Joe Hildebrand: Jess Rowe shouldn’t have deleted Pauline Hanson podcast

After a torrent of abuse, Jess Rowe deleted her Pauline Hanson interview. She shouldn’t have done that – but she shouldn’t have had to, writes Joe Hildebrand.

According to the news this week the planet is boiling, China is invading and the NRL grand final is about to launch itself into football history by becoming a Covid-19 superspreader event.

So I was much relieved to discover on social media that in fact the biggest threat to civilisation was that Jessica Rowe had done a podcast with Pauline Hanson.

This of course followed other existential threats to humanity, including ABC Breakfast host Lisa Millar daring to be born to a Nationals MP and Bachelorette Georgia Love making a joke about a restaurant.

Such things of course cause hostility and division in society, which is why Rowe had to have her interview deleted, Millar had to be bullied off Twitter and Love had to be taken off air. It’s a small price to pay for tolerance.

And of course it’s a great way to attract people to your cause. After all, what better way to build a growing consensus than by hounding out anyone who happens to accidentally fall foul of the latest progressive software update.

Jessica Rowe getting her Covid-19 jab.

There have been countless farcical examples of this dull marauding puritanism but the public denouncement of Jess Rowe is without doubt the most eye-watering height of hypocrisy.

For one thing, there is probably no one more painstakingly politically correct in Australian public life than Rowe. Her entire purpose on the planet is to avoid offending people.

I know this because I sat next to her for years on Studio 10 and her ever-positive and ever-understanding approach to just about everyone she ever met used to sh*t me to tears.

Our arguments on the show were frequent and sometimes fierce, initially because I thought she was the same type of pontificating modern puritan that has now turned against her.

In fact it was just her as a person, and I was shocked to discover that she was personally upset by some of our earlier on-screen fights. I assumed it was all just theatre but she really felt it.

Sarah Harris, Joe Hildebrand, Jessica Rowe, Denise Drysdale and Ita Buttrose on Studio 10.

In short, she is a sensitive soul. She would tip-toe on eggshells for a thousand years to avoid discomforting a chicken.

She is also a strange combination of whip-smart and oddly naive. She once told me a story of how she was verbally accosted by a Greens campaign worker while she was handing out how-to-vote cards for a friend running as an independent.

Needless to say, she was shocked that a Green could be so mean. Needless to say, I was not.

The irony of course is that Jess was a Greens supporter before that incident. Whether she was afterwards, I do not know. Knowing her, she probably just told herself he must have been having a bad day.

But it clearly upset her, and if that was enough to upset her then you can only imagine how the ugly pile on this week made her feel.

Little wonder she quickly issued a grovelling mea culpa and deleted the podcast. She shouldn’t have done that but then again she shouldn’t have had to.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen/The Australian

Like Lisa Millar and Georgia Love she was swarmed relentlessly by the social media mob until she capitulated and offered them whatever they wanted. It is a bizarre but now common ritual of online waterboarding.

As to the politics of Pauline Hanson, I have no time for their deranged lunacy. I have disputed and discredited her views in almost every form of media imaginable, including this week on 2GB and 4BC. There is no doubt that she has spent much of her public life perpetuating baseless idiocy and hateful ideas.

But the same charge cannot be levelled at someone interviewing her in an effort to understand who she is or the experiences that made her. That would be an attack on the fundamental premise of journalism itself.

Indeed, the former Labor MP Kate Ellis explored Hanson’s experiences as a female politician both intimately and extensively in her excellent book Sex, Lies and Question Time and did not suffer a shred of the abuse and condemnation that Rowe was subjected to.

The tolerant left talk a lot about perpetuating hate. They’re also pretty good at doing it themselves.