ScoMo, Peter Dutton, Lyle Shelton: the best of 2023's Tips

And that's a wrap. The goss, the innuendo, the claims and counterclaims — oh! and the weed sent to our former PM — have given us a great year.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

We come to the end of another year of Tips and Murmurs, Crikey‘s repository for all the gossip we’ve heard and the weird stuff we’ve noticed, and the gossip you’ve heard and the weird stuff you noticed. Huge thanks to everyone who suggested we take a closer look at this or that throughout the year — we can’t wait to hear from you again in 2024. Until then, here’s a selection of some of our 2023 favourites:

Which one of you drongos tried to send Scott Morrison a bag of weed? (November 9): What seems to have happened is that someone sent a bag of weed in the post to an illegible address, and put the return address as “Scott Morrison, Canberra”. So when the devil’s lettuce in question couldn’t be delivered to its addressee, it eventually found its way to the parliamentary mail room.

Now we don’t want to accuse someone who sends bags of primo bambalachacha through the mail — and puts “where the politicians live” as the return address — of fuzzy thinking, but if it’s an elaborate prank, it’s a bit of a weird one. Morrison wasn’t even PM at that point. Was the sinsemilla offered by way of consolation, coming roughly a week after his job got decidedly less hectic, maybe?

A non-exhaustive list of everything that’s “woke” according to The Australian (June 19):

And much, much more…

Peak AFR (July 6): The Australian Financial Review occasionally wears the reputation of being a paper for people with names such as Plutus P. Moneyfellows, who wouldn’t feed what your family eats at Christmas to the hounds on their estate, who are so infuriated by the thought of baristas getting weekend penalty rates that their top hat simply flies off their head, landing in the caviar holder and comically splattering their dinner guests. There are days when this seems unfair. And then there are days like this.

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While Australia struggles with a cost-of-living crisis, as housing and childcare services slip from the grasp of normal people, support services are maxed out and supermarkets brace for increased shoplifting of basic food items, the AFR snorted the headline “Why CEOs should be paid more” into the back of its throat and hocked it into readers’ faces.

Perhaps feeling that the bandaid was off, that same day the paper also announced it was launching “Australia’s first prestige watch fair”.

The upshot of marriage equality laid bare: the loveless union of two male penguins (July 4): Advocates for marriage equality in this country must hang their heads in shame. We blithely dismissed the concerns of traditional marriage exponents about where such changes to our social fabric might lead us. We were smug and complacent, and we cannot say we weren’t warned.

It must have been a bittersweet kind of vindication for Family First leader Lyle Shelton to put out a press release concerning where the rainbow Gestapo has dragged us: two male penguins “manipulated” into a loveless marriage.

Ancient tennis club under threat from native title claim (September 8): 2GB host Ben Fordham brought us the story on the future of the Naremburn Tennis Courts, and claims that the club had been cast into a storm of uncertainty thanks to an unresolved Aboriginal land rights claim.

I mean, I can only ask, how would the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Councils of this world like it if that kind of thing was done to them?

Having to deal with the fallout of some kind of land grab, to have irreplaceable sites of deep history and community destroyed with the stroke of a pen, with generations passing before anything approaching justice could be even reluctantly discussed? You can’t even imagine.

By their logic, Peter Dutton and Michaelia Cash might be ineligible for Parliament (September 1): Whatever those whingers at the Australian Electoral Commission and elsewhere have to say about “damaging and opportunistic attacks on democratic institutions” or whatever, it’s a universal truth: all ticks mean yes and all crosses mean no. Which is why we were horrified when a tipster got in touch to direct us towards Dutton’s register of qualifications: