Michaelia Cash Is Copping So Much Shit She’s Literally Hiding Behind A Whiteboard

Yesterday Liberal senator and Minister for Jobs and Innovation Michaelia Cash was forced to issue a (qualified) apology after she threatened to name female staffers in Bill Shorten’s office she had heard “rumours” about.

Cash’s extraordinary and bizarre comments were made in Senate Estimates in response to Labor senator Doug Cameron who was questioning the minister about her new chief of staff, and links her office had to the highly controversial Australian Federal Police raid of the Australian Worker’s Union.

“I’m happy to sit here and name every young woman in Mr Shorten’s office about which rumours in this place abound,” Cash said. “If you want to go down that path today I will do it.

“Do you want me to start naming them and have Mr Shorten deny any of the rumours that have been circulating in this building now for many, many years? Dangerous path to go down and you know it.”

Labor senator Penny Wong later demanded an apology for the insinuations made against Shorten and his staff. Cash did end up apologising but only if anyone was “offended” by her remarks, which is the classic apology you make when you don’t really want to make an apology.

Cash was roundly criticised by senior Labor MPs, including Deputy Leader Tanya Plibersek. Bill Shorten released an angry statement expressing surprising Cash hadn’t rung up to apologise personally.

“I’m honestly shocked she hasn’t said sorry,” Shorten said. “I’ve been waiting for her to ring up my office and organise it.

“It’s this sort of nonsense that turns people off politics. We should be focusing on the things that matter to Australians, not hurling insults and making up stories about people who can’t defend themselves.”

Cash hasn’t commented on the issue since yesterday and has been trying to avoid the media. That can be a tricky task in federal parliament, especially during Senate Estimates week, where it’s pretty easy to track the movements of senators.

This afternoon a group of of journalists gathered in a corridor next a committee room Cash was due to sit in, hoping to get her reaction to Shorten’s comments. But little did those journalists know that Cash had a cunning plan to avoid their scrutiny.

She got a few parliamentary security guards to physically block her from prying eyes with the help of a large whiteboard.

As farcical as this sounds, it actually happened. Cash was walking towards the journalists when all of a sudden the whiteboard slid into view blocking her almost entirely.

Farcical scenes at Parliament House, as security guards wheel out a whiteboard to stop media filming Michaelia Cash arriving at a #estimates committee hearing pic.twitter.com/YZXC7VxE6S

— ABC Politics (@politicsabc) March 1, 2018

The dumbest thing? The room Cash was walking into is filmed because all Senate Estimates hearings are live streamed. All she managed to do was temporarily avoid questioning from journalists and look incredibly silly in the process.