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Victorian Consumer Affairs Minister Melissa Horne feeding defective toys into a shredder (Image: Nine)

Parting the seas As we’ve previously pointed out, for much of our Lies and Falsehoods dossier, the source for our evidence that the prime minister has been untruthful is simply the media section on his website. So we wonder, if he happens to be asked about the following decidedly sketchy gag about Josh Frydenberg’s cultural heritage, he might simply say he’d never said it:

It has been quite a few years, hasn’t it? These last three years. Floods. Fires. Drought. Pandemic. Mouse plague. I turned to Josh Frydenberg one day in cabinet, I said, I think it’s time we let your people go, Josh.

Child’s play We’ve decided the most important thing we can do for the rest of the year is find out the process that led to a minister allowing herself to be filmed feeding several babies into a shredder. Channel Nine reported on the Victorian government’s destruction of 368 unsafe toys ahead of Christmas. The footage features Consumer Affairs Minister Melissa Horne joining safety inspectors and feeding some of those defective toys into a shredder. Except … surely some of the defective toys were less visceral choices than babies?

She does this three times, on camera

Stenography watch The same line on the National Disability Insurance Scheme is being regurgitated, seemingly without any real scrutiny, at The Australian Financial Review and The Australian. Both publications have got access to figures that reveal the “spiralling cost” of the NDIS is apparently causing a budget blowout of $26 billion over the next four years.

But as Crikey has been reporting for some time, the “cost blowout” line the government has been running doesn’t really track: costs have increased but only marginally from 2012 projections, and the reason for that is the modelling planned for people “exiting” earlier (i.e. get so fed up they’d ditch the scheme, miraculously stop requiring support or die). So if anything, this shows the NDIS is prolonging the lives of people with disabilities.

But the government has focused on NDIS costs to target and attack the scheme and try to subject it to independent assessments. Meanwhile, we have been hearing more and more examples — added to by Labor’s NDIS spokesman Bill Shorten during the year’s last sitting week — of people whose plans have been cut.

About Time Commentary suggesting that Elon Musk was the “worst choice ever” for Time magazine’s person of the year is pretty hardcore, given that Hitler won it in the 1930s. Musk is nothing more than a rich, tax-dodging white South African boy bully. But then it becomes clear that Time approves of him, so… The confusion has arisen because Time defines the person of the year as someone who has had the “most influence for good or ill”.

Alas, it lost its nerve on that in 2001 when it could only really have been Osama bin Laden and it chose Rudy Giuliani, a man for All Seasons (Landscaping). Since then it’s been a PR stunt. Most obscure choice? Maybe Harlow Curtice, 1955? Biggest renege? Iranian PM Mohammed Mossadegh, 1951, deposed by a CIA coup in 1954. Biggest fudge other than bin Laden, 2001? Mark Zuckerberg instead of Assange, 2010. Weirdest in retrospect? Either “You” in 2006 — the issue had a silvered, reflective, cover — or Ken Starr 1998 or, related, “American Women” in the 1970s. Stalin won too, twice. For ill, 1939, for good 1942. So goes the century…

Sub-optimal Earlier this week we mentioned what happens when you file for a publication where the subeditors are all on strike. Turns out, it can happen at the best of times. Check out this bit of fact-checking notation that survived in Bill Kelty’s piece on Labor preselections for The Age: