Sunday, February 15, 2015

Get your act together, media

I reckon the Australian media has run oddly cold on some of the more outrageous behaviour of the Abbott government.

Sure, Fairfax, The Guardian and then The Australian ran the story of Brandis sending over a big wig to invite the President of the Human Rights Commission to resign - because they didn't like a report she has written.   No one in the government has denied it - it is clearly true.

But by today - it gets barely a mention on Insiders, and I haven't seen any TV doorstops with a journalist calling out to Abbott - "Do you really think this is appropriate?  How is it different to workplace bullying?  Why do it in secrecy - was the message that if she didn't go quietly you would rubbish her in Parliament?"

The behaviour towards her is, in my reckoning, a major scandal that the media seems not all that interested in pursuing.

Which puts in mind of the continuing scandal of the secrecy with which the whole "Operation Sovereign Borders" was untaken, including the imprisonment at sea of people for weeks at a time, and the lack of challenge to the weak justification given for it.

By the way, going back to the HRC - Tim Wilson played a "straight bat" on the matter in his Sky News brief interview on Friday.  Yet the hosts deliberately did not invite him to comment on the politics of the government asking his boss to resign.  

Weird.

1 comment:

Dave C said...

Tim Wilson likes his $350k job with an authority he said should be abolished, until George Brandywine decided he needed a leg up and gave him a life on easy street.

He is getting paid 5 or 6 times as much as the average real worker and doing absolutely fuck all.

Then again, at least he's a lifter and not a leaner.