Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is the most embarrassing group of student activists: righteous far-left types, or Young Liberal dickheads. But right now the Liberals look to be in the lead.

The Liberal student group Make Australia Fair submitted a “dossier” to parliament that named academics it considered dangerous radicals, describing their teaching methods as an “almost slavish adherence to various theories and political commitments associated with neo-Marxism, postmodernism, deconstructionism, the theories of Michel Foucault … and related ideologies.”

However, a Senate inquiry into their accusations has refused to take action, describing the episode as “undergraduate” and that the suggestion of a leftist conspiracy in education “borders on the farcical.”

“Even if it were true that the majority of academics have a broadly left, liberal political stance, the question is whether this matters?” committee chairman, Senator Gavin Marshall, told Parliament.

Well it matters to The Age, Gavin! In the absence of any relevant shots to accompany the story, clearly Fairfax staff photographer Michele Mossop was commissioned to swede up a pic – and we at the Subeditorial Antics Appreciation Society are delighted with the shonky results!

Mossop could’ve gone for any vaguely leftist imagery: Karl Marx, Communist propaganda posters, Chairman Mao, Soviet flags… but she picked up on the French theorist so demonised by Make Australia Fair, the one whose first name is so similar to her own, the master of power/knowledge himself, Michel Foucault!

The pic looks like it was done in about a minute. It’s just an image of Foucault (in which he looks disconcertingly like my granddad), copied and pasted nine times, with one pic flipped horizontally and one vertically.

But the caption, by one of The Age’s overworked and under-appreciated subs, is the kicker: “Michel, ma belle”!

Pun aside – and we do love a good pun here at the SAAS – we love the subtle implication that, no matter what that dumb Senate Committee might think, Foucault’s theories will always hold a cherished place in the Fairfax panopticon.