It’s about a century since Australia experienced a lynch-mob mentality of the kind that has pervaded the debate over Cardinal George Pell’s forthcoming appearance at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Between 1917 and 1921, there was rampant anti-Catholic sectarianism in Australia as a consequence of the debate over conscription during [...]
GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG – ISSUE NO. 303 12 February 2016 The inaugural issue of “Gerard Henderson’s Media Watch” was published in April 1988 – over a year before the first edition of the ABC TV Media Watch program went to air. Since November 1997 “Gerard Henderson’s Media Watch” has been published as part [...]
n the asylum-seeker front, it has been a big week for expressive — as opposed to instrumental — politics. In Melbourne on Thursday morning, protesters abseiled from the Yarra Bend Bridge to unfurl a banner over the Eastern Freeway. It read “Let Them Stay”. This was the most striking entry so far in support of [...]
Perhaps it is just a Freudian slip that so many journalists and commentators refer to the possibility of a double dissolution election as a “double disillusion”. There is, after all, quite a lot of disillusion about in contemporary Australia. Five months after Tony Abbott was replaced as prime minister by Malcolm Turnbull, little has changed [...]
I am a republican. In 1999, I voted “yes” to the proposal that the Constitution be altered “to establish the Commonwealth of Australia with the Queen and Governor-General being replaced by a President appointed by a two-thirds majority of the members of the Commonwealth Parliament”. Even so, I agree with Malcolm Turnbull that it would [...]
GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG – ISSUE NO. 301 29 January 2016 The inaugural issue of “Gerard Henderson’s Media Watch” was published in April 1988 – over a year before the first edition of the ABC TV Media Watch program went to air. Since November 1997 “Gerard Henderson’s Media Watch” has been published as part [...]
In 1949 Robert Menzies became one of four Liberal Party leaders to win office from opposition — along with Malcolm Fraser (1975), John Howard (1996) and Tony Abbott (2013). Right now, the Liberal Party in NSW is consumed with division between those who describe themselves as “moderates” and those who are depicted as “conservatives”. No [...]
As journalists, by means of social media, increasingly become activists in the public debate, what is not reported sometimes becomes as significant as what is. Take the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne, for example. It took ZDF, Germany’s public broadcaster, four days to report that up to a thousand men of Middle Eastern and [...]
Not surprisingly, the appointment of Australian-born, Singapore-based Google executive Michelle Guthrie as the new ABC managing director and editor-in-chief created considerable media interest. Guthrie is the first woman to head the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster and her $900,000 annual salary means she is one of the most highly paid public officials in the land. For all [...]
Australians concerned about freedom of religion in this country would be well advised to look beyond the present and likely future debate over same-sex marriage. Already, what was until recently the traditional view, that marriage is a union between a man and a woman, is being presented as offensive at best and discriminatory at worst [...]
