Pauline Hanson’s conspiracy theorist ‘blue book’ revealed

Pauline Hanson couldn’t remember the title of her Port Arthur conspiracy book. We can help.

Cartoon: Johannes Leak.

Around Seven’s Martin Place studios in Sydney, they’re now calling it “green room-gate”.

The extraordinary episode involves ex-deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce’s behaviour behind the scenes during the network’s NSW election night coverage.

Now, through Diary, Joyce has issued an unconditional apology to Seven staff on the night: “I apologise for my behaviour and my demeanour.”

Barnaby Joyce on set at Channel seven during their election coverage. Picture: Damian Shaw

Indeed, many viewers noticed Joyce’s cranky on-air demeanour during the election coverage.

But apparently that was nothing on his mood in Seven’s green room.

Seven insiders tell Diary there were four-letter words aplenty when Joyce first arrived on set and saw his schedule for the night.

As one insider put it: “He had the shits supreme about whether he should even be there.”

But now Joyce is the latest in a long line of famous people to learn the hard way that when behind-the-scenes people have bad experiences with them, it matters.

Along with his apology, he explains his behaviour was related to being initially told he would only be on Seven’s election panel, hosted by Seven’s Michael Usher, for 10 minutes.

“I saw the schedule on the wall,” he tells Diary. “Then I saw the closest human being, and I told them what I thought.”

Joyce flew down from Armidale with his partner, Vikki Campion, and their son, Sebastian, on election day. “Between a screaming child, and putting everybody in a hotel and walking through the rain to get there, I was wondering whether the 1000km round trip was worth it … You don’t take down a partner and screaming baby, and go into a hotel, talk for 10 minutes, and then say ‘I’m home, honey’.”

Joyce now concedes he was “probably a bit tired and bothered”. Perhaps thankfully for all concerned, Joyce’s screen time was extended by Seven. He ended up being on air not for 10 minutes, but “a couple of hours”.

Conspiracy theory

Remember Pauline Hanson’s “blue book”? You know, the one on Martin B ryant and the Port Arthur massacre which she told Andrew Bolt on Sky on Thursday night she couldn’t remember the name of.

Diary believes it may have found the book in question. It’s called Deadly Deception at Port Arthur, a 1999 tome by the late conspiracy theorist Joe Vialls.

The book certainly seems to fit Hanson’s description to Bolt about the tome she had read but couldn’t remember: “It was a blue book. It wasn’t real thick … (I) thought, well, I want to know about Port Arthur, so I read the book.” In the controversial al-Jazeera hidden-camera documentary screened on the ABC last week, she had also referred to the book and the massacre: “Those shots, they were precision shots ... they didn’t muck around ... I read a book on it, on Port Arthur. A lot of questions there.”

Vialls’ book on Port Arthur is indeed “blue”, not “real thick” at 70-odd pages, and does suggest that Bryant could not have been capable of the precision shots fired off in the massacre. At one point, Vialls says in the book: “To even suggest that Martin Bryant, whose proven weapons handling experience was limited to a single shot Webley Osprey air rifle could have caused this carnage is absurd.”

It goes on to mention that Port Arthur “bears the distinctive trademark of a planned ‘psyop’”: apparently an operation designed to “psychologically manipulate the belief mechanisms of ... a nation for geopolitical or military reasons”.

He then floats a bizarre theory that Port Arthur and other massacres could have been arranged through “multinational corporations” using “retired members of American and Israeli special forces”. Now that is one wacky blue book!

Wrath of Pauline

A furious Hanson cast her net far and wide on Thursday when lashing out at a veritable who’s who of media and political leaders following the al-Jazeera documentary.

Sunrise’s David “Kochie” Koch was in elite company atop the Hanson shit-list, along with Ita Buttrose, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and the founder of this newspaper, Rupert Murdoch.

When Diary caught Kochie at Adelaide Airport on Friday, he took his public shaming by Hanson as an honour: “I was quite surprised, but I was in pretty good company with Rupert Murdoch. I feel quite privileged to be where I am.”

In breaking news ...

By Adam Lang’s own admission, it has been “another remarkable week” at Macquarie Media, which owns 2GB, 3AW and 4BC.

The Macquarie CEO has been dealing with the fallout of an explosive Facebook post by a former 2GB panel operator, Chris Bowen, which Lang on Friday said had made a “spectacle” of the company.

Bowen said in his Facebook post 10 days ago that he had suffered “mental health problems” after “16 years of intense bullying by a work colleague” who he couldn’t “bring myself to name”.

It was The Daily Telegraph that on Monday named Ray Hadley as the person Bowen was referring to, despite Hadley being a leading columnist for the paper.

The Tele’s editor Ben English tells Diary the story had to run. “The days we can pretend that an issue doesn’t exist, when it is all over social media, are long gone,” he says.

“If we ignored it, we’d be accused of trying to bury it to protect our columnist. Ray Hadley is a significant public figure, and he would recognise that when serious allegations are raised, that is a story that we had to cover.”

After the Telegraph’s first story, Hadley subsequently said on air of Bowen: “I’m sorry for any hurt I’ve caused him … I’d like to think we could catch up into the future and talk about all the good times.”

The plot thickens

Last week’s Tele stories have now drawn TV interest.

ABC 7.30 reporter Andy Park contacted numerous past and present Macquarie employees, including Chris Bowen, in preparation for a Hadley story to run as early as tonight.

The timing is certainly interesting. John Singleton is right in the middle of negotiations with Nine, asking $100m for his remaining Macquarie stake.

Hadley’s bad week

In the first of two notes to Macquarie staff last Monday, Adam Lang said: “We have made contact with (Bowen) to offer support. Ray Hadley is obviously deeply affected by these comments and we are also supporting him.”

