GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG – ISSUE NO. 34
30 OCTOBER 2009
NANCY’S PICKS OF THE WEEK
▪ Catherine Deveny Calls “Seconds Out, Box”
What a stunning performance by The Age’s Catherine Deveny on Q&A last night. The star columnist of the “Guardian-on-the-Yarra” was once a stand-up comedian before she was recruited by Andrew Jaspan to become a sit-down comedian at The Age. Ms Deveny is a brilliant actor who did a great job channeling someone with borderline personality disorder early in the Q&A program. Nancy was just so impressed when Ms Deveny interrupted a considered discussion between Bill Shorten and Tony Abbott by throwing both hands in the air, clapping and yelling “FIGHT!” on no fewer than nine occasions before being restrained by compere Tony Jones. Great stuff.
Then Ms Deveny threw the switch to normal and got into statistics and the like. Witness the Deveny tactic of identifying a problem and multiplying by ten for effect. Early in the program, Deveny declared: “There’s 800,000 people in Australia who’ve overstayed their visas”. Nancy understands that the number of visa overstayers at any one time is 80,000.
Then Catherine Deveny asserted that Australia is 38th out of the top 44 industrialised countries in accepting asylum seekers as refugees. This is also false. In fact, on a per capita basis, Australia is near the top of the list. Still it showed another side to Deveny. The lady is not confined to commenting on shopping centres (See Issue 32).
▪ Booking-ending Alan Ramsey
Due to space reasons, it has been necessary to hold over an assessment of former Sydney Morning Herald columnist Alan Ramsey’s just released collected works. However, Nancy was most impressed with how Mr Ramsey responded to inquiries about what he was up to in retirement.
There is Alan Ramsey, book reader. Alan Ramsey – as told to Kerry O’Brien, 7.30 Report, Monday 26 October 2009:
I’m not reading newspapers. I haven’t since – it’s almost a year now since I gave up. I’m not reading newspapers. I’m not seeing much television. I’m reading books.
Then there is Alan Ramsey, who finds it hard to read books. Alan Ramsey – as told to Phillip Adams, Late Night Live Thursday 29 October 2009:
Phillip Adams: But now you’re out of the fray, you’re working to a different rhythm aren’t you? You’re looking at a monthly [The New York Review of Books] rather than a weekly or a daily [publication]?
Alan Ramsey: That’s right. That’s right. But that’s all. That’s about what I read. I find it hard to get into books.
CLIVE – CALL ME “DOCTOR” AND “CLIVE” AND EVEN “JACOB”
MWD is just so excited about the by-election in Higgins on Saturday 5 December – with the Greens candidate Clive “call me Doctor” Hamilton up against the Liberal Party’s Kelly O’Dwyer.
Some commentators have expressed concern about whether Dr Hamilton is the most appropriate candidate to seek election to the Commonwealth Parliament. For starters, there is the problem with the fact that Hamilton believes that the inability of democracies to handle climate change is so manifest that there is a case for “the suspension of democratic processes”. Then there is the matter that Hamilton reckons that the immediate advent of a “new climate on Earth” means that we’re all likely to die. Soon. And then there is Hamilton’s express belief that those who do not agree with his end-of-the-world-is-nigh position are suffering from a mental illness. Cognitive dissonance, in fact.
So the Greens candidate in Higgins (i) does not really believe in parliamentary democracy, (ii) reckons that the earth will end soon. [Is he seeking only one term? Ed] and (iii) maintains that a high proportion of the electorate is clinically insane.
In spite of this, MWD endorses Hamilton for Higgins. The reason? Well if the learned doctor wins, the electorate of Higgins will have two politicians for the price of one – Clive Hamilton and also Jacob Hamilton.
Confused? Well, that’s not surprising. But all was revealed when Clive Hamilton was interviewed by Caroline Jones on the ABC Radio program The Search for Meaning on 27 February 1994. Clive told Caroline that he was much influenced by the philosopher Carl Jung. So much so that he has an OTHER SELF – whom, it turns out, is a bloke called Jacob. We all know that Clive is a real luvvie and a good bloke. Not so Jacob. Clive told Caroline that Jacob is a foul-mouthed murderer and an abuser of women. However, it seems that Clive and his OTHER SELF (aka Jacob) have reached an accommodation. Which is good news for the good people of Higgins.
So vote for Dr Hamilton in Higgins. And you can have both the nice Dr Clive and the dreadful Mr Jacob. Clive would come in handy if there was need for, say, more solar panelling in Toorak Road. And Dr Jacob would be your man if democratic forms had to be disbanded and a dictatorship established to cope with climate change. (For the full story of Dr Clive and Mr Jacob see The Sydney Institute Quarterly, Issue 31, September 2007, pp 33-36).
