There’s reasons people call for Dorothy dixers to be ditched. They so very rarely elicit new information and therefore efficiently provide a platform for talking points.
Sky News After Dark’s Sharri Markson had her second exclusive one-on-one with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Thursday night. Markson lobbed up the questions and Netanyahu returned serve, untrammelled.
The analogy the pair laboured was of Hamas as the Nazis before the second world war. Churchill was summoned in the service of this analogy – in which somehow Australia is part of a global “appeasement” of Hamas.
“Is this word appeasement a direct reference to how Europe dealt with Hitler in the 1930s and do you think we’re seeing from leaders like [prime minister Anthony] Albanese and others a similar complacency?” Markson asked.
Netanyahu picked it up and ran with it. “It’s appeasement, pure and simple,” he said.
Markson went on.
“Part of the problem here is that there is a very effective propaganda campaign being run against Israel. The Albanese government is aiding and abetting it. So are some media outlets. Prime minister, what do you say to the libels that Israel is deliberately starving Palestinian children and is conducting a genocide in Gaza?” she asked.
“It’s the same lies that were levelled at the Jewish people in the middle ages,” Netanyahu said.
Disputed claims about Hamas’ actions went straight through to the keeper (who’s got a tortured analogy now?) as Netanyahu strolled his way through the interview.
Netanyahu declared Israel would “win both the propaganda war and the war on the ground”.
The first bit was true, at least on Sky News.
Summit hedging bets
Pity the poor subeditor tasked with editing mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s column for News Corp’s special Bush Summit liftout.
Actually, it looks like they were told to leave the copy in its pristine form and take off early to the pub.
The Bush Summit – presented nationally by her companies Hancock Prospecting and S Kidman & Co – is on again.
There are events around the nation with keynotes from luminaries including the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and climate change denier Ian Plimer (although the in-paper ads don’t mention Plimer), now a director at Hancock Prospecting.
And there’s the column from Australia’s richest person, apparently left blissfully edit-free.
Rinehart crafts the image of a dystopian future in which the Royal Flying Doctor Service cannot save lives because “we’ve exceeded our emissions permitted”. Nurses and doctors would be forced to buy electric vehicles before seeing patients, nursing homes would close. “Those who die,” she writes, “the funeral services can’t handle.
“The disruption and expense immense.”
And what of the poor farmers, who are some of the “many many many Australians” who’ll be hurt?
“They can increase the costs they sell us food for awhile, but then many Australians will be forced to buy inferior products from overseas, where net zero isn’t a burden, and where clean water and clean air may not or are not available like here in Australia, while our own delicious agriculture industry sadly shrivels up,” she writes.
The awkward clarion call to end net zero is only outdone by the awkwardness of its juxtaposition with stories about the impacts of climate change.
The liftouts include a piece from Daily Tele cartoonist Warren Brown on the “green drought” in parts of Australia – the more sporadic rainfall behind the phenomenon is linked to climate change. There’s a piece on bushfires threatening species with extinction, and other tales of droughts and floods, all of which are linked to climate change.
The cognitive dissonance was particularly painful while reading the Advertiser. A big pic lead on the front page covered the drought in South Australia, while page 2 was on the “devastating outbreak” of the algal bloom, which is – you guessed it – linked to climate change.
Drakonian take
Supermarket manager and media darling JP Drake has made headlines saying he is forced to “import” workers despite 23% unemployment, blaming welfare for Australians allegedly not wanting to work.
With echoes of the Paxton family era about it, Drake (who oversees the $1.3bn business and says he is rich enough to not have to work) went on the podcast 2 Worlds Collide a week ago, with media happily picking up on his comments days later.
“I’m importing people from Vanuatu because I can’t get workers to work at my site,” he says on the podcast. He says while their “English is not the best”, they’re happy.
He says in the area around Edinburgh North, where Drakes has a distribution centre, there is a 23% unemployment rate.
Only that doesn’t seem to be accurate.
Edinburgh North itself doesn’t have a big enough population to be statistically significant, but sits within the City of Playford, which has an unemployment rate of 9.3%. High by Australian standards, but not 23%.
He might have been talking about nearby Elizabeth, a tiny suburb with about 1,000 people (part of the larger Elizabeth area), where unemployment is at about 20%. Next door, Elizabeth East is 9.3%.
Multiple news outlets picked up on his claims – although not all those who picked up his theme repeated the specific 23% claim.
Drake is somewhat of a media darling in South Australia. He has used social media to publish pictures of shoplifters, and claimed they’re trading meat for drugs. He has blamed the “rush to renewables” for power prices, didn’t mandate staff getting vaccinated during Covid, and hit out at “Wokeworths” for moving away from Australia Day merchandising.
In his latest outing, he complained the minimum wage was “so high”. He said that when he visited one of his growers he “didn’t see a white Australian” (although he added he wasn’t saying just because someone wasn’t white they weren’t Australian).
“People don’t wanna work,” he says. “We pay enough out on Centrelink and benefits for the people that maybe don’t deserve it.”
Hamming it up
Former MP George Christensen is launching a terrifyingly militaristic-sounding “anti-regime media platform” called Command Post.
“It’s a war room,” he says, promising “tactical intel”, a “national effort to fight back against the managed decline of Australian democracy”, and a “weekly audio sitrep”.
And, here’s a clue. “It’s about sovereignty,” he writes.
It’s very macho and punchy and ends with a plea for subscriptions and donations.
“Will be looking at ham radios,” one social media user commented.
“What’s ham radios?” another replied.
Indeed.
Magical thinking
We’ve had the horror of horoscopes on TV news bulletins, and the lighthearted farce of psychic crocodiles. This week, on the Daily Telegraph’s page 3, chief entertainment writer Jonathon Moran confessed he was moved to tears – and belief – by celebrity medium David Stevens.
Stevens is on a PR blitz and appeared in the Nine newspapers a couple of days earlier.
Moran says Stevens knew everything about him, “literally everything”, including an undisclosed family secret.
Stevens specialises in necromancy, talking to the dead, or being a “medium” if you prefer something more palatable. But he also does more Nostradamus-style stuff.
His 2024 predictions included China rising, the US breaking down (before the election) and seeing increasing social unrest and terrorism after the election. There would be health discoveries, AI, bushfires and “lots of big waves”.
So far, so generic, but then: “After stepping into his power in 2024 and showing it didn’t work, Anthony Albanese steps off,” he wrote, adding there would be no changes in the economy to “high interest rates/costs/inflation”.
Stick to radio
It’s perilous for a fallible journalist to nitpick on grammatical errors, but there’s a stonking typo in the latest promo for 3AW’s breakfast show.
“Breakfast radio at it’s best!” about 1,350 posters across Melbourne proclaim. It’s an ad for “Ross and Russ” – Ross Stevenson and Russel Howcroft’s show.
The pair discussed the typo on Monday and declared it “embarrassing”.
The signs will be replaced, to protect pedantic Melbourne eyeballs.
