Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

If only there were something we could do: part 4000 Overnight Treasurer Josh Frydenberg shared with us “some heartfelt & heartbreaking letters I have received from members of my local community who have been doing it tough during the lockdowns”. And of course no one would dispute that the mental well-being of many Victorians has taken a sprint at the nearest cliff during the 200-and-something days of lockdown split over the past two years. But Frydenberg’s history with this is not good.

But the real sour taste this leaves is this: Frydenberg knows he could, with a stroke of a pen, improve the mental well-being of thousands of those in lockdown by resuming the kind of financial support that allows people to feed themselves and pay rent. Coincidence or not, when that support was in place last year, suicides decreased in Victoria, interminable lockdown and all.

A walk on the Burnside Former Clean Energy Finance Corporation chief executive Oliver Yates (also a former candidate for Frydenberg’s seat of Kooyong) has a few thoughts on the handling of New South Wales’ COVID disaster. It’s an inside job:

His seven-point “explanation” of the “federal strategy” — he claims the information comes from “a well-connected Liberal that plays in their own pool” — starts with: “Allow high case numbers in NSW but minimise deaths in marginal Liberal seats”, so you know you’re in for a wild ride. Quite apart from anything else, the granular level of control Yates credits the Coalition with indicates a level of competence that we in the bunker have yet to see any evidence of.

This is a party that can’t get its stories straight on seemingly any issue, not one with the Bond villain-like grasp of events that would be required to ensure the Delta variant swerves rather than crosses the electoral border into Reid. This hasn’t stopped a hundred Twitter drops from retweeting it (often with a “OMG READ THIS LOOK AT WHAT THEY’RE DOING” comment).

It also, to be fair, has attracted a lot of commentary dismissing it as conspiratorial. But perhaps the greatest surprise is which side Julian Burnside QC fell into. Burnside, a human rights lawyer of many decades, urged his followers to read Yates’ list.

Family hours violation Yesterday we made the point that if Craig Kelly and Clive Palmer can spam you with texts, why not return serve — and published every method we could of contacting the pair. We got a great response from our readers. But not everyone was amused. Former ALP national president turned Liberal candidate for Gilmore Warren Mundine responded to Crikey contributor and academic Ben Eltham’s retweet of the story by dropping language — since deleted — frankly unbecoming of an SBS board member. (Incidentally we’re sure The Oz‘s Media Diary, Chris Kenny and The Mocker will all be appropriately scandalised.)

We wonder if the SBS social media protocol extends to board members?

Just not cricket Whatever the Murdochs’ fantasies, it appears cricket will simply never take off in North America. Very quietly, Disney is killing off one of its many streaming services — the sport-skewing Hotstar US, where cricket and especially the Indian Premier League is on offer across the US and North America (presumably largely aimed at the roughly 4-5 million people of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent who live there).

Because of a lack of subscribers, Disney has decided to move Hotstar US’s programming to ESPN+ and Hulu. Those programs include IPL games, Bollywood films and TV programs and one-off specials. Hotstar US will vanish some time in late 2022.