New Year, Same Old Shtick

A LADY golfer, obviously much distressed, walked into the pro shop and cried, “I’ve been stung by a bee.”

“Where?” responded the pro.

“Between the first hole and the second,” she replied.

“Well then,” said the pro, “your stance is too wide.”

A dreadful bit of sexism to start the year, admittedly, but needed this morning to match dreadful bits of silliness in The Age, where the New Year resolution of all who produce Melbourne’s for-the-moment daily embarrassment must surely be to sustain the inanity until the bitter end. It is all over those broadsheet pages today, smug and thick as the writers under whose bylines it appears. There is Damien Murphy, for example, turning the blind eye to fact and history in his appraisal of the year 1984, which appears on the newspaper’s website apropos of nothing the casual reader can discern. Perhaps it makes more sense in the context of the printed page, but regardless of medium, this line would be foul in any display:

Ronald Reagan won a second term to complete his defeat of the so-called ''evil empire'' of the USSR.

So called?

Moral equivalence has long been the mother’s milk of the rudderless left, but is Murphy really of the opinion that 80 years of murder, mass starvation, oppression, corruption and debasement of human dignity are no more than examples of bad press? Apparently so.

Flick, flick, flick … the morning’s offerings continue apace, the Fairfax chapter of the Bitter Women’s League doing itself proud. Here’s Jacqueline Maley, for instance, providing a burlesque case study in attribution:

Tony Abbott has been a terrible Opposition Leader, if you believe the government.

A wrecker. A thug. A misogynist and would-be destroyer of Whyalla. He frightens pensioners and horrifies infants. He exercises too much and doesn't read enough. No one can prove he doesn't kick puppies.

There is no denying Abbott's personal brand is what you might politely style ''robust''. But this narrative rather ignores the polls. Yes, Abbott's personal approval ratings are disastrous (voter disapproval of Abbott sits at 63 per cent, according to the last Nielsen poll of 2012), but the attitude of most Coalition MPs is a resounding ''So what?''

See, it is the “if you believe the government” that lets Maley off the hook. They are not her opinions, perish the thought! After cataloguing Abbott’s many deficiencies of character, she opines that he is merely “robust” in his executiuon of an Opposition leader's duties. Like Comrade Colleague Murphy, the sketch artist’s invitations to echo fashionable views with fashionable friends at fashionable dinner parties are in no danger of being withdrawn.

Daniel Flitton might not be so lucky. No doubt his heart is in the right place – somewhere between Northcote and Fitzroy, most likely – but in expressing the view that gender barriers should be rolled up like the covers and Australia’s First Eleven opened to participation by female players he has gone a gender bridge too far. No doubt he thinks the idea of absolute equality will meet with approval, but that only demonstrates how difficult it can be to stay on top of the latest memes.

A couple of years ago, he would have been just fine in suggesting that the nation has an adequate supply of block-shoulder bowlerettes and winsome willow wielders. But not now, not when the parameters of inclusion have been redrawn along lines that look very much like separatism. Ever hear of the Stella Prize? It is a new literary award reserved for the women who have not been featuring with sufficient prominence in the Miles Franklin short lists, at least by the reckoning of the HarpieCollins set. The fact that the statistics have been cherry-picked to make the case for a Shiela Prize need not enter into it.

  

Dan had better revise his opinions and quick, especially with regard to Fairfax’s very own and looming gender issue. By his reckoning, women have a right to compete on equal footing (albeit with legs somewhat closer than that bee-buzzed lady golfer who began this post), competence, rather than chromosomes, being his only yardstick.

So expect him, after due reflection, to be waiting with a posey at the front entrance of Media House, eager and bright-eyed to welcome Gina Rinehart as his new boss. If we are to go by reports that she is about to take charge, how could he object to a woman who has competed with, and beaten, the blokes?  

A Pillar of Consistency

AS DAVID MARR observes, it is beyond decency's comprehension to hear the sort of abuse hurled at a prominent and successful woman.

Tell Him You're Indigenous, Gina

BACK in March, Martin Flanagan of The Age churned out 1,000 words or so on the prickly matter of Indigenous footballers and some of the problems – alleged involvement in axe attacks, for example – that have set a few footy club officials to quietly wondering if snatching talented kids from the back of nowhere and dropping them in front of the goal at the MCG is worth the culture shock and complications. That is what happens when you prefer to think of individuals only as members of groups – after all, who would not want Harry O’Brien in their team?

Flanagan, who is ranting today about the threat Gina Rinehart poses to his newspaper, should re-visit that March epistle and consider what he wrote then:

In my experience, when there are rising tensions between different groups, whether they be racial or religious, there is really only one remedy. Engagement. The alternative to engagement is a cycle of rumour and speculation that eventually finds expression through media types who mistake valuable opinion for saying the first thing that comes into their head, as opposed to arriving at a final judgment based on the best information available.

