Buried bones

Scoops, scandals and secrets are the juicy bones that newshounds sniff out and dig up. They provide much-needed distractions from the momentous events unfolding across the nation and the globe. 2020 offered up the old favourites of party infighting, branch-stacking and alleged pork-barrelling. Headline writers got a gift with a scandal that rhymed: ‘sports rorts’. Meanwhile, buried bones of a different sort prompted the Department of Home Affairs to consider domestic surveillance. And the ‘robodebt’ debacle refused go away quietly.