Saturday, June 2, 2012By Jay Fletcher
Image: KeepCalmAbbottIsNotPM/FacebookWhat would Australia look like if Tony Abbott became the next prime minister?
The Liberal leader is an outspoken climate denier, a hardliner on locking out refugees, determined to crack down on union and workers’ rights and wants to extend racist and draconian attacks on Aboriginal rights.
Yet polls have consistently shown Abbott and the Coalition far ahead of the Julia Gillard Labor government, whose pro-business policies and internal scandals have made it deeply unpopular.
Abbott’s unscientific rhetoric on climate change wildly swings between saying it is “absolute crap” and the science is “far from settled” to claiming it's a natural phenomenon unrelated to greenhouse gas emissions. The Coalition’s unofficial policy on climate change is to do nothing. Officially, it has a “direct action” carbon reduction policy.
Environmentalists have panned Abbott’s direct action policy as a big handout to polluters. It shares the same ineffectual reduction target as Labor: 5% emissions cuts by 2020. But instead of a business-friendly carbon price, Abbott would offer big polluters taxpayer-funded “incentives” to cut emissions yet would apply no sanctions on even the worst industries.
Under an Abbott government, Australia’s emissions would continue to rise. It is a worse-than-nothing plan in the face of runaway climate change.
Despite some opportunistic remarks meant to appease worried farmers, Abbott also backs coal seam gas mining, saying it is not as “devastating” as open-cut coalmining.
However, even as the urgency of action on climate change continues to grow, the Coalition remains focused on using the race card to manipulate Australian politics.
Abbott’s dangerous “stop the boats” tirade against refugees has been amplified even as the Labor government makes minor concessions to the public’s growing criticisms of long-term detention.
His policy plans for asylum seekers arriving by boat go beyond even what John Howard and Phillip Ruddock managed to achieve with the “Pacific solution”.
He said in January: “It is time for Australia to adopt turning the boats as its core policy.”
He said in an April 27 speech to the Institute of Public Affairs: “On my first day as prime minister, I would pick up the phone to the President of Nauru ... to reopen the detention centre there.”
He said “within a week” he would go to Indonesia, liken refugees to drug trafficking and push Indonesia into tougher persecution of people smugglers.
He would order the Australian navy to have boats carrying asylum seekers “turned around and escorted back to Indonesian waters”.
Abbott would reintroduce “temporary protection” visas and “there would be a presumption against refugee status for boat arrivals”.
An Abbott government would ramp up the persecution of so-called people smugglers with tougher minimum sentences and non-parole periods.
In January, Abbott said of Canberra’s Aboriginal Tent Embassy that it was “time to move on”. But this only hints at his deep-going plans to attack Aboriginal people and their communities.
There has always been bipartisan support between the Liberal and Labor parties on the Northern Territory intervention, led by John Howard in 2007. Labor has expanded many of the intervention’s worst measures, including income quarantining, attacking Aboriginal schooling and introducing widespread alcohol prohibition. It has introduced laws to entrench the intervention for a further 10 years.
But Abbott has argued to begin a so-called “second intervention” against Aboriginal communities, including putting the army back in charge: because “there's something about the military”.
He said in April last year that parents in Aboriginal communities should be fined if their children don't attend school, rather than the “cumbersome” punishment of cancelling welfare payments. The police would also be tasked with “rounding kids up in the morning to go to school”, the Age reported.
“I think a lot more is needed,” he said. Abbott favours the schooling model of anti-welfare campaigner Noel Pearson, which bids to force children into compulsory hearings for truancy, but does little to boost teacher numbers or training, or address the cultural issues.
Coalition policy also calls for abolishing the permit system for Aboriginal communities, which requires tourists and visitors to ask the locals for permission to enter the land.
Abbott would carry out these policies all while slashing welfare for the poor and cutting corporate tax rates even further.
His shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, said in his March speech “The end of the age of entitlement” that social welfare was too wasteful in Australia. Unemployed and many poorer families are forced to live below the poverty line already, but Hockey said Australia should aim to be more like Hong Kong, which is one of the world’s most unequal places, with scant social security and low corporate tax.
Despite claiming the anti-union Work Choices laws are “dead and buried”, Abbott says there is a problem with “union militancy” and would push Labor's Fair Work Act — Work Choices lite — further to the right again, including watering down unfair dismissal laws even more.
But in recognition of the huge campaign against Work Choices that forced John Howard out of office in 2007, Abbott and the Coalition remain vague about their industrial relations policy.
Australian people can also expect an Abbott government to attack women's rights — especially reproductive and workplace rights — and make huge cuts to social spending, education and health.
But building an Abbott-proof fence cannot wait until an election is called, because many of Abbott’s far-right policies are shared by a Labor government committed to pandering to corporate interests, taking next-to-no action on climate change and persecuting refugees and Aboriginal people.
It has to start now, taking on the two big parties through every progressive and social movement in Australia, so that we can make the big decisions about the future we need.
From GLW issue 925
Monday, June 18, 2012
We need an Abbott-proof fence | via: Green Left Weekly #Auspol
Friday, June 15, 2012
ACMA finds #2GB breached code over #AlanJones greenhouse gas LIE | #Auspol #carbontax #carbonprice
Alan Jones "researched the figures himself", 2GB told ACMA. Photo: Michael Clayton-Jones
Sydney radio station 2GB, the former partner of failed Melbourne talkback station MTR, has been found to have breached the broadcasting code over Alan Jones's claim that "human beings produce 0.001 per cent of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere".
The Australian Communications and Media Authority found that Harbour Radio Pty Ltd, the licensee of 2GB, had breached the Commercial Radio Codes of Practice by "failing to use reasonable efforts to ensure that factual material was reasonably supportable as being accurate" during the broadcast on March 15, 2011.
"The Authority found that this was presented as a statement of fact, it was not substantiated by the licensee and there was no evidence that reasonable efforts had been taken to ensure that it was reasonably supportable as being accurate, as required under the codes," ACMA chairman Chris Chapman said in releasing the finding.
Advertisement: Story continues belowThe radio station was also found to be in breach on two counts of failing to comply with the complaints-handling provisions of the code.
The radio station defended itself against the accuracy charge by claiming it provided production resources, researchers and writers to its presenters in the preparation of programming content.
However, 2GB admitted that "no research was conducted by staff and that Mr Jones researched the figures himself", the ACMA report stated.
ACMA also found that a "correction" offered by Jones on June 3, in which he cited an earlier interview with climate change expert David Karoly, was not "adequate and appropriate", as required by the code.
The media watchdog also considered two charges against the station relating to Jones's attack on Prime Minister Julia Gillard and various other political figures in a number of broadcasts in 2011.
On June 29, he called for the lord mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, to be put "in the same chaff bag as Julia Gillard and throw them both out to sea".
On June 30, he said "You dope, Clover Moore, you dyed-in-the-wool dope, Clover Moore."
On July 6, discussing the financial impact of the carbon tax, he said of Ms Gillard: "The woman is off her tree - and quite frankly they should shove her and [then Greens leader] Bob Brown in a chaff bag and take them as far out to sea as they can - and tell her to swim home."
He also attacked Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young ("brain dead"), economist and government adviser Ross Garnaut ("that fool") and independent MP Rob Oakeshott ("that fool"). The chaff bag also made a number of repeat appearances, usually with the Prime Minister inside it.
ACMA considered whether 2GB had breached a licence condition that proscribed it from broadcasting material that "is likely to incite, encourage or present for its own sake violence or brutality" or that "is likely to incite hatred against, or serious contempt for, or severe ridicule of, any person or group of persons because of age, ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexual preferences, religion, transgender status or disability".
ACMA found in favour of 2GB on these matters, stating that, "whilst disparaging and disrespectful", Jones's comments "were not strong, intense or inflammatory enough to be capable of being construed as urging violence or brutality against those public figures".
ACMA also found in favour of the station in a sixth investigation, into a claim that Jones's colleague Chris Smith had not made adequate efforts to represent alternative significant views on climate change during a discussion in which the topic was discussed by Smith and climate change sceptic and mining industry supporter Professor Ian Plimer on March 11, 2011.
ACMA found that the station was not in breach because, on other occasions, "reasonable efforts were made to present significant [alternative] viewpoints".
As a result of the findings, ACMA reported, 2GB is "reviewing its compliance processes to identify shortcomings ... the thrust of the review is the licensee's compliance processes across all of its major production teams, concerning factual accuracy and the presentation of 'significant viewpoints'."
ACMA has not put a timeline on the review process but stated today that it hoped it would be completed swiftly, as "the matter has gone on long enough".
Dirty, filthy, LIAR.
