Pauline Hanson and Boris Johnson (Image: AAP/AP)
Pauline Hanson and Boris Johnson (Image: AAP/AP)

Rightward grift Senator Pauline Hanson will never let an opportunity to raise funds pass her by — whether it’s hand-knitted jumpers to pay for her court costs, posters of her cleaning the Australian flag (hella symbolic), or just so she can keep preventing the apparently imminent renaming of milk. Her love of merch extends to freebies, like sending a stack of stubby holders to the largely Muslim population of a housing tower, who she’d previously called “alcoholics”.

But when it comes to transparent grift, it’s hard to go past selling blank books for the reduced price of $15. The One Nation website is selling Reasons to Vote for Albanese’s Voice by Pauline Hanson, a book that is — spoiler warning — completely blank, proof that Hanson’s jokes are better when she’s paying someone else to write them.

The blurb states: “Just like Albanese’s race-based Voice for Canberra, this book contains no details and every page is blank”, before noting “Anthony Albanese’s proposed race-based Voice to Parliament is not only divisive but also poses significant risks. Unless Australians vote against it, the consequences will be permanent”.

So we don’t know anything about it, but we also know it has the power to destroy the country. Cool.

BoJo Watch That big bumbling boy of Western democracy, former United Kingdom prime minister Boris Johnson, has done two things this week which take on the retrospective air of inevitability: he’s had another kid, and started pitching a podcast on the classics. Since being forced from office, Johnson has stayed in the public eye by taking on a Daily Mail column and frequently appearing on television in the exciting role of “disgraced former PM“. He said the column would only focus on politics when it “absolutely had to”, covering instead issues like the Titan submersible disaster (wherein he said the passanges “died in a cause — pushing out the frontiers of human knowledge and experience — that is typically British, and that fills me with pride”), presumably because he can’t go back to just making stuff up about how bonkers the European Union is.

Johnson is now, Semafor reports, shopping around a podcast on the classics. He has of course made his stated love of the classics a big part of his “bumbling posho” persona — telling radio station LBC that Pericles is his favourite politician, and sprinkling references to the Roman emperor Augustus throughout the saga where he removed the whip from 21 Tory MPs rebelling over Brexit in 2019. This is the Augustus who famously purged his former allies to establish his autocratic rule, and who Johnson called “a chill and subtle tyrant” during a 2016 debate on “Greece v Rome”. So when BoJo and his wife Carrie announced the birth of their third child together — and Boris’ eighth (that we know for sure) — what other name would they choose than “Frank Alfred Odysseus Johnson“?

A swift cash in We love it when corporate behemoths and arms of the state try to go woke. Thank you US Army for so welcoming the LGBTQIA+ community! We love how Chevron funds a biodiversity photography competition to “pull focus” away from those climate change lawsuits! We also love it when people try to sell dry political points, but for the kids.

So take a bow Pentarch Forestry, who opted to express their disappointment “in the Victorian government’s decision to fast-track the shutdown of the native timber industry by January 2024” via the following pop culture reference:

We’ve lost track of the number of times we’ve heard fans of all-conquering singer-songwriter Taylor Swift express their fury at the Andrews government bringing the logging of native forests to an end six years ahead of the initial schedule. “Slaaaay that native forest!” they shout, probably.

Musk Watch While we in the Crikey bunker have been weighing the pros and cons of Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter-aping new platform Threads, it’s lovely to see that Twitter users are continuing to have a completely normal one that definitely doesn’t reaffirm that anyone who abandoned Twitter might have been onto something. Behold, the widening gyre of bro-y pseudo-intellectual horror that is Elon Musk approvingly retweeting an interview between Tucker Carlson — a guy who was a bit much for Fox News — and roid rage in human form Andrew Tate, who is currently under investigation by Romanian authorities on charges including sex trafficking and rape:

Even better, the site remains the preferred option for one high-profile political group: the Taliban.

On Monday, Taliban senior official Anas Haqqani praised Twitter, saying it “has two important advantages over other social media platforms”: 

“The first privilege is the freedom of speech. The second privilege is the public nature & credibility of Twitter. Twitter doesn’t have an intolerant policy like Meta. Other platforms cannot replace it.” 

We’re sure once al-Qaeda officially replaces the late Ayman al-Zawahiri, its new leadership will swiftly offer a similar endorsement.

I gotta talk to you about Pepe Presumably coming to Crikey after Nick McKenzie, Kate McClymont and Chris Masters passed on the grounds that it was too risky and incendiary for them to touch, a tipster thought we ought to know about this:

Obviously, we’re going to put a team of reporters on the job of getting to the bottom of the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia season four, episode 10 “Pepe Silvia” bit.

In the meantime, if you’ve seen something you think this column should know about, let us know anonymously via Crikey‘s Tip Off section, or via email.