HUMOUR
Whispers from court side

Senator Georg Baddass and the Honourable Member for Spurt, Kristian Pinekone, are sitting back in the deep chairs in the Prime Minister’s special deep bunker at Billibilli Boy House.

The Prime Minister, a strong, intelligent man in his prime … ministership, is sitting opposite at his desk.

He has just said something profound and the other men are feigning intense interest.  Those years of a double-act as circus clowns stand them in good stead now.

Melrick Brightbull clasps his hands under his chin, his elbows on the desk. His years as a contortionist with Mudrick Bank stand him in good stead now. He has just been commenting with passion on the latest opinion polls, which put him behind the late Mark “Chopper” Reid as preferred prime minister and his Coagulation Government in third spot on a two-party preferred basis.

“What’s wrong with these people?” the PM asked. “This country’s going to the dogs!”

“Not your fault, Mel,” said Baddass. “It was Pew Mouth Bales that bungled that.”

“Polls are just polls, PM,” ventured Pinekone.

“Not what you said when you got me this job,” snapped back Brightbull.

The two men lapsed into silence; one had been a Unitarian till then and the other a Malthusian Chapel Roisterer.

Brightbull rose and paced up and down on his feet, a left one and a right one: bilateralism is one of his great political strengths. Yet now he was being lambasted in the media as a reactionary imposing a binary view of the lower ambulant portion of the human person and as a bilatero-normative oppressor of the one-legged, the two-left-footed and the two-right-footed communities.

The MLRLs (the Monopedals, the Left-Lefts, the Right-Rights and the Legless) had him cornered. He knew he was bilateral to the core: he could even do the tango. But the MLRLs had engineered a huge amount of sympathy in the general community by falling over in public places, under the legs of the police horses, down the steps at Parliament House, out of their chairs on Q&A; and consequently held far more power than their numbers warranted. He had to find a way to garner their support or he was ketchup at the next election.

“I have to find a way to make my one leg not know what the other is doing,” Brightbull continued.

“There must be something useful among the papers on the great campaign you led against lobotomy,” said Baddass.

“No, no way!” replied Brightbull. “It was a definite mistake to lead by showing the effects of lobotomy on a living person. I’d rather have a bottle of poison in front of me!”

The two underlings looked at each other with the beginnings of panic in their eyes at the emphatic tone of the Prime Minister. Neither could even feign emphaticism. So, Baddass grinned like the fool he truly was, his real self struggling to the fore at such times, and PineKone went red and puked into his shirt pocket, his years as a circus clown standing him in good stead again.