The destruction of an Australian icon the ABC is at hand and only the ALP can save it. Australian Democracy and values are being eroded and handed over to the IPA and News Corp on a platter in desperation and a last-ditch stand to maintain power. Can we imagine Australia without the ABC the only MSM we trust with news and information and not just pure propaganda? (ODT)
In June this year, the Liberal Party’s peak council voted by 2:1 to privatise the ABC, as proposed by the Institute of Public Affairs, whose alumni includes communications minister Mitch Fifield, an arch-plotter who backed Turnbull over Abbott, Dutton over Turnbull and then Morrison over Dutton. Turnbull and Fifield insisted at the time that the ABC would never be sold, but those assurances are surely worthless now. With News Corp on the attack and the Coalition so bitterly divided, it is hard to see anyone inside the government dying in a ditch over a high-minded defence of the ABC.
The Australian had another extraordinarily well-timed piece this morning [$], in which media diarist Stephen Brook reported a rift between chair and MD, including deep background that Guthrie had been upset at the chair’s push for the quixotic “Project Jetstream” overhaul of the ABC’s digital infrastructure. There was obviously more to that story. Whether or not Guthrie deserved to be sacked so summarily – and she is today reported to be devastated and considering her legal options – the ABC now appears vulnerable, poorly led, and in need of public support more than ever.
Australia has been sacrificed to the Careers and Self-interest of individuals.Grattan Institute finds the policymaking process vulnerable to hijacking by vested interests at public’s expense
More than one in four federal ministers have gone on to work for a lobbyist firm, peak body or other special interest since 1990, a major new
study has found.
The
AFR reports [$] that big business is quietly preparing for a potential change of government in Canberra to the Labor Party, and that this preparation is taking the form of financial donations, meetings with Bill Shorten and hiring politically connected staff.
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Corporation Boards in Australia have no equal representation of all members that make up companies. Maybe that's why Companies in Germany are regarded as more Democratic and more efficient than those in Australia and have always had a greater success as a result. Investors, workers and even women have greater say in the management and policies of those companies. Participation by law is far more Democratic and less adversarial. The outcome is greater consensus and efficiency in the management and problem solving rather than conflict. Conservatives like Andrew Bolt seem to prefer the conflict and the struggle for power. Well, it's that process that seems to have existed in the ABC when Bolt declares the staff have won a battle but not the war.
It's strange when Bolt spent so many hours criticizing Michelle Guthrie and John Milne both it now seems his criticism of them has turned to a defence. However not a defence of the ABC but a defence of the Liberal Party and it's treatment of women. It's a typical Bolt generalisation where he takes a single case and generalises it as a pattern of behaviour. He likens the sacking of Michelle Guthrie as a parallel to the history and treatment of women in the Liberal Party. Bolt tries to turn a single sandwich and call it feast but that's Bolt logic and always has been throughout his career as a commentator.
In typical form Bolt highlights an individual event and amplifies it to systemic status to defend the indefensible attitudes to women in the Liberal Party. He pays no attention to the systemic management of the ABC and how scepticism is applied to journalism and the verification of facts runs rings around the universe of one-sided opinion that's the product of News Corp. That the singular bias to all Murdoch media commentaries is one that's as great as the Leaning Tower of Pisa with no relevance to the facts or their systemic evolution.
How deafening is the silence on the systemic white collar and corporate crime currently being revealed in the management and Boards of the Financial service sectors of this country? No interest whatsoever by Bolt to engage in those issues their nature and structure that has given rise to such pillaging of ordinary Australians that has been ignored by the Liberals and Conservatives of Australia. Criminal management is the norm of the private sector the antithesis of how the ABC is run and it's transparency. It's that transparency that allows conflict to be seen rather effortlessly compared with the hidden agendas of News Corp where freedoms of opinions are strictly managed. Michelle Guthrie’s stint at ABC helm had a key weakness: she failed to back the journalists
" In the face of sustained pressure from the government and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, she has seemed incapable of mounting a sustained and effective response.
And in this environment of hostility, ABC journalists have felt under siege.
As editor-in-chief – which comes with the managing director’s job – Guthrie was unable to give the kind of robust editorial leadership that journalists need if they are to report fearlessly and independently.
It was clear by the middle of this year that whatever qualities Guthrie brought to the job, editorial leadership was not one of them. Thus the ABC was at a crossroads. It had as its managing director and editor-in-chief a person with no journalistic background who had shown scant signs of understanding the impact of the federal government’s relentless bullying on the ABC’s editorial independence."
HELPING SPENCE FIND THE BULLIES AT HIS UNI
Column Michael Spence gets $1.45 million a year to run Sydney University, but apparently has no idea who is organising the protests to stop conservatives from meeting and speaking at his university. He must be too busy to watch them on TV, or read them sounding off on Facebook and in his students’ Honi Soit magazine. Let me help.
"Either that or Spence just doesn’t care that his university is getting a name as one of the worst for turning a blind eye to thuggery, as long as it’s thuggery from the Left."Bolt
Bolt keeps showing us he's never really been to university as far back as I can remember universities were centres of protest far greater than any seen today and police weren't invited onto the campus back then. Demonstrations in the 60s to "Ban the Bomb", against the Vietnam war, against conscription against Apartheid. Debates were a regular event on Australian campuses as were ASIO spies on campus rooting out communist sympathisers. There far more demonstrations on university campuses then than there are today and the consequences far more severe for students than today.
