Suspension of belief In November last year, the arrest of Australian hotel owner Jamie Pang in Papua New Guinea gained some attention in our media. Less so this week’s development — the suspension of veteran PNG Journo Sincha Dimara for her coverage of his detainment, which raised concerns about police conduct. Dimara is one of Papua New Guinea’s longest-serving journalists and Head of News and Current Affairs at PNG’s public broadcaster EMTV. She has been suspended for three weeks without pay, with EMTV’s parent company, Media Niugini Limited (MNL), alleging “insubordination” and “defamation”.
The media council of Papua New Guinea are alleging Dimara’s suspension is “intimidation” and amounts to the “suppression of a free media in the country”. According to Reporters San Frontiers “several accounts” put the blame on Public Enterprises and State Investment Minister, William Duma, who is responsible for Telikom, which owns MNL. Duma has denied ordering Dimara’s suspension, but says he asked management to “deal with it”. MNL has a history here: In 2019 the company fired (and, following a strike by EMTV staff, forced to re-instate) head of news Neville Choi, and, in 2018, suspended senior journalist Scott Waide after his critical reports on government spending. Again, Waide’s suspension was overturned after public pressure. We’ll keep an eye on what happens here.
The cost of justice Rightly, there has been a a lot of recent focus on who helps pay our politicians’ bills and what they might expect in return. And if you wanted any sense of the level of opacity surrounding these matters, estimates this week has been revealing. Sort of.
We know that taxpayers picked up the tab for former defence minister Linda Reynolds legal costs during the police investigation into the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins. And we also know taxpayers are helping to fund Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar’s defamation defence — but Attorney-General Michaelia Cash last night refused to say who is suing him or why. Yet more suggestive was the refusal to rule out the possibility that more ministers might be getting taxpayer funded legal help, including herself. The grounds are that favourite go-to — that even confirming someone is receiving taxpayer support would “prejudice” their case.
Mooch-ing Given the rate at which it hired and fired, it has been an ongoing sport since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 to watch the afterlives of the assortment of grifters, opportunists and the genuinely unhinged that made up his inner circle after they were catapulted over the white house gates. A reputation-laundering book? A regular show on Fox News? Anthony Scaramucci was perhaps the apotheosis of the Trump White House’s HR policy, lasting a mere 10 days before calling up a New Yorker journalist to make a series of damning allegations about his workplace without clarifying whether he was on the record or not.
Anyway, none of this is disqualifying as far as the Australian Financial Review is concerned. In news that feels unlikely to allay any fears about the potential dodginess of digital currencies, the AFR have engaged the Mooch as one of the speakers for their 2022 cryptocurrency summit.
