Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

Old Daily It’s no surprise that News Corp routinely amplifies Liberal Party attacks on The New Daily. It’s a faintly progressive media outlet that can provide content for free, thanks in part to the support of industry super funds.

Now, an item in The Australian‘s Media Diary shows the publication has hit the hat-trick of right-wing irritants: Senator Andrew Bragg has attacked TND for giving money to the ABC.

Of course the underlying point of an attack aimed at the TND is that it represents some kind of profligacy with members’ money. But what always seems to get lost in Bragg’s attacks is that these funds consistently outperform retail funds and are an example of the industrial cooperation conservatives are always calling for. By law, they are controlled 50:50 by unions and big employer groups.

Note: Eric Beecher, chairman of Private Media, which owns Crikey, is chair of Motion Publishing, which publishes The New Daily.

Word salad Speaking of articles that appear to have been created via a handful of darts thrown at a word cloud of right-wing talking points, we offer our thanks to Peta Credlin for this truly profound instance of whataboutery.

The following appeared this weekend under the headline “One rule for SAS, another for Dan Andrews”:

How is it that we can have 19 special forces soldiers accused of unlawful killings in Afghanistan and, before any legal process to determine guilt or innocence has even begun, moves are under way to strip 3000 of their fellow comrades of their meritorious unit citation, including 20 killed in action earning it? Yet in Victoria, a failed government program leads to the death of 800 of our own, and we’re told to look the other way?

How are these things related? Does she think Jennifer Coate was involved in the Brereton report and was notably harder on our brave boys at the front than she has been on Dictator Dan? Who is she talking to?

NSW cabinet rehab After a year of throwing bombs for literally no reason whatsoever, John Barilaro has lost 5kg and is happier and healthier than ever! So a puff piece in The Sunday Telegraph tells us, complete with “cover of a cookbook you’d buy when you don’t know your office Secret Santa well”-style photos of Barilaro cooking some prawns.

The NSW Coalition has been adept at image rehab this year. There was the Mills and Boon-fication of Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s relationship with disgraced former MP Daryl Maguire. And then there was Treasurer Dominic Perrottet, who managed to briefly make us all forget his involvement in icare with a genuinely quite funny piece in The Sydney Morning Herald about which Sydney landmarks he’d like to get into a bulldozer and smash to rubble.

Who in the NSW parliament will be the next to take advantage of the media laundry service?

Nothing to report Energy Minister and Crikey‘s reigning arsehat of the year Angus Taylor has claimed victory over emissions, after the quarterly update on Australia’s National Greenhouse Gas Inventory showed a larger drop than the government had predicted.

According to Taylor, Australia is on track to “meet and beat our 2030 Paris target” — which, look, we’d argue with. He said the success was “due in large part to significant structural declines in emissions from the electricity and agriculture sectors”.

One thing he fails to mention (as does The Australian‘s report on the update): the majority of the country spent at least some of the year under lockdown. Wouldn’t that have something to do with the drop?

We’re surprised Taylor forgot the months the residents of Victoria spent in lockdown, given how important that seemed to his colleagues.