Adam Bandt (Image: ABC/YouTube)

Delicious Mayo She may sound like a New Zealander saying “Alice in black”, but Allison Bluck is actually the Liberal Party candidate for the South Australian seat of Mayo. You may remember that Mayo is the seat that walking dynasty handbrake Georgina Downer was trying to pry back for the Liberals from Centre Alliance MP Rebekha Sharkie when she fanned the embers of the sports rorts scandal into a raging fire with a big novelty cheque.

We’re sure it’s learnt its lesson and there will be no more avoidable gaffes — and I think you can see where I’m going here.

In a truly bonkers development, a letter went out from the Liberal Party claiming Bluck was the manager of the “Kangaroo Island Nature Trail”, except that job title actually belongs to Alison Buck. Talk about taking an L! Swiftly a retraction was issued, claiming an early draft was incorrectly sent out — but this raises questions about the process: was the letter drafted using an inexact Google search and without access to the candidate’s phone number? Liberal voters in Mayo must be delighted to see the party finally has its shit together.

Bandt’s revenge Occasionally the Crikey bunker is moved to simply acknowledge good work. Greens leader Adam Bandt gave a response at the National Press Club yesterday to an attempted gotcha question about the wage price index that must have given Labor’s media team a flush of embarrassment:

Google it, mate. If you want to know why people are turning off politics it’s because [of] what happens when you have an election that increasingly becomes this basic fact-checking exercise between a government that deserves to be turfed out and an opposition that’s got no vision … Elections should be about a contest of ideas.

Bandt has to take a lot of shit from both parties throughout the parliamentary year with no real allies to howl them down — but he was ready to take his shot when it came. We do feel for The Australian Financial Review’s Ron Mizen who, given the blanket coverage of Albanese’s slip-up on various figures this week, could be forgiven for having thought this would be a worthwhile avenue. Luckily he’s extremely not mad, thank you.

Hume-rous Ostentatious references to US presidential rhetoric are largely absent from Australian politics, partly because it always goes so disastrously wrong. Remember when Labor’s Kristina Keneally attempted a jokey reference to Lloyd Bentsen’s “you’re no Jack Kennedy” quip, which ended up sounding like she was deeply nostalgic for the presidency of Ronald Reagan?

Liberal Senator Jane Hume has tried a similar tactic, delivering her Instagram followers a video in which she promises “the Morrison government is delivering a stronger economy for a stronger future”, before adding “now watch this drive”.

This of course is a reference to George W Bush, a man no one has ever quoted approvingly in the history of the world, which is one thing. But the context of the original really does raise eyebrows. In 2002 Dubya, while at the golf course, told the gathered press pack: “We must stop the terror. I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive.”

The moment has since become emblematic of everything people loathed about Bush — the image of him as an idle failson, profoundly out of his depth and granted the presidency on some kind of monarchic transfer of power, flippantly leading the world into the greatest disaster of the century so far.

Perhaps not something you’d necessarily want to conjure while seeking reelection.