Defamation for #2GB clown Ray Hadley | #Ausmedia thetelegraph.com.au
THE state's chief law officer Greg Smith is threatening to sue broadcaster Ray Hadley for defamation over comments the 2GB announcer made last month which Mr Smith says falsely suggested he treated accused paedophiles favourably.
Mr Smith's office would not comment on whether taxpayers are footing the bill for his legal action. His lawyer has sent Hadley a letter followed by a "concerns notice", asking the broadcaster to apologise.
The proposed action relates to a broadcast in April and another on May 2 in which Hadley criticised Mr Smith over comments he allegedly made regarding a child sex case involving a friend of Mr Smith, Father Finian Egan.
The Daily Telegraph revealed on the day of the broadcast that charity worker Father Chris Riley had told Egan's alleged female victim that Mr Smith had told him she was "trying to get $1 million" from the church. Mr Smith denied making the comment.
Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.
Recommended Coverage
BAIL laws, electricity prices, asylum seeker boats, analogue TV hassles. Just some of the issues that have Ray Hadley talking.End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.
I'll gladly have my taxes used for this. Sue the pants off this arse-clown.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
What have Bolt, Jones, Akerman + Hadley been up to this week? | #Ausmedia
Piers Akerman sheds his blogging scepticism; Herald Sun to publish corrections over Bolt's columns; Alan Jones to speak at the National Press Club... Here we reveal what Australia's most powerful Megaphones have been up to over the last week.
Piers Akerman
The Daily Telegraph is getting more bang for their buck from Piers Akerman. The Labor baiter is now posting daily blog entries at the crack of dawn. It's quite a change of heart for the rotund right-winger, whose blog (until Monday) consisted only of republished newspaper columns. Akerman told The Power Index earlier this year that, unlike Andrew Bolt, he was no fan of blogging.
"No, I think it's a joke," he told us. "It presents readers with the opportunity of an online letters to the editor page. It allows them to vent. Whether it's useful in developing public policy I have my doubts."
Andrew Bolt
As Crikey will report today, The Herald Sun will run two corrective notices next to Andrew Bolt's regular column within the next fortnight. Bolt was found guilty of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act last month over two 2009 articles in which he took aim at pale-skinned Aborigines.
The conservative crusader hasn't backed away from the topic of race, despite the finding. His column today tackles the issue of "white flight" from selective state schools to the public system.
Alan Jones
Lunches at the National Press Club are usually pretty sedate – some would say soporific – affairs but not today. Talkback king Alan Jones will take to the stage at 12.30pm to pontificate on the topic: "Food security and the protection of the Australian regional way of life". Here at The Power Index, we'll be more interested in how Jones handles questions from the journalists in the crowd, rather than the speech itself (though it's sure to be entertaining).
The more sensitive hacks in the press pack are advised to stay at home. During his last public appearance in Canberra, at the August Convoy of no Confidence rally, Jones verbally attacked Sydney Morning Herald sketch writer Jacqueline Maley and encouraged the crowd to heckle a Sky News reporter as he did a live cross.
Ray Hadley
Meanwhile, Jones' 2GB colleague Ray Hadley has returned from New Zealand, where he flew on short notice to call Sunday night's rugby union World Cup semi final between Australia and New Zealand. Channel Nine had used Kiwi commentators for the Wallabies' previous games, but figured rugby fans deserved an Aussie caller for such an important match.
Some union diehards were unimpressed by the decision given Hadley's strident political views and the fact he hadn't called a rugby union game since 2003. They won't have to worry about hearing him during the final: in case you've just awoken from a coma, the Aussies went down 20-6.
Janet Albrechtsen
Believe it or not, The Australian's economic rationalista Janet Albrechtsen is no fan of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement. The protesters, according to Albrechtsen, are the "young people who feel they've missed out on the protests of the 1960s, ageing hippies wanting to relive those halcyon years, unhappy college kids, the unemployed and a range of loitering performance art protesters who don't want to miss out on a free feed".
But just because the feisty free-marketeer thinks the movement "inane" doesn't mean she isn't worried about it. "While it's tempting to see the occupiers as a harmless and humorous last gasp of the Left, the risk is that their grapeshot grievances will be pocketed for political purposes by those wielding power. If that happens, the present economic pain will only grow worse and last longer."
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Hypocrisy of Mirabella | #Ausmedia
I was absolutely intrigued by Sophie Mirabella’s attack on the growing “Occupy Wall Street” movement yesterday. In case you missed it, she basically dismissed these peaceful protesters as nothing more than a bunch of angry, anti-capitalist losers, looking to place the cost of their own failings into the hands of others:
Take THAT. Pic: AFP
“…There’s a strange dichotomy about this movement. These “occupiers” want other people to earn less, while presumably they are supported by the Government or benevolent families so they can spend their days creating sanitation problems in the street rather than earning a living themselves.
“They want other people to pay for their “free” college education. They want to hold others to account for the way they believe the world has failed them. There is an underlying sense of entitlement that just jars with the “other people are greedy bastards” protest.
“The real bottom line is that “Greed is over” is not a policy. It’s not going to create one job, it’s not going to provide the funds needed to build hospitals or schools, and despite the hokey sentiment it’s not going to build local communities.”
Sure, I have had a bit of a tongue-in-cheek dig at the Occupy Wall Street protests myself, but what got me so intrigued about yesterday’s piece was that it had more than a faint whiff of hypocrisy about it.
Indeed, just two months ago, here on this very same website, Mirabella was in fact vigorously defending “the right to peaceful public assembly”.
And, back then, she was aghast at the way attendees at the anti-carbon tax rally in Canberra were picked on by journalists, labelling it an attack on freedom of speech:
The determination to find an offensive placard, to photograph someone looking unhinged, to find fault with the tone of the event should be a little concerning for those who champion free speech and peaceful public assembly as tenets of democracy.
So, she’s more than eager to tell one group of people to “maintain the rage”, but then turns around and tells another, more softly-spoken group of people to shut the hell up and not bother.
Forget the famous line (dubiously attributed to Voltaire), “I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.
No, for Mirabella, it’s a simple case of “I will defend to the death your right to say the things I agree with…. And, PS, the carbon tax is the worst thing OF ALL TIME.”
Now, let’s make this absolutely clear. I am the furthest things from a spokesperson for the Occupy Wall Street protests.
In fact, I have no plans at all to attend any of their rallies here in Australia because I’m too busy working and looking after my family. Besides, the biggest change needs to happen in Wall Street itself, not Federation Square.
But, unlike Sophie Mirabella, I actually believe in free speech, and therefore encourage protests which might start a larger debate about social inequity, and the human right to “a fair go”.
I don’t have a “sense of entitlement” and am not a communist, but I think we really should stop every once in a while and think about whether capitalism left unchecked is actually good for society as a whole.
Even if it all comes to nothing, I’d prefer to be personally associated with signs with “meaningless” slogans like “people not profits”, rather than ones that say things like this.
So, in that sense, I really am the 99 per cent.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Intolerance? - The Bolt Factor proof #qanda
MEDIA
The Bolt Factor: Andrew Bolt and the Making of an Opportunist
The Monthly | The Monthly Essays | October 2011 | Add a Comment
On the morning of Sunday, 11 October 2009 the guests appearing on that day’s Insiders program gathered in the green room at the ABC TV’s Southbank headquarters in Melbourne before the show. Annabel Crabb was there, as were David Marr and Andrew Bolt. Marr, who had just returned from Bayreuth, Germany, chatted amicably with Bolt, who is a huge Wagner fan. “He is very intelligent about opera,” Marr told me. Soon they were in the studio, ready for the live broadcast.
Andrew Bolt as a young journalist working for the 'Age', c.1980.Host Barrie Cassidy introduced the first segment, ‘The Sunday Papers’, in which guests comment on a story from that day’s newspaper given to them by the producers. Bolt ignored his item and instead started talking about a report on the BBC that, Bolt claimed, demonstrated the Earth was not warming. Marr remonstrated with him, both for deviating from the script and for the absurdity of his claims. When Bolt persisted, Marr picked up a newspaper and in a show of mock exasperation turned his back on Bolt.
A couple of hours later, Bolt posted on his blog an image of Marr with pursed lips, seemingly in mid-sentence, with the invitation to his many followers to click on it and watch the segment. Over the next few hours 133 comments were posted, some remarking on Marr’s apparent rudeness, others commenting on the picture itself.
“I saw an expression like that on an egg-bound chook once,” said ‘Jackie of Gaia!’.
“Poor fellow is chronically constipated,” responded Fay of Charlestown.
“I doubt that, Fay,” chimed in Alan Jansen. “Given what Marr proudly admits to, constipation is unlikely to be a problem.”
