Tuesday, March 08, 2016

Or why it's dangerous to play with reptiles Peta ...

The front page said it all, really ...


And naturally the follow-up in the digital revolving splash of doom was equally hard-hitting ...


Oops, wouldn't you know it, the pond snapped the wrong panel on the wheel of doom ...


There, that's better.

Now on this day of days, the pond is of course deeply concerned at the treatment of women in politics ...

After all ...


But this isn't how you go about defending your legacy ...



The pond had an immediate problem with that "now", which suggested a profound lack of historical awareness.

Politics has always been unsourced gossip, long before the virulent, wonderful unsourced gossip that saturated the coffee houses of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Greg Hunt The Spectator and the more gossipy The Tatler via coffeehouses here).

Meanwhile, everybody from John Hewson to Lara Tingle have been racing around to note that it was Tony Abbott who was in charge and it was Tony Abbott who is ultimately responsible and who should be ultimately judged ...


Indeed, indeed, and it is fair to say that there's no Peta Credlin in this shot ...


But what's happened since Savva burst into print?

Well naturally attention has been paid to Savva in the Fairfax press in Niki Savva: How journalist went from conservative darling to Abbott 'she devil' (with forced video, natch)

She devil? Let it pass, because this is the nub of that matter ...

Credlin and Abbott loathed her columns so much they told The Australian's editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, to sack her. 
Mitchell refused, saying no prime minister or chief of staff had ever demanded such a thing.

That's how stupid, jointly or severally, Abbott and Credlin were ... with Abbott ultimately responsibility for the making of such a stupid request ...

And so to the defence.

Typically Abbott's response was to issue a short set of three word slogans ...


Oh not stop the boats, stop the carbon tax, stop the mining tax all over again ...

And a strong start to budget repair with the delusional effort of the 2014 budget is beyond the valley of the delusional ...

And then there's the ducking and the weaving and the refusal to rake over old coals.

And so Abbott once more relies on Credlin going in to battle for him ...


Well yes, a dignified silence would have been an infinitely preferable response to being shown posing down on the front page of the reptile Oz.

As for that golden rule of journalistic ethics, this was a book, a book written by a journalist, but a book, not a newspaper piece ... and so there's nothing extraordinary about it at all ...as per the Fairfaxians:

Controversially, Savva didn't approach Abbott or Credlin to comment for her book - despite detailing rumours of an affair between them. She also didn't speak to staffers with a more flattering view of the pair. This has made it easy for critics to argue she wrote her account with a pre-determined agenda. "My view was: why should I peddle their lies?" Savva says. "I knew from bitter experience that you could not trust their version of events." 
Veteran journalist and former colleague Laurie Oakes, who describes Savva as "gutsy", says it would have been "pointless" to ask them to participate. 
"I would check things with Abbott's office and be misled," he says. "One press officer even boasted openly about fooling members of the press gallery."

And then came this from another writer who'd attempted his own history, the oscillating fan ...


But back to the case for the defence, and please, oh please, don't run the up at 4 am slogging in coal mine and where's the gratitude and the thanks for it ... because you do it for your own reward and satisfaction ...

And please, oh please, don't mix that line with simple-minded three word slogans of the kind we endured and suffered under for years ...


What's there to say? Except perhaps ... flabbergasted ...

Because there in a nutshell is encapsulated everything that was wrong with the Abbott government.

Once more it's Credlin that does the running, and what's worse, with an indulgent, self-pitying tone ...

Do we really need to know that Credlin's father never finished school?

The pond's father got his intermediate certificate at the age of 15 and then was off to a working life always limited by his failure to finish high school ...

So what?

It's not as if others haven't experienced the tough world of politics, the shifting sands of betrayals, loyalties and smut ...

Savva knows how tough politics and journalism can be. When she was a reporter, a Labor MP spread rumours claiming she was getting her stories through an affair with a fellow politician. She and Peter Costello didn't speak for eight years after she published a book about her time working as his press secretary.

Here's the pond's tip for Credlin.

Stop trying to defend the indefensible, stop trying to burnish the god with feet of clay, who relied on a press release and ducked for cover, while you were paraded on the reptile front page ...

Tell Abbott to stop saying flabbergasted to his bromancer chum.

