The Gravy Train Express

For the last few years, the Murdochs have been attempting to engineer an Australian Fox News followership via their Sky content, which notoriously shifts from regular news in the daytime to shock-jock alt-reality at night. The domestic ratings are poor, but online it has extremist appeal, particularly in an American market always hungry for loud right-wing hate (about 30% of traffic in 2021), and with YouTube advertising bringing in revenue, the content is being more and more tailored - US conspiracist Alex Jones has shared Sky After Dark clips, and the hosts play up to that by feeding back Inforwars/QAnon buzzwords and concepts. According to The Guardian, by last year it had tallied more YouTube views than any Australian news outlet - something in the 500 million range. It's helped to spread enmity and conspiracies centring on Covid, race, women, education, sex, the environment, and any politics slightly more progressive than Atilla the Hun. Last year, a deal with Austereo saw thi...

The election is over. After 9 very long years, the Coalition has at last, mercifully, been removed. As many have noted, there's a general feeling of a nation breathing a sigh of relief. But while the most corrupt, inept, and malicious government in living memory is gone, the damage goes deep, and relief will very quickly need to give way to resolve, and action - on climate, ICAC, the social safety net, health, education, and even the restoration of a functional bureaucracy and state, a vast amount of work will need to be done. And the old donors haven't gone away - public pressure will need to remain high. There's a lot of damning detail to be shared about the dirty campaigning and old-media hysteria which surrounded this election. There was a worrying, frenzied tone to it this time - the use of smear and disinfo tactics imported from the US and UK was extensive. But covering all that is for another day. For now, here's a quick flashback to a telling episode that came f...

  On Thursday morning, Scott Morrison did the rounds of the media... excluding the ABC. He then revealed he'd agreed to two more televised debates - to be hosted by Nine and Seven, the friendly neighbourhood Costello/Stokes outlets. In the past, the National Press Club has been the debate venue, and Labor has declared their interest in continuing that tradition. (Last election, the Liberals insisted on it.) The moderator at the Press Club is usually the president - and the president right now happens to be the ABC's Laura Tingle. Morrison hasn't directly responded to the invitation, but said today that three debates made "a good number", and "I've already done one". (For anyone who missed it, that was on Rupert's Sky.) The ABC has issued a separate invite for May 9, with their Sky-import, the not-overly-taxing David Speers as host. The Morrison camp has so far ignored that offer. (With Albanese only due out of Covid iso on Friday, and Labor's...

On Thursday, April 14, the Fin Review ran both an opinion piece and an article based around Ipsos focus-group work which the Fin said showed undecided voters were leaning toward Scott Morrison. The paper described that voter-group's feeling as "better the devil you know". The Guardian's economics correspondent, Peter Hannam, noticed that no numbers were mentioned. When he contacted Ipsos to check, it turned out that two groups of voters had participated, with each group consisting of... five people. Yes - the work was indicative of the leanings of fully ten individuals. The journalist responsible for hyping this junk was Phil Coorey, who in recent years has been the AFR's contact-of-choice for leaks and briefings from the Prime Minister's Office, and who memorably penned the fawning "Woman Who Saved Australia" profile of Gladys Berejiklian just 5 months before her exit under a corruption cloud. The AFR was once a Fairfax publication. Then Malcolm T...

 Flashback - article written in March, 2021. In 2018, Scott Morrison described his squabbling band of gaffe-prone grifters as a "Muppet Show". On taking the Prime Ministership, he assured breakfast television that "the curtain's come down on that Muppet Show - and an absolute new curtain has lifted up!" The unintentional implication that the nation was about to witness the launch of Scotty's All-New Muppet Show was reinforced by his next miscalculated response: Presenter: "How do you unite a bunch of Muppets?" Morrison: "Well, I'm doing exactly that in terms of my colleagues." In the two and a half years since, the volume of corruption and ineptitude has become so great as to make the compilation of a complete list near-impossible. But just to refresh, here's some of the show's notable lowlights: Robodebt theft, deaths & $1.2 billion settlement; $100 million Sports Rorts plus Gaetjen's whitewash; slashing funding to t...

"Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is coal! Don't be afraid, don't be scared, won't hurt you, it's coal! " That's Scott Morrison in parliament in 2017, brandishing a chunk of lacquered coal, given to him by his beloved organ-grinder, The Minerals Council. In his speech, Morrison went on to praise the "prosperity" delivered by his pet rock, and to dismiss attempts to enact science-based climate-policy as simply "pathological...coal-a-phobia". Seated behind him, Barnaby Joyce laughed with the joy of a particularly thick-headed child as he fondled the prop. One month after this performance, Lismore flooded. At that point it was the most destructive flood the town had ever had. In 2008 the Garnaut Climate Change Review examined the scientific studies outlining climate impacts on Australia, and concluded in part that without concerted action the nation would be facing longer and more intense fire seasons - by 2020. Right on time in 2019/20, an es...

A huge stretch of the Qld and NSW coast is flood-devastated. Scott Morrison gives a special address announcing... ten billion dollars for a nuclear submarine base. Deputy Barnaby declares we could never have anticipated the flooding - despite repeated, detailed warnings from all the relevant experts. Morrison's hand-picked head of the National Recovery and Resilience Agency, vintage Liberal Party seat-warmer Shane Stone, complains about how expensive it'll be to fix the flood damage - and actually says out loud that it's the fault of victims for "(living) among the gum trees". Australia continues to have no climate policy, and to expand fossil-fuel projects. This is a government laughing in the public's face. Their contempt is absolute.