GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG – ISSUE NO. 23

14 AUGUST 2009 

NANCY’S PICKS OF THE WEEK

▪ Clive Hamilton Advocates Sandal-Booted Dictatorship

Yes, Nancy noticed the full moon on one of her recent midnight walks.  It seems that this lunar activity of a certain kind had an influence on the media debate Down Under – affecting judgment, memory and the like.

What a top story in Crikey last Wednesday by Clive “call me doctor” Hamilton.  The learned doctor has core degrees in arts and economics but feels qualified to talk at length about climate science.  This week he put in yet another stellar the-end-of-the-world-is-nigh performance with predictions of “climate disaster” and dire warnings about “the future of the world”.

Hamilton gave Australia’s leading politicians – including Kevin Rudd, Penny Wong, Malcolm Turnbull and Andrew Robb – a fearsome serve for squabbling “over their petty games while the planet locks itself into the path of no return”.  Only Bob Brown and his merry band in the Greens escaped Hamilton’s censure.

So alienated is your man Hamilton that he led his Crikey piece with the question: “Is Parliamentary democracy capable of responding to the climate crisis?”  For those who got to the end of his piece, the answer was ambiguous.  Just imagine how Hamilton would respond if, say, Sarah Palin raised the question as to whether parliament and representative government was really necessary.  Just imagine.

Still, it seems that the-end-of-the-world-is-nigh types are allowed to get away with hinting that representative government may have failed and some form of green dictatorship may be the way to go.

And how about Hamilton’s claim that “the best indicator of how effectively we are cutting our greenhouse emissions will be the number of jobs lost in the old energy industries and the number created in the new ones”?  Here we have one of our leading leftists salivating at the thought that workers in mining, agriculture and manufacturing will lose their jobs and be forced to re-train for something or other.  Dr Hamilton is an academic who emits carbon regularly when flying to various overseas gigs.

▪ The AFL’s Green Round – Some Really Useful (Green) Proposals

While on the topic of carbon miles, Nancy was also stimulated by the announcement in Canberra on Tuesday that the Australian Football League will inaugurate its Green Round this weekend.  The Canberra Times and ABC News (of course) were very interested in this green media presentation which featured Mr Rudd, Ms Wong and Carlton mid-fielder Chris Judd kicking and hand-balling green footballs.  ALF supremo Andrew Demetriou indicated excitement at this initiative – fortified, no doubt, by the decision of the Commonwealth Government to kick in a mere $200,000 to promote awareness of climate change at the centre bounce.  [Has Nancy thought about applying for a taxpayer funded grant to paint her kennel green? – Ed.]

A first great stride will be made towards saving the planet this weekend when the AFL will replace its centre-bounce circles with re-cycling logos and umpires will be decked out in green. Good moves. However, Nancy has some additional proposals if Mr Demetriou really wants to cut AFL related emissions over the weekend.  Here is Nancy’s five stages plan for a meaningful AFL Green Round:

  • Re-schedule the night games in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney and save on electricity by playing them during day-light hours.
  • Cancel games between interstate clubs scheduled for Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide and so eliminate some airline generated emissions.
  • Turn off hot water in the changing rooms and instruct teams to have cold showers after their matches.
  • Encourage AFL fans planning to watch games on TV this weekend to turn off their sets, put on their sandals and go for a bike ride.
  • Travel by pedal power to a hand-holding session in a local park and workshop Dr Clive Hamilton’s concept of a green dictatorship.  BYO green footies.

▪ Amanda Meade And The QC’s Borrowed Joke – Still Laughing After 30 Years

Nancy noticed that the recycling bug even reached Amanda Meade, who writes “The Diary” in The Australian’s “Media” section each Monday.  This week Ms Meade was tickled pink (or was it green?) with a joke by Julian Burnside QC – who apparently brought down the house at a debate on the media at Sydney’s City Recital Hall recently.

Ms Meade was most impressed that Burnside QC got the biggest laugh of the night when he declared that being “mauled” by certain columnists was “like being attacked by a dead sheep”. She seemed to find it quite hilarious. According to Nancy’s research, the savaged-by-a-dead-sheep line was first used by Labour MP Denis Healey against Tory MP Geoffrey Howe in the House of Commons on 14 June 1978. Still, there’s no joke like an old joke.  [Is this the same Amanda Meade who believes that Wikipedia is an authoritative source for information? – see Issue 13 – Ed].