By Friday, Lang was urging staff to raise any workplace grievances through Macquarie’s “fair, proper and confidential” complaints process, rather than the Bowen method of posting them straight to Facebook.

“We have had the historic workplace behaviour of our company in Sydney made a spectacle on social media,” Lang said.

“I am very grateful to all of the staff who have made their support known to me and directly to Ray Hadley.”

Completing Hadley’s challenging week, he admitted himself to hospital on the weekend with a bowel condition.

However, he told listeners on Saturday he would be back on air today.

Jones not a done deal

Macquarie’s other big priority, contract talks with Alan Jones, seemed for much of last week to take a back seat to the 2GB spot fire started by Bowen.

It didn’t help that Nine CEO Hugh Marks was overseas on a belated break after he worked through the summer holidays.

As Diary revealed last week, the Nine board, led by chairman Peter Costello and Marks, has given Macquarie an unequivocal “sign Jones” edict.

Talks with the Jones camp resumed late in the week. We hear his radio-leading $4.5m a year pay packet isn’t an issue.

But could new conditions on Jones’s contract now become the real fly in the ointment?

Pyne signs off

While Jones plans for the future, it’s time to bid farewell to another glorious media career.

Defence Minister Christopher “I’m a Fixer” Pyne, whose political career will end at the federal election in six weeks or so, is also calling time on his media commitments.

That means his Sky News show Pyne & Marles (with Labor’s Richard Marles), and Friday segment on Nine’s Today with Anthony Albanese, have both come to an end.

Diary hears Pyne may be considering a very different future career: not with boy band Human Nature, as he joked last week, but in board or advisory roles.

In the very last Pyne & Marles on Friday, The Fixer expressed gratitude the show lasted “five seasons and over 100 episodes”.

But Pyne couldn’t resist a sly dig at Nine’s 2015 turkey, The Verdict — the show that featured the much-promoted prime-time foray of Mark Latham, his ex-political adversary, and Karl Stefanovic.

“I wanted a show that was going to last longer than The Verdict,” he said.

Pyne certainly achieved that: The Verdict lasted just eight episodes.

Nine’s Footy flop

As Hugh Marks returns to work today, he confronts the ratings disaster that is Nine’s new-look AFL Footy Show, hosted by Anthony “Lehmo” Lehmann and Neroli Meadows.

In just its second week, the show confronted the ignominy of dropping below 100,000 viewers in its home city of Melbourne, making the figures for the previous version of the show, hosted by Eddie McGuire and Sam Newman, look like Married at First Sight by comparison.

You could almost hear the cries of “Come back Eddie and Sam, all is forgiven” echoing around Nine’s Docklands studios.

That was, until McGuire’s “ignorant”, national headline-making mockery of double amputee ex-SMH journo Cynthia Banham during the Swans/Crows coin toss on Friday night, which saw him forced to apologise and step down from his next day’s commentary duties.

For whom the Pell tolls

The worst nightmares of many top media figures came true last week, after contempt charges were laid by Victorian DPP Kerri Judd.

Herald Sun editor Damon Johnston, the Tele’s Ben English, The Courier-Mail’s Sam Weir, the AFR’s Michael Stutchbury, the SMH’s Lisa Davies, The Age’s Alex Lavelle, Today co-host Deb Knight, and 2GB’s Ray Hadley and Chris Smith are all in the DPP’s sights.

A directions hearing will shortly be held in Victoria’s Supreme Court. The move follows the recent George Pell “guilty” verdict on sex abuse charges.

Unusually, other high-profile media figures who Judd initially warned would face imminent “proceedings” for contempt avoided last week’s charges. They include 3AW’s breakfast duo Ross Stevenson and John Burns, news.com.au boss Kate de Brito, and Nine’s ex-morning TV boss Mark Calvert. The charges involve cryptic reports across the media in December when Pell’s guilty verdict was still suppressed. The reports did not identify Pell or refer to the charges against him, but mentioned a story of “widespread relevance”.

Despite the stories’ vagueness, Judd detailed up to four charges against the media, including the olde world “scandalising the court” — a charge scarcely used in decades.

Cass versus paps

The long-running war between the paparazzi and budding TV personality Cass Thorburn, ex-wife of Karl Stefanovic, continues to rage. Now there’s even talk of lawyers being called in.

The latest hostilities involve Instagram posts from Thorburn nine days ago about well-known pap Jonathan Marshall.

Among other things, the Studio 10 panellist claimed on Instagram that Marshall had staked out her parents in the Victorian town of Mildura. “(He) stalked my terminally ill dad, sitting in a car outside his house and pulling (his) camera out on him at 3am when he took his dog out to go to the toilet. She also claimed Marshall “chased my 71-year-old mum in her car and she called the police”.

But now the paps have joined forces to claim another version of events. Diary has a copy of a letter sent by another notorious pap, Stephen Cook, to Thorburn, in which he claims he has the “smoking lens” in proving who really staked out her mum in Mildura.

“I can tell you it wasn’t Jonathan,” Cook tells Thorburn in the letter. “He’s not once set foot in Mildura. The mystery man, this ‘stalker’ you speak of in such sinister tones, is in fact, me.”

Cook says that after the high-profile Stefanovic/Thorburn break-up in 2016, he had conducted a phone interview with her mother. He claims he then flew to Mildura in search of an accompanying photo.

But despite his confession, Cook wryly questions the claims of a car chase with Thorburn’s mother, and the 3am stalking of her father.

“Mildura is a pretty sleepy town,” he says. “One thing they don’t have is car chases, especially with 71-year-old women behind the wheel.”