By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
Senate estimates is where the politicians get to turn the tables and cosplay Sarah Ferguson by peppering people with attack-dog questions.
There is nothing civil servants dread more.
A Trumpian moment? ABC News director Justin Stevens.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
It was so good to see mild-mannered ABC News director Justin Stevens turning it up a notch and flinging aside the wet lettuce act straight out of the ABC playbook.
Senator Sarah Hanson-Young asked, as she regularly does, about the impact News Corp coverage has on ABC staff.
“I can confirm that News Limited do have a strange obsession with taking scrutiny beyond scrutiny and regularly agitating against the work of our journalists,” Stevens told the hearing.
“We’re flooded with their interest, but despite the very small readership, we do engage and respond to a lot of their queries quite regularly.”
Very small readership? Something almost Trumpian in dissing the readership of your opponents, but we are here for it, Justin.
Let the record show the following. Figures from Ipsos for the Top 20 news website rankings in January showed ABC News sitting pretty at No.1 with 12.48 million readers last month, and by comparison, The Australian in 12th place with 3.56 million readers.
“There’s multiple queries a week,” Stevens continued.
“Having said that, as a public broadcaster, we must be subjected to scrutiny, and we must have a culture of accepting scrutiny and self-reflect where we get things wrong and be transparent about that.”
CBD feels this might prompt a thousand News Corp op-eds to bloom and can almost imagine Chris Kenny, Rita Panahi, Peta Credlin and Andrew Bolt elbowing each other out of the way to be first in front of the Sky News cameras.
Stevens went on to say the public broadcaster would continue to defend the work of its journalists.
“I must say that by and large, the queries being raised are disproportionate to the issues that are being realised.”
Foreign funders
Three years after the teal wave washed through the old Liberal heartland, the party’s few remaining seats in Sydney’s leafy suburbs are under threat from the latest crop of wannabe community independents.
Going international: Bradfield independent Nicolette Boele.Credit: Edwina Pickles
Nicolette Boele, the self-styled “shadow member” for Bradfield who fell narrowly short of winning that seat in 2022, is hoping to get over the line now Liberal frontbencher Paul Fletcher is retiring. Meanwhile, Tina Brown is having a crack at Julian Leeser in neighbouring Berowra.
Despite the generous backing of Simon Holmes a Court’s Climate 200 fundraising machine, the two are searching far and wide for donations. Very far and very wide. The “donate” section of Brown and Boele’s website allows a prospective donor to select any country from a dropdown menu in the address field. Given electoral laws ban foreign donations of more than $100, it’s a bit of amateurish web design with the capacity to backfire spectacularly.
Berowra independent Tina Brown is relishing the attention.
Clearly, the Liberals sense a gotcha because Senator Jane Hume ran hard on this while grilling acting Australian Electoral Commissioner Jeff Pope in estimates this week.
“For example, someone could nominate their details to be Vladimir Putin from Moscow, and they wouldn’t be prevented from donating. It’s been put to me by a member of the public that this may actually have occurred,” she said.
Pope said it was “something we’ll inquire into”.
Unfortunately, CBD hears neither campaign has received money from anybody calling themselves Vladimir Putin.
Boele’s donation page includes information on the rules for foreign donors and forces generous friends to check a box affirming that they’re Australian citizens. Brown’s campaign, meanwhile, appeared to relish the attention.
“We’d like to thank the honourable Jane Hume for taking a keen interest in our campaign. Clearly, the Liberals are scared of losing this seat,” a spokesperson told CBD.
The campaign told us they rejected all cash from overseas. In fact, Brown even calls up any donors to personally thank them for their support. How cute.
Feeding the chooks
How the media works: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was spruiking a Medicare urgent care clinic in Sunbury but clammed up when questions began to get dangerously close to gatecrashing the big $3.3 billion infrastructure “road and rail blitz” announcement he was planning to make later at the Herald Sun’s Future Victoria forum.
There was an awkward silence when the PM asked the tiny room whether there was a Herald Sun reporter present.
PM: “Is anyone here for the Herald Sun?
(Everyone looks around.)
PM “... I am a guest of the Herald Sun at lunchtime, and I’ll do the right thing by the Herald Sun and give a speech to them, as I would if I was invited and a guest of any of your particular outlets. What outlet are you from?
Surprised reporter: “Channel 10.”
PM: “Channel 10? Well, if Channel 10 had a forum, what I won’t do is come and tell Channel Seven and Channel Nine, before I tell Channel 10 what I’m going to do.”
No matter that the cash splash had already been reported in this newspaper and the Herald Sun.
That’s Albo, scrupulously dividing the magic pudding.
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