Marr was outraged when he was alerted to these remarks two days later. “We’d been talking about opera and then you go on and get this blinding thing,” he told me. He immediately rang Bolt, who had the offending comment ‘snipped’, formally apologised to Marr and posted the following statement on the blog: “David has alerted me to a comment which snuck through our moderation and which abuses him in homophobic terms. I am mortified it got through, and have instantly removed it. I apologise to David and have banned the person who put it up.”
Marr accepted Bolt’s apology and his assurance he had not seen the posts. What Bolt did not disclose was that the person who was moderating the blog and past whom these comments had “snuck” was his wife, Sally Morrell. “It was an official arrangement, for his wife to moderate his blog,” Phil Gardner, editor-in-chief of the Herald and Weekly Times, told me. That arrangement ended about a year ago, he said, and Bolt’s blog is now moderated in house at the Herald Sun.
[ED: Sally Morrell has assured the Monthly that she had no part in moderating the blog posts that referred to David Marr and Annabel Crabb. The Monthly accepts that assurance and apologises to her for any embarrassment in saying that she did. The author has also received a communication from Andrew Bolt which includes the following: “I did much of the moderating myself on those days and through sheer carelessness through pressure of work, I almost certainly let those through myself. Sally helped on the blog for just a couple of hours a day and did not work the particular shift on which those mistakes were made. I deeply regret my error.”]
A few months earlier, on 5 July, a similar thing had happened to Annabel Crabb after she, too, had had an argument with Bolt on air during Insiders. Some of the comments were “grotty, sexist stuff”, Crabb told me, “about my appearance, or what my sexual performance would be like after a few drinks”. The episode in which the fight occurred marked the eighth anniversary of Insiders, and the ABC took the guests to lunch at a restaurant in Carlton afterwards: “The unnerving thing was that [the comments were] all going up while Andrew and I were having lunch together,” said Crabb. “I found it confronting because we’d always got on well together.”
Such attacks became so common, Michael Bodey reported in the Australian in April this year, that some people were unwilling to appear on Insiders with him, “because Bolt’s minions harass them afterwards”. Jason Wilson, a lecturer in digital communications at the University of Wollongong, described being “Bolted” in early August 2009 after he criticised Bolt’s performance on Insiders. Bolt’s post the next day featured a photograph of Wilson and an inaccurate description of him as working for GetUp!, and it accused him of using the Pravda model of journalism. For the next week Wilson was subject to abusive emails, many of which contained Bolt’s post cut-and-pasted into the message. One was even c.c.’d to Bolt, like a dog bringing a stick back to its master. Some of the emails threatened violence although most simply offered abuse, calling Wilson “a prick”, “an insignificant, parasitic socialist wally”, “a smug little shit” and a “leftoid, as in haemorrhoid, as in a continual pain in the arse …”
These incidents illustrate how readily readers of the blog can be revved up without Bolt explicitly directing them. “He was influenced by Howard’s nod and a wink,” says Jonathan Green, editor of the ABC online journal The Drum and a colleague of Bolt’s at the Herald in the late 1980s. “That’s why the blogosphere works so well. You don’t have to say much; you keep your hands clean but it comes out in the comments. You are setting up the discussion.” By claiming not to read the comments, Bolt was able to absolve himself of responsibility for what was said, apologise and remove posts if a complaint was made. But always after the event.
*
Although Bolt has been writing two or more provocative columns per week for the Herald Sun since the late 1990s, it has only been in the past five or so years that he has expanded his reach – and his influence – to the huge national audience he has today. He is now syndicated in Sydney, Brisbane, Darwin and Adelaide. Almost 12 million people around Australia pick up the newspapers that carry Bolt’s columns, and 3.5 million actually read those columns. His blog, which he only started in 2006 and which he updates as often as 12 times per day, received just over 3 million page views from 272,000 unique visitors in August this year. But Bolt’s ambition is not confined to print. He seems to understand the greater influence that comes from radio and television and, at the same time as he started to harness the power of the internet to promote his conservative views, he began his quest to become the Bill O’Reilly of Australia.
Bill O’Reilly is the combative and inflammatory ‘conservative with a capital-C’ star performer on the Murdoch-owned Fox News network in the US. The O’Reilly Factor is the most watched cable news program on American television. O’Reilly is also a syndicated columnist, author and commentator, who until 2009 also had a high-rating syndicated radio program. O’Reilly was hired by Roger Ailes in 1996, when Fox News was starting up, and the two men are synonymous with the stunning success of the network.
In 2006, through a third party, Andrew Bolt sought guidance from Roger Ailes on how he could replicate the Fox News model Down Under. “He saw the political power that comes from right-wing ranting,” says a colleague of Bolt’s, “and he appointed himself to do it.” Roger Ailes, formerly “one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican Party”, according to a 2011 Rolling Stone profile, is the chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group. He is responsible for the network outstripping CNN and all other rivals to become the number one cable network in the US and, to quote theNew York Times, for making Fox News “the profit engine of the News Corporation”. Although Murdoch publicly defends Ailes, his family begs to differ: “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to,” Matthew Freud, who is married to Elisabeth Murdoch, said last year.
Bolt had been introduced to Ailes earlier in 2006 at a three-day, high-level gathering of News Corporation editors, managers, columnists and their spouses hosted by Rupert Murdoch at the legendary Pebble Beach Resorts, on the Monterey Peninsula in California. ‘Imagining the Future’ enabled key News staff to hear world leaders address the big issues: the invited speakers included Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Shimon Peres, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Newt Gingrich, Bono and former US Vice President Al Gore, who showed his film An Inconvenient Truth.
Afterwards, Bolt and fellow conservative columnist Piers Akerman asked Gore some confronting questions, disputing the information contained in the film. Maybe Bolt saw himself as auditioning for bigger things because the exchange deteriorated into “a full-on barney”, according to someone present, with Gore shouting at Bolt.
Roger Ailes rebuffed the approach from Bolt, who had to wait until May this year to get his start on television. Some have been surprised that Sky News (part owned by News Corporation) had not picked him up. It was Network Ten that started The Bolt Report, a half-hour political show airing at 10 am on Sundays – just after Insiders, Bolt’s television launching pad. In November last year Bolt had written a column referring to “my strong and not entirely uninformed hunch” about mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s reasons for buying a sufficient stake in the Ten Network to get herself a seat on the board. “Rinehart is on a mission,” he wrote. “Channel 10 is just the vehicle.” One of Bolt’s former colleagues thought it read like a job application. This impression was reinforced by a reader comment on Bolt’s blog. “If Ms Gina Rinehart is reading this column, or someone in her office is, then I’d like to pass on this piece of advice,” posted Rosemary of Queensland. “Australia desperately needs Conservative voices in the media – especially in free-to-air media. In America they have Fox News …” Whether or not there was a connection, five months later Andrew Bolt had his own show on Ten.
*
At one minute past midnight on 30 August, Andrew Bolt posted the following tantalising words on his blog: “No politics until further notice. Principles to weigh up. Faith to keep. Sorry.” The usually prolific opinionator went on a one-man strike for 24 hours. His followers went berserk: “An Andrew Bolt blog without politics is like Masterchef without food!” was one of 732 comments that mostly supported Bolt as he addressed his quandary. The next day his column, titled ‘How Gillard Tried to Kill a Story’, told his readers: “I was considering resigning as a News Limited columnist.” The reason? “I thought this company that I love, that I have long admired for its defence of free speech, had caved in to pressure from a Prime Minister to close down reporting of a matter of public interest.” That matter was a 16-year-old – and much denied – claim involving aspects of Julia Gillard’s former relationship with a former AWU union official, Bruce Wilson. Bolt had headlined a Saturday post: “A tip on something that may force Gillard to resign”. He reported that a witness with a statutory declaration “will come forward and directly implicate Julia Gillard in another scandal involving the misuse of union funds”. Thus alerted, the prime minister contacted News Limited Chairman and CEO John Hartigan, thus setting in train the events that led to Bolt’s strike. Bolt’s response was remarkable. He accused his employer, News Limited, of “an overreaction” in removing an article by Glenn Milne from the Australian’s website, and railed against News Limited for deleting his own posts on the subject. Milne’s article, which had also canvassed the Bruce Wilson matter, had prompted the prime ministerial rage, an apparent threat of a defamation action and had led to an elaborate apology from News Limited. This is not the first time Bolt has argued with his bosses. He took on the chairman about climate change during a Murdoch visit to Melbourne, says Bruce Guthrie, who was editor-in-chief of the Herald Sun in 2007 and 2008. They ended up agreeing to differ. “In some ways he is quite brave to take on the Murdochs on that issue,” says Stephen Mayne, long-time Murdoch watcher who was business editor at the Herald when Bolt was opinion editor. “It is very unusual for a News person to take on management.” Nevertheless, it is one thing to have a private argument with Rupert Murdoch, quite another to accuse publicly John Hartigan of overreacting to a prime ministerial complaint. Is he perhaps concerned that his employer’s commitment to free speech – his in particular – is not quite as solid as he had assumed?
