Poor old John Hewson has been dumped as a columnist with the Nine chipwrappers for the great crime of being male.

Hewson should have counted himself lucky he had a column anywhere 28 years after condemning himself to irrelevance. We always thought he’d end up like Jim Cairns, pushing pamphlets on the streets of Double Bay the way Whitlam’s former Treasurer spent the last decades of his life occupying a card table by the doors of the Prahan markets.