joko widodo and albo
Indonesian President Joko Widodo and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Bogor, Indonesia (Image: AAP/AP/Laily Rachev/Indonesian Presidential Palace)

No Joko We’ve commented previously on the fairly lacklustre efforts of Labor’s social media in recent years. We have no such issues, however, with whoever is taking care of Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s online presence. Just check out the video put together for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s visit:

How did they manage to get such blood-pumping tension out of footage of a car arriving, two men in suits walking around shaking hands with people, and putting on bike helmets like contestants on the world’s least eventful reality show? Footage that, to the untrained eye, would appear to be some of the dullest imagery possible? It puts Thelma Schoonmaker to shame.

Taylor made Milo Yiannopoulos is back. Sort of. The far-right attention addict and sparkly bully has taken up an (apparently unpaid) internship with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the only politician awful enough to make you wonder exactly who’s slumming it in this arrangement. Greene, in case you’ve missed it, is a megaphone for the section of the Republican Party that appears to get its policy platform by copypasting 4chan’s politics board: white supremacy, false flag mass shootings, 9/11 truthing, Pizzagate, QAnon and much more. And Yiannopoulos is apparently willing to forgo a salary to work with her.

Apropos of nothing, remember when the conservative media in Australia fawned over Milo, falling all over itself to describe him as “razor sharp” and “an ancient form of genius”?

Feel that BoJo buzz Today in “politicians dropping incomprehensible and vaguely modern buzzwords”: UK Prime Minister (you know, for now …) Boris Johnson’s spokesman told reporters that Health Secretary Sajid Javid has insisted that the National Health Service is a “blockbuster healthcare system in the age of Netflix”. According to Adam Bienkov of the Byline Times, the spokesman was “asked repeatedly to explain what this means”, and was “unable to say which features of Netflix he believes the NHS should imitate”. Is it also planning to needlessly ruin its own reputation?

It’s dimly reminiscent of that period when then PM Malcolm Turnbull couldn’t stop describing everything as “agile” and “disruptive” and we wanted everything to be the “Uber of something”, regardless of where that analogy ends up.

Compare the pair Two rate hikes, just over a month (and a change of government) apart. See if you can spot the subtle differences in how The Australian covers them. Today we get the treasurer looking crushed, and a secondary story implying the prime minister is “hiding”:

Back in May the news was associated instead with a picture of Reserve Bank head Philip Lowe rather than a member of the government. We got secondary stories about what a “stuff up” this is from the RBA and why it would be a mistake for Labor to make a big deal out of all this.