Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

During this intriguing inter-regnum as Australia waits to see if a minority government can be cobbled together in Canberra between one or two of the major parties and the independents, we have again been shown the brazen double reporting standards of Fairfax and the government media. As occurred throughout the Rudd Government, these influential news agencies have seen their primary self appointed role as holding the Opposition to account. As they see it, the Government is so clearly on track with their urban latte sippers' approved policy and clever news management systems, that independent press scrutiny can be focused on the easy sport of picking at the Opposition's failings, rather than the substance of holding the Government's actual performance to account. And some people still seem to wonder aloud why Australia was caught by surprise when the Labor party killed off...

I watched Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard with compere Tony Jones and a studio audience in Adelaide, on ABC1's Q&A program last night , 9 August 2010. She's certainly a clever and accomplished politician, with a plenty of negative schtick for her opponents. My abiding impression however was that it was like watching an over-confident  suburban school principal dealing with questions in assembly . No one dared challenge her on her display of well honed defensiveness about her ruthlessness, although there was the occasional cheeky little boy who tried to play it for some laughs. It was not a debate and there was little policy substance.  She returned whenever she could to her saintly parents, sacrificing themselves, emigrating from Wales and doing it tough in suburban Adelaide for the sake of the children, Julia and her sister. This stuff clearly must poll well in focus groups. And I must not be very f...

Jonathan Holmes, of the ABC's Media Watch programme , was, as usual, fulfilling his institutionally self-assigned duty of holding the Opposition to account the other evening. He was gratuitously, but unsurprisingly, openly sticking the boot into a carefully chosen target, the former Coalition Government's Treasurer, because he had had the temerity to be critical of a public broadcaster for using its taxpayer funded media resources to favour a political party. In the process Holmes drew our attention to a piece of research recently published by some Australian National University academics. Holmes crowed jubilantly, at the Coalition's expense, from his taxpayer funded ABC TV soapbox, and without a hint of irony, that, contrary to Mr Costello's suggestion, research showed that ABC TV did show a political bias in the research period: towards the Coalition. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it you Coalition whingers. Just why would ABC TV choose to broadcast this? As Hol...