Albo and Labor meet with News Corp senior brass

The member for Bradfield had good reason to be cheery. And not just because he was there with jeweller wife Manuela Zappacosta. Big Ticket art openings have been few and far between. But while the Canberra Bubble may be giving Sodom and Gomorrah a run for its money, it is blessedly COVID free. Accordingly, NGA boss Nick Mitzevich didn’t hold back with the entertainment. Enjoying the mostly mask-free dinner in the Gandel Hall afterwards was what seemed like most of the country’s arts community including NGA foundation directors Richard Alston and Penelope Seidler, Caledonia founder Mark Nelson, AGNSW director Michael Brand, AGSA director Rhana Devenport.

Artists Ben Quilty and Sally Smart, an NGA director, were also there along with art collecting gastroenterologist Dr Clinton Ng, Holdsworth House founder Dr Dick Quan, property investor Michael Gannon, NGA chairman Ryan Stokes and his Grizzly Adams beard. Stokes, who runs Seven Group Holdings, had good reason to laugh at Fletcher’s jokes. Not only does the government’s digital media code mean Seven is likely to scoop money from Google and Facebook but the NGA is a beneficiary of the government’s coronavirus arts funding package.

Allan’s ire

Spare a thought for veteran Liberal MP Kim Wells who received both barrels this week from the government’s leader of the house, Jacinta Allan, who was fuming about a hot-button issue – the treatment of women in Parliament.

The ambitious Allan phoned her opposition counterpart to complain that he wasn’t reigning in his outspoken backbenchers, including member for Brighton James Newbury. Newbury tweeted this week that Reason Party MP Fiona Patten had “more positions than the Kama Sutra” after she used her crucial vote to back the Andrews government’s nine-month state of emergency extension. The week before, she said she would only support three months.

The cliched turn of phrase from Newbury is nothing new. It’s been used in Parliament eight times by Labor MPs, Hansard shows. But it raised eyebrows among some Labor MPs who believed the dig was made all the more off-colour given Patten’s pre-politics job as a sex worker. Labor MP Will Fowles then delivered the head-scratching moment of the week by accusing Newbury of “wholeheartedly embrac[ing] rape culture” in the chamber. If that seemed like a long bow, lower house speaker Colin Brooks obviously agreed. Fowles’ Labor colleague ruled the comment out of order on Thursday.

Now, the opposition will attempt to refer former lobbyist Fowles to a parliamentary committee that has the power to discipline the MP.

Patten has been subjected to vile trolling in her time in Parliament and she confronted Newbury in front of his colleagues outside Parliament this week. Some onlookers said she gave Newbury a dressing down but others claimed she simply asked firm questions about whether his innuendo was deliberate.

But some in Parliament were quick to point out what they described as hypocrisy from Labor and Patten. Premier Daniel Andrews, according to government sources who spoke to The Age in 2016, uttered in Parliament that a bowel cancer-suffering former MP would be “s—ing in a bag”. He vehemently denied ever saying that. Meanwhile, Patten’s long-time staffer has recently used the words “blowhard”, “dick” and “wank” to describe Liberal MPs on Twitter.

Whisperings on Spring Street

Preference whisperer Glenn Druery has landed in Melbourne. The controversial political strategist who has advised the likes of Derryn Hinch and Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party MP Ricky Muir has been spotted in Victorian Parliament where he has taken a role with Liberal Democrats crossbencher David Limbrick.

Druery, who gets paid to put no-names in office using a sophisticated understanding of preference flows in the upper house and Senate elections, usually lives on a 55-foot yacht at Sydney’s Clontarf Marina. This week, he crossed border lines to Melbourne to meet with Limbrick. Some observers suspect he’s here to spruik services to other interested upper house members.

Druery collects fees of up to $50,000 per candidate to co-ordinate what are called “group voting tickets”, which bring micro parties together in a bloc to preference each other and leapfrog better-supported parties. The strategy, only allowed in Victoria and WA, got Limbrick elected in 2018 with only 0.8 per cent of the vote.

So who’s interested in Druery’s wares and wisdom? He was spotted in a private conversation with independent upper house MP Catherine Cumming near the Parliament’s lawn bowls green. Admiring the green, or talking greenbacks? Who knows.