The is no shortage of rising tensions between Mrs Rinehart and Fairfax Chairman Dodgey Rodgey Corbett, but Flanagan is no  longer quite so sure about the efficacy of “arriving at a final judgment based on the best information available.” No pausing to consider Fairfax's dire financial straits or the palpable animosity many former readers now feel toward the newspapers they grew up with. Rather, it is his moment to become of those very same “media types who mistake valuable opinion for saying the first thing that comes into their head.”

The first thing that came into Flanagan’s today was to assert, without reference or citation, “hyperbole of this sort is on a par with saying all journalists are communists, which Gina Rinehart is said to do. (When did you last meet a communist? Seriously. I'd have to go back 30 years.)” Then he is off and defending the ABC from reform. That "engagement" he writes about, it seems to be a remarkably selective exercise.

If only Mrs Rinehart had just the slightest touch of tribal blood, Flanagan might be prepared to at least give her grievances a hearing. But no such consistency from this columnist. 

UPDATE: The source of Flanagan's claim that Mrs Rinehart believes all journalists to be communists has been revealed. He is quoting, without attribution, fellow Fairfaxista Adele Ferguson, who says on this video that unnamed people told her that is what the subject of her newly published biography believes.


There's your quality journalism right there, folks. No wonder they don't want adults running the company.

The Age of Opportunity

THERE is much to like about Keith Dunstan, despite several grave deficiencies of character. Those who lived in Melbourne during the Seventies, when the city still had large, wide, multi-lane roadways, may recall the many columns he penned for the Sun News Pictorial about the joy to be experienced upon a bicycle and how nice it would be if the Queen of the Yarra were to be carved up by bike paths. His wish came to pass and while he is probably too old these days to pump the pedals, his heirs now oblige motorists to observe their Lycra’d bottoms on roads reduced to perpetual one-lane traffic jams. Moreover, as cyclists are slow and prone to falls, their presence on our roads has been one of the many thin excuses for covering the landscape thickly with the revenue cameras that are said to secure their safety. Dunstan also displayed an open disdain for the footy, Melbourne’s great game and, unless someone in Jolimont cures cancer, quite likely to remain the Southern City’s greatest contribution to the sum of human achievement.

 Keith Dunstan massages the prostate.

That said,  Dunstan retains the power to make the gentle, salient point , which he has done this morning with a lament that so many people are announcing the apparent passing of newspapers. He maintains the Age will survive, also the hope at the Billabong, where one of the interesting things about Dunstan’s column is that it does not appear in his old paper, now called the Herald Sun.

Some years ago, for reasons best known to itself, the Herald Sun decided its future was in celebrity gossip, sport and pictures of adorable animals and babies.  Dumbing down the paper appears to have been a conscious and quite deliberate policy, as that is the only thing to explain why even the formerly robust finance section is worth reading only for Terry McCrann. So Dunstan has migrated his occasional pieces to the Age, where the dominant inanity is, for the moment, of a different variety.

But still, it should give hope to those who believe a city of 4 million people deserves at least one, semi-decent newspaper. The Herald Sun underwent a transformation – for the worse, but that is beside the point – and so can the Age, perhaps for the better, with Mrs Rinehart at the helm. Indeed, a board not half so infected with Roger Corbett’s fatalism might even see Melbourne as an opportunity. As a commenter at Mumbrella observed, the city still buys 600,000 papers every day. Even allowing that a reformed Age will not attract too many young and thoroughly wired readers, it does not require too much optimism to see it taking away 100,000 sales from the Herald Sun on the strength of a more convenient format and improved content, especially the latter.

It would seem that, at this stage, all Fairfax’s announced plans for transforming itself are moot. Within weeks, Mrs Rinehart will be in control and, one way or another, in a position to determine how the corporate and editorial re-sculpting is implemented.  With any luck she will be aided by a spate of aggrieved resignations, as embarrassments like Ross “I’m no plagiarist” Gittins and David Marr decamp to academia and the solace of Mark Scott’s comfy lap. Without wishing to tell her how to run a business, the very first thing she should do is speed up the Age’s move to tabloid format. The current management has announced that the Great Shrinking will not take place until March next year, which demonstrates, if further proof be needed, that imbecility is the prime qualification for a seat on the current Fairfax board. How many businesses not only alert competitors to their next strategic moves but also grant them nine months’ grace to prepare countermeasures?

Of course, if the current crew of hacks regurgitating Earth Hour press releases remains intact, it won’t matter what size the Age comes in. To paraphrase Gough Whitlam, it’s what it puts in its guts that’s stuffed it. So, new editors, a new shape and an old-fashioned return to covering the city where its erstwhile readers reside.

Why, Gina could have a winner!

FOOTNOTE: On page 26 of Wednesday’s Herald Sun the following caption appeared beneath a picture of some sheep. “Theft: Sheep, similar to those that were stolen.”

Herald Sun editors apparently believe their readers need to be told what sheep look like. If that doesn’t encourage Mrs Rinehart to start a newspaper war and have a red-hot go, nothing can.      

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.         

