Aiding and abetting in Peter Slipper's downfall ... Opposition leader Tony Abbott and Shadow Minister for Education, Christopher Pyne. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
Justice Steven Rares of the Federal Court is no stranger to political rough and tumble. I recall him fondly as junior counsel on my defence team when Neville Wran sued me for defamation - unsuccessfully - back in the rollicking 1980s.
His honour knows his way around the traps, you might say, and his demolition of the sexual harassment case against Peter Slipper was a scorcher. The disloyal former staffer James Ashby had plotted with his lawyer and various odds and sods in the Queensland Liberal National Party to ''damage Mr Slipper in the public eye and political arena with any information they could find''.
But the case was never just about the former speaker and his scheming political opponent, the former Howard government minister Mal Brough. It was central to Tony Abbott's agenda to destabilise and bring down the Gillard government.
Abbott, Christopher ''Poodles'' Pyne, and the would-be attorney-general, the mouthy Queensland senator George Brandis, were in it up to their necks, aided and abetted by a vicious campaign against Slipper in The Daily Telegraph.
Now it has blown up in their faces, revealing the conspiracy for what it was. It will be interesting to see who pays Ashby's legal bills, which should run into a hefty six-figure sum. Perhaps Abbott could call for donations to a slush fund like the one he ran when he was trying to destroy Pauline Hanson a few years ago.
THERE are some loose ends to tie up in the prank phone call affair. As I had thought, the errant disc jockeys Michael Christian and Mel Greig turned out to be mere pawns in the radio ratings game.
It was not their decision to make the hoax call or to put it to air. Naive, hopelessly out of their depth, they did what they were told to do. If you have not worked in the catch'n'kill jungle of commercial radio, you can have no idea of the pressure they were under to perform.
Plainly they had been coached for their TV interviews last Monday, repeating the lines they had been spoon fed. ''Nobody could have expected …'' they said again and again. But their remorse seemed genuine, and I felt sorry for them. It would be unjust if they lost their jobs.
The British media behaved as abominably as ever, led by the Daily Mail, which is the top people's instruction manual for the lower classes, and Rupert Murdoch's gutter-dwelling Sun. The Mail virtually accused Christian and Greig of killing the nurse Jacintha Saldanha and went on to declare, without the slightest evidence, that she had ''died of shame''. Whenever the Mail commits a new atrocity, it cheers me up no end to recall its sordid past, not least its enthusiastic support for the up and coming German statesman, Herr Hitler, and its long-held notion that Signor Mussolini would be the saviour of Europe.
Next we have Major The Rt. Hon Simon Arthur, 4th Baron Glenarthur (Eton, Sandhurst, 10th Hussars, Imperial Tobacco) and now chairman of the posh King Edward VII Hospital. His lordship's letter of protest to the 2DayFM parent company, Southern Cross Austereo, was a masterpiece of evasion, bristling with the hauteur you would expect of a Thatcherite hereditary peer. He gave not a hint that the hospital had abandoned its duty of care to the future queen of England by so irresponsibly revealing details of her medical condition. In better days, Glenarthur would have been drummed out of the regiment for a stuff-up like that, but no more.
And so to Rhys Holleran, the SC Austereo boss, who is ultimately responsible for the broadcast of the call. At first blush, his decision to stump up at least $500,000 of 2DayFM's advertising revenue to a fund for Saldanha's family looks like a generous act of contrition. Actually, it's devilishly smart crisis management. It encourages his advertisers to stay on board and could be enough to bring back the two big spenders who have fled, Coles and Telstra.
In broadcasting the prank call without the victims' permission, 2DayFM is in breach of two, and possibly three, sections of the commercial radio code of practice. Given the station's previous form with the oafish Kyle Sandilands, the Australian Communications and Media Authority may well consider suspending its licence to broadcast. As it should, ideally for a week at the start of next year's ratings.
But by making his six-figure donation, Holleran can plead to ACMA that he has already paid a whopping financial penalty. It might just get him and SC Austereo off a very unpleasant and even more expensive hook at the end of a very unpleasant business.
As sensible people know, international soccer is a numbingly tedious game. Pampered show ponies, many of them multi-millionaires, run around in circles for an hour and a half in an exercise in futility that ends, as often as not, in a nil-all draw. The boredom is occasionally relieved by a riot on the terraces or when one of the gilded youths gets a light tap on the ankle, at which point he drops to the ground howling as if he'd been bayoneted.
Here in Australia, nobody actually goes to soccer games. The ABC doggedly shows snatches of something called the A-League on its TV news bulletins, but there are never more than 30 men and a black dog looking on. The Socceroos always seem to be away somewhere, playing a ''friendly'' - whatever that is - with Turkmenistan.
For some reason, governments continue to throw taxpayers' money at this vapid pastime. One of the great scandals of the Rudd and Gillard governments, unexplained to this day, was the waste of an astounding $45 million in a farcical attempt to secure hosting rights for the 2022 World Cup. In the end - the abject, humiliating end - we got exactly one vote. Qatar had spent even more millions splashing bribes around left, right and centre.
This week, the O'Farrell state government announced it would squander $3 million on bringing the world's richest sporting club, Manchester United, to play a game in Sydney next July. This extravagance came wrapped in all the usual dodgy assurances that it would be a wonderful tourist attraction, raking in many more millions, putting us on the world stage, blah blah.
Wake me when it's over.
smhcarlton@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment