Au pairs are back, and a fight in Kooyong

What’s the go with the au pairs?: A decade on from Peter Dutton’s infamous au pair scandal, we discovered what appears to be another Australian politician with a high-profile au pair. American TikToker Grace Harris (not to be confused with the Queensland and Brisbane Heat cricketer) has been posting lately about her new job as an au pair in Mount Isa. Her TikTok of her plane taking off, as well as a later video mentioning seeing her new boss “on a billboard”, makes it seem an awful lot like she’s gone to work for one Robbie Katter, son of Bob, who is a member in the Queensland Legislative Assembly for the seat of Traeger, as a member of his old man’s political party.

The plane she flew in on sure looks remarkably familiar:

Shithousery on the hustings: We have long held a view at Tips that a candidate’s comedy value often makes up for many a political shortcoming — and there are very few things as funny in the lead up to an election than polling booth shenanigans. We’ve certainly seen plenty of those from Liberal hopeful for Kooyong Amelia Hamer, whose antics have attracted the ire of opposition campaigners.

Rob Baillieu is a volunteer for incumbent Kooyong independent Monique Ryan (whose own advertising tactics have been featured in Crikey’s campaign for Parliament, much to her chagrin), and he’s less than happy about Hamer’s corflute carpet-bombing at polling places across Melbourne’s affluent inner-east.

As a side note, Baillieu is also the son of former Victorian premier Ted. And Ryan’s aforementioned spam texts came to our attention via Rob’s media personality sister Eleanor, who posted to her Instagram story about them.

In any case, we’ve got to say, the “tower defence funnel strategy”, as it was billed by one social media user, is an extremely funny one — and as far as we can tell, completely okay as far as the rules are concerned. The solution seems to be to just get up before your opponents do in the morning. As the old football cliché goes, you’ve just got to want it more.

Introspection at Nine: This week, most of the country was outraged by the booing by neo-Nazis of a Welcome to Country ceremony at the Anzac Day dawn service at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance. Except for Peter Dutton, who suggested that while they chose an inappropriate forum, the boo-ers might have had a point.

Both the Nine papers wrote in support of the ceremony. The Age in Melbourne called the booing “an affront to decency and values we hold dear”, and its federal politics reporter Natassia Chrysanthos spoke on the company’s Morning Edition podcast about how the likes of Sky News and conservative politicians have weaponised the ritual. But she conveniently left out her stablemates at the Nine-owned radio stations.

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In just the past year, 3AW in Melbourne and 2GB in Sydney have posted a combined 17 times on X about Welcome to Country ceremonies, as well as Acknowledgements of Country. And not a single one of those posts could reasonably have been seen as positive. We asked Nine whether it had any reflections on its role in all this, but the company declined to comment.

The price is right: Earlier this week, we revealed that Seven staffers had leaked Sunday’s leaders debate questions ahead of time, with Crikey getting Seven political editor Mark Riley’s full script hours before the broadcaster went to air. We were fairly convinced that the leak didn’t make it to the Liberal camp in time, given Peter Dutton’s much-mocked failure to name the price of a dozen free-range eggs.

However, it has since been pointed out on social media that Dutton’s oddly specific guess of $4.20 might in fact have been evidence he was briefed ahead of time. That is, after all, the price of a half-dozen free range eggs at Coles at the time of writing. While Riley’s script might have been specific, for the rapid-fire round in which Dutton was asked to name the price of eggs, his script simply read “price of eggs”, leaving the number of eggs up to interpretation.

Disclosures please!: Last week, we noticed former Guardian Australia investigations editor Anne Davies had returned to work for the outlet, publishing a number of analysis articles on the federal election.

This prompted one of our colleagues to ask: “Didn’t she go and work for a teal?”

Indeed she did, dear reader. The 2002 Gold Walkley winner spent much of her sabbatical from journalism as a media adviser for Climate 200-backed independent member for Mackellar, Dr Sophie Scamps. Not that you’d know that from her recent stories in Guardian Australiawhich didn’t carry any disclosures of the sort.

Following questions from CrikeyDavies’ author page was updated to reflect her stint with Scamps. Editor Lenore Taylor told us in a matter-of-fact statement that “Anne has returned to work for Guardian Australia. We have updated her biography on our site.”

We’ve had less success over at the Nine papers, where it was brought to our attention that regular columnist Parnell Palme McGuinness, who makes no secret of her often-conservative views, sits on the advisory board for the coal industry-backed lobby group Australians for Prosperity. While McGuinness’ author page (as well as most of her columns) discloses that she is the managing director at communications consultancy Agenda C and has worked for the Liberal Party, there’s no disclosure about this new venture. We asked Nine why that was the case, but it declined to say.

Incidentally, also on the Australians for Prosperity board is cringe conservative TikToker Jack Tossol, who proselytises about lefty elites on social media while being a Melbourne Uni and Caulfield Grammar graduate working full-time in finance. According to his board bio, he’s “famous for his fearless ocker takedowns of people who take themselves too seriously”. Sure.