Bolt has reason to be anxious about this. He is awaiting a judgement from the Federal Court on a charge of racial vilification following a 2009 column, ‘White is the New Black’. “Meet the white face of a new black race – the political Aborigine,” the column began sneeringly. He accused a number of prominent light-skinned Aborigines (who he maintained were or could pass for Caucasian) of opting for an identity “that has political and career clout”. Bolt showed no understanding or sympathy for the anguish the issue of skin colour causes in many Indigenous communities. He portrayed the matter as merely one of opportunism based on the benefits associated with being “an official Aborigine”. (He made no mention of the disadvantages.)
But he was careless with his research. He accused lawyer and writer Larissa Behrendt of being “a professional Aborigine … despite looking almost as German as her father”; her late father was Aboriginal. Writer Anita Heiss was accused of taking “a job reserved for Aborigines” at Koori Radio, where she was in fact a volunteer.
Bolt has quite a reputation for factual errors in his writing. Sydney academic Catharine Lumby provided me with several examples of how Bolt consistently got facts about her wrong, in ways that suited his agenda. In 2002 Victorian magistrate Jelena Popovic successfully pursued a libel claim in relation to a Bolt article; the judgement cost Bolt’s employers almost $250,000 in damages to Popovic, as well as the costs of the trial and an unsuccessful appeal to the High Court. The racial vilification judgement was expected in late September, as we were going to press. The plaintiffs are not seeking money, but want an apology from the Herald Sun, and an injunction to prevent Bolt writing similar material in future.
If the judgement is in Bolt’s favour, he will claim vindication and a victory for free speech. And he had assumed that, if it went against him, News Limited would mount a strenuous free speech campaign on his behalf. But the landscape looks a little different now, following the prime minister’s claim to have been defamed by the Australian. Cabinet has been considering “going to war” with News Limited, possibly by withholding government advertising, and on 14 September the government announced an inquiry into the media in Australia. In such a climate, will News rethink its strategy?
*
The emergence of Andrew Bolt as a powerful right-wing commentator has surprised many people who have known him over the years. Certainly the Andrew Bolt of today bears very little resemblance to the shy 20 year old who took up a cadetship at the Age in 1979, or to the polite young man who was hired as an assistant features editor on Eric Beecher’s Herald in the late 1980s. Those who knew him then are startled by the transformation. One colleague from the Age said she never found him to be opinionated and was utterly amazed to return to Melbourne after a few years overseas to “find that he was such a personality”. “He was forceful but he was not as right-wing then or we would not have got on so well,” says journalist Shelley Gare, who as features editor at the Herald in the late 1980s was Bolt’s boss. Bruce Guthrie was similarly surprised: “When I left the Herald in ’89 he was a very attentive assistant to an editor and when I returned in 2007 he was not only the most powerful person within the paper but also within News. It was truly a metamorphosis.”
For many, it is not an entirely convincing reinvention. “It’s a performance piece,” says Catherine Deveny, comedian and writer (whose columns Bolt has, surprisingly, said he reads). “If it wasn’t so dangerous it would be hilarious.” A woman who lived with Bolt in the early 1980s says, “He certainly was not the conservative figure he is now. It’s like he found a niche.” Later that same decade the writer and academic Robert Manne wrote for Bolt when he was editor of the opinion pages. “He was conservative but so was I,” says Manne. Ten years later – Manne’s politics having changed – Bolt attacked him at a multicultural conference: “I was astonished he was the same man,” Manne told me. “He obviously saw there was reputation and money to be made from being conservative. There were no examples of such people in Australia. In the mid ’90s this type emerged and he was one of the first.”
So is Andrew Bolt the opinionator a construct, the creation of a media-savvy brain that saw the opportunities offered by the internet and by the absence of significant right-wing voices among the commentariat in the mid 1990s? A great many people think so. A former journalist who has worked with Bolt says, “A big part of me admires Bolt for having built all this out of nothing. But it is so cynical because that is not who he is.” Steve Harris, editor-in-chief of the Herald and Weekly Times Group from 1992 to 1997, remembers a conversation with Bolt: “There was no shortage of people filling the left-hand side, I told him, but there was a shortage of people of the Right. He responded by saying, ‘Yes, there is a shortage in that area, maybe I can help fill that space.’”
And he has filled it in spades. But, unlike an earlier generation of conservative print columnists, who explored ideas, Bolt understands that to succeed in today’s media you need to create controversy. The media is increasingly dominated by commentary and opinion, by The Drum and The Punch, by Q&A and Can of Worms, by personal blogs and newspaper reader comments online. Media and politics today are less a contest of ideas and more a continuing conflict of opinion. “Bolt’s genius is that he’s always finding the fault lines and finding an argument,” Lachlan Harris, press secretary to Kevin Rudd when he was prime minister, told me. The resultant toxicity of our politics is only going to get worse. “In 2004, we estimated that people were getting 70% of political information from news outlets, television or papers,” says Harris. “Now it is flipped: most people get most of their political information from opinion, from a medium that is dependent upon division of opinion.”
Although Bolt describes himself as a conservative columnist, he is less a William Safire than a Billy Graham. He is like an evangelist, providing fixed points of reference for people who feel confused in a world where certainty has eroded. He tells people what they should be thinking – and hordes of followers lap it up.
Like the Fox jocks, Bolt tends to stick to just a few themes – “no stolen generation”, “honour the Churches”, “frown on divorce”, “crack down on welfare”, “stop the cult of victimhood”, “stop immigration”, “end multiculturalism” – and to hammer them over and over. Top of the list in the right-wing songbook, though, is the non-existence of climate change. Bolt is utterly obdurate when it comes to the subject. “I thought he wrote too much about climate change,” says Bruce Guthrie, “but he was immoveable.”
Bolt is credited with being an important factor in the collapse of the political consensus for action on climate change that existed with the major parties in 2007. Just five years ago, the Lowy Institute poll found 68% of respondents agreed that global warming was a serious and pressing problem, and that “we should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs.” In 2011, that number had fallen to 41%. “The strange distortion of the climate change debate is down to a few people and he’s one of them,” says Jonathan Green. Bolt gives no quarter, dismissing “warmists”, the scientific consensus on climate change and, in 2008 quoting Christopher Monckton, one of his preferred sources: “The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.”
You would never guess Bolt used to write for the ‘Environs’ column in the Age. Or that his younger brother, Richard, helped develop Australia’s first comprehensive national cap-and-trade scheme. “Climate change threatens the world’s and Australia’s economic activities, communities and ecosystems,” was the key message of the former National Emissions Trading Taskforce’s final framework report, released in December 2007. “It is in Australia’s interests to promote international action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” Richard Bolt was deputy chair of this taskforce and, in May 2010, the Gillard government appointed him to the advisory board of the Australian Centre for Renewable Energy.
*
Andrew Bolt would not speak to me for this article, not even to confirm details of his biography. “If I help to get some things right I will give authority to the rest,” he told me in an email. I have had to rely on my own research and interviews with people who know Bolt. Along the way, I have encountered the widely held opinion that Bolt is South African. “It sounds like an Afrikaner accent,” says Shelley Gare. “I just assumed he was South African.” She is not the only one to have made this assumption; some people even attribute his opinions to these supposed origins.
In 1957 Mijndert Huibert Bolt and his fiancée, Margaretha Korenstra, applied to migrate to Australia. Mijndert Bolt, then aged 24, from Utrecht in the Netherlands, had trained as a teacher, although he described himself as a clerk on his immigration application form. Korenstra, aged 26, was a shorthand typist and came from Aalsmeer, a town 13 kilometres south-west of Amsterdam famous for its flower market, the largest in the world, and notorious for having had a Nazi mayor during World War II. The couple undertook to marry before embarkation. The selection officer who interviewed Bolt said the applicant had created a “favourable impression on appearance and attitude” and that he “should assimilate readily enough”. Both applicants underwent medical and other checks. They were found to be in good health and to have no criminal record; they were confirmed not to have engaged in “political delinquency during occupation 1940–45”; and their “political reliability” was assessed as “good”.
The couple married on 16 January 1958 and travelled from Holland in March with an assisted passage under the Netherlands Australia Migration Agreement of 1951. Once they arrived in Adelaide, they changed their names to Mike and Margaret. Mike set about getting his qualifications to teach in Australia while working in a brush factory and as a bus conductor. Andrew, the first of their four children, was born on 26 September 1959. Once Mike got his teaching certificate, the family began what would become years of moving around according to his postings. They went first to Elizabeth, a satellite town of mostly English migrants north of Adelaide, then to Darwin for six years, on to Tarcoola on the edge of the Nullarbor – where Mike obtained his first job as principal – to Warramboo on Eyre Peninsula and, finally, to Tailem Bend, a small town on the Murray River, 100 kilometres south-east of Adelaide.
