Arts body green-lit tax status for a website that’s published conspiracy theories

Creative Australia executive director Leisa Bacon, chief executive Adrian Collette, right, and website owner John Menadue.

There’s an unofficial rule in journalism, and it’s our policy to follow it in this column. The rule is simple: punch-up. Go after the powerful. The rich. The people with influence. Don’t punch down. Ever.

Which is why we hesitated at the thought of writing about John Menadue and his risibly obscure website, Pearls and Irritations. Because writing about some bloke’s website felt like punching down. Like we were sinking a big walloping boot into a pensioner’s blog.

But then we remembered something. John Menadue ran Qantas. Actually ran it, between 1986 and 1989.

He was also Australia’s ambassador to Japan and secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. And apparently he writes emails without saying “hello”. Just launches straight in with your name. The man’s ego must be the size of a small Japanese island. Which means he doesn’t think anyone’s punching down on him. To John Menadue, everyone is punching up.

So morally we’re in the clear.

Any hidden pearls of artistic wisdom to come from the website? We wait with bated breath.

Now, Menadue hasn’t actually done anything wrong. Let’s be plain about that. What he’s done is simply exist while staff at Creative Australia – the arts-funding body – have bent themselves into spectacularly improbable shapes to help him secure tax-deductible donation status for his website.

And we’ve got the emails. All of them. The papertrail of bureaucratic backflipping and box-ticking. The drafts and redrafts.

Here’s what Menadue’s original application seeking this perk said about his website, a public policy journal, and what it promoted: “Climate change, relations within our own region and a lack of trust in our major institutions including our monopoly media.” That’s it. No mention of art. No mention of culture. Just politics. The fundraising goal was to “broaden our reach”, “introduce moderated reader comments” and – best of all – to “reduce workloads particularly for my wife and me”.

Wouldn’t we all love government support to make our hobbies less tiring.

But here’s the problem. Creative Australia funds art. It is, rather conspicuously, an arts body. It says so right there in the name.

Which is why on March 19 an official at Creative Australia wrote to Menadue, apologetically explaining this conundrum “We have hit a bit of a roadblock,” they said. “Arts and culture are currently not mentioned and would need to be the focus of the fundraising.”

In other words: Mate, you’ve got to at least pretend this is about art.

Menadue got the message. He sent back some lines to comply. “Thank you very much for your advice … We do carry book reviews and articles relating to arts and cultural activities. We plan to increase such articles.”

John Menadue back in the days when he led Qantas.

We plan to increase such articles. Plan to. Not “we do this extensively” or “we’ve always done this” but “yeah, we might do it at some point if we remember”. Menadue had another suggestion: he’d package some articles for schools and universities from his website – articles about “economics, international relations, China, climate change, media and politics”. As though any of that had anything to do with promoting art.

The Creative Australia official, however, was absolutely delighted. “It’s great to hear about all of the arts and culture work P&I are doing” – even though Menadue had literally just said he was planning to maybe do it in the future – “I’ll try and merge this copy with the existing and frame the project to highlight the arts and culture aspects.”

Or perhaps: Let me rewrite your application and make it sound like something we can approve.

Up the chain it went to CEO Adrian Collette and executive director Leisa Bacon. “Good to proceed,” said Bacon. “Fine with this,” said Collette. The result? Menadue has raised more than $600,000 in tax-free support over the past year. For a website that has as much to do with art as this column has to do with astrophysics.

Creative Australia defended itself. It said staff actually pulled up Menadue’s proposal and clarified the eligibility requirements, telling him the money raised could only be used for “arts and cultural activities”. Menadue promised he’d do just that. But is anyone going to check? Of course not.

And while we’re here, let’s talk about the content that makes it to Pearls and Irritations. The “experts”, as Menadue calls them, his contributors who “bring background, depth and insight into issues that are often ignored my (sic) our failing mainstream (sic) media”.

Experts like Scott Ritter. The former UN weapons inspector. The convicted sex offender who was twice – twice – arrested in police stings for trying to solicit underage girls. He went to prison for a year in 2012.

And Menadue published his take on the October 7 massacres in Israel. Ritter claimed Israeli soldiers – not Hamas – were the “number one killer” of civilians that day. Hamas didn’t burn people alive in their homes, he said. “It was Israeli tanks that did the destruction and killing.”

So, here we have, to be absolutely clear, the Australian government subsidising a website that publishes a former convict’s conspiracy theories about murdered Jews. And Creative Australia made it happen – by deciding that “arts and culture” can mean whatever they want it to mean if it helps getting the right boxes ticked.

Punch up? Punch down? At this point, who cares. We’re punching something.