The lead-up to Saturday’s election in New South Wales has been by all accounts a fairly lacklustre campaign from both sides. In the absence of stirring rhetoric or (outside of gambling reform) much in the way of a contest of ideas, the press has had to focus on some weirder details. And thank God they did.
Manhunt
As New South Wales Parliament was suspended ahead of the upcoming election, the news in the state was dominated by the fact that Parliament had hired private contractors to embark on a statewide manhunt. They were looking for Premier Dominic Perrottet’s younger brother Jean-Claude, along with Liberal power broker Christian Ellis and his mum, Hills Shire Councillor Virginia Ellis, after the trio had failed to appear when called as witnesses to an upper house inquiry three weeks earlier.
The inquiry had heard claims that Perrottet and Christian Ellis had asked a businessman for $50,000 to help them “get rid of” federal MP and then prime minister Scott Morrison’s numbers man Alex Hawke. Channel Nine’s Hayley Francis appeared to be having the time of her life on the story — as did the network’s graphics team — trekking about the state and knocking on doors in pursuit of the trio.
Perrottet insisted at the time that his opponents really ought to leave his family out of things — but he and Minns have not been above wheeling out the family during the campaign when it makes them seem more human.
A view from the West
On Tuesday this week, The West Australian did one of its characteristically “colourful” front pages — previously deployed to devastating effect against Clive Palmer when he threatened the state’s COVID-free status and coffers — depicting Minns and Perrottet as Harry and Lloyd from the 1994 comedy Dumb and Dumber. This was over their shared view that NSW ought to get its hands on more of the GST carve-up (predictably, at the expense of WA).
The height of deception
Minns took a “cheeky” swipe at Perrottet’s claims about his height — “I think there’s some height inflation there. If he’s claiming six foot four then I’m calling him a liar,” he told The Kyle & Jackie O Show. Former Liberal Party “dirt unit” strategist John Macgowan then noted that “before my retirement I was doing an investigation into Minns’ height anxiety and how many of his more statuesque female colleagues appear to shrink in official photography”.
He followed this with a thread of official photos. It inevitably found its way into The Daily Mail, to which a Labor party spokesperson gave a pretty solid response: “It’s true. This is obviously a huge setback for our campaign. It was a secret we’d hope would last until election day. We have 17 days to bring it back.”
Macgowan, for his part, offered his “thoughts and prayers”:
Assorted detritus
Kyle & Jackie O was a nexus for most of the self-consciously wacky political content this election. While on the show, Perrottet’s confidence that he could *sigh* beat Minns in a foot race kicked off Heightgate, and the episode also proved Minns could noodle out a few AC/DC riffs on electric guitar (something which counts as surprising only if you’ve never met a white guy in his forties before).
Meanwhile, The Daily Tele gleefully reported that local Cantonese speakers have claimed that Minns’ Chinese language campaign posters have been “insensitively” translated. And the headlines wrote themselves when Minns had to ditch his EV campaign bus in favour of a “gas guzzler” after it broke down.
Still, better than a rigorous interrogation of the parties’ differing views on, say, the regulation of poker machines in the state?
Is this the same Australian media which responded so astutely to Keating’s criticisms of AUKUS & the submarines deal? A media which demonstrated they sometimes don’t understand the background to their ill-thought-out questions & then take umbrage when it is pointed out? Yes, it’s the same.
The values and priorities of Stokes’ The West Australian, writ large.
Please don’t include links to The Daily Fail. I can’t afford to shower more than once a day.
… Actually, we measure height in centimetres. Since 1966.
July 1974 actually for metrication. Decimal currency on “the 14th of February 1966”. I can still remember the Dollar Bill jingle and the brochures they gave us in primary school and the extremely droll film clip put out showing the exciting new coins.
I’m so old that I remember measurements back before the ‘change’ – changing the weights on bales of wool from lbs to Kgs in ’71.
I could never understand why the police (and others) didn’t/don’t give heights of ‘suspects’ in both (ft/inches and cms – for the sake of us old timers). When a bulletin comes out with the cm height of a person of interest, I go off air, trying to convert, so that’s one pair of eyes not peeled – and I reckon I’m not the only one.
I love the human scale of Imperial measurements, weight – a cwt being a human lift, length, mensuration – an acre being a day’s ploughing with an ox, even l/s/d currency, etc but the vagueness of ‘bushel’ threatened my childhood sense of stability in the world.
Whatever the bushel was we were encouraged not to hide our light under it.
The osiers would catch alight.
1 cwt = 112 lb. That is approximately 51 kg. I doubt that there are many humans who can routinely lift that much. WorkSafe would have a field day if employees were expected to lift 1 cwt (hundredweight).
Although we went metric approximately 50 years ago, there are still farmers who talk about the size of their crop in bushels to the acre or (heaven forbid) bags to the acre, conveniently ignoring the fact that grain silos effectively replaced bags of wheat even longer ago.
Prior to the Advent of the Elfen Sayfti, most sacks of anything were a hundredweight (cwt/8 stone – less than the weight of the average person even before morbid obesity became a celebrated norm) spuds, grain, coal, cement etc.
Anyone who couldn’t carry that – from point A to point B for 8 hrs a day was no use on a building site, farm or factory or any other physical job, poo petals.
I couldn’t believe it when cement started to be sold in 25k bags – think of the excess wrapping.
Bushels were great. You just have to remember they are a standard volume represented by a standard hessian bad. Being a standard volume they had different weights when they contained different things. Hence a bushel of wheat was a different weight to a bushel of barley. Both were bloody heavy though. Thats it in a nutshell.
how big is a nutshell?
why are rod, pole and perch the same, and what are they?
Exactly what the words suggest – a narrow length of wood, 5′ 6″ long.
The British surveyor measured the world, from the bogs of wild Eirean to the upper slopes of the Himalayas with just that, a pencil & paper.
As Eric Blair noted in his Burmese Days memoir, “…behind a quarter million bayonets“.
A withy basket, aka creel – not a hessian sack. That would be saved for a blanket or wedding dress.