(Image: StockSnap/Pixabay)

South of the border It has all the hallmarks of a banana republic: a late night coup, an unstable economy and a government that effectively condones corruption within its locked border. Is South Australia on the brink of collapse? Should the rest of the of the Commonwealth’s troops be massing at the border?

Late on Tuesday night, rebel conservatives sided with Labor to oust speaker Josh Teague and replace him with Liberal turncoat turned independent MP Dan Cregan. This all occurred, of course, just before midnight. Cregan insisted he’d “do this job for a can of baked beans if that’s what the pay was”, a noble sentiment made easier by the $150,000 bump that the pay for this job actually is.

Those same Liberal defectors had caused more chaos in the Parliament earlier on Tuesday, siding with Labor to back a conflict of interest inquiry into Deputy Premier Vickie Chapman over her refusal to back a port at Kangaroo Island, where she has property interests. 

As Crikey readers might recall, this follows SA MPs unanimously voting to strip the state’s ICAC of its powers to investigate misconduct and maladministration.

If all this was happening anywhere else in the world we’d be parachuting in grizzled foreign correspondents to report on the failed state. 

Culture war imports Here’s one to keep an eye on. After US airline Southwest cancelled 2000 flights at the weekend, it was jumped on as evidence of widespread dissent over the company’s vaccine mandate. US senator and unwell pancake face haver Ted Cruz helpfully tweeted: “Joe Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate at work! Suddenly, we’re short on pilots & air traffic controllers.”

Except there is absolutely nothing to back up that assertion. The airline, its pilots’ union and the Federal Aviation Administration have all said it has nothing to do with any demonstrations — just bad weather. Of course none of that stopped the “resist medical tyranny” crowd from picking up the idea and running with it. As day follows night, these ideas and tactics make their way to Australia — so keep an eye out for any workplace disruptions being ascribed to anti-mandate freedom fighters.

Text on tilt Are we living through the golden age of embarrassing text message chains being read in court? It was the “Bad Art Friend” piece that got everyone in a cold sweat about what would happen if that one text conversation you had about that one awful friend was ever made public (let alone considering what it would be like to sit in court and hear what your co-workers really thought of you). But we in the bunker think another example didn’t get enough attention: the texts read at disgraced former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes’ fraud trial last month between her and her then-boyfriend Sunny Balwani:

Holmes: You are the breeze in desert for me. My water. And ocean. Meant to be only together tiger.

Balwani: OK.

Texts, notoriously, can deaden and misrepresent tone. In this case though, we suspect everyone hears that “OK” the exact same way in their head.

Donut forget it What is it with politicians posting pictures of doughnuts, and why is the effect so weirdly off-putting? Last night Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk gave us a soft-focus portrait of the “second best kind of donuts”:

Look, it’s not quite as weird as that time Tim Smith thought the best way to honour those who had tragically died in Victoria’s 2020 COVID waves was to arrange baked goods into the shape of dick graffiti.

But we’d have thought that the pointlessness and risk of continued “doughnut-day” fetishism would have been plain for all to see when Victorian CHO Brett Sutton accompanied news of the state’s last day with zero new cases with a screen cap of Olympic coach and out of control enthusiasm hose Dean Boxall attempting to thrust himself into the next century. Within days Victoria was in its sixth lockdown. It’s yet to come out.