(Image: AAP/Private Media)

It’s that time of year already Yesterday the satirical website The Betoota Advocate ran the headline “Scotty just holding on for Australia Day debate to overshadow RATs mismanagement”:

With Australia deciding they have heard just enough about an unvaxxed Serbian hotel room enthusiast who is really good at hitting a ball, Prime Minister Scotty from Marketing is hoping that a new debate will dominate the news cycle before anyone realizes cough testing is being privatised.

Certainly it isn’t the only one harbouring the vague suspicion that the elongated drama regarding the deportation of Novak Djokovic is serving the government just fine. As ever, the Institute of Public Affairs is here to help drum up some culture war content, putting out a press release this morning that insists most Australians want the day kept where it is. Good to see the IPA get out in front of a conversation no one much appeared to be having this year. And stacking culture war topics one atop the other like so many reactionary pancakes, it manages to get a crack at identity politics and the terrifyingly non-existent spectre of critical race theory in there:

The bad news is that strongest anti-Australian sentiment is among young people, who through no fault of their own, have been subjected to years of indoctrination at school and at university. In this poll, we are seeing the fruits of bad ideologies like identity politics and critical race theory.

No no Novak One group that definitely does want to move on from the whole saga is the Australian Open itself. This morning it swiftly decided it no longer needed the reigning men’s champ as its cover image:

Dog pound sterling Over the weekend we first hear a phrase that will surely enter the pantheon of classic rhetoric delivered by British prime ministers, one that will be returned to in coming years, recited by a beloved character actor in a serviceable but bland biopic, along with “The lady’s not for turning” and “We shall fight them on the beaches …”

Just picture it: a major star, extremely handsome in real life, but under a wig and a metric tonne of prosthetics so as to resemble Boris Johnson. The camera noses in as he says to an adviser in a plummy whisper: “It’s time to engage … Operation Save Big Dog”.

Breaking China Here’s an interesting point of overlap between some of the more hawkish members of the Australian government and the kind of local council that the British right-wing tabloids (not to mention the British Conservative Party) called the “loony left” back in the 1980s. The Tower Hamlets Council in London has voted to consider naming the streets surrounding the site of a new Chinese embassy compound Tiananmen Square, Uyghur Court, Hong Kong Road and Tibet Hill, CityAM reported last week.

SBS sets us straight In the past decade the lines have blurred between sport and entertainment, biography and soap opera. Reality TV became current affairs and the venn diagram of sci-fi, disaster, horror and documentary is now just a circle. 

Genre ambiguity is a real stress, so it was genuinely refreshing to open up SBS On Demand and see that it’ll be having none of that.