I just don’t get it. Colin Riddell, please explain. Actually, he is one of the few people in this country who doesn’t have to. I mention his name because Riddell is a passionate conservationist who has been trying, for nearly a decade, to save threatened dugongs and sea turtles in Queensland. Endangered critters being slaughtered under the real farce of Native Title.

I say, I don’t get it, because — despite Senate speeches, recent visits to a turtle veterinary hospital in Cairns, and more questions this week in Senate estimates, I can’t get any traction with the Liberals or with Labor. Or, shamefully, with the Greens. It has to be because they fear indigenous antipathy.

It’s one issue on which the Nats’ Nigel Scullion and I part company and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg seems to be singing permanently from another song sheet these days. As did his predecessor Greg Hunt. Despite promises.

There are polystyrene eskies coming into the baggage carousel at Cairns Airport from the Torres Strait Islands with meat. It is turtle. It is not chicken. It is coming in and I understand being sold for up to $80 a kilo for turtle and $130 a kilo for dugong and this is happening in Cairns as we speak.

I’ve been involved in this campaign on radio and television for about eight years and have spent time with Riddell and Steve Irwin’s father, Bob.

They have been promised the world and have been given dust.

At Senate estimates this week I asked: “I would like to know, under Native Title, how many dugongs and sea turtles are slaughtered every year in Queensland?”. These are endangered creatures. They could be extinct in 30 years.

Turtle and dugong meat seized at Cairns airport

It was a legit question. As I said: “I was on Green Island a couple of weeks ago. As the boat arrives they say it this is a protected marine park and they warn you not even to pick up a piece of coral off the beach because it is a protected marine park. Yet, we have boats with outboard motors on them getting in amongst the swimmers on Green Island and slaughtering turtles with machetes, which surely was not the plan of the cultural system under Native Title?”

“It is not cultural. It is not done with a spear. It is done with a modern boat with outboard motor and machete, chasing these beautiful creatures until they are exhausted and then they are killed.”

In Cairns, I talked to Aboriginal elders from the coastal clans, the coastal tribes, who have banned the killing of dugongs up there, but the rainforest tribes come down and the young bucks go out there in their motor boats and kill them. At the turtle veterinarian hospital, they tag them, take them 50 kilometres out to sea and they are still tracked and killed within 24 hours. Surely that is not what Native Title was designed to do for cultural reasons?

***

I am thick. Just didn’t get it. In the midst of Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg talking up the NEG and the apparent solving of the domestic power price crisis, I didn’t get the hidden Freudian message.

NEG – the National Energy Guarantee. The cartoonists, like me, zeroed in on the negative aspects of the NEG.

It took my brother, Des, visiting from across the ditch, and an aficionado of Australian politics, to point out what should have been obvious.

“They’re talking endlessly about the NEG policy, the N-E-G policy, solving the energy crisis. Energy, don’t you get it?”

I do now.

***

At 2.15pm tomorrow the High Court will hand down its dual citizenship verdict on the Munificent Seven. I’ll be on a plane back from Melbourne from the Daniel Morcombe memorial red T-shirt walk in Maroochydore, in Queensland.  I will ask the pilot to relay the message.

Hinch’s Hunch (and I’m often wrong) is that the safest of the Seven is Nick Xenophon. Roberts is well gone, And the Greens, Ludlam and Walters, resigned anyway.

***

I know this is “off the west wall” as they used to say in newsagency talk, but I’m getting really sick of mispronunciations, or should that be “mis-pronounciations”? And some of our pollies are the worst offenders.

It’s Los “Angelis”, not Los “Angeleese”. It’s “Los” Vegas, not “Lass” Vegas. Nuclear is “nuclee-a”, not “nuke-u-lah”. And it’s not a bloody medium strip either!

I call prostate cancer the “lying down disease” because so many people call it “prostrate” cancer.

And, on planes, listen to the safety instructions and wait for a mention of the emergency “egg-sit”. The letter x has been replaced by a g.