Between 1951 and 1970 about 160,000 Dutch nationals migrated to Australia. Today the Dutch make up 2.6% of the overseas-born population of Australia, and a further 240,000 people, such as Andrew Bolt and his siblings, claim Dutch ancestry. The Dutch were known as “model migrants”, according to Nonja Peters in a paper on Dutch settlement issued by the National Archives of Australia: “Anglo-conformity became the hallmark of Dutch identity in Australia.” They had a word for it: Aanpassen (‘fitting in’). Mike and Margaret Bolt exemplified this, and it appears to have profoundly influenced their oldest child. In August this year, after the London riots, Andrew Bolt wrote that Australia should “cut immigration until we get better at integrating the people we’ve brought in already”.
When he was 16, Andrew Bolt formed a band that used to play at dances in the area surrounding Murray Bridge, the largest town on the river. He played the drums. The budding musicians wore red vests, grey shirts, polka-dot bow ties and black trousers, and played songs such as ‘A Swingin’ Safari’, ‘Pearly Shells’ and ‘Running Bear’. Many years later, Bolt recalled those gigs: “We’d play while the women put their plates in the side room, and the men chatted at the front entrance … We’d play while dads danced with their daughters, and aunts taught steps to their nephews … There were no drunks, and we none of us ever imagined people actually took drugs. There were no fights, either, of course.”
This was “my Australia – with more heart, more life and greater decency than many artists credit,” wrote Bolt in 2004. “I know at times it could seem dull, and how often our cultural elite seem in horror of that evenness of our temperament and history, trying to make us more dramatic by inventing genocides that never happened, satanic legions of racists that never lived, and rebellions out of a few shots.”
In this same Australia, one of the mums told the boys in the band that they should visit “the transsexual” who lived on the edge of town to learn to play dance music. The word “transsexual” was not used, Bolt said, “so it took me a while to wonder why the woman who taught us to play every dance from the military two step to the ‘Pride of Erin’ had such a low voice and hid her face behind her hand.” But the boys got used to it: “No fuss, no politics,” Bolt wrote. It apparently never occurred to him how lonely a life “the only gay in the village” probably led, and that much of the “fuss” and the “politics” around sexuality and other matters Bolt would rather keep under wraps is all about enabling people to feel included while freely expressing their differences, not concealing them.
*
I could find only two profiles where Bolt had co-operated with the writers, both of them appearing in the Institute of Public Affairs Review. In June 2004 he gave an interview to Andrew McIntyre, then the IPA’s public relations manager and, in January this year, a more than 9000-word profile of Bolt by Tony Barry appeared. At the time Barry was the institute’s director of finance and operations, before which he had been press secretary to Malcolm Turnbull, then Opposition leader. Barry was let go after he was notoriously filmed by Australian Story using Google to look up the meaning of ‘concoct’ during the Godwin Grech emails affair. Bolt confided many previously undisclosed details of his life to Barry, including the revelation that he had once been “a minder for a belly-dancer”. If this titbit was designed to make Bolt seem more exotic and interesting to his fans, it infuriated the woman who was once engaged to Bolt and who lived with him for the best part of six years.
I met the former belly dancer at Mr Tulk, the buzzy cafe inside the State Library of Victoria. Sophia Wilson, as I will call her (she does not want her name used), an attractive, articulate dark-haired woman now in her early fifties, works as a business consultant and executive coach. She was enraged that Bolt had characterised her only by the part-time dancing job that helped finance her study to become a teacher. “Belly dancing has a connotation of salaciousness but it is a traditional dance,” Wilson told me as we sipped herbal teas. “As if I needed a minder!”
“It suggests a stereotypical image of Middle Eastern men trying to paw me. It’s inaccurate and frankly ridiculous,” she said. She was also deeply offended that Bolt had used her to add some spice to his public image when she had supported him through the 1980 journalists’ strike and his mother’s protracted terminal illness. “Whilst Andrew might have a high IQ, his EQ [emotional intelligence] is obviously underdeveloped, he appears to be blind to the impact that his actions have on others and then takes it personally when they respond. It is as though his public persona has become enmeshed with his personal identity, which is quite sad.” She got in touch with Bolt, who immediately and profusely apologised.
Wilson and Bolt met when she was working as a secretary to one of the editors of the Age and he was a cadet journalist. She remembers him as being quite introverted, romantic, restless and argumentative, and he always enjoyed being the devil’s advocate. He also had strong ethics and a sense of social justice. He opposed sensationalist journalism, once refusing an assignment to doorknock a Vietnamese family on the anniversary of the murder of their small child in an inner-city public housing estate. Bolt read widely, perhaps trying to make up for dropping out of university after just one year. He introduced Wilson to his World Record Club collection of music, especially opera, while she overhauled his wardrobe and broadened his culinary experience. The relationship eventually foundered, mainly because of “interminable arguments, which ended up in a battle of wills”. Wilson instigated the break. “We are fundamentally different and, whilst we had some great times together,” she told me, “I was not cast in the mould of the ‘little woman’ that I think he was secretly craving.”
In late 1983, the year his mother died from cancer, Bolt took leave without pay from the Age and headed for Europe. He spent some time working at the flower market at Aalsmeer, meeting up with his mother’s relatives, and travelled to Germany and Ireland. Wilson showed me the Claddagh ring Bolt sent her from Ireland (a traditional ring worn one way for love, then turned after marriage), and the small diamond engagement ring he’d given her earlier. As he travelled, he imagined himself as Peer Gynt – the hero of one of his favourite operas – addressing Wilson in his letters as Solveig, the woman who waited while Peer Gynt roamed the world. “I think that in some ways he probably saw himself on some romantic quest to achieve something,” Wilson said, “which I guess, depending on your criteria, he has.” The theatre writer Alison Croggon has described Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play on which the opera was based, as “a pitiless self-portrait of a man fleeing the most essential conflicts within himself, endlessly seduced by his own trolls”.
Bolt returned to Australia and followed his by now ex-fiancée to Darwin, where she had a six-week stint belly dancing at the Palmerston Tavern. At a loose end, he went to the local Commonwealth Employment Service and came away with a job as a political staffer to John Reeves, the ALP federal member for the Northern Territory. The job lasted only a few months as Reeves lost his seat to Paul Everingham in the December 1984 election, but Bolt had befriended Gary Gray (now special minister of state in the Gillard government), then on the staff of NT Opposition leader Bob Collins, making a connection that would prove useful down the track.
Bolt returned to journalism in Melbourne, first at the Age and then in November 1985 at Neil Mitchell’s Herald, where he met Sally Morrell, another journalist. But he was still restless, and left the Herald to travel to India to freelance for a year. He returned in 1987 and followed Morrell to Canberra where she was working in the press gallery. He called up his old mate Gary Gray, now an organiser for the federal ALP, who got him a job with the National Media Liaison Service (the infamous aNiMaLS government media management agency). It was a short stint. Bolt left after the July 1987 election when Bob Hawke was re-elected, and headed back to Adelaide to become publicity director of the South Australian Opera.
Again it was a short-lived job. The company was in a state of near collapse with administrative and financial problems; for a time Bolt was acting general manager, while arts consultant Justin MacDonnell was brought in to sort out the mess. He remembers Bolt as polite and well dressed. “I thought he was bright and shrewd,” MacDonnell told me. “I would have been happy for him to stay on.” But journalism called. In mid 1988 Bolt took a job as assistant features manager on the Eric Beecher Herald. Rupert Murdoch had acquired the Herald and Weekly Times Group in 1987, and in 1990 he appointed Piers Akerman to oversee the merger of the paper with the down-market, high-circulation tabloid the Sun News Pictorial. The resultant paper, the Herald Sun (or the ‘Hun’ as it is popularly called) has been Andrew Bolt’s home ever since.
In 1989 Bolt married Sally Morrell. Today they have three children aged between ten and 16. These days, in whatever spare time he has, he grows tulips and engages his passion for opera. A friend of the belly-dancing Sophia Wilson compared her relationship with Andrew Bolt to his current one this way: “You were his moonwalk phase, before he settled down at the Little House on the Prairie.”
