Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Toto (Image: Anthony Albanese/Facebook, Private Media)

In Toto Someone’s made a Twitter account for new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s dog Toto, complete with that twee “hewwo fwendz” dogspeak.

Say what you want about the right wing in Australia, at least it never pulls this bullshit (well, almost never — in mid-2021 The Daily Telegraph published a column from the point of view of Scott Morrison’s dog Buddy, instantly upping the level of humanity across its commentary team).

But ever since the Obama White House account told Bo to “stop trying to make fetch happen“, centre-left politics has been awash with cutesy humanising nonsense.

As it turns out, the account isn’t an official bit of ALP public relations, it’s the work of a Twitter rando with a similar dog. He claims he has no particular connection to politics, which probably explains why there’s no tweet announcing “It wooks wike Daddy turned back a boat full of despewat hoomans!“

Farewell to Finn “Can we expect a lynching on the steps here?” Thus Victorian Liberal Bernie Finn bowed out of politics with the grace and restraint we’ve come to expect.

According to Finn himself, moves to expel the obsessively anti-abortion MLC have been afoot for years — back in 2017, he put out a (swiftly deleted) Facebook post in which he claimed a “small but poisonous group within the organisation of the Victorian Liberal Party” had for two-and-a-half years “subjected me to a vile campaign of lies aimed at destroying my character and removing me from Parliament”.

He called on then state president Michael Kroger to remove these “loathsome scum” and “pieces of excrement”. Indeed for a free speech warrior, Finn sure backed away from a lot of what he had to say — in yet another deleted post late last year, he once compared Victorian Premier Dan Andrews to Adolf Hitler. Which is doubly ironic given, a month earlier, Finn’s thirst for denying women autonomy over their bodies had blinded him to the apparent neo-Nazi views of a speaker at an anti-abortion rally he ran.

Following the US Supreme Court decision that threatened to undermine the protections of Roe v Wade, Finn posted that he was praying for abortion to be banned in Victoria, even in the case of victims of sexual assault.

It was the last straw for a politician whose combination of very old-fashioned religious intolerance and a distinctly modern addiction to posting proved his downfall.

Safe as houses It’s a genre of filler news story now so common that you can pick the rhythms and catchphrases as surely as those of a hacky sitcom. A newspaper interviews a photogenic young couple who, rather than sit around moaning about intergenerational theft, went and bought their dream house with nothing but gumption, hard work and cutting avocado on toast from their diet.

And then there’s a pause and you set your watch to see how long it takes the phrase “… also my dad gave me a million dollars” to kick the door in.

So I suppose the Herald Sun deserves credit for mixing it up in the grimmest way imaginable. It told the story of Jane Sayner, a 74-year-old woman who was “finally able to turn off her 3am alarm and retire from her job at an Epping fruit and vegetable market after inheriting her long-time home off her late landlord” — a sentence which, in its every clause, makes us want to walk into the sea.

We in the bunker are obviously delighted that Sayner has been afforded the dignity to finally take some well-earned time to garden and travel. And we have to give the Hun credit for at least acknowledging that this is part of a wider problem towards the end of the piece.

But that someone in their mid-70s had to work full time to merely continue to live in a flat they could never afford to buy is not a particularly feel-good story.