GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG

ISSUE – NO. 713

31 January 2025

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  • THE ABC RENEWS ITS (UNBALANCED) ATTACK ON THE LATE CARDINAL PELL

At 5 am on Friday 31 January, ABC reporter Louise Milligan renewed her attack on Cardinal George Pell – who died on 10 January 2023. Milligan commenced her fanging on the ABC 7.30 program and continued it when the left-wing Louise Adler published Milligan’s book Cardinal – The Rise and Fall of George Pell. Louise Milligan has never defended her ABC reporting on Pell – she has ignored all criticism. Moreover, she only gave interviews to friendly journalists – mainly ABC colleagues. And she never appeared in a debate – either in the media or at a literary festival – in the presence of a critic of her work. In short, Milligan has been protected by her mates from debate.

And then there’s the fact that the ABC censored critics of Milligan’s (alleged) scholarship. Frank Brennan, Gerard Henderson and Keith Windschuttle wrote books on the Pell case after he was acquitted of sexual assault by a 7 to nil judgement in the High Court of Australia.

In view of the ABC’s coverage given to Milligan’s attacks on Pell, this can only be regarded as censorship. Quite a few well-known ABC journalists are embarrassed by the ABC’s decision to cancel critics of Milligan but none will say so in public.

At 5 am on Friday 31 January, ABC Online published an article by Louise Milligan and Charlotte King titled “Cardinal George Pell abused two boys in Ballarat, compensation scheme decides”. This is how the article commenced:

Two men were compensated after the National Redress Scheme accepted they were abused as boys by the late Cardinal George Pell in Ballarat in the 1970s. One man who the scheme decided was groped by Pell was compensated just five weeks before the cardinal’s death. Two men have been granted compensation by the federal government’s National Redress Scheme for abuse by the late Cardinal George Pell, including one whom the scheme accepted was raped by Pell when the Cardinal was a young priest in Ballarat in the 1970s.

In a criminal jurisdiction, the standard of proof for a criminal conviction is guilt beyond reasonable doubt. In the civil jurisdiction, decisions are reached on the balance of probabilities. Media Watch Dog understands that the Commonwealth government’s National Redress Scheme makes findings on the basis “reasonably likely” or “reasonable likelihood”. However, the fact that something is found to be reasonably likely acknowledges by its very word usage that it might have not occurred.

MWD understands that most decisions of the National Redress Scheme are made by government employees who rely primarily on written submissions from complainants seeking financial compensation.

The fact is that Pell agreed to be interviewed by Victoria Police concerning all the allegations made against him. In the end, not one was sustained in a court of law.

The ABC Online report is based on a long article by Louise Milligan in the February 2025 issue of the left-wing magazine The Monthly titled “The True Legacy of the rapist Pell”. Yet another act of cowardice. There is no way a serious magazine would have alleged that Pell was a “rapist” while he was alive. Pell was never convicted of any crime. And he had no victims – although there were complainants. Yet The Monthly refers to Pell’s “victims”.

As to complainants, some allegations are due to mistaken identity. Some individuals have clear “recollections” of events that never happened. Some are liars as the recent Carl Beech case in Britain demonstrates. And some are truthful as to the accusations. All allegations deserve to be tested in a court of law where a complainant can be heard (anonymously if necessary) and an accused defend themselves.

MWD will examine The Monthly article in the next issue. However, a glance at the article is instructive of Milligan’s anti-Pell bias. In her article, Milligan cites the majority judgement against Pell in the Victorian Court of Appeal. But she does not refer to the devastating dissent by Justice Mark Weinberg – perhaps the most senior criminal law jurist at the time. In short, Milligan does not accept the unanimous decision of the High Court in Pell v The Queen.

Louise Milligan and her colleague Sarah Ferguson do what High Court judges warned against. They believe what they want to believe based on the demeanour of a complainant. The fact is that it cannot be established to any sufficient evidentiary requirement in criminal or civil law that Cardinal Pell sexually abused two boys in Ballarat.

Meanwhile, it is worth noting that not only Milligan but also the Royal Commission, after years of inquiry, did not examine one instance of pedophilia in any extant government school in the whole of Australia. As we now know, pedophilia was rife in the government school system presided over by the Victorian Education Department. Milligan and many of her Melbourne-based ABC colleagues never saw this because they never looked.

