Meet Australia’s most anonymous but important politicians

Taylor made it

He did it, folks. Angus Taylor, who was briefly well known for pretty much exclusively bad reasons, has achieved what he appeared to be aiming for since his first speech as energy minister: he has been largely forgotten.

In the Freshwater Strategy polling run by the Australian Financial Review, Taylor ranks near the bottom for people having a “favourable” response to him, but he’s also right at the top of politicians who respondents had “never heard of”. His only rival in either field is Sussan Ley, making this a real “El Clasico” of crap politics.

But both must bow to the true master of political invisibility — Richard Marles. This is the deputy prime minister, as well defence minister, overseeing some of the biggest spending in the history of the nation in the form of the AUKUS program. And in a poll that — I cannot this stress enough — “canvasses the approval of key figures in federal politics“, the pollsters either didn’t think to ask, or the Fin didn’t think to mention, how anyone thought he was doing:

Cheques in the Post

It’s always worth keeping an eye on questions on notice, where departments under the microscope of Senate estimates face curly questions. Liberal Senator Jane Hume asked the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts last November how much it had spent on advertising to that point in the financial year. The answer, released late last week, shows that Australia Post spent a fairly eye-watering $14.1 million on advertising between July and November last year.

What did we get for our money? Around $4 million went to its Christmas ad campaign, put together by The Monkeys. The ad agency is run by Accenture Song, which in turn is part of big consulting firm Accenture — which was also picked ahead of any Indigenous creatives to run the Yes ad campaign last year — seemingly proving there is almost no giant chunk of public money in Australia that doesn’t at least partially find its way into the pockets of consultants.

No space for news.com.au’s scoop?

James Massola’s SMH article on Tuesday regarding texts leaked from Anthony Albanese’s office, which indicated the prime minister might be planning on an early election this year (he’s not), was understandably prominently featured on the Nine newspapers websites, and was pointed to again in The Age’s AM newsletter.

But of course it wasn’t initially reported by Nine — getting to slap the coveted “exclusive” tag on the piece was Samantha Maiden over at news.com.au. So it was faintly baffling to us in the bunker to head over and find that not only was this fairly major scoop not prominently featured, but it was also absent on the homepage at all, having had to make way for revelations regarding Sydney Sweeney’s “figure hugging” red carpet outfit and the “outrage” over a Taylor Swift fan brandishing a pro-Trump sign.