News editors around the nation are furious after being conned by a heartless prankster into sending reporting teams to the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme.

The unfeeling trickster send an overnight email to all of Australia’s major mainstream news outlets, claiming a witness at today’s hearings would have irrefutable proof that Scott Morrison in his various ministerial roles was totally blameless in the implementation of the Centrelink debt recovery scheme and had never, ever, been told it could be illegal.

The commission’s hearing room was this morning crammed with reporters, camera operators and sound recordists from all the major Newscorpse Australia and Nine Entertainment Co. mastheads and radio stations. Even the ABC went along.

The nation’s mainstream media had been avoiding the commission’s first week and a half of hearings seeing, as a senior deputy editor at The Daily Telegraph told The Bug “it’s not as if anyone died as a result of the scheme, unlike what happened under Labor’s lethal and disastrous, poorly thought-out, pink-batts project”.

“The evidence to date has all been rather dry and boring with a lot of legal mumbo jumbo so why would we inflict that on our readership,” a source at The Sydney Morning Herald added.

Ex-wharfies’ generous offer to family

Retired waterfront workers have offered to provide a free funeral for former Liberal Party deputy federal leader and Howard Government industrial relations minister, Peter Reith.

A spokesperson for the Maritime Union of Australia Alumni Association said: “Me and some of me old wharfie mates have contacted the Reith family to make the offer of transporting Mr Reith’s body wrapped in a shroud to a point 100 nautical miles north of Christmas Island where we plan to throw him overboard.

“We’re not optimistic that the family will respond positively because we’ve been making the same offer quite regularly for several years now.”