Throsby can admit but awe and humility at the leader of the National Party’s overwhelming command of retail politics.
Barnyard – or Beetrooter, as we have come to cherish him in so short a time – is such a retailing master, why, he could not only sell the shirt off your back, he, in fact, has. And the cheque is in the mail.
If you, my now shirtless friend, ever imagined your National Party bore any resemblance to the Country Party of 40 years ago, well, did you know your pants too have also been sold? Yes, the ones you’re wearing. The Nats might sport many candidates in regional Australia, but the majority are either supporters of big mining or in bed with local agricultural phylarchs.
All the while you thought he and his jolly band of Nats represented “the person in the weatherboard and iron.”
Weatherboard and iron, you city-slicking, avo-smashing apartment dwellers probably wonder, is an euphemism for rather more affordable housing than those that McMansions your suburban fellow travellers were oversold. They are typically old suburban and rural dwellings with no study, rumpus room, or in-suite. And they were constructed en masse from cheap “fibro and iron” that ye latte-sippers wouldn’t be seen dead living in.
For an inkling of the economic class we’re insulting, observe the accompanying illustration.
Which is to whom Barnaby the Bush-tailed Beetrooter referred when he set the Twittersphere alight with the priceless hashtag #weatherboard9, created by the majesty of our famous strine.
Who are the Weatherboard Nine, the nation asked?
Their roots set in the fertile plains and bush of regional Australia, the Fibro Nine were a splinter group born of the Weatherboard Nine and their pretentious cousins, the Vinyl-clad Colourbonders.
Mcnock, aka @12ponies, suggests an association with the Brick Veneer Seven, but scholars believe they’re a nouveau riche clique and their twains shall never meet.
Weatherboards, known as clapboard siding in America, have been around since logs and timber slabs could be machined into long thin planking. Fibrous cement, or fibro, manufactured since circa 1900, became the cladding of choice for the poor due to ease and speed of construction. And corrugated iron rooves were all the rage. Nothing rusts with quite the style of poorly galvanised iron.
Newswires and the Twittersphere meanwhile furiously asked: who are the “Weatherboard Nine”? I can inform you without hesitation they are a terrorist group of dissenting poor country losers.
In his stepping-down statement, Barnyard said there needs to be “clear air.” The same clear air PM Trumble thought he had at 2018’s inception – until his deputy wandered in traipsing mud over the Lodge carpet. The Right Honourable Member complained the leaking and backgrounding will destroy the government, retail-ly oblivious to the idea that leaking and backgrounding require a juicy subject to amuse NewsCorp readers (who have been known to gaze for hours at photographic caricatures on front pages).
Beetrooter’s exhaustively paraded Akubra hat rather suggests, of late, “all hat and no cattle.” The hat is now problematically synonymous with a glass of beer.
But if the Minister for Gas Fields and Inland Rail has any redeeming features, Throsby cannot complain about his summation of his predicament as a “current cacophony of issues.”