Nurse Grattan With the Happy Pills

From a Michelle Grattan column of a few days ago, the latest example of Blair's Law:

MANY readers will recall Margo Kingston, a deft hand at investigative reporting and a pioneer of interactive journalism through her Webdiary. Margo left the trade a while ago and is studying nursing, interested in specialising in palliative care.

But last week, watching from afar the AWU affair unfolding, she leapt back into the fray with an online article. She remembered what many of us, in the heat of this slush fund battle, had forgotten. Tony Abbott has had his own slush fund experience, not all of it happy.

Is it too late for Grattan to take up a career in hospice nursing? All the bent words she peddles on behalf of our PM suggest she has a genuine gift for bringing comfort to those on their way out.

Et Tu, Michelle...

WHEN you lose Michelle Grattan, you're cooked.

A Journalist Of The Old School

BRINGING TO BEAR the weight of her 137 years in the gallery, Michelle Grattan ruminates on the role of politicians' advisers in the Canberra game, observing that they "are not expected to become players".

At last, a senior journalist addressing the shameful escapades of Tony Hodges and other, as-yet-unknown prime ministerial operatives in prompting a race riot on Australia Day. You beaut, Michelle! It took you a while, but you're finally on the case. That was the reaction at the Billabong, where a prayer was offered to celebrate the CSIRO's pioneering work in developing the fixture that allows a laptop and notebook to be mounted on the top rail of a Zimmer frame.

Alas, jubilation was premature and disappointment extreme. Even though Hodges is about to flee  both country and questions for a new life in England, Grattan's column mentioned him not at all. Rather, her focus was on Tony Abbott's COS Peta Credlin, who was the subject last week of an indirect instruction from the Speaker to stick a sock in it.

Still, charity urges that Grattan be excused on the grounds of a senior moment, as Hodges was clearly in her mind when those ancient hands began to tickle the keyboard. There is the reference in the first paragraph to the West Wing, for example, which rather suggests her initial thoughts were of those in power, not the opposition. And further down in the story, a reference to Gillard's imported svengali, John McTernan, which might have opened the way for an examination of the PM's riotous spin machine.

But those potential lines of investigation tailed off into nothingness, perhaps due to distraction. If Grattan had not heard the announcement that Bingo was about to begin, she might have retained just enough focus to tap out a few words about a race riot and those who promoted it. She was, after all, a quality journalist.

Grattan's Extreme Wind Event

PERHAPS Michelle Grattan was a little tipsy yesterday – a couple too many celebratory Pimms No.1 Cups? – or it could be that her command of the language, such as it is, was eclipsed by tingling delight at another “devilishly clever” Gillard coup. Whatever the reason, the venerable Fairfax correspondent’s proclamation of her favourite government’s carbon swindle begins with this ardent observation:

Whether good or bad, this is a big reform.

A “bad reform", eh, Michelle?

Some years ago, former Fairfax chief Fred Hilmer sold his company’s art collection. It would seem his successors  have flogged the dictionaries. Either that or Grattan stumbled across Orwell’s Politics and the English Language and misread its cautions as a guide to the practice of contemporary journalism:

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Wind? Nah, just more Fairfax flatulence.