slag off

Verb

slag off (third-person singular simple present slags off, present participle slagging off, simple past and past participle slagged off)

To talk insultingly to or about someone or something.
To purify by melting and removing slag. There is a lot of copper oxide, but I can remove that by melting everything and slagging it off.

After the launch of After Words at City Recital Hall, Paul Keating launched
(into) the Balmain basket weavers.

"The man who talked about the recession we had to have (and sent some fraction of the middle class to the wall) was hated and feared by one part of the Australian electorate and adored by another. Former Hawke government minister John Button once said you could track the stretch of Australian politics with Keating's one-liners. Remember the banana republic and the arse end of the universe?

Keating's tough charm carried him the longest distance with the constituency that adored him, the chatterati he described as "the basket weavers of Balmain". When he declared, "Mate, if you live in Australia and you don't live in Sydney, you're just camping out", we laughed at the sheer insolent wit of the man, however secure we thought we were in our Melbourne houses.

He was one of the greatest talkers in the history of Australian politics. Part of what gave him the right to put his signature on the reformist government that carried Australia into the harder but more profitable world of the open marketplace was that as treasurer and then prime minister he gave a new politics, a tough economically liberal one, all the vernacular charm of an old and familiar larrikinism. "He's got a front on him as big as Mark Foys," he'd say. Or, addressing the question of a politician's privacy, "Mate, we can't even shit in the ocean."

The correlative of that street fighter's charm (which could also be extraordinarily powerful in the negative mode) was that Keating knew how to ice the cake. He gave the basket weavers Mabo; he gave them, as no one else could, the dream of the republic.

He was, in any case, a man of the word more than a man of the book." ...

- extract from
Lyrical larrikinism from the mouth of Paul Keating
Peter Craven / The Australian
12 November 2011