VIRGINIA TRIOLI’S (PUBLIC) MOMENT – LOL
Being deaf, Nancy was just so impressed with Virginia Trioli’s isn’t-he-a-nutter signage following her recent interview with National Party senator Barnaby Joyce. That’s why Ms Trioli was Nancy’s pick-off-the-week last time. (See Issue 33).
Alas, the co-presenter of the ABC News Breakfast program could not out-perform herself in the signage stakes this week. However, she did do a fine verbal rendition of the aren’t-they-nutters theme on Thursday when discussing the decision to exclude Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia from the AFI Award nominations for the best film category.
On Thursday, Nicole Brady – the editor of The Age’s “Green Guide” – was invited to present the segment on the morning’s newspapers. This is the section when the guest – usually a journalist or an academic – analyses the daily papers. However, on this occasion, Virginia Trioli and her co-presenter Joe O’Brien seemed more interested in stating their opinions than listening to those of Ms Brady.
The problems commenced when Nicole Brady suggested that Australia should have been nominated for the best film category since, after all, it was the second most successful Australian film shown in Australia (only Crocodile Dundee did better) and since it made more than $232 million world-wide. Films in the AFI Award’s best film nominations include Balibo (it made $1.2 million), Beautiful Kate ($1.6 million), Samson & Delilah ($3.2 million) and Blessed (a mere $440,000).
Nicole Brady said it was “quite a snub really that Australia’s second ever highest grossing movie is not being considered” for the AFI Award best film category and added:
The AFI awards are often criticised as just being about the marginal art-house films that no one ever goes to but are highly worthy. And even though Balibo and Samson & Delilah are terrific films and absolutely worthy of nomination, it seems a bit silly of them to have left off Australia.
This upset La Trioli who told Brady to “hang on a minute” and opined that it was “good” that the “most artistically deserving” films received AFI awards rather than the “highest grossing” ones. When Brady responded that the fact that a lot of people watched and enjoyed Australia should count for something and added that the AFI awards reflected the “view of the cultural elite” and therefore were “not relevant to most people”, the News Breakfast presenters sounded off. Joe O’Brien depicted Australia as “a bit of a shocker in a lot of people’s eyes”. And then La Trioli had a go:
I’m prepared to say it [Australia] was a bad film. I thought it was a shocker of a movie. I couldn’t figure out what this film was about. I mean, I was laughing out loud during certain parts of it thinking “Is this, is this vaudeville? Is it, is it a documentary?” It was the silliest thing.
Nicole Brady held her ground. But Trioli and O’Brien came back again at the end of the program and bagged Australia again. Virginia Trioli revealed that two out of two emails received had supported her view that Australia was dreadful. [Gosh, that’s 100 per cent – Ed]
It seems that, according to Trioli and O’Brien, Australia was both “a shocker” and “bad” irrespective of the fact that it was entertaining. Pity the movie goer who paid good money to be entertained by Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman and the like and ended up sitting next to the inner-city Trioli who LOLed during certain parts of the film.
Nancy reckons that Virginia and Joe must appreciate Aussie art house films like the one she saw, starring Cate Blanchett, some years ago. Nancy rocked up to an inner-city venue and, surrounded by sandal-wearers, observed the following story line. It went something like this:
Two alienated types shoot-up in the presence of lotsa grime and plentiful (unread) copies of Green Left Weekly. The gorgeous Cate Blanchett is made up to look like a hag and her male co-star looks like he’s down to his last needle and last workable vein. They hang themselves from trees when their welfare cheques arrive late. Life is so difficult in John Howard’s Fascist Dictatorship that there are scant branches on the trees and rope is in short supply at K Mart. But they do it.
Curtain, please. And pass the taxpayer funded subsidy along with the AFI Award nomination for the best film category.
REALITY CHECK – LEIGH SALES FORGETS
Introducing her report on the testimonial dinner held for retiring former Liberal Party leader Brendan Nelson on Lateline last Friday, Leigh Sales commented:
In his first major act of diplomacy, new Australian Ambassador Brendan Nelson has managed to get John Howard and Peter Costello into the same room. Not seen in public together since the Coalition’s 2007 election defeat, the former prime minister and his treasurer were reunited tonight at Doctor Nelson’s gala farewell in Sydney.