At Long Last, A Real Enemy

LONG before they put video screens or even cassette decks in cars there were games like Spotto to keep the little ones occupied. Does anyone remember it? Little cards printed with trucks, cows, trees, clouds and what have you, all to be observed through the window and crossed off the list? Variations on the game, prompted by parental suggestions, soon took root, so that a long trip might see quests to name a dog breed for every letter of the alphabet, or composers, major cities and, inevitably, VFL footballers.

One challenge the nippers never faced was compiling an A-Z of Australian intellectuals, and just as well. If the grown-ups in the front seat had heard Clive Hamilton offered as a suggestion for “H”  – not that the like of him existed back then, mind you --  blinding laughter might have seen the car run off the road. Adults were different in those days. Seeing off the Depression and a couple of serious wars must have done something to their sense of perspective, and a poor, ranting fellow forever beside himself about imperceptible shifts in temperature and weather would have been an object of indulgent ridicule. Silly Clive, he does no harm down there on the Yarra Bank.

Ah, but the Spotto kids grew up, as all do, to find themselves the luckiest ever born. No foreign threats, no susso or rabbit for tea.  TVs and bountiful times, inoculations and a good certainty of hitting at least the three score and ten -- for the child of the Fifties’ those were birthrights.

And their kids, the ones now two+ generations removed from first-hand knowledge of just how genuinely nasty the world can be, what of them? Every action demands an equal and opposite reaction, and the business of growing up is no different. There needs to be something to push against, and if the enemy’s vileness owes much to the imagination so much the better. Bogeymen won’t actually cut your throat or blow you up, so it is just fine to take issue with Tony Abbott’s Catholicism, never the goings on at the el Ratbaggi mosque. Bristling and snarling  is part of every young pup’s training. Israel, Big Carbon, Maccas, even the bloody thermometer – that was some tempting smorgasbord of wickedness, all items fit for rants and raves, and each just right for bleeding off some of that adolescent bile. Down on the Yarra Bank, Clive and many like him heard the racket, caught whiff of think-tank sinecures and comfy campus gigs, and rose to the moment.

And those angry kids? The ones least familiar with soap are still out there, camped in the City Square or jeering at Jews outside Max Brenner’s chocolate shops. The smarter ones, they scrubbed up nice and moved with their imaginary enemies into glass offices with plenty of bicycle racks out the front.

Yesterday some such specimen at Fairfax had the opportunity to publish something interesting, perhaps even a little provocative, about Gina Rinehart, free speech and the Fairfax raid. Such an article might even have touched on the company’s narrow and ever-narrowing demographic, how that shrinking audience might have a big something to do with the moribund stock and shrunken prospects.

They might have done that. Instead it was the Jeremiah from the Yarra Bank who was hauled into the spotlight with instructions, as usual, to froth on command. There would be no adult laughter this time, not as once for a bit of Spotto silliness. Outrage and furious applause on one side and silence on the other. The explanation for that is simple. The last adult abandoned Fairfax long ago, leaving only a choir to heed the incessant preaching.

With the exception of Rinehart, there is no longer anything about Fairfax to command a grown-up’s respect. What interests her, however, is not likely to please the editor whose first instinct was to tap Hamilton for that opinion column. This is a genuinely odd development, and sad in its way, because the businesswoman’s likely arrival on the Fairfax board fulfils every luvvies’ lifelong dream.

Finally, at long last, they have a genuine, bona fide enemy to contend with.And perhaps, if the innocents' screams are loud enough, some adults might come back to see what is going on.

I Dream Of Gina

ANY DAY that begins with an Indian gentleman sticking a camera up your bottom is probably not going to be one of the best. Then the computer came to life, news poured into the Billabong and things took a turn for the better, as opposed to the many turns the camera took to get somewhere just short of a poor Bunyip's adam's apple.


There must be some very nervous stomachs at the Silly and Phage right about now.

Not to worry. The Professor can recommend a good proctologist.

UPDATE:  An invaluable resource for nervous Fairfax types. Better hurry though. Job security will only last until Abbott & Co. take charge.

UPDATE II: A little more here. Not a lot, just a little.

I Dream Of Gina

MUCH joy for Fairfax shareholders or, more correctly, those many who have been shorting the stock.

As of a little after 10 am this morning it had broken through the $1 barrier and was twitching, rather like a dying bird, in a trading range of between 98 cents and 99 cents. Markets are wonderful things and creative destruction even moreso, so here is a thought: With roughly 2.3 billion shares outstanding, it would cost Gina Rinehart no more than the sort of cash she could find down the crack in the couch -- $230 million or so -- to lift her holding from the 4% of Fairfax she controls to 15%.

The Fairfax family's 9.7% stake buys it two of the board's seats, so if Ms Rinehart were to fnd just a tiny little bit of additional capital on top of that, perhaps via likeminded sorts (or from the ashtray of her car), she could snaffle three, four or even five seats, giving her effective control.

Of course the left could do the same thing, at least in theory. But that must be regarded as unlikely, as the port side of Australian politics prefers to fund its media lickspittles with other people's money.