Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

Don’t know weather that’s true Barnaby Joyce has a history of some of the most bonkers social media activity of any federal politician. And like many of our true eccentric political posters, nothing gets the weird flowing like energy policy. Whether it was his contention that climate change action would lead to abolishing private property rights, or wishing an ailing Bob Hawke well because “the honesty of being to the top is something treasured when honestly given. Like Bob said we should go to nuclear power“.

Now Joyce has pulled the brilliant gambit, snookering climate change activists by asking the simple question: “If global warming exists, why is it so bloody cold right now?”

Truly it’s an embarrassing oversight from those pushing the fraudulent climate change narrative who are totally ignoring that weather still happens.

In-Credlin-able As Crikey delved into last year, the Council of the Order of Australia has become stacked with Liberal Party veterans, insiders and sympathisers, and the awards have taken on a distinctly partisan vibe since. Former chief of staff to prime minister Tony Abbott, Peta Credlin (you may recall Niki Savva wrote a book about the partnership called The Road to Ruin) joins her husband Brian Loughnane as an Officer of the Order of Australia.

Credlin, who among other things has admitted that the “carbon tax” attack she and Abbott devised to attack then PM- Julia Gillard was a lie and who spent last year acting as Sky News’ primary Dan Andrews attacker, isn’t the first former chief of staff to receive the gong. Indeed, it’s probably the most nakedly partisan use of the AO since former Howard head-kicker Tony Nutt got his back in 2019.

Monstrous We’re wondering whose public relations team has goofed worse. Monster Energy Drink, for paying a guy facing charges of indecent assault to promote their product in the Coles catalogue, or Collingwood star Jordy De Goey, the man in question, who decided there was an amount of money that would be enough to convince him to wear a shirt saying “monster energy”.

Regardless, obviously someone came to the conclusion that, at best, the optics were extremely odd, and swiftly the page was removed from Coles’ online catalogue. Coles told Crikey the ad was supplied by Monster and removed at its request.

Wayward Hartcher For some reason — perhaps to do with our lack of systemic protections like a bill of rights, or the absence of an ingrained culture of resistance to government overreach — Australian journalism is prone to the phenomenon of senior journalists supporting ever greater powers for the state to destroy basic rights and privacy in the name of stopping terrorism, organised crime, paedophiles … whatever the threat du jour is.

The latest contribution to that genre was an effort by Peter Hartcher on the weekend in which he claimed recent crime operations showed “a forceful new argument in favour of equipping the state with new powers and tech abilities to stay apace of organised crime” and that “the onus on scrutineers of state power is now heavier and the political argument in favour of enforcement is stronger”.

Putting aside Hartcher’s strange argument that successful police operations show police don’t have enough powers, in his enthusiasm for constantly expanding the powers of unaccountable and secretive agencies like the Australian Signals Directorate or the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Hartcher made a howler, claiming that parliament’s joint security and intelligence committee had signed off on the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill and handed it back to the government.

In fact — as a correction on the piece now admits — it’s being considered by the committee. Perhaps his well-connected source didn’t make that clear. In any event, the article certainly showed an “onus”, but it was Hartcher’s onus on display, not that of those who — like all journalists should — seek to hold the powerful to account.