In fact, since the 2007 election both Mr Howard and Mr Costello attended the funerals of Lindsay Thompson, Peter Howson and Richard Pratt – all of which were held in Melbourne. If Lateline producers had bothered to check the ABC’s library, they would have known that John Howard and Peter Costello were even photographed and filmed (on ABC TV no less) together at the Thompson service. [Is this the same Leigh Sales who has not desisted from her view that the dogmatic theologian Martin Luther was really a self-doubting figure? – Ed. See Issues 17 and 19]. It seems that Lateline wants to bang on about the Howard/Costello stand-off even though neither remains in Parliament.
As shown on The Age’s website, here are John Howard and Peter Costello together well before Lateline’s reunion “scoop”.
[HOWARD/COSTELLO PHOTO TO BE INSERTED]
HISTORY CORNER
▪ Siobhan McHugh, James Carleton and the Chifley Marriage
On Friday 16 October the talkback segment on the Radio National Life Matters program focused on Siobhan McHugh’s two-part “Marrying Out” series which aired on the RN Hindsight program on 11 October and 18 October.
James Carleton was in the presenter’s chair – and Siobhan McHugh was in the studio – when John phoned in from Bathurst, the hometown of former Labor prime minister Ben Chifley. The issue under discussion turned on marriages between Catholics and Protestants in Australia during the first half of the Twentieth Century. Catholics were permitted by the Church to marry Protestants – provided the ceremony took place behind, rather than at, the altar. This meant that the Catholic Church recognised the validity of what were called “mixed marriages” but did not welcome or embrace them.
Let’s go to the audio tape:
James Carleton: Let’s take a call from John. A story about Ben Chifley?
Caller: Yes, this is John from Bathurst.
James Carleton: Well, you ought to know about Ben.
Caller John: Well, my understanding comes from a wonderful Ronan Films documentary that came out last year called The Chifleys of Bushby Street. And in that, it tells the story how Ben Chifley was a Catholic, his wife was a Protestant. Their marriage was, as you say, “behind the altar”. I presume the marriage was sometime around the time of the First World War, I’m not sure. But when he wanted to go to church, he was required to sit up the back of the church. He couldn’t take part in the service in the front of the church.
James Carleton: But he came in the front of the train, though, that was the point – as the driver. [J.C. laughs. Can this be a joke about the fact that Mr Chifley was once a train driver? Ed.]
Caller John: Yes. And when he went to Canberra, he went to Mass there. And, as part of the documentary, they show the special chair that the priest kept up the back of the church for the prime minister.
Siobhan McHugh: That’s right. That’s absolutely right. And that chair is going to be part of a major exhibition that the National Museum is having in 2011 on the Irish in Australia.
Caller John: Okay. And the other thing in the documentary – they show the magnificent funeral, State funeral, that Ben Chifley had which, of course, did emanate from the Catholic Church in Bathurst.
Siobhan McHugh: Yes.
Caller John: Not the full marriage, but the full funeral.
Siobhan McHugh: Well, the Catholic Church were kind of having a bit both ways there, weren’t they? They were sort of punishing him for having married out, but then they were reclaiming him for the glory of the prime ministerial burial.
James Carleton: Thank you very much, John, for your call.
Interesting story. Pity about the facts.
The Catholic-born Ben Chifley married the Protestant-born Elizabeth McKenzie at the Presbyterian Church in the Sydney suburb of Glebe on 6 June 1914. This was not a “mixed marriage” or a “behind the altar marriage” in the Catholic sense of the term. Rather, Ben Chifley married in a Presbyterian Church and did not receive the Catholic sacrament of matrimony. This was an act in defiance of the Vatican’s Ne Temere decree of 1908 which prohibited Catholics from marrying outside the Catholic Church and put Chifley formally outside the Church.
Certainly Chifley attended Catholic Mass on occasions but he did not – and was not entitled to – receive the sacraments. Hence the placement of his chair at the back of the church. Also, as D.B. Waterson writes in his entry on the former Labor prime minister in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Chifley himself did not believe that he was a full member of the Catholic Church. Rather, he regarded himself as a humanist.
Ben Chifley collapsed and died at the Hotel Kurrajong in Canberra on 13 June 1951. Some of Chifley’s Catholic friends called a priest to give him the sacrament of Extreme Unction. As David Day relates in his biography Chifley (HarperCollins, 2001), there is no evidence that Chifley was conscious when the priest arrived. However, the priest told Labor MP Fred Daly (who was a Catholic and a friend of Chifley) that it was difficult to determine when the soul left the body. So Daly and others took comfort in the possibility that Chifley received the Church’s final sacrament before he died.
Ben Chifley’s family did not oppose a Catholic Requiem Mass at the Catholic Cathedral in Bathurst. But there is no evidence that Chifley ever sought re-admission to the Church which he had formally left almost four decades previously.