  • THE AUSTRALIA INSTITUTE’S EBONY BENNETT COMES UP WITH A YOU-BEAUT THEORY ABOUT HOW TO ABOLISH INFLATION – OR DOES SHE?

Wasn’t it great to see the ABC/Australia Institute entente back in action on Thursday 30 January?

As Media Watch Dog readers know only too well, the conservative free zone that is the taxpayer funded public broadcaster has a special relationship with the proudly left-wing Australia Institute think tank based in Canberra. Representatives of the politically conservative think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, have been cancelled by the ABC. But the ABC’s “Welcome” mat has been worn down by Richard Denniss (the Australia Institute’s executive director) and Ebony Bennett (the Australia Institute’s deputy director) rocking up at ABC studios to spread their leftist ideology every morning, every night and frequently during the day.

And so it came to pass that Comrade Bennett made her first appearance for 2025 on ABC TV’s News Breakfast on 30 January – and was the recipient of a soft interview by the program’s co-presenter Bridget Brennan.

First up, Comrade Brennan asked Comrade Bennett about the prospect of the Reserve Bank cutting interest rates at its next meeting. Let’s go to the transcript – commencing just after the Australia Institute’s deputy director declared that an interest rate cut would be “hopefully good news for the [Albanese Labor] government”. How times change. What about the workers? As the left was wont to chant:

Ebony Bennett: … I think these inflation figures also show that the government really can help inflation. Its energy subsidies here are a pretty crucial reason why inflation has fallen compared to things like rental prices and insurance costs, which are still going up. And really these figures show that the RBA is out of excuses not to cut interest rates now, people are really struggling, and it’s well past due.

Turn it up. It seems that the economist Dr Denniss (for a doctor he is) has not advised Comrade Bennett about the difference between the headline rate of inflation and the RBA’s attempts to measure the underlying rate, through measures like the trimmed mean. Comrade Bennett seems to believe that the RBA should be convinced that inflation is under control because a government is using taxpayers’ money to subsidise the cost of energy. If this is the case, then a government should subsidise all payments (including rent and insurance costs) and abolish inflation altogether. That’s economics – according to the Australia Institute. Can You Bear It?

  • THE SMH’s RICHARD GLOVER APPEARS TO BELIEVE THAT BUSHFIRES IN AUSTRALIA COMMENCED CIRCA 2020

There was enormous interest in Media Watch Dog’s coverage last week of The Sydney Morning Herald’s “The Summer That Changed Everything” series – featuring the likes of Sean Kelly (who wrote about his 40th birthday party in damp and warm Spring) and Kathy Lette (who wrote about herself on a holiday in New Caledonia some decades ago) and Niki Savva (who described moving to Canberra in February 1974 with only three days left of Summer to go). In other words – zzzzz.

Lotsa thanks to the avid Gunnedah reader (the hometown of the late Jackie R.I.P.) who drew attention to something that Ellie’s (male) co-owner had overlooked. Namely, the piece in the series by SMH columnist Richard Glover. Here’s what Comrade Glover had to say on 31 December:

If you have a favourite landscape, suck all possible enjoyment from it. Contemplate it. Photograph it. If there’s a tree involved, go hug it. In an era of climate change it can be gone in a moment, never to reappear. That’s my sliver of wisdom from the summer that, for me, changed everything. It was the summer of 2019-2020.The bushfires hit me hard. With family and friends, I’d built a mud-brick house up in the wild land between Mittagong and Taralgo.

It turned out that a neighbour saved the mud-brick house, but not much else. So, it’s back to Comrade Glover’s account:

The fire had destroyed all the fences, the shed too. The septic tank was a puddle of PVC. But worse, the fires had incinerated the surrounding bush. The landscape of my dreaming had been lost; the landscape I would summon up each night as a way of settling into sleep.

It’s appropriate to sympathise with your man Glover due to the damage to his property and surrounds. However, to just put down the bushfires that occurred in southern NSW in 2019-20 to “the era of climate change” is a bit much.

Richard Glover should know that if you build a house in the middle of the Australian bush, you run the risk of it being burnt down. Some of the worst fires in Australia, after European settlement of 1788, occurred in the 19th Century and early 20th Century.