That was just another ham-fisted example of his remarkable deafness of ear, and his willingness to keep up the white-anting, the sniping and the bile. When Sheridan rang him for a comment, he should have said a simple "no comment" ...

At least if he wanted to maintain the pretence he wasn't motivated by anger and a deep desire to destabilise Turnbull.

For the love of the long absent lord, stop facilitating him. He was the one in charge, and he was the one who failed, and everything done for him was done with his permission, or if not, he should have reprimanded or sacked his recalcitrant employee ...

Yet here you are again ...

And all you've done is confirm that there might be something in all the idle chatter about Stockholm syndrome and co-dependency and a very strange and peculiar - perhaps weird - relationship ...

And above all, stop with the three word slogans.

We've had enough already to last a lifetime ...

Besides, you've already achieved what you wanted to achieve ...

Look, there it is on the left, right next to you ...


But at least the fuss has served its usual purpose for the pond, which is to be able to run the relevant Rowe cartoon, and more Rowe here ...



10 comments:

  1. Dignified silence all round would have been by far the most preferable response, DP. But that doesn't result in any cash in the paw, does it?

    This way, everyone profits. Savva from book sales (even if you knock 35% off RRP), Credlin and Abbott get to scribble, and the Chairman sells more papers.

    Win-win-win - but I get the feeling there might be a loser or two somewhere...

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  2. "The pond's father got his intermediate certificate at the age of 15 and then was off to a working life ..."

    Luxury, unparalleled luxury. My dad finished school after two years of Central School and was then off to an apprenticeship at age 13 and a bit. Didn't actually have many high schools back then, it was 1921 after all, and unless your family was well off, or you could get some kind of a scholarship, two years of post-primary was all you got.

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    Replies
    1. Sounds like you should be in Canberra GB, but it might be hard to be heard over the snuffling of the pigs in the trough as they whine about their hard and tragic lives ...

      Delete
    2. Not me, DP, I personally had it easy. After primary school I went to the new High School in the honest working class suburb of Brighton - it was the second High School in that geographic area, McKinnon having been built a year earlier in 1954.

      Then I got through Matric in 1960 (along with 33 others, nearly half of whom were of the female persuasion) and picked up one of those Chifley/Menzies Commonwealth Scholarships and made it into Melbourne Uni.

      So they'd probably all con me unmercifully with their tales of grievous deprivation that would make me think my dad had it all too easy.

      But I did make a small arithmetic error with my dad - he arrived in Australia in 1908 (paddle wheel steamer and high mast sailer) but he was 3 at the time, so his schooling actually ended in 1918, and he was out in the workforce in 1919 - just in time to compete with all those returning ex-servicemen (but almost no women, of course, and none of them wanted to be brickies anyway)

      Delete
  3. Hi Dorothy,

    Remarkable, it has taken six months for the likes of Savva, Van Onselen, Oakes and indeed the whole Press Gallery to eventually summon up enough courage to tell us that Abbott's government was dysfunctional, irrational, dishonest and incompetent.

    Six years of watching the monkey and his organ grinder up close and personal and only now, do they realise what a kakistocracy they unleashed upon the country.

    What confidence can we then have that they are giving us a honest picture now of what is going on under Turnbull? In most professions, failure to acknowledge what is staring you in the face would be the end of your career. Evidently not so in political journalism.

    DiddyWrote

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    Replies
    1. Savva says she's going to put Turnbull under the microscope, but guess the lens went bung when she turned it on to the NBN. Or maybe the copy didn't get through, copper being what it is ...

      The pond only reads the reptiles in the knowledge that, whatever they write, the opposite is equally likely to be the truth ...

      Delete
  4. Mmmmm .... leather? Is there latex, too?
    Never mind, look over there!
    FIVE NEW TAXES!!!

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  5. DP, you will be intrigued to hear that Opus is thinking of re-branding itself as Yes. They may have some trademark issues with a certain UK supergroup from the '70's.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNkWac-Nm0A


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    Replies
    1. What, they turned down the pond's suggestion of The Optus The?

      Delete
  6. So many words, so much cogitation, and an oversupply of hand-wringing.

    Laura Tingle on Sunday's Insiders got all reductive about Abbott utlising what might almost be considered a slogan:

    As PM "he was an oaf".

    Wonder if that was an EXCLUSIVE?

    Suspect not.

    ReplyDelete

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