They seek him here, they seek him there Those Frenchies seek him everywhere Is he in heaven or is he in hell? That demned elusive Pimpernel.
New Zealand has its very own, well, maybe not Scarlet Pimpernel, but Red Shrinking Violet. PM Jacinda Ardern has of late developed an amazing ability to vanish from sight when it suits her. One moment, she’s popping up, unannounced, at a school somewhere, then fleeing as soon as the selfies have been snapped, the next, she’s disappearing from a long-running weekly prime ministerial radio appearance.
It’s almost like she’s trying to avoid scrutiny — not to mention pesky protesters.
But Ardern is a rank amateur, compared to Queensland Health Minister Yvette D’ath.
Like Ardern, D’Ath has plenty of reason to be shy of public appearances. Her portfolio has been inundated with scandals, from a forensic DNA lab with systemically bungled criminal investigations for years, to a shocking series of medical stuff-ups (including deaths) and chronic hospital bed shortages. What’s a minister to do?
Play hide-and-seek, apparently.
At one point, there were farcical scenes as D’Ath first announced she was heading to Mackay with less than 24 hours’ notice to announce the damning Mackay Base Hospital report – then called off the trip just as journalists were boarding flights to chase her […] the next few hours was something straight out of a Benny Hill Show chase sequence, together with the silly music, as Nine and Seven scrambled to find last-minute flights.
At the peak of the school holiday season.
All D’Ath managed to do, in the end, was piss off the media pack even more.
The Health Minister’s Friday press conference led the news on Seven, Nine and Ten on Friday night, and hogged the weekend news cycle.
Meanwhile, Greens leader Adam Bandt is finding out that not even the privileged confines of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge — the hyper-exclusive, invitation-only retreat of the nomenklatura — is safe from prying media eyes.
Bandt is contending with Teal “independent” Monique Ryan for the dubious honour of Australia’s leading Mask Karen. But, just like Mongo, who posted maskless selfies at a packed football final, Bandt is as selective with his mask-wearing as he is with his Marxist class warfare.
Diary’s spies were surprised to spot the unmasked figure of Bandt in the anything-but-socialist world of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge last Wednesday afternoon.
And our observers noted while carefully watching Bandt during a frantic peak hour in the invitation-only confines of Qantas’s most exclusive lounge that his face was conspicuously unprotected for the entire time […]
Still, there was one more twist in the tale. Just as Bandt departed the camera-free Chairman’s Lounge to enter the common area of the airport to catch his flight, lo and behold, the Greens leader immediately donned a fashionable black mask to match his outfit and public rhetoric.
But if Marxist Bandt says one thing in public, does another in private, the Marxists at the ABC are at least keeping true to their dismal principles. When George Orwell wrote about “all that dreary tribe of ‘high-minded women and… more-water-in-your-beer reformers”, he might have been gazing in a crystal ball at the 21st century ABC.
Michelle Ainsworth, the new boss of the Canberra bureau, announced she was ditching the ABC’s dedicated ‘beer fridge’: which for decades has allowed staff to drop $3 into an honesty box and down an ice cold one at the end of a hard day.
Ainsworth told some of the ABC’s most senior political staff that the very concept of a beer fridge was no longer in step with the values of the new culture in the Canberra bubble.
The Australian
Which is more sadly true than you might think. The cat’s-bum-mouthed puritans of the woke left really are the world’s most fanatical Fun Police.