As his departure from politics grows ever-nearer, high-profile Victorian Liberal MP Tim Smith has made a point of settling some scores with some of his former media allies on the way out.
And at the very top of Smith’s media ‘get square’ list is 3AW’s morning radio host, Neil Mitchell.
In recent days, Smith embarked on a furious Twitter spree against the 3AW radio host, variously accusing him of being an “awful,duplicitous, hateful individual” and of hounding him “like a rabid dog”, after the departing MP’s drink-driving incident last year in which he crashed his Jaguar into a Hawthorn fence. The tweets were subsequently deleted.
But when Diary reached Smith over the weekend, far from backing down, he said that his fury against the 3AW host was even stronger. Smith remains angry at what he claims was Mitchell’s ‘betrayal’ of him after an exclusive interview he granted the 3AW host following his infamous October 2021 car crash.
Smith has cited sympathetic texts sent by Mitchell in the immediate aftermath of the crash, in which the 3AW host expressed worries about “the long term damage” that the incident would cause the MP as he angled for the interview.
“Neil Mitchell privately sent me a number of messages that were sympathetic to the horrendous situation that I had caused for myself, only to find two weeks later the guy is kicking the crap out of me for taking myself out of the country and the media cycle,” Smith told Diary. “He wonders why people like Eddie McGuire and I find him to be a less-than-honest broker.”
McGuire, of course, had his own colourful on-air spat with Mitchell earlier this year in which he at one point accused the 3AW host of lying.
But Smith – who developed a big profile outside of Melbourne during the pandemic through his regular slots on Ben Fordham’s 2GB show in Sydney — has gone even further than McGuire, claiming that Mitchell had posed as an ally while “working to destroy me”.
“Neil Mitchell for years pretended that we had a working, if not reasonable, personal relationship,” he told Diary. “That gave rise to an expectation that what he said in his dealings with me would be truthful. That proved to be more than incorrect.”
In response to Smith’s claims, Mitchell told Diary on the weekend: “At one stage, as many people were, I was concerned about his state of mind and I showed some compassion for the man. I’m not the only one who was concerned about him in those days.”
The enmity that Smith holds towards Mitchell first bubbled to the surface eight days ago on Twitter.
Smith – once touted by some as a potential future Victorian Premier — unloaded on Mitchell in response to what seemed to bean innocuous post by the 3AW host.
“How’s your palatial homestead in Flinders where you fled for the pandemic,” he asked of Mitchell, further tweeting provocatively: “Do you have plebs tending to your pebble lined driveway?”
When another member of the Twitterati responded: “I guess Tim figures he won’t be needing Neil anymore”, Smith upped the ante with an even more angry post, referencing the warts and all interview he gave the 3AW star in November last year.
“@3AWNeilMitchell is the most awful, duplicitous, hateful individual I think I ever met,” Smith posted in a deleted tweet. “I did everything he ever wanted, I gave him an exclusive interview when I disgraced myself, and he hounded me, like a rabid dog, for weeks thereafter. I hate him.”
To top it all off, Smith then claimed that Mitchell’s son worked for Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy: “Be in no doubt, @3AWNeilMitchell is a member of the @MatthewGuyMP fan club,” Smith wrote. “Neil’s son works for Matthew.”
When we put this claim by Smith to Mitchell, he responded: “I’m not going to talk about my kids. I’ve done nothing wrong – and my family’s done nothing wrong.”
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Fran Kelly critics are ageist: Ita
ABC chair Ita Buttrose has fiercely defended Aunty’s newest TV talk show host, Fran Kelly, after a series of brutal criticisms from the Nine papers that claimed Kelly is too old for the new role.
Speaking to Diary on Sunday, Buttrose has dismissed the critics’ claims as “totally inappropriate” and displaying “ageism” towards the respected ABC presenter.
The criticisms, including two separate commentaries by former ABC employee Osman Faruqi, now the Nine newspapers’ culture news editor, have suggested, among other things, that Kelly had been working for the public broadcaster “longer than we’ve been alive”, that her selection seemed like a “parody”, and that her new hosting role proved that the ABC was ignoring “younger talent”.
