John Howard’s interesting new friend, a messy QLD mayor fight, and Linda Reynold’s Freudian slip

How’ard can it be to Google someone? Former prime minister John Howard is here to help everyday Australians save themselves “from the looming financial threats” with a couple of free events on Wednesday. We wonder if Howard’s plan involves spending decades in Parliament under a pension system that nets you roughly a quarter of a million a year and getting all your travel paid for the rest of your life? Because I’ve often thought if I could implement that kind of passive income, it’d give me a bit of breathing space.

Even more eyebrow-raising is Howard’s co-host choice. He’s joining Pat Mesiti, whose bio on X (formerly Twitter) describes him as an “income acceleration coach specialising in helping people shift their mindsets to create more wealth and committed to helping raise 10,000 millionaires”.

But he’s probably best known for his history. Mesiti was convicted of assaulting his wife in 2016, and prior to that, the Hillsong Church dumped as a minister the self-described former sex addict when he was caught engaging sex workers in 2001. His last brush with politics was his “prayers and pushback” events where the COVID-19 sceptic cohort of Parliament got together: Senator Pauline Hanson, then United Australia Party leader Craig Kelly, then LNP MP George Christensen and Senator Alex Antic.

We’ll be fascinated to see how this coheres into a theory of financial security.

The good book We’ve never been more certain our serial truth-dodging former PM Scott Morrison was being sincere when he promised, in September of last year, that his memoir would be “quite unlike any other book written by a prime minister”. Well, the clumsily titled tome, Plans for Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness, is now available for pre-order.

Morrison is explicitly targeting the lucrative US evangelical market with this book (worth upwards of a billion a year), though when it was first announced our publisher sources were sceptical that a figure with Morrison’s, shall we say, limited profile in the US would make much of ripple.

But he’s managed to get one US politician to remember his name at least, with a foreword by former US vice-president Mike Pence. He’s an obvious choice, the man who always described himself as a “Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order” and managed to illustrate quite a lot about the state of all those appellations by spending four years between 2016 and 2020 gratefully accepting whatever humiliation Donald Trump threw his way.

Sandy Grant, co-founder of Hardie Grant, told Crikey last September that he doubted the book would clear 100 copies in the US; I guess now we’ll see.

Brittany on the brain It’s pretty much a textbook version of a Freudian slip: Western Australian Senator Linda Reynolds, while grilling public servants last week in her role as deputy chair of the joint committee of public accounts and audit inquiry into probity and ethics in the Australian public sector, reached for a pop culture reference, but it somehow got away from her:

… time after time after time in this committee, we keep getting departments coming forward and just saying, oops, sorry, you know, we did it again. You know, like Brittany Higgins’ song, you know, oops, we did it again. I’m so sorry. We’ll do better next time. But there’s little or no accountability for not delivering on outcomes.

Former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins, for anyone who requires the clarification, did not in fact release the 2000 pop smash “Oops!… I did it again” — that was Britney Spears. Probably an understandable slip given how much of Reynold’s brain Higgins would have occupied in recent years. Interestingly, the Hansard transcript from this session on March 12 is not yet up — we’ll be interested to see if they clean that up to account for Reynold’s obvious intention.

Painting the city Redland Beneath the notice of much of the country, a series of Queensland local government elections have been playing out. And given one of the candidates for mayor is former Liberal MP Andrew Laming — who was seeking the top job in Redland City Council in the state’s southeast — it will surprise no-one to hear things got a little weird.

The state electoral commission was forced to call for calm during the “highly acrimonious” campaign, claiming it had received an unprecedented number of complaints about candidate behaviour; though it’s worth mentioning no single candidate — neither Laming, nor Jos Mitchell, nor Cindy Corrie — or their representatives was singled out. 

There were confrontations between Laming and candidate Jos Mitchell both in person and in court, and the commission required security at all three Redland polling booths. Mitchell appears to have had the last laugh, with the latest count (at time of writing) seeming to provide no path to victory for anyone but her.

Lest you think Laming’s failure means we’ll be deprived of colourful mayor content, The Courier-Mail has a handy list of the newly elected mayors, which it tells us is expected to include: “A former bankrupt, an alleged drink driver, a weather presenter who once played a witch, and a former neighbour of musician Keith Urban.”