AS VISITORS to this little blog will know, unseemly language isn’t
appreciated, so this post may strike some as an exercise in hypocrisy. Why
decry obscenity’s public ubiquity only to broadcast more of it, you may ask?
Well, given that Australia’s quality journalists have lately become the most
ardent disciples of Thomas
Bowdler in declining to repeat that
joke from the CFMEU dinner about Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin, the gag that
failed to outrage various members of the Gillard cabinet until their media
advisers noted that such a reaction would be a good idea, it seems a civic obligation
to pass it on.
We all believe in fairness and equity, after all, and memory
serves up no other recent example of self-censorship embraced with such silent
gusto. Indeed, the enthusiasm to tattle overheard examples of Tony Abbott’s
salty tongue makes this eruption of reticence curious indeed. For those with poor memories, here are a couple of reminders:
The ever-reliable
Michelle Grattan used the above incident to speculate at length on the
Opposition leader’s fitness of character, while little protégé Phillip
Coorey performed a double twist with pike in order to splash a
further exploration of that same subject, even as he conceded that
accusing “Abbott of deliberately making light of a trooper's death is absurd.”
Then there was this, another
eavesdropped incident resurrected of late to build the case for Abbott’s innate
sexism:
All this makes media
silence about that CFMEU joke a mystery – or rather, it would be if not for the
gallery’s determination to kill a dying industry all the more quickly was not
self-evident. With Fairfax stock at 36 cents (as of Friday) and News Ltd crippling
its push to digital it is one field
of endeavour in which quality journalists and their corporate masters cannot be
faulted. The other, of course, is the stenographers' selective candour.
Tony Abbott's chief of staff Peta Credlin does a good Head job. Come Clean. Abbott calls her the Vacuum Cleaner she cleans up his messes.
The excuse for not publishing that joke is that it is
slanderous and would see media organisations and reporters sued for defamation.
Yeah, right.
