Marise Payne (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

ICYMI With all the focus on the government’s nice little nothing of a climate policy, it’s important to remember this is how this outfit operates. Remember July’s national cabinet when Morrison announced a “national plan” to address women’s economic security? This was a much-needed corrective after a pandemic that had disproportionate economic effects on women, and a year in which the government’s handling of “women’s issues” in general had all the grace and efficacy of a clown rollerskating up a staircase.

In estimates this week, Minister for Women and silence Marise Payne quietly conceded the “plan” had been downgraded to a “framework” which, as Women’s Agenda incredulously notes, “may not be made public and may or may not have targets”. At least with the climate non-plan the government threw a tonne of money at consultants to mock up some PowerPoint slides.

Welcome to the party, pal! Earlier this month, we noted the absurdity that “a group collectively representing 13% of the electorate … can stymie urgent action to address a major threat, and extort billions in order to stop objecting” and failure to name “what the National Party really is: it is, and always has been, a vehicle to exploit Australia’s parliamentary system to rort taxpayer funding in its own interests and those of the people who fund it — these days, fossil-fuel interests. It is not, by any conventional measure, a political party.”

As such, does that make the Nats the most successful special interest group in the country? We asked various advocates what they thought, and what they could learn from the junior Coalition partner.

Kathryn McCallum, climate justice campaign director at GetUp, was effusive: “There’s little doubt the climate deniers in the Nationals partyroom are brilliant political minds. Whether it’s the deputy prime minister leaking internal group-chat arguments about the ethics of shooting the robot cop from Terminator or pointing out that windfarms don’t work at night, the climate-denier wing of the Nationals are a smooth and savvy bunch of operators.”

In particular, their communications have McCallum in awe: “One of the Nationals’ most brilliant strategies is convincing journalists that they represent rural people, rather than the fossil-fuel corporations that strip country towns bare. It’s a devastatingly effective playbook that involves making the same joke about people in cities drinking lattes every day for 40 years.”

McCallum concedes GetUp could “learn an awful lot from the way the Nationals do things”.

“For one, if we sold out completely, took millions of dollars from massive corporations that are destroying the planet and regurgitated their misinformation verbatim, we would probably get invited to a lot more evening drinks events at Parliament House.”

Crypto keeper While his party is looking decidedly sketchy on the whole “ensuring a future” thing at the moment, we can at least rest assured that Mackellar MP Jason Falinski has an eye to the future. According to his register of interests, our boy is getting into the cryptocurrency game. Unfortunately for Falinski, the figures make the whole thing look a bit low rent; he has 0.1 of Ethereum and 0.01 Bitcoin. We’re not experts, so if anyone can explain why he adds so many zeros at the end, we’re all ears.

COP that It’s not just politicians packing their bags for COP26. There’ll be all sorts of meetings on the sidelines of various interest groups. The group that most caught our eye was the Climate Leaders Coalition — technically an NGO, it’s certainly a climate leader of sorts, insofar as it represents Australia’s biggest emitters: BHP, Rio Tinto, Santos and more. Call us naive, but we think these guys have probably had quite enough say on Australia’s carbon footprint already.

Doing us proud Checking in with Miranda Devine, we find her telling Tucker Carlson about her attempts to get into Hunter Biden’s art show. The gist is that Biden does bad paintings and is able to charge a lot for them because his dad is the president of the United States. Mid-segment, apropos of absolutely nothing, the chyron details Hunter’s conduct with a sex worker, a reference to a months-old Devine piece and which drove Carlson similarly wild.

All class. It’s almost reassuring that, after embracing the avarice and amorality of Donald Trump for five years, American conservatives are back to giving a disproportionate shit about weird, overpriced art and mildly unconventional sex practices.