After 14 election campaigns reaching from Bob Hawke to Anthony Albanese, Laura Tingle has had enough of covering federal politics. “I never intended to do it for the rest of my life, and now it’s 40 years,” Tingle told Weekly Beast. When a job ad for global political editor, replacing John Lyons, hit her inbox, she saw an exciting opportunity. Far from being parachuted by Aunty into a “plum new gig”, as the Australian reported, the political editor for 7.30 faced an interview panel of seven inquisitors from the ABC’s international division.
Understandably, fans of her forthright analytical skills, which she demonstrates across 7.30, Radio National’s Late Night Live (LNL), Insiders and online, are bereft. Tingle laughs and says the ABC will be “just fine without me”.
“I’ve been very touched by all the people – and lots of people have sent me messages about how much they’ll miss me – and that’s really lovely. I’m overwhelmed. But I am only moving from one area to another at the ABC.”
A former political editor of the Australian Financial Review who has spent 40 of her 45 years in journalism covering national affairs, Tingle moves to her new international role mid-year. The ABC will advertise for a replacement. Weekly Beast understands the frontrunner is Jacob Greber, the ABC’s chief digital political correspondent, who has impressed with his sharp analytical skills on the ABC’s Politics Now podcast.
Hidden talent
Some of Tingle’s fans, who include legendary political commentators Laurie Oakes and Paul Bongiorno, were unimpressed by how the ABC utilised her skills on Saturday night’s somewhat overpopulated election panel.
Oakes on X: “The ABC has shoved Laura Tingle so far from the centre of its election panel that she is almost out of sight in the wings. Stupidity!”
Bongiorno: “Indeed – it makes you wonder, without doubt [how] La Ti is without peer in political journalism.”
Now, the ABC’s election night coverage was a triumph in terms of ratings, serving up the broadcaster’s biggest audience since the new ratings measurement began in 2022. The national total TV average audience (including iview) of 2.3m was bigger than Bluey’s The Sign, which got 2.24m in April last year.
But the panel’s make up and the amount of time accorded to Tingle and outgoing numbers guy Antony Green were not universally praised. One panellist, former Liberal party strategist and Guardian Australia podcaster Tony Barry spent the night on ABC TV and then jumped online to say he thought the coverage he was on was “woeful”.
His Facebook post was swiftly screenshot and shared widely with journalists on Sunday. “The ABC was the only telecast of six hours of no data, analysis and insight – just six endless ‘what I reckon’ journalism. Unwatchable drivel,” Barry wrote.
We understand Barry believed he didn’t get enough screen time, but to be fair to him, some observers agreed that political nerds like Barry, Tingle and Green should have been front and centre, and there may have been too many talking heads.
‘Absolute irrelevance’
But there was plenty of Tingle boldness on Monday when she told David Marr on LNL that News Corp was irrelevant in terms of influence on Australian elections.
“There’s just no correlation between what News Corp says and what voters do, except, you know, for a few old people in grey cardigans somewhere,” Tingle said. “I mean, it’s irrelevant, and I find it extraordinary that people, including other journalists, get so cowered by a bunch of people who are so irrelevant and who have basically dragged the Liberal party and the Nationals into irrelevance as well because they’re trying to suck up to them.”
Veteran columnist Niki Savva, who famously quit the Australian and joined the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age after editors told her she had to share a page with Sky News host Peta Credlin, agreed with Tingle’s analysis.
“What [the election result] exposed in the end was the absolute irrelevance of Sky After Dark and the News Limited tabloids, and also the Australian,” Savva said on LNL, adding that she didn’t “really subscribe to many of those publications”.
Savva said Dutton “got it so wrong” because he “spent so much time in the Sky studios and reading the Australian and not enough time talking to the millions of other people who don’t subscribe to those outlets”.
On Friday, News Corp’s global results brought more bad news for the media mogul. Rupert Murdoch’s mastheads in Australia, the US and the UK have suffered a sharp fall in revenue after lower advertising income cut into their revenue streams.
The forever war
For some News Corp commentators, the election result was not an invitation for self-reflection but a time to double down on the Sky News agenda of amplifying the culture wars.
Janet Albrechtsen began by saying “everything is about culture”.
“Genuine Liberals need to stop trembling about these ‘culture war’ accusations from opponents, inside and outside the party. What kind of country do we want to live in? If Liberals don’t start embracing that, explaining policies through the prism of what kind of culture we want, they may as well fold their tent and save donors a heck of a lot of money.”
Credlin urged the party to offer a strong and clear alternative and not “Labor-lite”.
“Importantly, the Coalition cannot get spooked by the call from its enemies to ‘drop the culture wars’ because it’s the ‘long march through the institutions’ that’s the reason for the left’s ascendancy.”
Mail gets the drop
While the Daily Mail Australia headlines are often amusing, this one from the election caught our eye.
“Kooyong election results: Teal doctor Monique Ryan – who doesn’t answer journalists’ questions, has a rogue husband who tears down candidates’ signs – celebrates victory after being pooed on by a bird on election day”. There is a lot going on there.
No surprises
There was nothing unusual about Kerry Stokes’ West Australian newspaper endorsing the Coalition last weekend. But a line in the editorial caught the attention of one of its readers.
He thought the editorial, “Anthony Albanese must be punished for a poor three years”, claimed that the newspaper backed Labor last election.
“In WA, we backed Mr Albanese in [sic] during the 2022 campaign, in large part because Mark McGowan reassured us that it was the right thing to do, and also because Scott Morrison, despite delivering the GST deal for our state, had let us down and we couldn’t forgive him for it,” the editorial said.
The reader pointed out that in the 2022 election, the West’s editorial was headlined “It’s Morrison, but with some crucial caveats” and said, “We believe Australia should stick with a Morrison Government”.
We asked editor-in-chief Christopher Dore about the apparent anomaly, and he explained that “in WA” meant the voters in the state and not the newspaper. “The editorial was referring to the people of WA backing Albanese in 2022, not specifically the paper in its editorial,” Dore said.
Lots of love for Shakespeare
Cartoonist and illustrator John Shakespeare walked away from the Sydney Morning Herald in August after four decades, taking a redundancy package along with 85 of his colleagues from Nine publishing.
A kind and humble chap, Shakespeare not only delighted readers with his incisive cartoons but generously provided staffers with a detailed caricature when they left the newsroom. It is a treasured artefact for many former Herald staffers.
When he left the building, he drew his own likeness, at the request of Peter FitzSimons, who included it in his column. “As great an artist that he is, he is a better man and has always stood out as a gentle, selfless soul, always with a quiet smile, an endlessly cheery presence in whatever room he entered,” Fitz wrote.
But Shakes, as he is known, was not long out the door when he was diagnosed with cancer and has spent much of his retirement in and out of hospital. On Friday, his colleagues and friends are meeting Shakes and his wife Anna-Lisa Backlund in a Sydney pub to tell him how much they love him and to sing his favourite song, Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is?
