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The Abbott government has appointed conservative commentator Janet Albrechtsen and former deputy Liberal Party leader Neil Brown to the panel overseeing appointments to the boards of the ABC and SBS.

Pork chops politics..

Following some debates in the Senate last week, I was struck by some odd phrasing and linguistic glitches on the part of some of the honourable members. There was the Greens child-senator Hanson-Young who said the nasty old government was literally bashing up the poor unfortunate children of refugees (..).

She also described the circumstances of an indeed very tragic case of a juvenile asylum seeker who had suffered the trauma of his father not just being murdered by the Taliban but what made matters worse was that his father also ended up dead as a result of the murder.

But it wasn't all one way by any means. A Coalition senator (at least I'm guessing she was, dressed like Margaret Thatcher on acid), responded to the questions around underage asylum seekers, consistently talking about "unaccompanied minders."  I take it she meant to say 'unaccompanied minors'.  If the juveniles had had minders with them, they wouldn't have been unaccompanied, surely.

Another nice usage was a Labor MP describing a plan initiated by his opponents as follows: "To call this a half-baked plan would be unkind to half-baked plans."