Gladys Berejiklian koala
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian (right) (Image: AAP/Rick Stevens)

Everything is politics Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is certainly not the first Australian politician to weaponise suicide rates, but he’s really committing to the approach. He has already cack-handedly invoked mental health concerns to attack Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews — contemptible enough given the federal government’s cutting of JobSeeker payments back to poverty levels.

But now he’s taken it up a notch, yesterday announcing in parliament that he knew someone who knew someone who had killed themselves on account of Victoria’s lockdown.

Apart from the exceedingly shabby practice of exploiting a friend of a friend’s tragic end and publicly speculating on the reasons for it, the underlying political point simply doesn’t carry: the suicide rate in Victoria during this most dismal of years has not gone up.

For anyone seeking help, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is 1300 22 4636.

How much can a koala take? Before she was hauled in front of the authorities for no crime but loving the wrong man (and apparently failing to pick up that wrong man’s alleged corruption that he kept actively trying to tell her about), NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian was enjoying good press, having stared down the NSW National Party over its sure-fire, vote-winning policy of koala murder. One can understand why she’d want to return to those heady days.

Hence yesterday’s announcement of 6000 square metres of land being gifted to a koala hospital. The timing is a little off, sadly, given it follows the approval by federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley of a quarry expansion straight through a koala habitat, which is expected to destroy more than 50 hectares. It makes Berejiklian’s recompense (less than a hectare) seem a smidge inconsequential.

There write, you no Little tip for the editors of The Australian: when you next run a head-shaking “kids learn so much woke nonsense these days that they can’t even spell” piece*, like today’s “We don’t need illiterate activists”, you might want to give it a second read over and make sure it doesn’t contain an extremely basic grammatical error.

(*Here are some suggestions for the next one: “Kids need to learn less about gender schematics and more about mathmatics”; “Less Gillian Triggs, more Trigonometry”; “Less body positivity, more ion positivity (science)”; and so on.)

That was then Senator and sports rorter extraordinaire Bridget McKenzie last night grilled ACCC chair Rod Sims on the whereabouts of the commission’s report into water trading:

Finally, a lot of concern in basin communities about pushing back the water trading report final report into early next year, a lot of people were hoping it would be done and dusted by November, I’d like to understand why, and don’t tell me COVID, because we’ve all got Zoom even out in regional areas for consultation.

It’s true, the world-shuddering crisis that is COVID-19 is no excuse to not get things done. Which is why McKenzie will soon speak out against Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who told Parliament last week that the government had been too busy dealing the coronavirus crisis to work on a federal integrity commission (she’d LOVE one of those).

And we’re sure she was just furious when, back in March, the government announced that, on account of COVID-19, it was delaying the resumption of Parliament until August.