Whack!

OFF TO play golf, which usually wins.

Back later. Who knows? We might have a new PM by then.

Persons Of Interest

WANTED

Tony "Black Arts" Hodges

Sought for questioning in connection with a Canberra race riot. Hodges is believed to travelling incognito and is said to enjoy the protection of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Not believed to be dangerous unless encountered in company with pale people wearing Indigenous war paint and waving spears.

Hodges may be travelling with this woman, who presents herself as an Aborigine. Attention should therefore be paid to grant-issueing establishments.

Kim "Humpytown Crier" Sattler

Anyone observing this pair should contact the press on 03 8667 2250 and report the duo's whereabouts. Then they should call that number and repeat the information all over again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Do not be discouraged by  loud yawns on the other end of the phone. That is the sound of quality journalism and is entirely normal.

More Ginaphobia

EVERY SINCE the Phage dropped Bristow, the smiles to be drawn from that newspaper have been largely accidental. Today is no exception. With Ginaphobia running rampant and office copy machines no doubt churning out bulk copies of CVs destined for the ABC recruiting office, business writer Elizabeth Knight has melded boastfulness with dread to produce some remarkable assertions about her (current) employer. For example: 

For the mega-wealthy, control of Australia's most influential newspaper group, Fairfax, is like an insurance policy against political decisions that run against their commercial interests. 

Influential? With whom? A doomed federal government? The sprout suckers and semi-literate humanities undergraduates who dominate its online comment threads? The weary janitors who must throw out all the unclaimed free copies of the paper left daily in organic bicycle shops and free-trade tofu emporiums? 

Just in time, too. Hall [an investor and market player] was getting more concerned about the media group's advertising and readership numbers in December and January. 

At least someone is concerned about Fairfax’s commercial decline. Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood might get around to expressing an interest sooner or later, but probably not until he has finished counting last week’s, and every week’s, 50K pay cheque. 

For Rinehart and for Forrest the rationale is simple. Invest several hundred million to gain control of Fairfax, and wrest the political agenda from the government. In Rinehart's case this would involve using the editorial influence of Fairfax to get rid of Labor and its expensive (to her) taxes - the minerals resource rent tax and the carbon tax - an outcome that could ultimately save billions. 

Again with that influence business! What influence does Fairfax wield? The Coalition knows it can expect nothing from the Phage or Silly but more of the luvvy-dovey same. On a good day, those papers might concede that Tony Abbott is not going to install a hotline to the Vatican in the Lodge, but that would be a very good day indeed. As to the other side of politics, if influence is re-printing talking points while shouting “Amen!” from the sidelines, well that is influence. 

But this may not be a fool-proof plan because taking control of the editorial agenda is not necessarily that easy. 

Really? The Greens found it to be not in the least challenging. 

Thus, for Rinehart, waiting just one year from now would see her take effective control of Fairfax and the highly regarded editorial integrity of trust, built up over 150 years, could be sacrificed for a few hundred million pieces of gold. 

Shareholders might not object to seeing the odd bit of gold coming their way, not being quite so smitten as the column’s author with fantasies of “highly regarded editorial integrity”. Would that “integrity” include having an unauthorised poke about in a Labor-voter database, now the subject of a police investigation? Or would it be the betrayal of a source, as was confirmed this week when Judge Lucy McCallum released her long-delayed views on the matter of Helen Liu and former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon. 

To do this, she would need to inject a few user-friendly editors into the Fairfax newspapers including, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review

Users? Who are these users of whom Knight speaks? Could it be the papers’ former readers, the ones who walked away long ago? What a tragedy it would be if the Silly and Phage were to fill their pages with stories, columnists, entertainments and investigations of interest to the public, not merely topics that excite the passions only of the ardent luvvie in the adjoining newsroom cubicle. 

Rinehart has already had some success in achieving influence through the acquisition of 10 per cent of Ten Network last year. Not only was she readily granted a board seat but the politically like-minded News Corp journalist, Andrew Bolt, was given his own program, some say through Rinehart's influence. 

