Please enjoy our flight plans … check that out, Prue … reds in his head

Consult these figures As Crikey has long chronicled, the COVID-19 era has been a golden one for Australia’s consultants. And thanks to the work of technology and public policy publication InnovationAus, we know that trend only accelerated in the past financial year. It says the Boston Consulting Group more than doubled revenue from its federal government business in that time, and McKinsey & Company’s grew to $58.6 million, an increase of more than 75%.

A particularly decent gig was McKinsey & Company’s engagement to provide (get this) an “affordability analysis” for the Department of Defence’s Hawk trainer aircraft. According to the report, it lasted 16 days and netted it $1.44 million (or $90,131 a day). Crikey would like to take this opportunity to offer our services assessing the affordability of the glut of consultants. We could do it for like half that.

Not being Prue-dish Inexplicable media fixture Prue MacSween, having seen an obvious photo op in which opposition leader Anthony Albanese posed as a checkout worker, has furiously pointed out the double standard on Twitter, wondering whether Albo would attract a similar level of ire as Scott Morrison had when showing up at a hair salon and washing a blameless apprentice’s hair. A defensible enough point, which is probably why she tagged @Albo in her tweet.

Except it’s not the Albo who sits in Parliament that MacSween is contacting. In fact, if that tag gave you the vague cold-sweat feeling that you shouldn’t click it at work, it’s because — as Crikey has previously covered — it belongs to a NSFW Italian account called “Albo draws lewd”. The long-suffering cartoonist just wants to do his horny drawings for people with specific proclivities on the internet, and has had to spend at least a decade telling people he doesn’t give a shit about centre-left politics in Australia.

No commune Speaking of Albanese, yesterday The Daily Telegraph gave us another in News Corp’s remarkable run of hit pieces on the opposition leader. James Morrow, the Tele’s federal politics editor — who has proved his rigorous and nonpartisan approach to journalism with this little dance sequence after the Liberals’ win in 2019 — has produced a scoop pointing out that 18 months after the fall of the Berlin Wall (yep that Berlin Wall, the one you’ve heard of, the one that came down in 1989), Albanese agreed to an interview with Tribune, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA)’s magazine.

The bow being drawn — what are we to make of his judgment if only 30 years ago Albanese was not too disgusted by the Ceaușescus to sit down with the Tribune? — would be so long it could span the distance between us and the Canis Major dwarf galaxy. This would be true even if it didn’t ignore tidbits like that the fact that the CPA lost its Stalinist members when it denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and (it’s weird we keep having to mention this) Albanese’s shift to the right of Bill Shorten on, say, tax cuts for high-income earners.

Look, to put this in a time frame that will resonate with Morrow: Albanese talked up Labor’s need to be a party of aspiration that stopped calling people who made money from franking credits “wealthy” a mere 340 months after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Alas for Anthony, the commies don’t want him either: