On Tuesday the funny things were, in no particular order: a protester interrupting the prime minister’s considered effort to project gravitas among the root vegetables; the prime minister pretending to answer a question about whether his communications minister would break curfew to go on a television program; and the prime minister appearing to suggest that if the Greek financial crisis and the current global financial market wobbles posed a problem, then his grocery code of conduct was the solution.
Lest we get overcome by the sheer bizarreness of the sequence – which, for the record, took place in the Wolli Creek Woolworths on a fine winter’s Tuesday morning – let’s deal with these events one by one.
Abbott got his opening sequence off before a protester loomed with intent. He appeared close to the onions. I’m not sure what the protester was unhappy about, but the man in the black T-shirt seemed to be concerned about democracy before he was helpfully bundled out of the live television shot.
Reporters, as could have been predicted, were quite interested in the vexed matter of whether the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, would, like the agriculture minister, Barnaby Joyce, be sent to his room next Monday night to punish the ABC, which is so deeply and thoroughly punished at the present time that it continues to broadcast Q&A to larger audiences.