Well that is the party line on Bolt and Knight is sticking to it. At Fairfax the wan attribution “some say” is considered an entirely adequate source – even though Channel 10 chieftain Brian Long has repeatedly stated, and on the record, that Rinehart did not play midwife to the birth of the Bolt Report. Actually, Knight might learn a thing or two from that Sunday morning programme – like the wisdom of giving consumers content which commands their interest. Fairfax should try it sometime, even at the risk of forfeiting a few invitations to Brunswick vegans’ dinner parties.

The curious thing about author Knight’s authorised view of Ms Rinehart’s interest in Fairfax is that it overlooks the very real possibility of some active boardroom stewardship turning the company around. What if The Age were to go tabloid and hire some editors who are aware that there exists in Melbourne a considerable number of people who do not dress in black, fellate their bicycles or revere Bob Brown as the Buddha of Bellerive? The Herald Sun grows worse by the week, a southern iteration of what Clive Palmer on Lateline last week observed to be the editorial approach of the Courier Mail – a daily version of celebrity-fixated women’s gossip rags. The Herald Sun once held a generational stranglehold on what might be termed Middle Melbourne but now seems determined to trash that legacy.

A reconstituted Age could fill that void and thereby gain a genuine measure of the influence which Knight repeatedly cites. Sadly, the prism of conceit obscures her ability to recognise the word’s true meaning, just as it has long delayed a much-needed examination of Fairfax’s editorial and commercial conscience.         

The Parson's No's

SAINT PETER of the Cross has declined to shed light, sanctified or otherwise, on his wee-hours cab-crawling about Kings Cross and Taylor Square. A dogsbody in Peter Slipper's office has told the Australian that the midnight marathon man is preparing for his debut in the Speaker's chair and is just too busy to comment.

Busy? Wait until Tuesday, when the Reverend Slipper must try to impose order on what promises to be one of the most riotous parliamentary sessions since Federation. Then he will be busy, very busy indeed. He will need to expel not just Christopher Pyne, whose ejection is a given, but every single member of the Opposition if he is to keep the mystery of his travels under wraps.

Tuesday is going to be so much fun.

Andrew Bolt's Pervasive Evil

CLIVE PALMER sounded very much like a man with tongue in cheek when he raised with Tony Jones the possibility of joining Gina Rinehart's campaign to force reform on Fairfax -- a possibility only a little more credible than his effusively insincere admiration for Jones' virtues as a journalist. Still, if he does want to pile on, there would be no shortage of work to keep both of the big miners busy. The most recent indication (as of midnight; by dawn there will be more) of just how deranged Fairfax has become can be found in Gerard Henderson's latest Media Watch Dog, which features several rounds of correspondence between Nancy's co-owner and Greg Baum, chief sports writer at the Phage.

The exchange concerns the late Peter Roebuck -- an an interesting enough topic, but nowhere near as revealing as Baum's reference in passing to Andrew Bolt:

I don’t know who was looking over whose shoulder, you or Bolt, but I am mystified by the allusion to priests. Roebuck was not a priest. End of story.

Henderson responds thus:

I don’t understand your reference to Andrew Bolt – who, as I understand, is one of The Age’s obsessions, judging by your paper’s coverage of him. I rarely speak to Bolt and have never discussed Roebuck with him.

Now think about that exchange for a second. Here we have a fellow who covers a field of human activity that should be immune to political interpretation, yet some paranoid fancy has evidently led him to see Bolt's insidious finger at work, stirring up trouble with catholic malevolence.

You can understand why Fairfax political writers detest Bolt, who has so often highlighted their sycophancy and many other shortcomings. And it requires no intelligence to understand why the Greens publicists who pass themselves off as environmental reporters loathe someone who exposes so many of their untruths, instances of wilful blindness and arrogantly naked biases.

But a sports writer! If Boltaphobia is now colouring Fairfax's reports of sportsmen hitting, kicking and punching things, the sooner Palmer stops with the jokes and starts buying stock the better. Going by his Lateline performance, the magnate could have a lot of fun assuring Baum and others that neither Bolt nor Rupert Murdoch is mounting sly crusades to see the flick pass re-introduced, the cricket pitch metricated or the imposition of automatic penalty strokes on Sudanese golfers. Not that Baum would believe him.

What ails Fairfax, it must akin to syphilis. Once in the blood, there is just no stopping it from ravaging the brain.

Treading On Ted's Turf

THE WEATHER in Melbourne tonight has been so pleasant it would have been a crime to waste it inside a cinema, which was the original idea.  What had been planned as a short meal became a rather long and very relaxed one, which was quite OK and very responsible, right up to and including the sambuccas, because it is but a short stroll from table to Billabong and authorities have not yet found an excuse to impose Breathalyzers and fines on cheerful pedestrians. But give them time and those scolds will have their way, as they always do.

Mind you, it would not have been a good night for the enemies of pleasure to chance their arm, as the Professor’s companions, in addition to the Rufous Bird, were two learned friends, and while they make a charming couple there were several instances during the evening’s course when that wonderful legal instinct to make mischief and empty someone else’s pockets quite dominated conversation. If Foster's issued gift certificates for legal services with every slab, rather than bobble-headed plastic cricketers, its stock would be doing a whole lot better.

She has something to do with insolvency and said her business has been doing rather nicely,  which earned a toast of gratitude to our still-current Prime Minister and the March Hare who presents himself as a treasurer.  He specialises in some other expensive area of the law, but constitutional matters, not his own field, were what animated him most of all.

“You realise,” he said in a tone that dripped with doom, “that Gillard has just turned Commonwealth-state relations on their head. We might as well dissolve the State of Victoria and be done with it.”

This came as news to the Professor, who as a frequent visitor to the bush was rebuked for not keeping up with current events. It seems that a few cows released early last year into the Alpine National Park have cost our state its sovereignty. This became official a few days ago when Environment Minister Tony Burke overruled Victoria’s plan to let the cows loose again this year -- the basis for a study intended to determine if transhumant grazing reduces the risk of bush fires.

Apparently, up in the High Country there are several species of imperilled frogs which Burke has taken as his excuse for over-ruling Spring Street and banishing cattle. The creatures managed to co-exist for 150 years, but the experts, who are probably warmists as well, have concluded the frogs can no longer tolerate horned animals, not even for one more day. By Burke's reading of the law, that places under his control any spot where the frogs, or any other endangered species, are known or thought to be. In other words, the entire state.

Premier Ted Baillieu can appeal and is said to be considering such a move, which is itself unsettling. If Big Ted needs to ponder his duty to defend Victoria from federal encroachment, he cannot take that duty too seriously. Goodbye, cattle. Goodbye, state’s rights.

Ted should not need to think about fighting this incursion tooth and nail, not even for a split second.

Saint Peter Of The Cross

THE BILLABONG’s visitors are mostly a decent, fair-minded lot, but just lately the moral tone of comments at this blog has taken a turn for the worse.  Ironic, really, as the catalyst for those gushes of suspicion and aspersion is a man of the cloth, the Honorable Peter Slipper, Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Now it is true that, as sects go, the Reverend Slipper’s denomination is one of the more obscure, and also that his bishop was convicted of rifling his own poor box, but let not those minor details elevate anyone’s suspicion that Slipper does not put his own faith into practice. The evidence is there, laid out and tabulated by Department of Finance investigators, whose accounting of Rev Slipper’s taxi trips has set some of this blog's commenters to noting the many pleasure palaces and carnal consultancies available to the traveller in the Kings Cross/Taylor Square area.

Please, let us lift our minds from the gutter.  Those cab rides detailed in the post below, one needs but a pinch of charity to see each and every stop as a testament to the Rev Slipper’s determination to back his faith with action.

What was he doing late at night on the grounds of the University of NSW? Taking his lead from St Francis and preaching to the possums, of course. Unlike his own electorate’s arboreal marsupials, righteous and upright creatures every one, your Sydney possum is given to vice and fauna-cation, so Rev Slipper must have felt no less than compelled to stop off in the Harbour City on his way to Canberra and see to their salvation. Here is just one of the many he baptised that night.

After that, it was off to Kings Cross, where many lost souls yearn for succour. Again, the Rev Slipper placed a faith tumescent to the fore and shared his love with those most in need.

Finally, exhausted from his outreach efforts, the Rev Slipper had just time to preach a final sermon in Taylor Square, where he won many converts amongst the sons of Sodom.

When our new Speaker introduces the prayer at the start of Tuesday’s parliamentary session, the first of the year, let none doubt that he is fit to utter it. 

Here endeth the lesson.