So the story as told on Life Matters was something of a beat-up. Ben Chifley did not marry behind the altar (pace caller John) and the Catholic Church did not cynically reclaim him for the glory of a prime ministerial burial (pace Siobhan McHugh). However, in Catholic teaching of the time, Catholics were entitled to believe that Chifley had made his peace with God before his death. Consequently, Chifley was entitled to a Catholic burial service. So there was no necessary cynicism involved.
▪ Emma Alberici Overlooks Precedence
While on the topic of the Catholic Church, it is appropriate to clarify the excitement exhibited on the AM program on 21 October 2009. Presenter Tony Eastley declared that “the Catholic Church has surprised its community by announcing that it will allow disaffected married Anglican ministers to convert and work as Catholic priests and remain married”. Then Emma Alberici reported from London:
Up to six Church of England bishops are said to have visited Rome to plead for some sort of structure inside the Catholic Church that would recognise their wing of the Church of England. The new constitution will provide personal ordinariates that will allow Anglicans to embrace Catholic teachings while retaining elements of their former ecclesiastical identities. It will also allow married Anglican priests to be ordained Catholic priests, although married priests won’t be allowed to become Catholic bishops.
The fact is that there have been a few married priests, who converted from Anglicanism, in the Catholic Church for eons. Even in Australia. Here is a photo of Hobart Catholic priest Fr Peter Rushton – with Mrs Helen Rushton and children – talking with Archbishop Guilford Young, the Catholic Archbishop of Hobart, in Tasmania circa 1970. Fr Rushton, a former Anglican clergyman, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1969 and was parish priest at South Hobart from 1975 until his sudden death in 1981. This was some three decades before AM’s “revelation” that the Catholic Church would accept married Anglican clergy as Catholic priests.
MICHAEL BRULL WRITES TO MWD ABOUT HIMSELF, HOWARD/BUSH/CLINTON/BLAIR, THE MIDDLE EAST – AND DENIAL
Email to Gerard Henderson from Michael Brull – 29 October 2009
Hello,
I’ve just discovered, on August 14, you write dismissively of a column I wrote on newmatilda. It reads as follows:
▪ New Matilda ’s Old Obsessions 11 August. Writing in New Matilda, Michael Brull declared that the likes of “John Howard, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair” and many more “have committed terrible crimes against the people of the Muslim world and would like to commit more of them.” He provided no evidence of where or when this quartet would like to commit the said crimes.
That’s not entirely true. I wrote:
But there is also a small group of Western extremists who have committed terrible crimes against people in the Muslim world and would like to commit more of them. They’re presidents and prime ministers, people like John Howard, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and many more.
This didn’t imply – as you seem to suggest – that Blair, Bush, Clinton and Howard continue to plot new crimes against Muslims.
Furthermore, you say I provide no evidence of said crimes. This is perhaps partly true, though I imagined my views on the matter would be plain to newmatilda readers by now. Within the article, I did, however, have a link for those who couldn’t understand why the Muslim world might be unhappy with us. Plainly, if you read the article, you would have noticed that this was not my primary focus when I wrote that particular article to which you objected. [See newmatilda 30 July 2009].
What crimes might I suggest the West is guilty of against the Muslim world? Well, there’s the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The history of both countries is pretty grim – support for Muslim extremists in Afghanistan. Support for Saddam Hussein, the sanctions in Iraq. Besides that, there’s support for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians (and also against Lebanon in particular), support for the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and so on.
What other crimes? Well, there is a possibility of an attack on Iran, as an example. It is true that I cannot prove plans to commit more crimes against the Muslim world (though I consider our complicity in ongoing oppression a crime against the Muslim world). For example, I cannot prove a new invasion of the Middle East is being planned. However, I consider the bombing of Pakistan as a crime against the Muslim world, and there was a time when I may not have anticipated that. I think the indifference to the rights of Muslims by Western governments makes it likely that the rights of people in the Muslim world will continue to be violated by Western governments.
These are perhaps more extended than your observations. Yet they have the merit of being honest, which yours did not.
Best wishes,
Michael Brull
Email to Michael Brull from Gerard Henderson 29 October 2009
Mr Brull
I refer to your email received today in which you allege that I am dishonest in that I misquoted you in the 14 August 2009 issue of Media Watch Dog. You seem extraordinarily sensitive to criticism:
In your article in newmatilda.com on 11 August 2009 you wrote:
…there is also a small group of Western extremists who have committed terrible crimes against people in the Muslim world and would like to commit more of them. They’re presidents and prime ministers, people like John Howard, George Bush, Tony Blair and many more. We must create a space to reject them all, to stand for human rights and against the slaughter of innocents.
