Antony Green hits back at ‘Twitter fart’ critics attacking his federal election performance
He may be the key to the ABC’s continued ratings dominance of the federal election night. But on May 21, after a few uncertain moments on the night, Antony Green copped some rare flak from armchair critics, particularly on social media. The main thrust of the online criticism was that his election performance wasn’t as assured as in previous elections.
Before he left the country last week for a well-earned European break, Green delivered a brickbat to his critics: “I’ve had Twitter farts saying I wasn’t as decisive this time. There’s a lot of people with opinions who get critical when they think you’re not being decisive. But there was a lot happening at this particular federal election.”
Green also made a candid confession before he flew out: the May 21 poll was his hardest out of a whopping 90 federal, state and territory campaigns he has presided over since 1989. “This was the toughest election I’ve had to call, because there were so many seats in play,” he said.
“A wide variety of swings occurred for a variety of reasons. The government lost 18 seats, Labor won 10 seats and lost two, the Greens won three more, and the teal independents won six. There were also 27 seats that were not two-party contests: that’s nearly twice as many as any previous election.”
Green said that before the huge swing to Labor in Western Australia, “I couldn’t see Labor getting above 71 seats.”
Complicating the picture were the teal independents, in particular. “The independent seats did make it more complex. We could see the government was losing seats to Labor. We just couldn’t project the teal independent seats because we had no history.”
And with the 2022 poll now disappearing into the rear-view mirror, Green’s reign over Australian election nights may finally be starting to wind down.
The ABC election doyen has confessed to Diary that at 62, he may only have “one more federal election left in me”.
Green admits that being on TV isn’t his dream, as the ABC has been increasingly grooming another noted number-cruncher, Casey Briggs, as his long-term successor through reports on nightly news bulletins.
“The TV stuff gets me a bit irritable,” Green tells Diary. “Everything with TV takes time. Physically I don’t have time to do it. In TV, you use up to two hours to get three minutes of TV. I hate having to say the same thing over and over in interviews. There’s a point where you say, ‘I’ve done this enough’.”
In this circumstance, Green – whose well-earned cycling trip takes in the picturesque Emilia-Romagna region in Northern Italy – is happy to present opportunities to Briggs to have a broader day-to-day presence on screen. “It suits me that Casey does it,” he says.
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Sutton comes out of hiding to deny Dan ‘gag’ claim
He’s the Victorian government’s rock star chief health officer, whose frequent TV briefings at the height of the state’s lengthy 2020 and 2021 Covid lockdowns saw fan sites pop up all over the internet. But last week Brett Sutton became the story for a very different reason: an apparent two-month media vanishing act, prompting questions about whether he’d been “gagged” by Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and his government.
A gaggle of journalists, led by 3AW’s political reporter Dennis O’Kane, grilled Andrews at a press conference last week about why requests to talk with Sutton had been stonewalled for months – at a time, it was claimed, that it was crucial for Sutton to talk, amid the current surge of Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths from the latest outbreak. One reporter even claimed they had been rejected time and again by both the Department of Health and the Premier’s media team.
But Andrews wasn’t having a bar of it. In his forthright style, he shirtfronted suggestions he was responsible for muzzling Sutton from talking. “That’s a matter for him – I’m not his press secretary, Dennis,” Andrews told O’Kane. “He’s perfectly capable of answering your questions and playing his role … he has quite a bit on.”
But vocal Andrews critic, 3AW morning host Neil Mitchell, immediately seized on Andrews’ response as “a load of nonsense”.
“I have no doubt he has been gagged by the government,” Mitchell said last week. “We go to the Department of Health, others go to the Department of Health, and get an answer from the Premier’s Department. They are controlling him. There is no question. They are restricting his access, because he can be embarrassing to government, and that is a bloody outrage. But what’s new?”
Sutton certainly disappeared from media view in the lead-up to last week. Research conducted exclusively for Diary by media monitoring service Streem shows that Sutton’s media presence has collapsed in recent months to around 15 per cent of its levels of a year ago, with an average during 2022 of just over 250 media mentions a month for Sutton across Australia in print, TV, radio and online, compared with nearly 1800 mentions during last August alone.
