(Image: Private Media)

Media managers Is Saturday the new Friday? Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s decision to ruin the state premiers’ weekend by bringing the emergency national cabinet meeting forward to Saturday from Monday smacks of taking out the garbage. And a relatively successful one at that — the decision to can the $750 payments to workers without access to sick leave who are forced to isolate with COVID-19 was disingenuously argued for and universally panned.

The reinstatement seemed inevitable, and the equally inevitable “government does a U-turn on pandemic leave” commentary that followed happened while people were largely occupied elsewhere. By today, the government’s go-to clean-up man, Treasurer Jim Chalmers, was already filling the headlines with talk of the “white-hot anger” about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which, well … is that news at this point?) and China’s possible easing of trade sanctions on Australia.

By this morning, the only echo of the pandemic-leave-U-turn discourse was Sussan Ley’s quite magnificently terrible intervention, claiming Albanese “owed an apology” to Australians who had recently tested positive to COVID because he had, lest it be forgotten, maintained the existing Coalition policy of having the payment expire on June 30.

Civil shot Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has called for a more “civilised” level of debate in Australia, pointing, imaginatively, to the menace of social media as a well-poisoner when it comes to our ability to politely express differences. And civility in the public square is something Dutton is extremely well versed in. Let’s look back at some of his genteel highlights:

  • Said his opponent in the seat of Dickson, Labor’s Ali France, was using her disability as an “excuse” for not yet having moved to the electorate
  • In 2015 was caught on camera making light about rising sea levels affecting Pacific Island nations, joking that time is meaningless when you have “water lapping at your door”
  • In 2019 said refugees who became pregnant as the result of rape on Nauru were “trying it on” in an attempt to get to Australia
  • Said allowing Lebanese Muslim refugees into Australia in the 1970s was a “mistake”, on account of all the terrorism and crimes they do
  • In 2016 invoked a kind of “Schrodinger’s refugee”, unable to function at a basic level but also better qualified for your job than you, saying: “They won’t be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English … These people would be taking Australian jobs, there’s no question about that”
  • And finally, we wonder if Dutton intends to delete the following. It’s far lower on the list of outrages, but worth citing one of the great TGIF signoffs of all time:

Well Dershowitz There is a wonderful subsection of the internet dedicated to posts that can be broadly collected under the heading “thing that definitely happened” — dubious anecdotes that conveniently back up a poster’s political views in a pungent and utterly believable way. It’s a subgenre packed with subgenres. There’s “woke toddler” (“My 5yo daughter saw me crying at the news of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death and say ‘Mummy, just remember, when you’re feeling sad, gender is an unhelpful binary …”); the “unknowing self-own” (say, Ben Shapiro’s contention that female arousal is actually a malady that, thankfully, his wife doesn’t suffer from); the “so much for my tolerant opponents” where the poster (frequently a well-established white man) makes a point about not only the narrowing of permitted debate at the hands of the censorious left but also the dangerous incendiary truth of their work with an extremely convincing tale of the kind of treatment their fans can expect, merely for holding an opinion.

Alan Dershowitz provided an A-plus example of the latter this last weekend when, continuing his descent into whatever he is now, he cited a “letter” he received:

I was reading your book yesterday at the beach, when some guys… asked me about the book… so I told them that I had a great deal of respect for the author… Without warning, I was slugged and punched in the face.