DEVENY REMEMBERS HER LINES – AS A 4-YEAR OLD

It seems that recycling is all the rage of late. So much so that Catherine Deveny, the stand-up comedian who doubled up as a sit-down comedian when signed up by former Age editor Andrew Jaspan to write a column for the “Guardian on the Yarra” – continues to rail against religion on a regular basis.

Ms Deveny’s weekly column went on a well-earned break for most of March and some of April this year, following what appears to have been a pay dispute with The Age’s newly appointed editor Paul Ramadge. Also, under Ramadge’s tutelage, her column was moved from the Comment & Debate Page to the Metropolis section at the end of the first section. She has appeared there since 8 April and has continued to impress MWD with her look-reader-no-facts opinion pieces.

Catherine Deveny put in a you-beaut performance in a column which appeared on Wednesday under the heading: “Pew, that was a lucky escape (and thank Heaven for it)”. The piece concluded with a plug that The Age’s prized columnist would be appearing, with one other, “in An Evening of Insight and Filth at the Butterfly Club, South Melbourne, until Sunday”. Roll up, roll up and buy your tickets now.

As usual, the Deveny column on 12 August was about the subject she knows best – HERSELF.  She also ran her familiar public bar-style rant against the Catholicism of her youth.  All very predictable, to be sure.

However, MWD was so impressed with Ms Deveny’s account of her visit to the Catholic church she attended, with her parents, as a child growing up in Melbourne in the 1970s. First there was the usual Deveny put-down of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.  Then Ms Deveny threw the switch to the self:

When I was four, one of the girls from a “good” family who sat two pews in front of us got pregnant. She was 15. She married on a Saturday afternoon wearing an orange kaftan. She wasn’t allowed to wear white because she wasn’t “a bride”. The poor girl was being shamed and made an example for the rest of us. On the way home from the wedding I remember Dad saying to Mum: “I feel for her father.” I remember wanting to jump over the front seat and ram my father’s head into the windscreen.

How’s that for self-awareness?  At age four, young Catherine was aware that a 15 year old girl was being shamed for marrying, while pregnant, in an orange kaftan.  So much so that Catherine, aged four, wanted to punch-out her old man for (allegedly) sympathising with the 15 year old pregnant bride’s father.  This suggests that Catherine had a remarkable perception for so young a child.  She also possesses a wonderful sense of recall – being able to directly quote precisely what her dad said to her mum in a car when she was just four years old – some four decades ago.  With such a grasp of detail, The Age’s columnist should be encouraged to add a fact or two to her future pieces.  Also readers would be interested in CD’s reflections on Plato’s Republic at age two and a half.

HISTORY CORNER 

Alan Reid On Labor’s Front Line

The word from Amruta Slee at HarperCollins is that John Howard’s political memoirs, scheduled for publication in November 2010, are a great read with compelling detail and featuring the former prime minister’s retentive memory.  Maybe. However, to reach such a standard, the text will have to be significantly better than the content of Mr Howard’s speech titled “Politics and the Media: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” which was delivered at Melbourne University on 4 August 2009.

Generally John Howard was supportive of, or at least sympathetic to, the media – including reporters attached to the Parliamentary Press Gallery in Canberra.  However, he reserved his highest praise for the late Alan Reid who was sometimes described as the doyen of the Press Gallery.  Reid is the subject of a forthcoming biography by Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt.

The fact is that, at times, Alan Reid’s journalistic behaviour was quite unprofessional – in that he regarded himself as both a reporter of and player in Australian national politics.  Reid involved himself in the affairs of the ALP (of which he had been a member) and the Liberal Party but never reported his own activities.

In the mid-1950s, the Labor Party was deeply divided and, in time, the ALP split.  The spark which commenced the split was a statement issued by Labor leader Dr Bert Evatt on Tuesday 5 October 1954 in which he attacked the anti-communists in the ALP’s Victorian branch.  Evatt’s attack soon after extended to Daniel Mannix, the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, and the Catholic activist B.A. Santamaria.

As the journalist Robert Murray revealed in his book The Split: Australian Labor in the Fifties (Cheshire, 1970), Alan Reid was actually involved in the preparation of Evatt’s statement.  As Murray wrote:

Evatt drafted a momentous Press statement at his Mosman home.  In close confidence, Ormonde, Haylen, Reid and Dalziel, all of whom had had journalistic backgrounds, and others were asked to comment. They assisted him with some passages and suggested changes, but the basic text and tone remained Evatt’s.

At the time Jim Ormonde and Les Haylen were Labor politicians and Alan Dalziel was a Labor political staffer.  But Alan Reid was a journalist for The Sun in Sydney.  Soon after, Reid became famous for his scoops on the Labor Split which he himself had helped to initiate.  It was not clear whether John Howard was aware of Alan Reid’s journalistic standards when he praised him during his Melbourne University speech.