The Streem research also suggests the CHO’s last media appearance was back in May.
But on Friday, events suddenly took a comical turn: out of the blue, Sutton suddenly made himself widely available to the media. It started mid-Friday afternoon when Sutton rang into the 3AW newsroom to volunteer quotes to newsreader Tony Tardio for news bulletins. He then offered himself up for interviews with both 3AW’s drive host Tom Elliott and the ABC’s Raf Epstein, before – with less than half-an-hour’s notice – journalists were emailed an urgent media alert for a 4.15pm Sutton Covid media conference.
In the Elliott interview, Sutton was keen to offer up his key message: that he hadn’t received “any approach” from Andrews not to speak to media. Cryptically, he also added: “I don’t turn down (interview) invitations that come through to me.” Which raises the question: which invitations are actually coming “through” to Sutton?
At his Friday press conference, it wasn’t only the late notice that suggested it was hurriedly arranged. Sutton turned up looking like he’d just been come from a Woolies shopping trip, sporting something beyond designer stubble, T-shirt, and a windcheater that made even Andrews’s signature North Face jacket look overdressed.
Mitchell, who hasn’t been offered a Sutton interview since 2020, wasn’t buying the sudden media show: “I believe he has been in a form of witness protection for some time: he has witnessed things and the government wants to protect itself,” he told Diary.
“What happened on Friday was a veritable festival of Brett, after months of official stonewalling. It had the smell of a government panicking.”
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Palaszczuk demands LNP leader be ‘nice’ to her
When this column first branded Annastacia Palaszczuk as the “Red Carpet Premier” in June, little did we know how fast the tag would become part of the Queensland political vernacular.
In the days that followed, even her own colleagues whispered about her preference for red-carpet premieres over the daily grind of politics.
Rubbing shoulders with Hollywood royalty at movie launches, enjoying the hospitality at VIP enclosures of race meetings, Moet et Chandon balls, and of course the Logies, have all been part of an increasingly hectic social schedule for Palaszczuk and her laparoscopic surgeon boyfriend Reza Adib in recent months.
Over the past week it became just how much of a raw nerve the unwanted tag has struck. The Premier launched an extraordinary and furious attack on Opposition Leader David Crisafulli after he dared to mention her love of the high life.
The flashpoint was reached in full view of anyone who cared to stream a bruising week of Queensland estimates hearings. Crisafulli faced off with Palaszczuk about the $245m Wellcamp quarantine facility in Brisbane, which has quickly proved to be a white elephant for the state as it operated at a tiny fraction of its capacity.
Crisafulli went on the attack after Palaszczuk refused to commit to releasing cabinet documents relating to the Wellcamp fiasco. “Same old games, round and round,” he told her. “Red carpet, glitz, glamour, no vision.”
It’d be no exaggeration to say Palaszczuk saw red. After offering her go-to insult – that Crisafulli was “exactly like Campbell Newman” – the Premier upped the ante.
“I say to the Leader of the Opposition: do not come up to me at social events and be nice – and then come in here and put on a turn,” she told him.
“You come up and be nice. I take your photo with Peter Beattie.”
Following the Premier’s extraordinary outburst, it would be fair to say the Queensland LNP won’t be deterred from taunting her with the “Red Carpet Premier” line again.
As one insider put it: “The Premier has now officially begun to believe her own publicity: that she is actually a celebrity herself – and everyone is now required by law to be nice to her.”
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Half a Nigella in MKR’s big return
It’s already being triumphantly promoted by Seven during Commonwealth Games ad breaks as the Nigella Lawson season of My Kitchen Rules. But the British cooking superstar’s reputedly huge fee just to appear on the Seven cooking show – which returns next Sunday after a two-year hiatus – appears to have been too high for Seven to buy a full season of her. Diary’s mail from MKR insiders is that her pre-recorded appearance lasted for less than half of the 16 episodes of the rebooted but dramatically shortened MKR. We’re told she will appear only for the first round of the show with Manu Feildel. For the second round of heats on the show, Matt Preston pops up to replace Lawson as Feildel’s on-air partner. And just to add to the revolving door of judges on this year’s edition, Colin Fassnidge and Curtis Stone are drafted in to adjudicate the show’s finals, after Feildel apparently came down with the flu and had to go to hospital.
