Did the Prime Minister drag his heels on new firearms legislation because he feared it might impact his cabinet? Until she was named as one of the female Labor MPs overheard subjecting male Lib counterparts to the popular partner profiling protocol ‘Shoot, shag or marry’, few suspected that the Assistant Minister for Health Rebecca White is a gun nut. Nobody has said that the attractive mother of two selected her own husband in this way, or that she went to the Hobart Taste of Summer food festival to find a replacement for him. But the fear is that other, less fortunate Tassie women may now resort to the same tactic to meet the perennial challenge of husband-hunting in the country’s least populous state, where most good-looking, intelligent males head for the Bass Strait ferry as soon as their voices break and where B&S ball catchments are never large enough to preclude the possibility of incest. Cynics have suggested that far from being careless talk, the conversation overheard in Hobart was carefully scripted, and an attempt to counter two commonly held and – as we enter the post woke era – potentially vote-losing apprehensions: a) that having a sense of humour disqualifies you from membership of the Labor party, and b) that Tassie Labor has been completely captured by LGBTQ+ activists. In the meantime, media coverage of the scandal has failed to answer the only questions the rest of Australia is asking: who were the male Libs involved, and how, respectively, did they score?

The readiness of Taswegians to move to other states at the earliest opportunity is one reason to doubt the veracity of the assertion, made by Xi Jinping’s man in Canberra last week, that Taiwan’s relationship with China is no different to Tasmania’s relationship with Australia. As Ambassador Xiao Qian knows, of the 23-plus million people who live in Taiwan, only fugitives from justice have ever shown an interest in relocating to mainland China, with some expressing a preference for North Korea. In truth the only thing Taiwan and Tasmania have in common, beyond the fact that both are islands with lots of mountains, is that both also have more than their fair share of poisonous snakes. It is testament to Tasmania’s environmental priorities that it confers protected species status on all its snakes. It is testament to Taiwan’s essential Chineseness that it permits not only the killing of snakes, but also the public skinning, cooking and consumption of them. I doubt I will ever forget my visit to Taipei’s Huaxi Street night market, aka Snake Alley. Not least because the last three hours of the evening were spent doing snake impressions on the floor of my hotel bathroom.

As a single man, the older I get the more Tasmanian I feel, and if there was a Shoot, Shag or Marry dating site I would sign up tomorrow, not least because if all you had to do was tick one of three boxes it would save so much time. One month into the year in which I will turn 67, even the over-fifties speed dating nights I occasionally attend are starting to feel like procrastination. The difficulties of finding a senior soul mate are compounded if you’re a conservative, since, as they get older, even the most intelligent Australian women start making Pascal’s wagers about the world their grandchildren will inherit. Older blokes, by contrast, attach more importance to having sex a few more times before they die than to securing the future of their progeny or saving the planet.

One reason I prefer speed dating to conventional dating websites is that John Howard was PM when most of the photographs posted on those sites were taken. Another is that speed dating recognises certain Darwinian truths. History is full of women who fell for men they weren’t initially attracted to after getting to know them. What Darwin discovered was that the male of every species, by contrast, is incapable of modifying the immediate impression the female makes on him. To put it bluntly, if he doesn’t want to consummate the relationship after 30 seconds he never will. Darwin also learnt that if the male does want to have sex with the female, he will do whatever it takes to make that happen, even if he discovers, in the process, that he hates everything else about her. But Darwin’s most prescient insight into the human condition was discovering that acknowledging the truth of all the above will not stop men speed dating. And damn it – I feel lucky!