Bolt seemed to be a fan of Julia Gillard’s while she was deputy but since she became prime minister his tirades against her have been so obsessive they hint at a fundamental discomfort with women in leadership roles. Back in 2002 Bolt opposed Labor’s decision to guarantee that 40% of all winnable seats went to women because “women are more likely to act irrationally”. Bolt argued that the greater likelihood of women (as compared with men) to favour alternative medicines, yoga, horoscopes, feng shui and the like made them unfit for holding office. Not only were female politicians more likely to be “superstitious New Agers” but “more dangerously, they’ll tend to show … an irrational fear of useful things like nuclear power and genetically engineered crops”. Bolt asserted that the ALP quotas would produce dud sheilas: “given so many talented women, particularly mothers, actually prefer not to have full-on careers or buck-stops-here jobs”. But his greatest fear – I kid you not – was the possibility that our parliament would become populated by witches. Noting that the latest census had found the number of witches in Australia had jumped more than four-fold in just six years, he stated that the risk of having a woman at the top was just too great. “We’ve had enough ministers practise voodoo economics and do vanishing tricks with our money,” he wrote, “without Labor putting a witch in charge.”
*
These days, with his operatic wanderlust over, Andrew Bolt deals with trolls of an entirely different nature. The term is used today to describe people who post abusive or off-message material on blogs or in chat rooms. It has also become a general term of abuse on Bolt’s blog: “Go home troll. Your village is missing an idiot,” was a posting in March 2009 by the same man who made the offensive comments about David Marr. The comments that are made on blogs or on Twitter are often quite startling for their crudeness.
For newspapers, such banter presents a particular challenge because it is deemed to be published just as any other journalist-generated content is. Reader comments and, importantly, links to articles and videos made by readers are subject to the same laws of defamation, and most newspapers are now trying to come to grips with how to encourage reader participation while preventing abuses of law and taste. The problem is exacerbated by people using fake names, or inventive ‘handles’ – “far canal of perf”, “bigfatpaganprincess of Queensland”, “finally had enough” and “rightwingnucleararmeddeathrabbit” are just several of Bolt’s trolls – and not being obliged to disclose their real identities.
That is about to change.
“We are moving towards a position of having greater control over what people leave on our website and we will be in a position to trace back comments if we have to,” says Phil Gardner. Two important changes have already occurred. The Herald and Weekly Times Group now has a ‘pre-moderation policy’, whereby posts are directed to a holding site where they will sit for anything up to half an hour until they can be checked. And this is done in house – by sub-editors who can be required to moderate upwards of several thousand comments per day.
*
Bolt’s television start has been shaky, and his daily radio stint on MTR with shock-jock Steve Price gets less than a 2% share of Melbourne’s morning ratings. On television Bolt is stilted and awkward and does not look comfortable in front of the camera but he is getting plenty of help. The Melbourne-based The Bolt Report is well resourced, with three local producers. “He gets a fair bit of coaching,” says a Ten insider, “but they are confident he can eventually do it.” That confidence does not yet extend to filming the show live. They start shooting the three segments hours before the program goes to air. Insiders is filmed live, as is Meet The Press, which follows The Bolt Report and which has received a welcome ratings boost from its new timeslot. (It was previously at the unfriendly hour of 8 am.) “We call it the Bolt-led recovery,” says Tom Krause, Meet The Press supervising producer. Critics have noted that the “furious agreement” between host and panellists on The Bolt Report does not make for great television. “He was best when being challenged,” says Barrie Cassidy of his Insiders appearances. “Preaching down the barrel of a camera is not very persuasive.” Bolt’s guests have included Tony Abbott, John Howard, Peter Costello and regular Michael Kroger, as well as Labor outsiders such as Michael Costa, Belinda Neal and Mark Latham, but no federal government minister has yet appeared. Unlike Insiders, where host Cassidy interviews guests and encourages divergence on his panel of journalists, Bolt declaims and opines, inviting guests to simply agree with him.
It seems Bolt has a solid, if fluctuating, audience. The show debuted with 163,000 viewers (and another 123,000 at the encore on Sunday afternoon), dipped to 100,000 in June but stacked up a solid 168,000 on 4 September, just 20,000 viewers shy of the Insiders audience, although on 18 September it crashed to just 86,000. Bolt has started hinting he’d like the show to be extended to an hour. He already does commentary on the Ten Network news and if, as is being speculated within Ten, he improves his performance sufficiently to handle live to air, The Bolt Report (with a name change to The Bolt Factor, perhaps?) will move to prime time. It is widely believed that MTR owner John Singleton is seeking to buy the top-rating 3AW from Fairfax. “If Bolt ends up on 3AW that would give him enormous power,” says Eric Beecher, owner of Crikey. “A 15% rating; for a lot of people that would be very scary.”
Taken together, the columns, the blogs, the radio and the television constitute a formidable media presence and a powerful voice that seems destined to just keep growing. Bolt does not use Facebook but in recent weeks has begun to tweet links to his blogs. On 21 September he had just 465 followers (compared with Annabel Crabb’s 38,894 and Laurie Oakes’s 33,887 on the same day) but the potential is there for his reach to grow exponentially once his followers sign up and start re-tweeting him. It’s a far cry from the junior sports reporter for the Age who in 1982 covered the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane by riding inside Matilda, the giant kangaroo mascot.
On 9 September The Power Index, a publication of Crikey, anointed Andrew Bolt as the nation’s most influential ‘megaphone’. “Print, TV, radio: there’s no medium this conservative can’t conquer” was the citation. They added: “Bolt bites … his willingness to bully, bait and ridicule is crucial to understanding his power.” Bolt’s response was to blog: “Gosh, world domination is easier than I thought … Basically I just type stuff at a keyboard in my study with an imprudent lack of concern for the consequences …”
– 21 September
RELATED ITEMS
Andrew Bolt's blog: homophobic comments on David Marr, Bolt's wife involved | #Ausmedia
If the makers of At Home With Julia are looking for a sequel, then the last few days would provide plenty of illuminating material for a comedy called At Home With The Bolts.
The first issue causing grief was the revelation by Anne Summers in The Monthly that Andrew Bolt was previously engaged to a former work colleague at The Age. The woman in question has even gone so far as to provide The Monthly with a statutory declaration and showed copies of letters from Bolt.
Bolt has quite clearly accused both her and Anne Summers of concocting this fact, but The Monthly’s editor Ben Naparstek told The Australian today: “I have seen letters from Andrew that he wrote to her saying that he was excited to be her fiancé.”
Oh dear. Either the mysterious fiancee is an elaborate hoaxer and document forger or Bolt is being loose with the truth.
The other point of tension in the Bolt household has been over what Bolt claims was a “despicable defamation” of his wife by The Monthly.
Jonathan Green, editor of The Drum, last week carried this extract from the 6700-word Summers profile on Aunty’s opinion and commentary site. The most contentious point related to the publication of some appallingly homophobic comments about David Marr on Bolt’s blog the morning after Marr famously turned his back and started reading the paper whilst Bolt launched into one of his many climate change rants on Insiders.
You only imagine the discussions inside the Bolt bunker in Malvern which led to Green first publishing and then later withdrawing the following two paragraphs, the first being from the Summers profile:
Marr accepted Bolt’s apology and his assurance he had not seen the posts. What Bolt did not disclose was that the person who was moderating the blog and past whom these comments had “snuck” was his wife, Sally Morrell. “It was an official arrangement for his wife to moderate his blog,” Phil Gardner, editor-in-chief of the Herald & Weekly Times, told me. That arrangement ended about a year ago, he said, and Bolt’s blog is now moderated in-house at the Herald Sun.
(Editor’s Note: Andrew Bolt in correspondence on Friday afternoon disputes this point. He says that Sally Morrell was one of several moderators of the blog and far from the most involved. Bolt insists that none of the posts reported here were moderated by her. Documents provided by him suggest that in fact she was not moderating the blog at the times in question and that the posts in question were published by either Bolt or another staffer. He says: “I did much of the moderating myself on those days and through sheer carelessness through pressure of work, I almost certainly let those through myself. Sally helped on the blog for just a couple of hours a day and did not work the particular shift on which those mistakes were made. I deeply regret my error and am horrified that Sally is now given the blame.”)
Whilst Bolt might have been mending fences with his wife, this line of defence clearly causes a major problem with Marr. After all, how can Bolt simultaneously admit to Green that he let those comments through, when he denied it directly to Marr and his Herald Sun editor, Simon Pristel, at the time.
Marr today made the following comments to Crikey:
“In my view, those horrible posts were Andrew Bolt’s revenge after I made a fool of him on Insiders that morning. I don’t feel defamed by those posts but here is Andrew Bolt ridiculously hyper-ventilating when this is meant to be about my hurt feelings.
“I am absolutely on the side of accuracy in this saga and believe Andrew has got himself into all sorts of trouble because he lied to his employer and he lied to me about who let through those posts.
“Bolt simply cannot maintain three separate truths on this matter. Was it him? Was it his wife? Or was it this mystery other party who is “so decent” they cannot be named?
