By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
Another day, another high-profile departure from Guardian Australia’s rapidly shrinking Canberra bureau. This time, it’s veteran photographer Mike Bowers, who presents the popular Talking Pictures segment during the ABC’s Sunday morning political junkie power hour Insiders.
Bowers, a press gallery stalwart who previously worked for this masthead, had been with The Guardian’s local operation since its inception in 2013. Editor Lenore Taylor alerted staff to the news.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reacts as Guardian Australia photographer Mike Bowers’ phone rings during a Labor party caucus meeting.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“I’m very sorry to let you know that Mike Bowers has decided to leave Guardian Australia to pursue his own photographic project,” she said in an internal memo.
The latest rumour around the press gallery was that the progressive media outlet, known for its austerity approach to staff entitlement, was cutting back on Sydney-based Bowers’ trips to Canberra for sitting weeks, leaning on wire pictures from the Australian Associated Press instead. But Taylor was quick to dispel them in a statement to CBD.
“It was Mike’s decision to leave and we are very sorry that he is going. He has done brilliant work for Guardian Australia for more than a decade,” she said.
“Your suggestion regarding use of AAP photographs is false. Had Mike stayed with us, he would have continued the current practice of working in Canberra during most parliamentary sitting weeks.”
Glad that’s settled, then. Bowers declined to comment.
There’s been churn aplenty at The Guardian’s press gallery bureau since political editor Katharine Murphy jumped ship to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s media team in January and was replaced by The Saturday Paper’s Karen Middleton.
Since then, as reported by CBD, political live-blogger and writers’ festival favourite Amy Remeikis defected to The Australia Institute, and foreign affairs and defence correspondent Daniel Hurst left soon after.
Eulogy song
Andrew Hansen: Former Chaser, now political speechwriter.
The boys behind the Chaser’s War on Everything are now well into middle age, mostly settled into comfortable tenured gigs with the ABC. Craig Reucassel is a radio host. Chas Licciardello is something of a pundit on American politics. Julian Morrow has emerged the battered loser from a four-year legal battle with a former friend and business partner. Chris Taylor partnered with Tim Minchin to write well received comedy drama Upright.
And what of Andrew Hansen, famously the one who could sing and play the piano and write funny songs? Most recently, he parlayed that talent, along with Taylor, into TV show Australian Epic, which turned incidents from Australian history into musical numbers. (Full disclosure, one of your columnists appeared in the episode about the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard/Barnaby Joyce customs importation scandal involving two Yorkshire terriers, Pistol and Boo. It’s our specialist subject.)
But now, Hansen has embarked on that made-for-CBD career trajectory from media personality to … political flack. He’s picked up a new gig as a speechwriter for Melbourne’s Lord Mayor Nick Reece.
For the swearing-in as Melbourne’s 105th lord mayor on Tuesday, Hansen wrote the speech for the former political staffer and Sky News presenter (yes, it’s that Reece we are talking about).
Sadly, it was absent any jokes or song and dance numbers.
The guilded age
If Tuesday night is anything to go by, silly season is in full swing. And it is not even December. While the nation’s journalists were partying at the Walkley Awards in Sydney, one of the country’s most powerful lobby groups was flexing its muscles in the Great Hall of Parliament House.
The Pharmacy Guild, which plays the Canberra game as well as any, hosted 400 people, including around 70 MPs and senators, at its annual dinner on Tuesday night. Among them – Health Minister Mark Butler and his opposition counterpart Anne Ruston, Nationals leader David Littleproud, Labor’s assistant health ministers Emma McBride and Ged Kearney, former deputy prime minister Michael McCormack, and the man with the big hat, Bob Katter.
Relations between the Guild and the Albanese government got particularly heated last year, as the lobby group declared war over Labor’s plan for 60-day medicine scripts. But after getting an additional $3 billion from the government in a peace deal, hostilities seem to have eased.
So much so that on Tuesday the event featured a performance from Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s dad rock band Left Right Out, featuring Labor MPs Matt Keogh, Pat Gorman, Mary Doyle and Graham Perrett.
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