‘Dom and dumber’: a wrap of the weirdest NSW election media coverage

The lead-up to Saturday’s election in New South Wales has been by all accounts a fairly lacklustre campaign from both sides. In the absence of stirring rhetoric or (outside of gambling reform) much in the way of a contest of ideas, the press has had to focus on some weirder details. And thank God they did.

Manhunt

As New South Wales Parliament was suspended ahead of the upcoming election, the news in the state was dominated by the fact that Parliament had hired private contractors to embark on a statewide manhunt. They were looking for Premier Dominic Perrottet’s younger brother Jean-Claude, along with Liberal power broker Christian Ellis and his mum, Hills Shire Councillor Virginia Ellis, after the trio had failed to appear when called as witnesses to an upper house inquiry three weeks earlier.

The inquiry had heard claims that Perrottet and Christian Ellis had asked a businessman for $50,000 to help them “get rid of” federal MP and then prime minister Scott Morrison’s numbers man Alex Hawke. Channel Nine’s Hayley Francis appeared to be having the time of her life on the story — as did the network’s graphics team — trekking about the state and knocking on doors in pursuit of the trio.

Perrottet insisted at the time that his opponents really ought to leave his family out of things — but he and Minns have not been above wheeling out the family during the campaign when it makes them seem more human.

A view from the West

On Tuesday this week, The West Australian did one of its characteristically “colourful” front pages — previously deployed to devastating effect against Clive Palmer when he threatened the state’s COVID-free status and coffers — depicting Minns and Perrottet as Harry and Lloyd from the 1994 comedy Dumb and Dumber. This was over their shared view that NSW ought to get its hands on more of the GST carve-up (predictably, at the expense of WA).

The height of deception

Minns took a “cheeky” swipe at Perrottet’s claims about his height — “I think there’s some height inflation there. If he’s claiming six foot four then I’m calling him a liar,” he told The Kyle & Jackie O Show. Former Liberal Party “dirt unit” strategist John Macgowan then noted that “before my retirement I was doing an investigation into Minns’ height anxiety and how many of his more statuesque female colleagues appear to shrink in official photography”.

He followed this with a thread of official photos. It inevitably found its way into The Daily Mail, to which a Labor party spokesperson gave a pretty solid response: “It’s true. This is obviously a huge setback for our campaign. It was a secret we’d hope would last until election day. We have 17 days to bring it back.”

Macgowan, for his part, offered his “thoughts and prayers”:

Assorted detritus

Kyle & Jackie O was a nexus for most of the self-consciously wacky political content this election. While on the show, Perrottet’s confidence that he could *sigh* beat Minns in a foot race kicked off Heightgate, and the episode also proved Minns could noodle out a few AC/DC riffs on electric guitar (something which counts as surprising only if you’ve never met a white guy in his forties before).

Meanwhile, The Daily Tele gleefully reported that local Cantonese speakers have claimed that Minns’ Chinese language campaign posters have been “insensitively” translated. And the headlines wrote themselves when Minns had to ditch his EV campaign bus in favour of a “gas guzzler” after it broke down.

Still, better than a rigorous interrogation of the parties’ differing views on, say, the regulation of poker machines in the state?