“He needs to address the error. He admitted to Jonathan Green that it was probably him, so why did he deny it to me and his editor, Simon Pristel, at the time?”
Meanwhile, the rest of Bolt’s world is also under pressure. Mark Day has today predicted that his six-figure MTR gig is about to end because Gina Rinehart and John Singleton have not been able to get a bid together to buy any of Fairfax’s radio assets.
The Bolt Report also produced woeful ratings yesterday and the prospect that News Corp will fund an expensive appeal against the Federal Court judgment is looking less likely by the day, especially now that the original columns are carrying the following in bold:
“The below article was the subject of a decision of the Federal Court on 28 September 2011 that it contravened section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth). To view a full copy of the Federal Court decision please access the following link: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCA/2011/1103.html.”
News Ltd can’t even get its facts right on this. The Australian’s Media section editor Stephen Brook today claimed “the Herald Sun has until Wednesday to decide if it will appeal”. Truth be known, they have 21 days to appeal after orders are made, but orders are not yet made although some lively revelations are expected in court over the coming days.
Facts are important in journalism and for all Bolt’s fury, Summers and The Monthly are not making any concessions on the accuracy of what they’ve published.
The same can’t be said for what Walsh and Marr are saying about Bolt’s approach to telling the truth. As for Morrell’s attitude, one can only imagine.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
#ACMA probes channel 9's pokies propaganda | Power index
Broadcast authority ACMA has commenced an investigation into comments made by Channel Nine rugby league commentators Ray Warren and Phil Gould, as fallout continues to spread from their anti-poker machine reform editorial.
An ACMA spokesman confirmed the investigation this morning, telling The Power Index that a statement would be released shortly.
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie and fellow anti-gambling campaigner Senator Nick Xenophon have also written a letter to Channel Nine demanding an explanation over the comments.
Last week The Power Index reported that Clubs Australia was given advance notice by Nine that the editorial was going ahead. The lobby group said it did not pay Nine for the spot.
At the time Nine did not respond to questions about who commissioned the editorial. Today a spokesperson told The Power Index the network would be providing a "considered response" on the issues raised by Wilkie and Xenophon. The spokesperson did not return a second email asking about the ACMA probe in time for today's deadline.
"We are confident we are not in breach of any code provisions," a spokesperson said. "That said, we do not intend to offer a running commentary on the matter in the media."
Warren and Gould have come under attack from Wilkie and Xenophon for the half time message in which they slammed mooted pre-commitment technology for poker machines.
Senator Xenophon says he is "still pretty stunned" by Warren and Gould's comments which were "so clumsily worked into the commentary."
"We need answers from the network about who actually authorised this," he told The Power Index this morning. "Ray Warren says it was given to him as a job to do, the question is by whom."
Yesterday Warren told Fairfax radio that he did community service announcements "regularly" and the September 23 editorial "was no different". He said he believed the controversial policy could lead to job losses.
But the day after the match Warren co-hosted a Triple M sports show called Dead Set Legends, on which he revealed the comments were scripted, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
''It was a directive from up top that it be read by at least somebody, so I read it,'' Warren told co-host Dan Ginnane.
Warren said he supported the message and while he wasn't sure, believed it was paid for:
''I think it was an ad, if you like, it sounded like an ad. I think it was done on behalf of the rugby league, who is fully supportive of the clubs.''
Those comments seem to contradict a letter to a complainant from Nine's Network Compliance Manager Shelley Bates, who said the message was "purely the opining of the commentators" and "in no way an advertisement".
According to Media Watch, Bates said: "The comments were part of the program content and were in no way an advertisement. Furthermore the Nine Network did not receive any payment or other benefits for the broadcast of the information."
What is still unclear is how involved Phil Gould was in writing the remarks. In his response to Warren's initial half time comments, Gould called mandatory pre-commitment a "rubbish policy" that "won't work" and "will hurt."
Gould is a key Penrith Panthers identity, having been recently installed as football operations manager. Last year the Penrith Leagues Club took home more than $90 million from poker machines.
Gould has also been staunchly anti-pokies reform. In a column published in July he wrote that mandatory pre-commitment technology was "not a policy designed to benefit the Australian people".
The politics of race go beyond black and white | The Punch
You don’t often hear people challenging someone’s claim to be Italian. Or Swedish, or American. Generally you accept what they say even if they don’t have an accent, or a funny surname, or blond hair.
Cartoon: Peter Nicholson
Aboriginality, on the other hand, apparently remains a contested field.
The Federal Court last week decided that high-profile and controversial columnist Andrew Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act in his columns ‘It’s so hip to be black’, and ‘White fellas in the black’, which questioned why nine prominent ‘fair-skinned Aborigines’ identified as Aboriginal.
Bolt has (loudly and publicly) claimed that the decision is an attempt to silence him and muzzle debate on race – and indeed the court’s decision will make some people more hesitant to speak or write frankly.
Bolt says he writes in order to unify, rather than divide people.
But the court’s decision and the renewed prominence of those articles have sparked more malignant and divisive chatter about whether people ‘choose’ to be Aboriginal when it suits them – what Bolt called a ‘popular’ choice.
Why would you accuse someone of choosing to be Aboriginal just to get some hazy, occasional benefit? Identity is a deeply personal thing, not a whimsical choice that happens in a vacuum.
Anyone who thinks someone of mixed genetic heritage would elevate their Aboriginality for personal gain wilfully misunderstands humanity in general. That many can feel proud of their heritage rather than ashamed as they may have in times past is a triumph.
To think this is a ploy is utterly arse-backwards.
It’s a symptom of this strange but creeping belief of some that the most disadvantaged are in fact unfairly advantaged.
These little Aussie battlers see their hard-earned money propping up the welfare system, and it fair makes them see red. Why should they work their gnarly fingers to the bone so people can sit around on their arses all day?
With their overblown sense of entitlement they’ve lost sight of what it means to live in a society; a society that has an obligation to the less fortunate.
They think people who have been sideswiped by colonisation, sent into a tailspin of poverty, ill health and despair, people who suffer appalling health outcomes, shorter lifespans and intergenerational unemployment, are somehow better off than they are.
The same people look at refugees making a new life for themselves and forward fraudulent emails claiming they take home huge amounts of cash in government benefits.
They probably think people choose to be disabled just to get the good carparks.
In Australia we prize individuality, we celebrate the ‘battler’ eking out an existence to keep his family fed, and in doing so we seem to have eroded the higher purpose of being a good group; a functioning civilisation.
The ‘tribe’ has shrunk from being a community of people to being a household of people, with many sure that their obligations end at the front door.
People see the distinct welfare for Aboriginal people – Abstudy, for example, or dedicated scholarships or housing – as favouritism, or misplaced atonement.
It’s a hard-hearted, self-interested bunker mentality.
Put aside the judge-a-society-by-how-it-treats-its-most-vulnerable platitudes, and look at the pragmatics.
Breaking the cycle of disadvantage through offering extra opportunities is a way to end the welfare dependency. Give people a leg up so they no longer need a hand out.
It worked for girls – who have come from behind on academic achievements but thanks to extra support are now in front; so it is now boys who are behind in school.
To all those who envy the ‘advantages’ of the vulnerable, one can only hope you one day enjoy them.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Angry Anderson: A Nat on Sydney's Nthn Beaches #Auspol
Watch out Peter Garrett: another bald, outspoken rock star has his sights set on Parliament House. And he's determined to bring Julia Gillard's government – and her carbon tax – down.
Rose Tattoo front man Angry Anderson may be a cityslicker through and through – he was born in Melbourne and lives in Sydney's northern beaches – but he wants to run for the National Party at the next federal election.
The self-described "lapsed Labor supporter" says he joined the Nats because he didn't want to be silenced by either of the major parties. He will consider moving from Beacon Hill, near Manly, to a rural or regional area if the party wants him to run.
Anderson, a big fan of Barnaby Joyce, has spoken at several anti-carbon tax rallies this year and has previously been a vocal critic of Muslim fundamentalism.
"We have strict quarantine laws and it should be the same when it comes to cultures that do not want to integrate," he told The Daily Telegraph in 2007. "We should be very careful about where certain Muslims come from and what they believe. If you come here, you should behave yourself – it's as simple as that."
Last year he told a parliamentary inquiry into youth violence that "Aussies use their fists" when they fight and that "other cultures" – namely the Lebanese, Indochinese and Pacific Islanders – had introduced weapons.
Anderson was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1993 for his work with youth charities and has also fronted a recent campaign to raise awareness about prostate cancer.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Marr sticks boot in, as Bolt hits back at guilty race verdict #Ausunions
News Limited columnist Andrew Bolt has struck back against a court judgement which found him guilty of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act, branding the finding an attack on free speech.
