Stephanie Knows the Ropes

STEPHANIE Peatling of the Silly Moaning Herald understands the appropriate relationship journalists must maintain in their dealings with the powerful, most particularly our Prime Minister:

If you have wondered why this government has survived a stellar record of incompetence without ever being called seriously to account, the reluctance of Peatling and many like her to be thought other than a prime ministerial allies and all-round team players may help to explain things.

It also helps to explain why Fairfax circulations are plunging -- down 25 percent in a single year at Peatling's former roost, the Sun-Herald. If Fairfax survives long enough to welcome a new owner, that relationship between bum-kissing and near bankruptcy would be worth bearing in mind.

(Thanks to Bob on the Murray for noticing Peatling's eager debasement)

UPDATE: Just imagine if, instead of tut-tutting into her nosegay, Peatling had spoken up, perhaps to say something like this: "Now hang on a tick, Prime Minister, there is more than one of us rolling their eyes. Some straight answers, please, and you'll get a lot more respect."

A More Appropriate Australia Day Celebration

EVERY SO OFTEN adversity presents opportunities for the wise eye to spot and tonight, as White Ribbon Day draws to a close, is one of those Eureka! moments when all of inspiration’s many pieces click suddenly into place. The problem is that, with all the White Ribbon publicists  and promoters packing up their press kits and quotable social workers for another year, how will Awareness Inc., sustain itself until Earth Hour arrives in four months’ time? The answer is so straightforward, so blindingly obvious, it is a genuine wonder nobody has thought of it until now: Combine the two!

At the midway point between the two guilt-edged publicity campaigns, around the date which now marks the First Fleet’s arrival, we must have a new festival of national guilt. Ardently promoted with billboards and Lateline interviews, it will include posters and TV ads featuring men’s faces in rapid close-up, each announcing “I vow never to do violence to a woman with a power tool.”

Call it Green-Striped White Ribbon Day and it’s a keeper.

Australia Day is a bit of loss, anyway, a good day for a race riot but worth not much more than that if the Prime Minister is not in the mood for a bit of restlessness in Humpytown. So why not replace it with an official festival which members of the Caring Industrial Complex can celebrate by hectoring blameless viewers about the violence they do not commit? When the day is done, all concerned can then go back to campaigning for the more nuanced sentencing of the genuinely violent.

Gillard going, going....?

Two calls from people who like to follow politics and sometimes know a thing or two. Both report rumours that a move against Gillard is afoot.

It is the Sabbath, so let us set aside the mouse, rake or Mixmaster and join hands in prayer: 

Please, Great Bunyip, don't rob us of tomorrow's Question Time. Let her swing for awhile yet. Of this we ask. Amen

UPDATE: Well, Question Time came and went and she is still there. For now.

Start a Race Riot, Win Life's Lottery

Tim Blair brings news of Kim Sattler, the Humpytown Crier and noted supporter of terrorists, who last came to prominence when her conversations with a prime ministerial staffer launched an Indigenous intifada against Tony Abbott. Readers will recall the big news arising from that event was that Julia Gillard lost her shoe; less commented was the fact that she surrounds herself with people who see a race a riot on Australia Day as a neat trick for impaling a political opponent. Sattler kept a low profile after that disgrace, but is now back in action and denouncing Abbott as a lifelong Zionist, which probably means the Opposition leader has more wild scenes ahead. As recent events in Sydney have demonstrated, Sons of the Prophet tend to a much greater volatility than welfare recipients living in shipping containers on the lawn of Parliament House.

But what of Sattler's phone buddy, Gillard staffer Tony Hodges? He last made headlines with news that his part in the Australia Day outrage had earned him the sack -- a career setback from which he progressed directly to London and a reported job at the European Bank for Reconstruction with former Labor hack Senator Bob McMullan. If you need to be swept under a rug it is nice to find a mentor beneath the pile with a pay cheque ready and waiting

Well things are going swimmingly for Hodges, it is good to report. There is lots of European touring, a comfy lifestyle and many happy snapshots of his travels to share with friends back home.

And Hodges' happy lot includes plenty of time for twittering as well, including to any number of reporters. Surprisingly, given that many questions about the Australian Day riot remain unanswered, their interest in the co-instigator of that February unpleasantness appears limited to cooking tips...

 ... and chummy, idle chit chat

One day, being journalists and driven by a compulsion to reveal the truth, the Fourth Estate may get back to asking about that riot, what Hodges' current job may be costing the Australian taxpayer, who arranged it, and if he has any plans to whip some trouble with the Welsh by passing along the whisper that David Cameron has been heard engaging in hate speech against leeks.

