Neil Mitchell: Opposition senator, Senator Scott Ryan good morning.
Senator Scott Ryan: Morning Neil.
Mitchell: Did you have a good time?
Senator Ryan: It was actually a really nice dinner with 600 of my nearest and dearest friends and I was down in the cheap seats down the back, but it was a pleasant dinner with short and quite good speeches.
Mitchell: Even John Howard wasn’t up the front. He was on table number 11, I see.
Senator Ryan: He was a few rows back, I didn’t even know he was there until I ran into him towards the end of the evening.
Mitchell: Ok, macadamia and thyme encrusted lamb, how was it?
Senator Ryan: Look, I can say that while the wine was from South Australia and Western Australia, I did ask one of the guys there and they said it was Victorian lamb.
Mitchell: Ok. [Interruption]
Speeches? Long? Short?
Senator Ryan: Short speeches from the Prime Minister, from Tony Abbott and then from Barack Obama.
Mitchell: [Interruption: Speaks to Tom Switzer]
Why don’t we move on Senator Ryan, from the macadamia and thyme encrusted lamb to the pan-fried jewfish?
Senator Ryan: It was nice, I didn’t eat all of it.
Mitchell: You didn’t?
Senator Ryan: No, I’m on a bit of a diet and I skipped dessert as well.
Mitchell: Wattle seed and passionfruit pavlova.
Senator Ryan: I skipped it completely.
Mitchell: Did it look all right
Senator Ryan: It looked ok, yeah.
Mitchell: And a couple of flagons of wine on the table?
Senator Ryan: It was surprising, there wasn’t a great deal of drinking going on.
Mitchell: Come on, this is Canberra.
Senator Ryan: At least down the back where I was.
Mitchell: Did the diet allow you to taste the wine?
Senator Ryan: I tasted it. As I said, I checked it out and I was a bit disappointed no Victorian product got on the table.
Mitchell: But it was Victorian lamb?
Senator Ryan: It was Victorian lamb.
Mitchell: The speeches, were they serious? Were they light-hearted?
Senator Ryan: The Prime Minister spoke about our long friendship. Tony Abbott made a speech that had a lot of cultural references. While this is the 60th anniversary of ANZUS, our military links with America go back a lot further, as far back as World War I, with Australian troops and the ANZACs under John Monash. Just over a century ago, the Great White Fleet visited Australia and the British at the time weren’t too happy and the Liberal Prime Minister Alfred Deakin invited them to come and say hello and they got rapturous crowds in Melbourne. Then Barack Obama made a very amusing speech where he said that he would try and speak “strine”, but he didn’t do it with a Merryl Streep-type accent, but he did get it right. He said he’d like to give it a burl, he particularly liked the Australian phrase “ear bashing” and he said he was going to try and use that back in Washington because he felt like he had had it a few times.
Mitchell: Is he a good political performer? George Bush impressed me significantly as a smooth politician. Is he?
Senator Ryan: Obama spoke very well and he didn’t use a teleprompter.
Mitchell: Thank you very much for being our man inside.
Senator Ryan: Thanks Neil.