the government this year. 

In February, disgraced film producer and melting gargoyle Harvey Weinstein was convicted of rape and sexual assault. 

You may remember the fabulously wealthy predator tried to give the impression he was a frail, harmless grandpa by using a walker on the way to court, complete with tennis balls on the tips. It was a prop he abandoned away from court — he was never an actor, he just assaulted them.

Oh, and back on the first day of the year, a Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China was shuttered and put under investigation. Authorities said they had come to believe a virus affecting roughly 30 locals originated there.

Xmas Card Crikey — via visual satirist Tom Red — has intercepted a cache of secret Christmas cards from our political class, and we’ll be sharing them with you, one at a time, over the week.

First up, the ever popular Joel Fitzgibbon.