But the minestrone has to cook first.

UPDATE: Commenter BH notes one of those delightful coincidencs. Today in the Sunday Telegraph, Maiden describes the Australia Day riot thus:

After some false starts and celebrated debacles - witness the Australia Day fiasco which included the Prime Minister losing a shoe - her office is gearing up for an election year.

Yes, it is that lost shoe which is the most important thing to remember about the melee. Not the lost adviser-cum-kitchen companion

How to Deal With a Rude Dill

BEFORE submitting to Jon Faine's interruptions this morning on ABC Radio 774, Michael Smith and Mark Baker should have spent a few minutes reviewing James Delingpole's technique.

A good line to use with Faine (and other ABC hacks and flacks): "Will you stop interrupting me!"

UPDATE: Faine commutes to work:

This is a small detail of a splendid cartoon, one of many, by Beagle Blog Cartoons. Check them out.

ADVISORY: The sky is clearing here in Melbourne and the golf club bar will be a'twitter with lady members fresh from their morning round, the Grass Parrot by far the fairest bird of all. Posting will resume later, after the Professor has put the wood to good use.

And the Winner Is.....

DRUM ROLL, please (no, not that Drum): the correct answer to the competition to spot the genuine,authentic Aboriginal representative on the ABC Advisory Board is Dr Patrick Bradbery, the fellow with the bush beard any casual observer, if not otherwise alerted, might take just as easily as an indication of rabbinical lineage. Perhaps the Charles Stuart University academic moonlights as a mohel who prefers to perform his sacred duties with a sharp stone or broken bottle. In this age of multicultural melding, who can tell?

What we do know is that Dr Bradbery counsels the ABC about its operations and content and, as the author of many tracts and little tomes about the art of learning, that he is especially qualified to help chart the broadcaster’s course. One of his papers, “Arcane Diversity: Is It More Important than the Superficially Obvious?”, seems particularly germane:

When the word diversity is mentioned in contemporary discourse, it evokes concepts like age, race, gender, religious expression, marital status and sexual preferences. While these are undoubtedly important markers of diversity, they are but the more or less obvious indicators that can lead to unproductive stereotyping. Hidden below the surface is a vast ocean of diversity that is harder to detect and consequently often ignored. Just a few examples of this diversity include: access to resources; knowledge; skills; physical health; emotional health; mental health; learning; development; personality; wealth; motives; intents; belief systems; and intelligence. This paper explores just a small part of that ocean in an attempt to bring to the surface one of the vital dimensions of understanding and responding to diversity. That part is that of learning and development. The paper is based on a transcendental phenomenological study of learning and development carried out by the author as a part of his doctoral studies. The conclusion drawn is that facing the endemic challenge of diversity of outcomes, which defies the best intentions of individuals and nations, will benefit from acknowledging, detecting and responding to diversity in learning and development and similar arcane characteristics of the community.

Dr Bradbery is quite right about that. Some strains of diversity are very hard to recognise. Very hard, indeed.

Jon Faine Doubles Down

AS noted yesterday, it is a good thing Jon Faine found paid work as a toady on ABC Radio 774, rather than remaining with the law, because a compulsion to connect dots is generally regarded as an asset amongst learned friends. Faine, whose preciousness needs to be valued in carats, displayed none of that this morning, despite the oft-thwarted attempts of Michael Smith and The Age's Mark Baker. Each attempted to address the increasingly insistent question of our Prime Minister's fitness to hold the highest elected office in the land, and neither could get a word in edgeways.

Smith was seldom allowed to finish a sentence and, when he did, his point was engulfed by the shill's interruptions and poo-hooing. Baker fared somehat better, several times insisting on his right to complete a thought, but the Voice of the Taxpayer was similarly unmoved.

If the ABC answered to ACMA, as do commercial stations, listeners could complain, as another ABC Voice of the Establishment, Jonathan Holmes, urged Media watch's viewers to do in regard to Alan Jones' climate-change heresies. Sadly, ACMA has no authority over the national broadcaster, nor does the Press Council.

What that means, as complainants have learned , is that the ABC pays Faine a very generous salary, gives him a pulpit, promotes him as person worth hearing -- and then adjudicates on his fitness to broadcast. One might as well ask the College of Cardinals to discipline the Pope.

The ABC costs taxpayers somewhere north of $1 billion a year. Where do those of us who foot that bill file a consumer complaint likely to be taken seriously?