Question. The political scene is hot as Hades right now so why is it that the spectator sport of mud-slinging Australians are entitled to is appalling lacklustre?
No amount of parliamentary privilege carte blanche seems to be assisting matters. No genius-at-work social media contributions from the minders of our honourable doofi, either. No off-the-cuff rejoinders putting upstarts back in their place.
If matters don’t improve smartly, if some smart jackass doesn’t come to the rescue, we might have to declare the great Aussie insult dead as Dezi.
Seriously. Ditch the Witch? Fire the Liar? Are these the best our politicos can muster? A high school paper headline scribbler could knock these begged, borrowed and stolen museum pieces out of the park.
Pauline’s “Suck it up, sweetheart… Tim Fischer called me a witch and (said) I should be burned at the stake” is a neat smack back but it lacks the deep scorn of a serious insult and is a long way from the best we should be demanding.
Rob Mitchell’s “sook from Cook” at Scott Morrison had some simple merit but the over-use by his colleagues of whinger, boofhead, grub, drongo and dill are adolescent and obsolescent.
Jim Chalmers’ attempt to can Angus Taylor with his “Born with a silver foot in his mouth” is hackneyed and a bit of an own goal.
Where are our dogs returning to their vomit, shivers looking for spines to run up, our Ian Sinclairs dubbed George every time they open their mouth for forging company returns in his late fraudster dad’s handwriting?
We need more Malcolm ‘Mr Harbourside Mansion’ Turnbull acid drops. More Bill ‘social-climbing sycophant’ Shorten bitterness. More Andrew ‘painted, perfumed gigolo’ Peacock cynicism.
Call me romantic but why don’t we have insults flying about parliament that would have you thrown out of the workplace faster than a chicken vindaloo through an old age pensioner, as Yartz Minister Les Patterson might say?
Too many intellectual rust buckets, I’d suggest, and as the Blaxland brawler did say.
Higher echelons aren’t pulling their weight, either. The inherent politeness in the “iconoclastic outburst” tag levelled at Federal Court judge Ian Jackman for calling out colleagues taking years to hand down rulings sets an alarming precedent.
I can hear the redoubtable insulter Roddy Meagher, late Judge of Appeal of the NSW Supreme Court and scourge of pretentious, overweening peers, shuffling in his necropolis.
“He is a brilliant, and original, thinker, and it is earnestly to be hoped that his speeches will be collected and published,” he once wrote of Chief Justice of Australia, Murray Gleeson, before administering the scalpel.
“He has written nothing outside of his professional work. He takes no interest in either music or art. He does, however, like flowers. He stares at them to make them wilt.”
In fact, if it wasn’t for cartoonists you’d have to declare the true insult truly cactus.
One of their best works, by Johannes Leak, has Albo exhorting his cabinet to “Twist the facts, bend the truth, tell fibs – do whatever it takes to make this label stick!”
The target? Morrison, of course. The label? “The Liar from the Shire.”
You can’t hold a hose to that.
This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiseer 23 June 2026