LUNAR TUNES

The coming and going of the full moon provides a convenient book-end [and a dreadful cliché – Ed] to summarise the media highlights of the week.

▪ Ms Grattan Forgets

6 August.  In her daily discussion with Fran Kelly on Radio National Breakfast, Michelle Grattan (The Age’s political correspondent) said that Labor’s attack on Malcolm Turnbull on character grounds “reminds you of the Howard Government going after Mark Latham”. So it does.  But it also reminded MWD that as late as August 2004 Michelle Grattan did not agree with Howard and his colleagues about Latham.  Quite the contrary.

Writing in the Sun-Herald on 29 August 2004, Grattan claimed that Howard was “looking uncomfortable against an opponent who has electoral appeal”.  It was only after the October 2004 election that Grattan wrote about Latham’s faults as Labor leader.

▪ Mr Milne’s False Prophecy

9 August.  Under a Sunday Telegraph heading “Party crashers line up to oust Turnbull on Tuesday”, Glenn Milne reported that “Malcolm Turnbull will face a torrid test of his leadership in a Coalition party room meeting set to turn nasty on Tuesday”. They didn’t and he didn’t.  MWD says: One False Prophet is enough – leave soothsaying to Bob Ellis.

▪  Have Dinosaur Head – Will Get Head Shot On ABC 1

9 August. ABC1 News gives prominence to a demonstration by John Connor and supporters of his Climate Institute.  Mr Connor and his colleagues dressed up in suits carrying briefcases and umbrellas with their faces covered in a dinosaur mask.  Mr Connor told ABC cameras: “They say dinosaurs ceased to exist but the coming days and months will determine whether, here in Canberra, they still rule in Parliament”.  It is not clear whether he is talking about Labor, the Coalition or Independents.  But he got his face (ex-mask) on telly.

▪  Canon Fires UpThe Age’s Self-Doubt 

11 August. Barney Zwartz, The Age’s religion editor, gave prominent coverage to Reverend Canon Dr Peter Adam’s 2nd Annual John Saunders Lecture.  As an almost breathless Zwartz reported: “All non-Aboriginal Australians should be prepared to leave the country if the indigenous people want that, making restitution for the vile sin of genocide, an Anglican leader suggested last night”.  In the full lecture, the Melbourne based principal of Ridley College did acknowledge that he was “not sure where we would go”.  Also he did not tackle the question as to what should be done with indigenous leader Mick Dodson who has Irish ancestors.  Perhaps Mr Dodson might be exited to Dublin for perhaps three months a year.

On 13 August Barney Zwartz wrote an opinion piece in The Age in which he rationalised Adam’s speech and suggested that God might be interested in his message.  Well, that’s a start.

▪  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.

▪  Spin Doctor’s Spin

13 August. On ABC Sydney Metropolitan Radio 702 presenter Deborah Cameron introduced her Spin Doctors segment by describing this as the “gritty glamourous part of the show”. This week it was Anthony McClelland (from AMC Media) and Ian Kortlang (from FD Third Person) whom she described as “two of the best” in their profession.

This was soon borne out when Anthony McClelland spoke out about the possibility of an “early election” – a “Christmas election”.  He declared that the likelihood of such an event was “toughening up every day”.  The argument was that the Rudd Government would seek a double dissolution election before Christmas 2009. One of Ms Cameron’s  “best” spin doctors failed to understand that, in order to meet constitutional requirements, a double dissolution election cannot be held before Saturday 19 December – just four shopping days before Christmas.  It’s most unlikely that Mr Rudd would call a Christmas Eve election – but Deb Cameron bowed to McClelland’s gritty prediction and let it pass without challenge.

▪  Guy Calls For Recount – For 1998 Election

13 August.  In Crikey Guy Rundle seems to suggest that John Howard did not win a second term in the 1998 election because he did not receive a majority of the total vote after the distribution of preferences.  He just won a majority in the Parliament, that’s all.  Apparently Rundle does not believe that this is good enough.

 

PHILLIP ADAMS’ CLOSURE

And so ended a week in which Clive Hamilton expressed the view that democracy should be abolished in order to save the world and Phillip Adams (Late Night Live, 11 August) was so horrified that some Americans were protesting against his hero President Obama that he depicted American democracy as looking “a bit sick”.  Perhaps Americans should have stayed indoors last week and stayed out of the direct moonshine.

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Until next time.