If Richard Glover had done his research before purchasing his property in “the wild land between Mittagong and Taralgo”, he would have known that there was a catastrophic fire in the Chatsbury-Bungonia region of the NSW Southern Highlands in March 1965. That was over half a century ago. Chatsbury is a 10-minute drive from Taralgo.

And your man Glover reckons that the cause of the fire which burnt the landscape of his dreaming in 2019-20 was due solely to “an era of climate change”. What a load of absolute tosh. Can You Bear it?

  • RAI GAITA – AUSTRALIA’S INCOMPREHENSIBLE PHILOSOPHER WRITES ABOUT HIS FALL IN ST KILDA

Thanks to the Melbourne reader who drew the attention of Ellie’s (male) co-owner to the front page of The Sunday Age on 22 December. That is, around the beginning of what some followers of the media describe as the “Silly Season”.

Obviously, there was not much news around on the morning of 22 December. How else to explain that The Sunday Age ran with a front page lead headed “Espy Angels”? There was a large pic of MWD fave Rai Gaita along with three young women over the caption: “When author Rai Gaita had a nasty fall outside St Kilda’s Esplanade Hotel, three angels came to his rescue”. Enter Kaity, Tayla and Fleur.

As readers of a certain (advanced) age may know – the reference to “Espy” Angels was a take on the American series Charlie’s Angels which commenced in 1976 – half a century ago. In it, three young women worked for the Townsend private agency under direction of Charlie Townsend – i.e. Charlie’s Angels.

But MWD digresses. The point here is that Rai Gaita had a fall in St Kilda and was looked after by Espy’s Angels until an ambulance arrived quite some time later. A hold-the-front-page moment for sure – don’t you think?

Now, it’s appropriate to express concern about the fallen philosopher. Especially since he has declared that he has Parkinson’s disease. However, the good news is that when your man Gaita got to hospital, X-rays showed that he was “indeed OK”. This quote is taken from Gaita’s article in The Sunday Age about the fall of Gaita titled “As Raimond took a tumble outside the Esplanade Hotel, three ‘angels’ appeared”. Groan.

Not only did news of the fall of Gaita make it to The Sunday Age’s front page along with a pic, the newspaper’s online editor circulated two other photos of him, in a recovered state, with the Espy Angels. There were also two photos of the philosopher on the ground – taken by his wife Yael Gaita.  In short, four photos to accompany a 990-word article.

Meanwhile, that very day a report by Nine Newspapers’ fine European correspondent Rob Harris about the terrorist attack in the German town of Magdeburg – which led to the deaths of five people along with hundreds injured – obtained only two paragraphs on The Sunday Age’s front page.

Comrade Gaita is much loved by The Age and the ABC. Last May he was the subject of an ABC Compass program titled “The Moral Philosopher”. It commenced as follows:

Raimond Gaita: For me to be a moral philosopher is basically to try to understand what this strange thing we call morality is. Ours is a society in which we discuss things, and I think of that as the deepest form of hope.

That’s pretty clear then. As MWD readers may recall, Issue 116 of MWD discussed the introduction to Rai Gaita’s all but incomprehensible tome After Romulus (Scribe) – which even the author conceded was “difficult” to read. In Issue 116, MWD quoted from Rai Gaita’s advice to readers who were likely to have trouble following his literary sludge. [Perhaps you should refer to it as “literary thought” – Just a thought. MWD editor]

They [Chapters 2 and 3] are, in parts, difficult essays. I ask the reader to read them slowly, but, if having done that they are still hard to fathom, to move on and to return to them later. Different though the essays are, I hope that the reader will find all of them the voice they heard in Romulus, My Father. If she does, then recognising in “Character and Its Limits” the same voice as in “An Unassuageable Longing” and in both the voice of the author of Romulus, My Father, she might find, when she returns to the difficult passages she had skipped, that they are not as foreign and therefore not as difficult as they seemed on first reading.

What a load of literary sludge. The writer George Orwell once commented that if a reader with average intelligence and education could not understand a book, essay or article – the fault was with the author not the reader. But Philosopher Rai reckons that if a reader cannot understand his work they should go back and read it again and again. Really.