Faruqi’s fellow culture reporters Thomas Mitchell and Karl Quinn have also printed strong critiques of Kelly’s new show.
Faruqi said on an August podcast of the Kelly appointment: “I think my original reaction to it was, ‘oh, this is like a parody press release that somebody has put out’,”, while Mitchell wrote that her selection was “pandering to the past”.
Yet another scathing assessment by Faruqi was published on the SMH and Age websites on Friday, the day of the first edition of Kelly’s new talk show, Frankly, in which he claimed the ABC had “failed to invest in younger talent”.
Friday also happened to be Ageism Awareness Day. When Diary reached a bemused Buttrose, she said that Faruqi’s criticism of Kelly was “totally inappropriate”.
“Given the Nine criticism of Fran’s appointment, does that mean Karl Stefanovic will be consigned to the media scrap heap when he turns 60?,” Buttrose asked your diarist.
“On Ageism Awareness Day, the criticism of Fran on the grounds of her age is totally inappropriate, and I think ageism is inappropriate. I thought the show worked particularly well, and the interaction between the guests was really good.”
In what appeared to be a veiled reference to Faruqi, a former deputy editor of ABC Life, Buttrose also referred to ABC staff departing and suddenly becoming “experts” about the public broadcaster.
“I am used to former employees of the ABC,” she told Diary. “They leave us, and then they become experts on what we should be doing. If only we’d seen that skill when they were with us.”
Buttrose pointed to Friday night’s screening of Kelly’s interview with former Australian of the Year and Thai cave rescuer Richard Harris, as an example of the benefits that an “experienced” interviewer is able to bring.
“Fran’s interviewing skills came to the fore. I thought I knew everything about Richard Harris, but she got things out of him I haven’t heard before. That is the skill of an experienced interviewer,” she said.
Despite Kelly’s elevation in this particular instance, Buttrose also pointed to other examples of high-profile examples of younger hosts who the ABC had quickly elevated to prominent roles, including thirty-something talent like ABC News Breakfast star Tony Armstrong, Question Everything co-presenter Jan Fran and Win The Week host Alex Lee.
“I do think we are the training ground for talent, who then often get pinched by other TV networks and move on,” Buttrose said.
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Bolt from the blue: Sky host stays on
By his own admission, Andrew Bolt has been predicting his own retirement almost as often as the great Australian opera singer Nellie Melba. But after much consideration and some behind the scenes negotiating, Bolt – one of Sky News Australia’s headline acts — has finally confirmed he will go around with the network again in 2023 as host of his eponymous show, The Bolt Report.
When Diary reached Bolt last week to ask if he’d recommitted to Sky, he put a humorous spin on a famous line by Mark Twain to confirm the news.
“Reports of my retirement have been greatly exaggerated ….by me!,” he joked. “You’ve got good mail — I renewed my contract last week.”
In doing so, Bolt seems to have put his threat of retirement on the back burner – at least for the time being – by invoking the memory of Melba, who became famous in her latter singing years for her ‘farewell’ performances. “I’m already sounding too much like Nellie Melba, so I can now say I’ve given up predicting my future,” Bolt, a self-confessed opera lover, said.
Perhaps the biggest rumours about Bolt’s allegedly imminent plans to disappear from the media came in 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the Sky host stated he was contemplating retirement, before eventually negotiating a new deal with Sky that allowed him to broadcast directly from his home on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.
Under the terms of his latest renewal, which will see The Bolt Report continue to run at 7pm from Monday to Thursday nights, Bolt will continue to broadcast from his home.
And the conservative commentator hints that in a new era of ‘wokeness’, he may continue to have the fire in his belly to continue to dodge retirement for some time.
“I mustn’t be a quitter,” he told Diary. “The causes are too great. I’ve been banging my computer so hard, I’ve got three loose keys on my keyboard. One is the delete key! The others are the space bar and the letter ‘t’. Now, those loose keys are caused by one thing: I believe in what I’m writing.”
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Bandt’s adventures in business class
Last week, Diary brought you the adventures of an unmasked Adam Bandt – one of the most foremost campaigners in the media for mask-wearing – in the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge at Canberra Airport.