Word from the set was that Lawson had an entourage of hair and make-up artists, wardrobe, agents and spinners following her every step during her time filming the show, which was completed several weeks ago during her high-profile stint Down Under earlier this year. During her time in Australia, she hosted Melbourne’s food and wine festival, and famously attended Peter FitzSimons and Lisa Wilkinson’s legendary pro-Albo election night party.
There is a lot on the line for Seven’s attempt to resurrect MKR, once Australia’s top-rating show, after years of declining audiences. In this light, it has been no surprise to see Seven make a concerted attempt to distance ‘‘new MKR’’ from ‘‘old MKR’’.
Already, the word is that with Nigella in tow, MKR producers have toned down the “melodrama” element of the show to allegedly make it “all about the food” this time around. That means the previous season’s decision to sleep the contestants together in one compound to generate drama between them has been discarded, replaced by the original formula of the contestants cooking for judges in their own homes.
The run of the show has also been almost cut in half from the previous 2020 season which ran for 29 episodes. And with Seven’s motto seemingly being “anything but the old MKR”, there has been lots of tinkering with the formula – with the show’s signature red colouring and “ding dong” doorbell both ditched.
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Truce reached in Mitchell/McGuire stoush
After more than a month of taking brutal shots at each other, both on and off-air, two of Melbourne’s most prominent media figures, Neil Mitchell and Eddie McGuire, appear to have finally reached a truce.
Neither of the high-profile pair had been willing to back down after they got into a public slanging match over the behaviour of Collingwood star Jordan De Goey that spilled over into two heated exchanges on Mitchell’s 3AW radio show.
Mitchell had variously dubbed McGuire “a nasty bastard” who had “shouted” at him, threatening to “ban” him from his show. Meanwhile, McGuire had accused Mitchell of lying “by omission”, and of “condescending to me with snide, disparaging and inaccurate remarks”. He also ominously told this column a fortnight ago: “We need to sort out our relationship in the next fortnight.”
Well, two weeks is a long time in radio, and that gap seems to have been enough time for the pair to hammer out a peace agreement. When McGuire finally reappeared on Mitchell’s show on Thursday, it was immediately apparent that the pair was making an effort to be more cordial than on the previous two occasions. The only reference to their previous on-air fireworks came when Mitchell promoted the pair’s regular Ideas Factory segment to his listeners, promising: “We’ll play nicely (this time).”
Still, in talkback radio, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. We’re told that they had a bigger than normal response from listeners on Thursday.
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Why Seven put off Barilaro scuffle footage
The John Barilaro/New York trade commissioner saga raged on last week, with the latest drama being the former NSW deputy premier’s scuffle with a camera crew at the Sydney seaside suburb of Manly nine days ago.
It’s interesting that the network that employed the camera crew, Seven, didn’t air the footage of the scuffle until last Monday night – a full 48 hours after the Barilaro encounter with the crew.
Seven’s Sydney news director Jason Morrison tells Diary that his initial decision had been not to air the footage at all: “We didn’t go there for biffo. We went there to get an answer out of him. I probably wouldn’t have run the footage, because I didn’t feel it was enough for a story.”
What changed in the 48 hours was that Barilaro chose to go on Ben Fordham’s 2GB breakfast show on Monday morning to give his version of events, to complain about “the way I was confronted in the dark outside of a bar”.
“I’m being absolutely intruded on and harassed, and I’m sorry to say, the media (is) at the forefront,” he told Fordham.
It was these comments that Morrison says prompted him to screen the full footage, telling Diary: “If he hadn’t have gone on 2GB on Monday trying to make himself the victim, I probably wouldn’t have run the footage.”
Morrison said the question by Seven reporter Chris Maher had been “innocuous”.
The footage showed Maher asking Barilaro: “Are you disappointed that Labor is blocking your appearance before the public inquiry?” Barilaro replied: “It’s a night out mate,” shortly before the scuffle broke out.
Barilaro didn’t return our calls.
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