Meanwhile Hendo is still trying to work out what your man Gaita meant when he wrote in 2011 that “many people wonder whether there is such a thing as someone who really is”. MWD wonders what the Espy Angels would make of this.  And there’s another question: Can You Bear It?

YOUR TAXES AT WORK

This hugely popular Media Watch Dog segment looks at how taxpayers’ money is spent by governments and councils – along with the various institutions they fund. Of particular interest to Gerard Henderson – a published author who never gets invited to literary festivals, which obviates the need for him to respond to any literary festival RSVP in a negative way – are the various taxpayer funded writers’ weeks.

MWD defines a literary festival as an occasion when a soviet of leftist activists and bureaucrats get hold of a bucket load of taxpayer funds and invite members of the leftist intelligentsia to rock up to festivals (speakers’ fees, travel and accommodation costs all paid). There they meet fellow panellists of like mind and participate in forums in which everyone agrees with everyone else in a leftist kind of way.

Each year, MWD focuses on various writers’ festivals – in particular, the taxpayer funded get-togethers in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra.

  • LOUISE ADLER’S 2025 AWW – ANOTHER LEFTIST STACK

The program for the 2025 Adelaide Writers’ Week has just been released. Gerard Henderson will cover this in his column in The Weekend Australian on 1 January 2025. However, MWD readers may wish to learn about the Australians who will be covering politics and related matters.

Once again, Louise Adler, the left-wing opponent of contemporary Israel, is director of the AWW.  And, once again, this is a taxpayer funded leftist stack.  You be the judge.  Here’s a list of some Australian writers (including “writers” who have not written a book, monograph or long essay, e.g. Mark Kenny) who have a gig between 1 March and 6 March 2025 in what was once called the City of Churches:

Waleed Aly, Julia Baird, Eric Beecher, Allan Behm, Larissa Behrendt, Matt Bevan, Josh Bornstein, Geraldine Brooks, Nick Bryant, Mike Carlton, Bob Carr, Kim Carr, Anna Clark, Annabel Crabb, Richard Denniss, Robert Dessaix, Anton Enus, Gareth Evans, Sarah Ferguson, Nikki Gemmell, Jonathan Green, Alice Grundy, Sarah Hanson-Young, Wendy Harmer, Anita Heiss, Tony Jones, Fran Kelly, Mark Kenny, Malcolm Knox, Alan Kohler, David Leser, John Lyons, David Marr, Thomas Mayo, Maxine McKew, Louise Milligan, Rick Morton, Kerry O’Brien, Amy Remeikis, Geoffrey Robertson, Mark Scott, Tory Shepherd, Emma Shortis, David Speers, Natasha Stott Despoja, Yumi Stynes, Norman Swan, Cathy Wilcox, Clare Wright.

Not a conservative among this lot.

Your Taxes At Work.

HISTORY CORNER

  • THE SATURDAY PAPER’S PAUL BONGIORNO POSTS ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST ON THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LIBERATION OF AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU WITHOUT MENTIONING JEWS

Here’s what The Saturday Paper’s leftist columnist Paul Bongiorno tweeted on 28 January 2025:

Now Paul Bongiorno is an intelligent, well-educated 80-year-old man.  In view of this, it is reasonable to expect he is aware of the aim of Nazi Germany – under the leadership of Adolf Hitler – to eliminate European Jewry.  It’s called the Holocaust.

Yet Bongiorno wrote on 28 January 2025 that the “main lesson” of the Holocaust has something to do with the inherent dignity of all human beings.

In other words, on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz/Birkenau death camp in Poland, Bongiorno posts a message about the Holocaust which does not mention Jews.  Despite the fact that an estimated one million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of the estimated six million who were murdered in the Holocaust.

It would be interesting to know what Morry Schwartz – proprietor of The Saturday Paper – thinks about Bongiorno’s understanding of the history of Europe in the 20th Century.

[I note that Comrade Bongiorno put out a new photo of himself on Elon Musk’s X on 28 January with lotsa books in the background.  Does anyone really care about Bonge’s profile – old or new?  Also, I wonder about the library – surely it should contain some work pointing out that the overwhelming majority of victims of the Holocaust were Jews.  But The Saturday Paper’s columnist was reluctant to say this or to condemn anti-semitism in general.  – MWD Editor.]

 

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Until Next Time.

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