We noted that while he was safely away from the cameras in the Chairman’s Lounge, Bandt was happy to shed his Covid-shielding mask. But as soon as the Greens Leader left the anything-but-socialist confines of the lounge to join the general riff-raff of Canberra Airport, his fashionable black mask came straight back on.
In response to Diary’s item, some federal MPs have contacted Diary to regale us with yet more stories of Bandt’s intrepid adventures with the Flying Kangaroo.
One tale suggests that even for the Greens leader, the climate emergency can sometimes take a back seat to personal in-flight comfort.
Witness accounts relayed to Diary from fellow business-class travellers suggest Bandt has for some time been known to have a fondness for life behind the little curtain up the front of the plane in Qantas’s first three or four rows.
A variety of studies suggest that travelling business class emits between two and four times more greenhouse gas emissions than economy.
Bandt’s apparent fondness for the front of the plane appears to be borne out by his considerable expenditure on domestic airfares, as per his parliamentary declarations. For the first three months of this year, Bandt spent a chunky $10,664.85 on domestic scheduled fares.
That’s not the sort of amount you’re going to clock up booking Qantas Red-e deals in economy, and indicative of a pretty decent carbon footprint.
We called Bandt’s spokesman on Sunday to ask about the Greens leader’s allegedly close relationship with the front of the plane, but didn’t receive a response.
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Maverick MP’s other media war
Tim Smith’s attack on Neil Mitchell isn’t the only highly-colourful spray he’s unleashed on senior Victorian media figures in recent weeks. A fortnight ago, he turned to Twitter once more for a full frontal attack on Shannon Deery, the Herald Sun’s long-serving state political editor, in a post that remained live on the weekend.
An angry Smith took a dislike to an item in the Sunday Herald Sun’s anonymously-authored political column, Backroom Baz, which suggested that he’d departed the Victorian Parliament’s last session before the November state election with “a whimper”.
While hurling insult after insult, Smith also used his tweet to attempt to ‘out’ Deery as the author of both the offending item, and Backroom Baz as a whole.
“I notice the dunce of the Vic press gallery @s_deery aka @BackroomBaz said I left parliament in a ‘whimper’,” Smith wrote. “Dopey Deery will find out to his internal professional horror that’s not going to be true. For a guy the @theheraldsun pays to know about state politics he knows f-all!”
While Deery didn’t reply to the tweet, or offer any comment for this item, Diary is told that it would be an understatement to say that the post didn’t go unnoticed in the Herald Sun newsroom.
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Lane Calcutt becomes Anna’s ‘Fireman Sam’
Spare a thought for former Nine Queensland political editor Lane Calcutt.
While his former Nine political reporting colleague Chris Uhlmann embarks on a glorious retirement with a one-man drive to the tip of Cape York, Calcutt, 63, is embarking on an entirely new career in one of the toughest jobs in Queensland politics: as the number two spinner for Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.
On Friday night, Calcutt, Queensland TV’s most experienced reporter, was given a rowdy farewell from his 35-year career at Nine at the network’s chosen Brisbane pub, the Regatta Hotel in Toowong, near its Mount Coot-tha studios.
But as he walks into Palaszczuk’s William Street Brisbane digs this week to kick start his new career in earnest, you could forgive him for having the mother of all hangovers: with the Queensland Premier in the midst of one of her toughest periods since becoming Premier nearly eight years ago.
It’s a case of duelling crises for Palaszczuk, as she faces down everything from the failures of her state’s DNA forensic lab to hospital failures across the state, land tax backflips and the assault of female officers at the Queensland Police Service, to name but a few.
As one old media mate of Calcutt quipped to Diary on Friday of his new role: “There are that many bushfires in the Premier’s office, he’ll think he’s Fireman Sam.”
Meanwhile, in the wake of the departures of Calcutt and many of its other staff to join the big bucks of Palaszczuk, Nine has continued to resort to desperate measures to replace its lost talent.
Diary noticed that the network was forced to quietly post a Seek ad on Wednesday, in search of a “Mid-Senior” reporter to replace Calcutt in the Brisbane newsroom.
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