JEN MAROHASY reports that Media Watch's sleuths are still working the phones, still trying to mount their expose of a woman who dares to hold incorrect opinions about estuarine tidal flows. Here is how she describes her ongoing ordeal at the hands of the ABC:
Last week the ABC phoned around to get snips of fact about me that it could intertwine with lies with a plan for a national broadcast Monday night on its Media Watch program. I tried to head-that-off with full and frank answers to the many questions they asked me. Indeed I provided them with a lot of information that was none of their business.
But not content with all of that, this week ABC journalists and researchers continue with the same activity; they continue to phone about. And from the feedback I have received from those the ABC has phoned: they continue to peddle misinformation about me, and misinformation about the natural history of the Murray River.
These activities are undertaken at tax payer expense, but there is no way I can find out who specifically they are phoning, or what specifically they are telling people.
While Jen wonders when it will end, Jo Nova knows where it needs to end:
What is it when a government agency “questions” all your friends and acquaintances, digging for dirt and spreading untruths, because you criticize government policy? When state-funded psychologists like Lewandowsky call you crazy for disagreeing with the government’s policy to control the climate? What sort of state do we live in now?
There is no half-way measure worth taking. It’s time to ask for our money back. Let the ABC raise their own from voluntary consenting citizens, or give us a vote that counts so we can object when our tax dollars are used against us.
And the funny thing about all this? The people ginning up Jonathan Holmes' juvenile delinquents -- that would be the Australian Conservation Foundation, for starters -- detest Marohasy because she wants to see the Murray's mouth restored to the way it was when Matthew Flinders came upon sailed right past and missed it.*
Just to repeat, nature-loving greens are fighting to protect a dam. It is not about saving the environment and never has been. It is about money and power and, most of all, control of life's every aspect, from water flows to speech.
* Thanks to reader Philby, who points out in comments that the navigator didn't notice the river's mouth, an oversight that supports Marohasy's insistence that the river was sometimes open to the sea and sometimes wasn't.
