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You know, for kids As the year draws to a close, we get the chance to take a breath, reflect on a bruising year, and hopefully share some time with our loved ones.

Oh yeah, and apparently, it’s also time to endure cutesy bullshit like various premiers announcing with faux-bureaucratic formality that Santa will be permitted entry to the country, despite COVID-19 worries.

And it’s not just politicians — some poor public servant in Queensland had to tell the ABC: “We understand Santa has received a special global travel exemption to ensure he can deliver gifts who are on the nice list right across the world.”

Sure, sure, it’s a very long way from the worst thing we’ve seen this year, but we’re baffled as to who this joke is even for? All those six year olds who follow Andrews on Twitter? The many actual children who only get their news from the ABC? (“I mean, since Christopher Dore took over, The Australian is just TOO conservative, even for me,” they say to each other, presumably, at recess before returning to their Beyblades).

Honestly, it made us pine for the Donald Trump approach. Befitting the funniest presidency in history, Trump once asked a seven year old if she was “still a believer in Santa? Because at seven it’s marginal, right?”

The Daily Tele Three days after Scott Morrison crumbled like a fistful of Weet-Bix in the face of its campaign, The Daily Telegraph doesn’t appear to have noticed.

We’ve already noted that it took one lousy Tele front page for Morrison to intervene on the stripping of citations from special forces troops. We guess they spent a lot of time on that “save their medals” logo, because they’ve continued to slap it on stories every day this week.

Go well We were extremely sad to hear that, after more that 50 years, Mungo MacCallum is laying down the pen, owing to ill health. MacCallum’s writing — dense with history yet totally limpid, acerbic but never cruel, and just plain funny — would mean a great deal to Crikey even he hadn’t been good enough to produce it in our very own pages between 2007 and 2011.

To pick one among many, he contributed an exquisite piece to The Crikey Guide to the 2007 Federal Election about the relationship between the press gallery and governments, in which he identified, as was his wont, a trend that has only gotten worse since:

The age of the gifted amateurs, men and woman who would take temporary leave from their careers for a period of public service while preserving a real job to return to, is gone forever. The current lot are in it for life; if they lost their seats they would be totally bereft. Hence they are deadly serious, terrified of making the sort of error that would cause them to fall from favour with their party heavyweights … It is one of the more worrying features of [John] Howard’s style of government that while the public standard demanded of his ministers has never been lower, the intra-party discipline has never been more savage.

Rest up, Mungo, you’ve more than earned it. Australian political writing will be that much more credulous, myopic and — perhaps worst of all — dull without you.