When push comes to shovel

ANDREW Bolt is a champion of free and forthright speech. Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull is too, as am I. But Turnbull took unbridled exception to Bolt’s questioning of Prime Minister Tony Abbott about his minister’s loyalty after Turnbull had been outed inviting snoarasaurus PUP leader Clive Palmer to a Chinese restaurant for dinner last week. He excitedly responded, calling Bolt “unhinged” and “demented” for querying his motives and choice of dining companion. It was OTT and an experienced former journalist, former barrister, like Turnbull should have realised — as he undoubtedly has now — that a measured response would have been best, if any response was warranted. Clearly he felt aggrieved Bolt perceived the dinner with Palmer as an act of disloyalty. Second, he felt, by giving it prominence Bolt had excited the usual Canberra idlers into conspiratorial talk of leadership tensions, distracting the Coalition government from its so-far quite clumsy attempts to sell last month’s Budget. Hardly helpful as Abbott departed for a fence-mending meeting with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a D-day commemoration and a call on US President Barack Obama, and Turnbull called Bolt out on it. He jousted with chart-topping veteran broadcaster Alan Jones over the same points. In his defence, Turnbull has repeatedly said that, if he had ignored the remarks, his silence could have been seen as consent. Giving a mealy-mouthed response would not have been much better, he says, though he now concedes that that may have been the wiser thing to do. “Sometimes you’ve got to call a spade a bloody shovel,” he said. “I’m not going to take a backward step in defending this government’s unity, this government’s Budget.” Calling spades bloody shovels should never have to be justified and I am fed up with those who argue that no one should ever call things as they see them and as they are. The sort of people who want ultra-political correctness and self-censorship resort in line with the current section 18C of the racial discrimination act, which is patently a block on free speech. Bolt is a commentator. And he was absolutely within his rights to query Abbott about Turnbull’s dinner with the snoarasaurus. The lumbering behemoth used his financial clout to see a contingent of PUP candidates installed in the senate from July 1 and the public (which overwhelmingly did not vote for Palmer or his candidates) has every right to know what may be taking place in his confused mind even as his paws grasp for the levers of power. Turnbull has been opposition leader and, while he has not been the most brilliant politician to grace Canberra, he is far and away smarter than anyone in the opposition ranks and has applied himself effectively to remediate the absolutely abortionate unfunded national broadband mess Labor bequeathed the nation. He is also the member for Wentworth, the most “l” liberal of all the Liberal electorates, and he is endorsed by a rainbow coalition of homosexual rights activists, tree-huggers and activated almond eaters as can only be found in an extremely wealthy seat. While he is right about the need for unity of purpose in selling the Budget, his unswerving support for the ABC, an organisation which defiantly refuses to permit any conservatives to call spades shovels or anything else by refusing to employ any conservative of any statue in any prominent role, is at odds with his defence of his government. The ABC is not a neutral organisation. It is anti-conservative in philosophy. It may work for voters of Wentworth for Turnbull to claim “there’s no more passionate defender of the ABC than I”, and participate in a cross-party group of Friends of the ABC, but he is being disingenuous in defending this rogue organisation and in not pillorying its disgraceful CEO Mark Scott. He correctly says the ABC is a very important public institution — taxpayers bankroll it to the tune of $1.2 billion a year — and if you live in regional Australia it is the single most important source of news — which, surely, makes the need for the national broadcaster to be even more scrupulously balanced and accurate. Instead, we have a left-wing organisation which provides employment for a raft of former Labor apparatchiks and actively promotes a Green-left perspective of events. The ABC board permitted a disgraceful defamation of columnist Chris Kenny to stand for more than six months. It accepted the tainted Australia Network contract. The ABC was once a pillar of professionalism and integrity. Now it displays as much ethics as an aberrant teenager posting sex videos from an internet cafe. Turnbull should demonstrate his enthusiasm for conservative government with an honest assessment of this ideologically driven, publicly funded leftist propaganda unit. DODGY DIARY OF A FOREIGN MINISTER IT’S a pity that former foreign minister Bob Carr didn’t honour a request from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and let them read the manuscript of his book Diary Of A Foreign Minister before publication. Somebody might have picked up some of the more obvious howlers. DFAT secretary Peter Varghese told a senate estimates hearing on Wednesday that he told Carr his department would “appreciate the opportunity” to look over the book before it was released but there was no response. “I never saw a draft,” Varghese told the committee. In his book, published in April, Carr speculated that US senator John McCain, among other US political figures including Secretary of State John Kerry, may have had plastic surgery. “John McCain is younger and more sparkle-eyed than I might have expected. Plastic surgery?” Carr wrote of the Arizona senator and former Republican presidential candidate, now in his 80s. But it was Carr’s report of his conversation with the Vietnam War hero that caught my eye. “He told me how his son had been offered early release but refused,” Carr wrote. It wasn’t McCain’s son, it was McCain, the son and grandson of US admirals, who was captured by the Vietnamese, and it was the McCain who Carr met who refused to be used by the Vietnamese as a propaganda tool and given early release from the notorious Hanoi Hilton prison, where he was repeatedly tortured during the six years he was held there before his release in 1973. McCain’s only two natural sons were born to his second wife, Cindy, in 1986 and 1988, more than 20 years after the Vietnam War ended. The older of the two, Sydney, graduated from the US Naval Academy in 2009, becoming the fourth generation of McCains to join the US Navy. His name is a reminder of the great times his father had on R and R in Australia, as Carr accurately reported the senator telling him: “Yes, I’d fly in and spend some time in the library stacks … at Kings Cross.”