Q&A’s latest plant

Did you catch Q&A on Monday night, especially its obligatory ‘gotcha moment’, which came at the very start of the show? This week it was a woman, a former teacher by who goes by the unlikely name of Fred, who lumbered to her feet and lambasted Attorney-General George Brandis for her sorry lot in life.

Greatly troubled by arthritis, Fred explained that she had been forced to leave the classroom after “an exemplary 28 years” and was scraping by on disability payments because, as she put it “I am unfit to work.” Now Centrelink was giving her a hard time, she said, resulting in a weekend of nausea as she worried what her three children might find on their plates, if anything at all.

Unable to work? Not according to her Twitter feed, whose doses of pithy spleen against conservatives in general and Liberals in particular can be viewed via the link above. The Tweet atop this item — click the image to enlarge it — expresses how much she was “looking forward to working for James Mathison“, who stood against Tony Abbott last year in the seat of Warringah.

One of Ms Thorpe’s recent tweets announced an “impulse buy” of vegetables and other meagre fare to feed her three nippers. One wonders if they supped on that slim repast in the rooftop garden of her beachside apartment at Manly, which was designer renovated in the second season of Backyard Blitz.

Of course, if she is short of a feed, she could always ask failed candidate Mathison to sling a few peas on her plate. Her work on his behalf helped earn him $25,000 from the Australian Electoral Commission.

For the full Q&A transcript follow the link below.

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