In the 14 August 2009 issue of Media Watch Dog I wrote about you under the title “New Matilda’s Old Obsessions”. It was part of a series of comments which reflected on some exaggerated remarks made during the week. The specific reference to you was as follows:
11 August. Writing in New Matilda, Michael Brull declared that the likes of “John Howard, George Bush, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair” and many more “have committed terrible crimes against the people of the Muslim world and would like to commit more of them.” He provided no evidence of where or when this quartet would like to commit the said crimes.
A comparison of the two texts indicates that my quote was accurate and honest. Contrary to your claim in your email dated 29 October 2009, you did state that Messers Blair, Bush, Clinton and Howard would like to commit more terrible crimes against people of the Muslim world.
You seem somewhat out of your depth. If you do not wish to be quoted unfavourably – my advice is that you should desist from making wild, hyperbolic and undocumented comments in the first place.
I would also advise that you be more sophisticated in your writing. It is ludicrous to suggest that an event which has not happened – i.e. “the possibility of an attack on Iran” – is a crime. Also, your claim that “the bombing of Pakistan” amounts to a “crime against the Muslim world” overlooks the fact that the military action against the Taliban in Pakistan is being undertaken by the Pakistani Defence Force. As you should know, Pakistan is a Muslim country.
The fact is that the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are currently being killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan are being murdered by radical Islamists. I do not recall that you have criticised these murders. Nor, do I recall that you have ever acknowledged that Arab citizens of Israel have many more democratic rights than Arabs of any Arab nation.
Gerard Henderson
Email to Gerard Henderson from Michael Brull 30 October 2009
Dear Mr Henderson,
I don’t know why you quoted your own passage in full again. I quoted it in full for you: do you think I forgot it?
As you should have realised in what I wrote, I said that there are extremists in the west, who comprise two categories, those who have committed crimes against the Muslim world, and those who would like to commit more. As examples, I gave presidents and prime ministers. I think you should be able to realise by now, everyone I cited could be taken as an illustration of the former category (those who have committed crimes). Western extremists might be people like say Daniel Pipes, or Alan Howe, or perhaps Greg Sheridan. Regardless, those I cited were obviously not intended as illustrative of the second category, and what I wrote implies they belong to one of the two categories, not both.
On Iran: well, I think you might find that threatening to bomb Iran (which Israel has done) is a crime under international law. But again, my point was that this was a crime that some might like to see committed against the Muslim world. I understand you think Muslims enjoy being bombed, and don’t consider it a crime against them. I find it a little incredible that you think to point out to me that Pakistan is Muslim, when it’s an example I cited. I don’t see why the complicity of the Pakistani government in what I was talking about – specifically, the drone attacks, which have killed hundreds of Pakistani civilians – somehow means it isn’t a crime. Do you realise how hated the US is for these attacks? Or does the opinion of the Muslim world not matter to you?
You conclude by implying that I’m not critical enough of Muslim and Arab human rights violations. If you read what I wrote, you would see, for example, that I specifically am critical of the West for its support of tyrannies like the House of Saud. Are you in print criticising it? You shouldn’t find it hard to see that I have been extremely critical of it, and Obama for his endorsement of the graciousness and wisdom of the Saudi King. And also the misogynist warlords we support in Afghanistan. And for that matter, the radical Islamists we have supported in Iraq.
I’m also not sure what you seek to prove by your reference to Israel. It is true that I do not recite Israeli MFA talking points. Palestinian citizens of Israel do indeed have more democratic rights than Arabs in Saudi Arabia. Would you say the same applies to Palestinian non-citizens of Israel living in the occupied territories? Or do they simply not count?
Yours
Michael Brull
Email to Michael Brull from Gerard Henderson 30 October 2009
Mr Brull
Your email of today is so badly written it is almost incoherent.
Clearly, you are in denial. You did refer to John Howard, George Bush, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as Western extremists who (allegedly) have committed terrible crimes against the people of the Muslim world and who (allegedly) would like to commit more crimes. It is denial to now claim otherwise. And your implied claim that the likes of Daniel Pipes, Alan Howe and Greg Sheridan would like to commit crimes against the Muslim people is bizarre, defamatory and unproven.
Your assertion that I believe that “Muslims enjoy being bombed” is an invention of your imagination and unsupported by any evidence. You should be able to do better than this.
For the record, I note that you still have not objected to – or even recognised – the fact that the overwhelming majority of terror attacks on Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan are currently carried out by militant Islamists.
As far as I am concerned, this correspondence is concluded.
Gerard Henderson
* * * *
Until next time.