Andrew Bolt's thugs were introduced in later years when the State invaded campuses the traditional arena for free and critical thinking that Andrew Bolt wants to be stopped. Universities today are far quieter places today than previous years and are far greater policed than they once were. Bolt, as usual, shows his ignorance of history and the events of the past when campus politics was central to campus life at a time when education was 'free' and campuses a hotbed of diverse thought much of which questioned everything.
Universities have been relatively silenced today been turned into businesses exporting education to Asians that Bolt and Hanson complain about and turned into debt factories training grounds for careers promised that don't in fact exist. Campuses ensure students graduate in debt and have little time for reflection on their why it is critical thinking leading to genuine protest has taken second place, a back seat on our campuses today. One wonders why Bolt even poses the question that demonstrations are worse today than they ever were when the evidence shows the reverse is the case and Bolt's alarm yet another of his concoctions and illusions of the far right.
If you take a look at the photo Bolt uses it shows the "lecture" wasn't to be held in a theatre but what seems to be in a tutorial room and the smiles on the faces of students might just be of those wanting to get in. Bolt's hyperbole of thugs and a riot makes him look a greater fool than he already is.
HOW COULD THEY MISS MARKSON?
For possible context, Turnbull fans aren't keen on Markson: "There are red faces at the federal parliamentary press gallery and the National Press Club after Sharri Markson’s entry into the Press Gallery Journalist of the Year award mysteriously vanished. The club... has apologised... Fairfax photographer Alex Ellinghausen was a popular winner."
Bolt the lone cheer squad member of anything News Corp promotes Markson as a victim of the media. Markson's accolades of the Daily Telegraph's scoop of the Barnaby Joyce story was held in question given she wasn't the first to report it. Others had brought it to the attention of the public months before. What's amusing Andrew Bolt who says he doesn't give a rats about awards is so upset about Markson not getting one when in fact she doesn't seem to care.
"Markson wasn’t aware her entry hadn’t been received and didn’t complain;"
Does Bolt expect the award should go to a doubtful entrant over and above one that's not?
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Bolt whacking a mole Julie Bishop or a woman. Bolt rarely if ever gave a positive voice tho Turnbull when his poll stocks rose he made sure he reminded us all that Turnbull was always behind even when he rose to 2 points behind the ALP and was by far the most preferred PM.
T"Bishop, who chose not to re-contest the Liberal deputy leadership when former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was dumped, said Australia was now a laughing stock internationally." the one thing that's true, unlike Bolt, Bishop doesn't gild the lily Australia became the laughing stock of the world when Abbott became PM and it wasn't the Australian press that promoted him to that level he did it alone.
"Bishop was deputy Liberal leader for 11 years and never said or did anything about what she claims only now is a problem."Bolt
No Bolt it's not a newly discovered problem its one that's existed since the beginning of the.
Statistics show that 23% today and Bishop even discussed as PM indicate even the Liberals know they have a problem and it's not one of merit given the public face of the Liberal Party which Bolt admires so much is Dutton, Abbott, Abetz and the young creationist Hastie
who doesn't believe in the separation of powers.
No, Bishop is far far better a politician than these godbotherers.
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The greatest embarrassment of any publication was Andrew Bolt's effort to call what he wrote a "book". So as a judge evidence is clear why he'd never be invited to be a judge. Bolt pumps for authors in the past that presented books as biographical accounts that turned out to be entirely false. Helen Darville is a Bolt literary heroine whose book turned out to be fake. "Helen Dale, the author who faked a Ukrainian heritage for her first novel, The Hand that Signed The Paper, is about to re-enter the world she spectacularly upended, by reissuing her controversial book and publishing a second."
Dale's The Hand that Signed The Paper, published in 1994, tells the story of a Ukrainian family who sided with the Nazis against Bolshevik Jews in World War II. It was published under her then pen name Helen Demidenko and won the Vogel and Miles Franklin literary awards before she was exposed as a literary hoaxer.
Bolt himself declared Anne Summers writings about him were fake but disappointingly what was fake was his denial of the truth and facts underlying what Summers wrote. Bolt's denial was a disparagement of his once fiance and a lie. He actually tried to glamorise himself in a fake account of a man being supported to saying he worked as a minder for a belly dancer Yes, Bolt does prefer fantasy over the underlying reality most of the time. He's particularly focused on the denial of Indigenous history which he makes every effort to label as fake.
1h
Andrew Bolt is picking up the Fox News baton and running with it in Australia. Nothing surprising nothing original only fear that the accusations might just hold water. Like a drowning man Fox news is clutching at straws and calling them rafts not allowing all the details to be presented it's a reminder of Trump declaring his sexual encounters with women never happened and yes it was Fox news that backed him up. Given Bolt's record of denial of his past exploits to be lies it's surprising he's taken up the cause of identifying the credible witnesses in the case of the SCOTUS nominee.No mention by Bolt of a second woman's accusations is there? Second woman accuses Trump's Supreme Court pick of sexual assault
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is already facing heavy scrutiny.
![Cardinal Pell is the most senior member of the Roman Catholic Church ever jailed for such a crime [Max Walden/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2019/3/13/aec6166a728a4e61b022802cd8e24483_18.jpg "Australian Cardinal George Pell jailed six years for abusing boys")
