In the right setting the word “setting” is terrific, but these days it’s become a buzz word for, well, every setting. Here’s another “Seven Days” with IAN MEIKLE.

SUDDENLY, our lives seem to be set in settings, like the sets in theatre (unsurprisingly derived from the word settings). 

Over the covid months, people at the podium and the health bureaucrats set our lives in hospital settings, medical settings, face-mask settings and vaccination settings. Since then, liberated, we find the settings still haunting us in retail settings, indoor settings and outdoor settings.

While leafing through the dictionary for a definition of setting (best fit was the “surroundings of anything”), I came across a word I’d never seen before: spermatozoon (“mature male reproductive cell”). I jumped out of that setting and back to the writing-a-column setting.

“Setting” has joined “a number of” and “at this point in time” in the list of redundant expressions that make editors grind their teeth at night. 

ACT opposition leader and shadow minister for climate action Elizabeth Lee finds herself in a foreign setting. She’s pluckily taken off to Glasgow for the global UN Climate Change Conference (COP26).

She’s part of something called the Coalition for Conservation delegation, and will give a speech to the Youth Environment Summit in an Edinburgh setting (not quite Glasgow) on the importance of young voices on climate and appear on two conference panels “alongside world leaders”. Eat your heart out, Shane Rattenbury. 

“The ACT has the opportunity to not only be an Australian leader, but a world leader, when it comes to reducing our carbon emissions and fostering the best minds in sustainable technology,” she says, setting a setting-the-pace setting. 

She’s looking out for world-class ideas we can use in Canberra, which must be curling the toes of Messrs Barr and Rattenbury. 

“The Canberra Liberals are unreservedly committed to the ACT achieving net-zero by 2045, but simply having a target does not mean our work stops.”

In an interview on 2CC’s “CityNews Sunday Roast” program she joined the setting set when she put things in a “legislative setting”.

I couldn’t resist asking the Korean-born, former lawyer what she thought of the streaming phenomena “Squid Game”. She’d seen it and she liked it, in a cultural setting, of course. 

MEANWHILE, the dogged Liberal shadow minister for women Nicole Lawder took on the real Minister for Women Yvette Berry in a setting called the Budget Estimates hearings.

Ms Lawder wanted to understand how road upgrades in Pialligo constituted a part of the 2021-22 Women’s Budget Statement. The minister, surely kidding, asserted that the road upgrades were part of a program to improve gender-responsive infrastructure.

A joke clearly wasted on Ms Lawder, who bewilderingly said: “The fact that upgrades to Beltana and Kallaroo Roads in Pialligo are listed under ‘safety in our community’ is a joke. 

“These roads aren’t getting upgraded because women feel unsafe there, these roads are getting upgraded because the Labor-Greens government has neglected them for years. 

“It’s a sad excuse of a statement to hide the fact that this government is delivering nothing for Canberra women.”

But, it seems, plenty for the blokes in a CFMEU setting.

“This Budget also awards $700,000 for progressing gender equality in construction to the CFMEU over five years – an organisation whose board is exclusively male,” she lamented. 

LET’S move to a weather setting and this year’s calendar from the Bureau of  Meteorology. It “features an image from each state/territory,” says BOM, neglecting to add: except for the ACT. 

Despite that, the calendar’s photos, drawn from more than 1400 submissions from professional and amateur snappers, features  extraordinary weather phenomena from across the country. 

Bureau meteorologist Dean Narramore has a favourite, the July image by Bet Wright. 

“It’s a supercell thunderstorm in Gympie, Queensland – a particularly strong, long-lived type of thunderstorm that can sustain itself for hours,” he says. 

“Supercells are an impressive sight, but many people don’t realise just how dangerous they can be. This one brought very strong winds, heavy rainfall and in some areas, hail up to the size of tennis balls.

“The rotating base you can see in the photograph is a clear indication that the storm is severe, and that potentially dangerous conditions may be on the way.”

Order the calendar from a retail setting – shop.bom.gov.au

Ian Meikle is the editor of “CityNews” and can be heard on the “CityNews Sunday Roast” news and interview program, 2CC, 9am-noon.