The customary teeth-gnashing from public company proprietors erupted on Monday following the release last week of a short thesis on Nearmap by activist research house J Capital. It was a predictable line-up – Harvey Norman’s Gerry Harvey, WiseTech’s Richard White and Corporate Travel’s Jamie Pherous – uttering the same disingenuity. “I don’t have an issue with short selling per se“, they variously say, which translates roughly to “I don’t have an issue with short selling that’s not directed at me”.

The Australian‘s David Swan even sustained the irrational narrative that a report by Glaucus – laden with “a rhetoric of crime, including the words ‘suspicion, unjust, gouge, abusive, egregious and distort’” – caused the failure of listed Brisbane asset manager Blue Sky Alternative Investments. That’s right, Blue Sky collapsed because someone said mean things about it. Where, oh where, have we heard such a stupid assertion before?