Australia has its own Panda. the Minister for Environment Coal and lobbying is quite rare, seldom seen, and fascinatingly elusive. Much prized by collectors of rare and endangered biota.

Since Clarrie left us for a high paying executive position with the Happy 8 Golden Dawn Beltun Woad Corporation things have gone from bad to worse. At first we thought it may have had something to do with the fact that he’d been playing pokies on the side at the Nar Nar Goon RSL, that we had nothing left to pay the bills but we later discovered that he’d been poached for his high level understanding of Pandas. 

‘Panda’s’ you exclaim, what has this go to do with the price of fish in India?.

Mr Robb pointing to the undisputable fact that the “elephant in the room” is in actual fact a Panda!

Clarrie has been sponsoring a Panda since the year dot. He started in the 70’s when he had an inkling that because they were cute and cuddly and very rare, their testicles would be highly prized by Chinese businessmen for their aphrodisiac qualities.  That’s the thing about endangered species, the more endangered they are the more you can be sure there’s a bloke in China spruiking their priapic proclivities. Clarrie actually put this theory to the test. He’d bred a rare Shitsu-Pug cross, we nicknamed “Fugly”, wrote an article on its uniqueness in the  “Golden Age Newspaper” and in an hour it’d gone. He reckons that’s why Andrew Robb took the gig at the Landbridge, on 770 k a year after signing the free trade agreement. To “look after” endangered species. 

Ever since then we adopted a sort of code. ‘Panda’, meant Big trouble. 

You’re probably wondering what this has got to do with pcbycp, but this is where it gets interesting. 

We got a call out of the blue from Clarrie. He’d been held in custody without trial in some gulag in China. He wanted to know how the Panda was going? We were flummoxed, we knew that Panda was a shorthand code, that we used to alert us insiders that something was seriously wrong. 

We were about to ask him, about the “price of fish in India”, which is code for “have they harvested your testicles yet’? The phone went dead. 

We knew the worst. 

Peter Dutton, Proof there is no such thing as a FREE LUNCH! In Chinatown or Manaus!

Clarrie was being investigated. But what for? we asked. His knowledge of Panda’s? His new job in the Beltun Woad Initiative? The lunch he organised for Peter Dutton? The fact that his recent purchase of briquettes may have influenced Melissa Price’s excellent decision to Give Adani the go ahead? Whichever way we looked at it he must have done something to annoy the Chinese authorities.

The next few weeks were spent in a flurry. We had to find the root cause. Panda’s eat roots, which gave us a clue. 

We subsequently discovered Clarrie had been working undercover. Not only was he instrumental in promoting the plight of Pandas but another bear. An animated bear by the name of “Pooh”. You see in China, one stuffed Winnie the Pooh is worth millions of dollars.  They are so rare, people, (well connected Chinese billionaires) are prepared to pay whatever it takes to get one. As a consequence Clarrie was on a gold mine. But, at his peril. Powerful interests were angered, and set about to undermine his business, and threaten the integrity of our work by embedding undercover agents in our midst. 

The truth is startling, and the reality terrifying.  We are in a new era. Not a golden dawn, but a Uighur short of the gulag, and you’ll have to wait till our next instalment, if we’re still around and find out what actually happened. It makes “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” look like a high school musical. 

Sadly, we may never see Clarrie again, he has paid the ultimate sacrifice. 

As Cec said, after mucking around with bears he’s now really in the Pooh!!