good morningand happy Sunday! Today on #Insiders are Annabelle Crabb from the ABC, Mark Riley from Stokes Seven and murdoch man Greg Sheridan. The interview is with shadow foreign affairs minister Senator Penny Wong. This thread is not fact-checked.

and we’re off. Half as many people are on jobkeeper as the government previously “thought” Speers tells us. He means as the government said. He calls it a “bungle” and follows the government storyline of focusing on Treasury estimates and business form-filling. #Insiders

still on government messaging, Speers says it is “not entirely bad news”. He then veers into the second of only two sides, because political journalism is basic and is not news reporting. This is to speculate about what should “the” money be spent on. #Insiders

#WhatThePapersSay the murdoch papers are reporting some of the presumed jobkeeper budgeted $60 billion will go toward the tourism industry. Ninefax says there is division in the caucus on what or if to spend it. #Insiders

apparently Morrison has written to Albanese to cancel the weekly briefings that were meant to substitute for not inviting the opposition leader to sit at the national cabinet table #Insiders

Riley calls $60 billion a rolled gold stuff up, a dreadful bungle. In a rare gallery comparative, he invites Speers to try and imagine the reaction if Rudd and Swan did this during the GFC, which you know they wouldn’t, because the underlying politick is different #Insiders

haha Crabb calls Mark “Riley”! She corrects two assumptions, one that business form-filling can retrospectively explain Treasury estimates (white man time machine, obs) and rejects the idea that this necessarily means 3 million people are employed instead #Insiders

Crabb then puts the focus on fairness and who missed out. Speers agrees, plays a clip of Albanese arguing for extending jobseeker to those who missed out. This clip is to segue to what Sheridan thinks about extending job keeper eligibility. “Not necessarily” says Greg #Insiders

poor old Greg. He says $60 billion is an embarrassment - it is more than that, mate - and that Frydenberg is the strongest government “performer” after Morrison, which is just delusional nonsense. Frydenberg “performs” like wooden peg left in the rain #Insiders

that infamous audio grab of Sukkar hypothesising about 3 million workers on jobkeeper instead of 6 million. The #Insiders have a bit of a chuckle about what is a dead set giveaway that the wildly exaggerated government claims pre-dated the changes to exclude universities.

parsing Sukkar, says Riley. He says jobkeeper was rolled out in a hurry, which is wrong. It was announced on 30 March and payments from the ATO did not start flowing until 6 weeks later. The government heavied the banks to extend credit to cover its delays #Insiders

back to tourism. Do these people know they are enabling a #SportsRorts-type politically targeted spend of up to $60 billion, allocated to industries in a way that the government perceives as electorally advantageous? #Insiders

to her credit, Crabb moves this framing away from targeting industries to “classes of workers” who have missed out, which is much closer to the point than unleashing yet another politically targeted spend #Insiders

no clip of someone else to conflict-journalism introduce the interview today, a first I think? Senator Wong is also introduced properly, as the shadow minister. She says the announcement by Frydenberg is a $60 billion black hole in the government’s economic credibility #Insiders

starting with jobkeeper. Wong puts the case for employers to access the payment for more of their casuals, as Labor has said all along. Clip of Fitzgibbon on beef exports, an irrelevancy. Wong says she has had a chat with Joel about that, which woulda been fun for Joel #Insiders

to be clear, Senator Wong thinks that Morrison could have sought support before announcing his call for an international inquiry into the virus origins. She tells interrupting Speers she might finish her answer, thanks #Insiders

oh ffs. Speers tries for a third time to misrepresent what Wong has said. He is gaslighting. The idea is to put a simplistic binary option of supporting the Aust gov call for an inquiry and anything else amounts to betrayal of those “values” nobody ever names #Insiders

heh Wong calms Speers down. We will always defend Australian values and indeed sovereignty, she assures him. We need to ensure that Australian interests are not negatively impacted by a deal between Presidents Trump and Xi #Insiders

no gotcha there then, so off to climate change. As a former minister for climate change, Speers addresses Wong. She gives a brief rundown of how climate policy is botched in the Coalition party room, and takes out their leaders #Insiders

the tedious reliance on CCS and other tech-magic nonsense in the latest Coalition climate offering is dealt with pretty expeditiously. Speers cites Fitzgibbon againWong says she and Joel express themselves in different ways, which is not news #Insiders.

after failing to bait Wong with what the member for Hunter thinks, the interview is bookended with footage of the minister for trade, who has been tapped to do all the diplomacy, a foreign affairs responsibility, instead of the responsible minister, a woman #Insiders

I missed whatever Sheridan said about the fight Morrison has picked with Beijing but he did go the back-hander, saying Wong is by far Labor’s best performer #Insiders

Crabb says Payne used “muscular language” on #Insiders a month or so ago by comparing health to weapons inspectors. Sheridan asks if he can jump in, which he does. He is for WHO inspectors into China, which exactly nobody, by my count, is against #Insiders

we should not get too carried away here, says Riley. The Chinese rhetoric is cartoonish, he thinks. He, Riley, has spoken to senior ministers and can report that they think the Morrison government is absolutely right #Insiders

quite agitated at the criticism of Morrison’s um “diplomacy”, Riley mixes the weapons inspector simile with a garden hose metaphor. Okay Mark #Insiders

do you suck up to the bully or stand up to the bully? asks Crabb. The key is to have other friends, she says. She also offers a reminder that there is an ongoing global crisis #Insiders

back to climate mitigation policies and economic impacts. Riley says we have to protect our domestic economy because everyone else is, which btw is the worst of all arguments on climate change #Insiders

Crabb is making much more sense than the men here. She says the market HAS spoken, by making renewables the most affordable option despite “a decade” of prohibitive government policy. This is wrong - it is 7 years of prohibitive federal policy #Insiders

*ten years includes 2010-2013 when a price on carbon was legislated, emissions fell, and the income was spent on renewable energy investment #Insiders

back to poor old Sheridan, who says there are great big coal fired power stations just waiting to be built all over Asia #Insiders

#TalkingPictures omg Ilic does an amazing job of singing out a Rowe toon but the pic is honestly quite painful to look at #Insiders

#FinalObservations 1 Riley has some insider guff that is too insidery even for this show #Insiders

#FinalObservations 2 Crabb would like to tell Sheridan all the ways he is wrong on coal but time is short so she will instead focus on good news (heh ie Sheridan is bad news) which is indeed good news: AAP may get picked up and turned around #Insiders

#FinalObservations 3 is a classic Sheridan straw man. It is wrong to jump to conclusions and assume the government is wrong, he says, a thing nobody did. In fact most of the gallery do the opposite #Insiders

we go out with that jumblefuckery from Trump on his perfectly positive negative covid test result #Insiders

this has been another edition of watching #Insiders so you don’t have to

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