In a rebuke published on the front page of his hometown Herald Sun (the country's largest-selling newspaper), Bolt said there were now laws against anyone who publicly disagreed with the idea that people could freely express their identity.
"I am truly shocked. I cannot believe this is Australia, a land of free speech," he began.
In a 1611-word piece published in both the Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph, Bolt said he had felt like an outsider as the son of Dutch immigrants before embracing his own identity.
He believed the case could further ensconce racial and ethnic divisions in Australia. Bolt recently was named the most powerful identity in The Power Index's Media Megaphones Top Ten.
"[I believe] that many people now increasingly do insist on asserting racial and ethnic identities, and that we increasingly spend money and pass laws to entrench them."
"I think that a terrible pity, even a danger, because surely in a multi-ethnic community like ours it's important to stress what unites us, not what divides."
On numerous occasions Bolt also alluded to the potential consequences of him referring to what he wrote in the two columns which were the subject of the action brought by the nine fair-skinned members of the Aboriginal community.
"Two years ago, I would cheerfully have argued that this acknowledgment of a multiple ethnicity was healthier, and truer, in such cases than insisting on only being Aboriginal. But not today. I no longer dare."
"For expressing such views, in such language, I have lost my freedom to put my argument as I did. And be warned: use such phrases as those yourself, and you too may lose your right to speak."
But in a column published by rival Fairfax newspapers, long-time Bolt sparring partner David Marr backed up the decision of Justice Mordecai Bromberg. He said the finding was not about free speech but "lousy journalism" and predicted there would be some "spectacular rhetoric" from the "now martyred Andrew Bolt".
"Denials are one of Bolt's great talents: with a smile on his face and his hand on his heart he is happy to claim the purest motives even in the unhappiest circumstances. Usually it works like a charm. Not with Judge Bromberg," Marr wrote.
But Bolt's column found issue with Justice Bromberg's insistence that he was not limiting free speech and questioned whether that ruling still applied if "your adjectives are too sharp, your wit too pointed, your views too blunt, your observations not quite to the point, your teasing too ticklish and your facts not in every case exactly correct."
"Despite Justice Bromberg's assurances, I feel that writing frankly about multiculturalism, and especially Aboriginal identity, yesterday became too dangerous for any conservative. It's simply safer to stay silent, or write about fluffy puppies instead."
Bolt also said the court case had made him depressed and referred to his "misery" at having spent "two years of worry, two weeks in court, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs".
"And so the multiculturalists win. They win, because no one now dares object for fear of what it will cost them in court."
"Hope they're satisfied, to win a debate not by argument but fear."
Pro-free spech editorials were also published in The Australian, the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun.
A Bolt hole anyone? » En Passant #Ausmedia
A Bolt hole anyone?
Posted by John, September 28th, 2011 - under Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun, News Ltd.
It was fantastic to see that Andrew Bolt and his employer, the Herald and Weekly Times (as publisher of the Herald Sun)’ have been found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act. As Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg said about the two Bolt articles in question: ‘… they contained errors of fact, distortions of truth and inflammatory and provocative language.’
Errors? Distortion of truth? Inflammatory and provocative language? Well blow me down with a feather. Who would have thought Andrew Bolt and the Herald Sun would be capable of such things?
Me. It is par for the course for the papers of Murdoch reaction.
It was fantastic too to see the joy on the faces of the defendants as they celebrated their victory over the racism of the right. Their right to be themselves, to right to choose their own identities, was upheld against the slanders of the likes of Bolt.
So what’s it all about? Bolt wrote two Herald Sun columns which asserted that fair skinned Aboriginal people identified as Aboriginal to get the benefits of being Aboriginal. You know, advantages like dying a decade earlier than non-Aboriginal Australians and lower living standards.
He named 18 well known Australian Aboriginal people as doing this. Nine sued him for a breach of section 18C of the Commonwealth Racial Vilification Act. Subsection 18C(1) says:
(1) It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:
(a) the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and
(b) the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.
According to Alison Cardwell at ABC News:
‘Justice Bromberg concluded the messages conveyed by the two articles included that the people were not genuinely Aboriginal; that instead, motivated by career opportunities available to Aboriginal people, they had chosen to falsely identify as Aboriginal.
‘Justice Bromberg said the messages included that fair skin colour indicates a person who is not sufficiently Aboriginal to be genuinely identified as an Aboriginal person.’
Andrew Bolt is a columnist of extreme reaction. He wears the cloak of common sense to babble right-wing nonsense.
There will be much discussion about free speech. Evidently the free speech of News Ltd, which owns 70 percent of the print media in Australia, and Andrew Bolt, who is paid enormous amounts of money to spew forth his filth, is being restricted. Writing the truth somehow conflicts with free speech whereas writing lies is the essence of free speech. Evidently.
In fact the case highlights that free speech is the preserve normally of the elite and rich, not ordinary working people.
It also shows the irrationality that has gripped sections of the population and ruling class. As Patrick Moynihan supposedly said: ‘You are entitled to your opinion; you are not entitled to your own facts.’
Unfortunately Australian politics has degenerated so that some politicians now echo the stubborn beliefs of the downwardly mobile middle class and sections of the working class to have opinions which blame everyone else, but not capitalism, for their plight. They have facts which are not facts.
Tony Abbott springs to mind, but so too to be frank does Julia Gillard with her attacks on refugees for example. Their appeals to the populism of reaction fuel the likes of Bolt and Piers Ackerman.
The material conditions of life under capitalism, and the lack of class struggle in Australia today, give support to this. The filth of racism, the denial of science, the homophobia, can breed like hardy weeds in a ground untouched by the water of class struggle.
It is in this context that legislative interventions to address racism, homophobia and other systemic hated filled aspects of capitalism spring forth. They are band-aids to treat cancer.
An alternative is to build the struggle on the ground against racism. In Australia the concrete and most visible manifestation of that is the campaign for refugees and against offshore processing. Another is against the Northern Territory invasion.
The real power to stop the ruling elites’ lie machines from producing racist filth lies at the point of production. Imagine a newspaper in which the journalists and production crew refused to allow racist filth into the paper? Of course, we are a long way from that. But I can still dream.
There is another problem. The paper and Bolt will appeal. They could well win, and that would be devastating for those involved and those sections of the Left who have descended into a gloat fest over this.
Second Bolt and the Herald and Weekly Times and other Murdoch papers will play the free speech card cynically and incessantly, all the while denying alternative voices an outlet in their own pages.
Third, the decision opens up some interesting possibilities for the reactionary Right.
For example, The Australian, deliberately I suspect in anticipation of the Bolt case decision, has been accusing opponents of Woodside’s proposed $30 billion gas hub in the Kimberley of racism for allegedly calling pro-development Aborigines coconuts – ‘black on the outside, white on the inside and full of the milk of white man’s money.’
Aborigines offended by that could perhaps lodge a complaint under section 18C against the writer, although it is in fact unclear who actually wrote it. Certainly the environmental groups deny doing it, not that the Murdoch lie machine, those great proponents of free speech, let minor details like that worry them.
As readers would also know I am a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against apartheid Israel. I could imagine Zionists using the decision to try to silence the legitimate BDS protest movement developing.
Worse, because the establishment has cynically accepted that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism for its own purposes, it is possible a judge could rule in favour of any Zionist action.The alternative is to build a movement in support of Palestine and BDS, to support refugees, to attend the demonstrations outside the ALP National Conference on 3 and 4 December in Sydney.
Finally, under the guise of defending free speech, a conservative government will amend the Act to allow all sorts of bile to issue forth under the guise of comment. Certainly Abbott will, and it is possible Gillard Labor could too although for crass political reasons on their part my guess is that such action is unlikely from them.
The short term embarrassment of racists like Bolt might turn into a longer term strategic disaster for the left. Certainly I will celebrate the Bolt’s loss, but the left needs to be careful. We might unleash the Right on their terrain – the bosses’ courts. Far better for us to fight on our ground – in the workplaces and the streets to stop racism.
Ultimately of course only a democratic working class revolution can sweep away the capitalist roots of racism. The struggles of today however can force the beast back into its lair for a while and help too to build the struggle for that new world of democracy and production to satisfy human need.
Comments
Comment from Jan Muller
Time September 29, 2011 at 12:18 amCapital A for Aboriginal please John. It’s a matter of respect and I am convinced that you would not wish to disrespect.
Comment from Jan Muller
Time September 29, 2011 at 12:21 amP.S. I do like your blogs and read them as often as I can.
Pingback from En Passant » A Bolt hole anyone? | Calling Card Pro
Time September 29, 2011 at 12:56 am[...] more:Â En Passant » A Bolt hole anyone? Related Posts:En Passant » Refugee activists call on pro-refugee Labor MPs to … En Passant – [...]
Write a comment
