Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and her loyal Health Minister Yvette D’Ath have wasted no time in making an enemy of the newest addition to the ranks of Queensland political reporters.
Sky News’s Peter Gleeson, who last week stepped away from the studio where he had been host of 11pm show The Front Page to take an expanded role as Sky’s Queensland editor, almost immediately broke two of the tougher stories of the year from a Palaszczuk standpoint.
Both stories exposed her double standards on who is and isn’t acceptable to enter Fortress Queensland.
Gleeson’s first grenade was his viral scoop revealing that NRL WAGs had received a special exemption to enter the state at the same time that native Queenslanders – even those with special needs – were being locked out.
His second salvo last Wednesday broke the news that even Defence Force personnel who’d come back from rescuing refugees in Kabul were less worthy than NRL WAGs.
Palaszczuk and D’Ath last week made the courageous decision that the best way to take the heat off themselves was to attack Gleeson’s stories.
Palaszczuk directly called out Gleeson in a hastily arranged press conference on the Sunshine Coast that was meant to be a victory lap to celebrate Brisbane snatching the NRL Grand Final from Sydney. Instead, she copped combative questioning at the presser about Gleeson’s Kabul troops story.
She pushed back strongly, claiming Gleeson’s “facts were incorrect” and his story “extremely disappointing”.
But Gleeson, as ex-editor of both Brisbane’s Sunday Mail and the Gold Coast Bulletin, wasn’t taking a backward step. He jumped on to Sky with Kieran Gilbert five minutes after Palaszczuk had finished to contradict the Premier’s comments, saying that he had been doing his job “for 40 years” and his sources on the troops story were “impeccable”.
Meanwhile in Brisbane, D’Ath described Gleeson’s stories as “completely false” and “mischievous”. She then strangely brought federal Defence Minister Peter Dutton into the story, in an attempt to prove that Queensland was urgently trying to get the troops home.
She showed off text messages sent from her personal mobile phone to three Queensland reporters — Nine’s Tim Arvier, Seven’s Ben Murphy and The Australian’s Lydia Lynch – as alleged evidence that she had texted Dutton about the troops.
Unfortunately for D’Ath, turns out she’d got one digit of Dutton’s number wrong, and her text was never sent.
Amid the confusion, it eventually emerged that the Defence Force troops had indeed been forced into hotel quarantine in Melbourne, rather than being allowed to isolate on their base in Queensland.
When we reached Gleeson at the end of his first week in his new role on Friday, he claimed vindication: “This government is better at spin than a Shane Warne flipper,” he said.
–
The mob that bullied Millar off Twitter
A rapid escalation of the politically charged climate on Twitter ahead of the upcoming federal election campaign has been the catalyst behind ABC News Breakfast host Lisa Millar’s decision in recent days to deactivate her account on the social media platform.
We’re informed that vicious, politically motivated abuse of Millar reached a crescendo over the past two months, as left-wing keyboard warriors – bravely hiding behind pseudonyms on their Twitter accounts – angrily accused Millar of showing blatant bias in favour of Scott Morrison’s federal government.
When Diary spoke to Millar on Sunday, she said that Twitter and its noisy trolls had officially “jumped the shark”.
Over the past year, Millar has become one of the three most trolled targets at the ABC among alleged “progressives” on Twitter, alongside her close friend, 7.30 host Leigh Sales, and Insiders host David Speers.
The basis for the Twitter hatred towards Millar appears to be little more than the fact she’s the daughter of the late Queensland Nationals federal MP Clarrie Millar, who died in 2017.
As one ABC source put it succinctly last week: “It’s hard to ignore the irony of left-wing progressives using highly sexist and misogynistic language to bully a 52-year-old woman because they assume she has the same politics as her father.”
And Diary has learned that one of the key catalysts for Millar was her critics savaging her for allegedly “smiling” while introducing a grab of former PM John Howard – which led to renewed claims she was a pro-Coalition stooge.
While Millar had originally planned to return to Twitter after 30 days when she quietly disappeared nine days ago, subsequent events forced her to shelve those plans last week. After the news of Millar’s departure from Twitter was broken online on Wednesday by Melbourne 13-year old whiz-kid journalist Leo Puglisi, @lisamillar once again became a nationally trending topic, with unrepeatable vitriol heaped on Millar again because of her alleged pro-Coalition bias.
Millar has attracted hundreds of private and public messages of support since the news broke, from the highest levels of the ABC to journalists from all other major media organisations.
Millar has told Diary the whole story, confirming that the trolling of her had peaked in recent months.
“It reached new heights of ridiculousness in the fortnight before I quit, when I came in for criticism for allegedly smiling while introducing a 20-second clip of John Howard speaking about Afghanistan,” she says. “Soon after, I quietly deactivated my account for 30 days. I wasn’t making a big deal of this. I wasn’t aggro against the trolls. I decided to take control of a worsening situation, and minimise my exposure by removing myself from the platform altogether.”
But the revelation last week that she’d suspended her Twitter account released a “whole new level” of bullying.
“The intensity of the furore has blown me away,” Millar tells us. “Enough’s enough.”
The irony of removing herself from the platform to silence the trolls, only to encounter a whole new round of bullying while absent, was not lost on her. Millar tells Diary of last week’s events: “For me, it was the week Twitter jumped the shark.”
Of a possible return to Twitter, Millar says: “Never say never. But until the platform works out a way to make the platform safer for women and others who attract criticism, I’m less inclined to return.”
–
Speers quietly cuts back social media
Lisa Millar’s action against Twitter isn’t the first among prominent past and present ABC personalities who have copped similar pile-ons.
Hamish Macdonald famously quit the platform in mid-2020, soon after he took over as host of the ABC’s Q+A, saying he’d “never had more abuse” than after taking that role. The online vitriol he copped when hosting Q+A is believed to have been a key reason behind his return to Ten’s The Project this year.
But now, Diary is told Insiders host David Speers has sharply cut back his Twitter presence ahead of the federal election, in the wake of continued abuse from the left over his previous role as political editor of Sky News.
And it seems that as the election approaches, the incendiary climate on Twitter will only become nastier.
–
Why did Gladys quit the media?
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian blindsided some key government allies on Friday when she announced that the Sunday edition of her daily Covid-19 soap opera and ratings hit Gladys TV would be “the last time we officially do a press conference in this way”.
Berejiklian shocked the press pack and, Diary is told, some of her closest confidantes in the NSW government, when she said that the daily 11am briefing would be replaced by videos of Department of Health officials running through the daily figures. “I will turn up when I need to,” she bluntly told them.
Just to make sure Gladys’s captain’s call wasn’t a national trend, we contacted Victorian Premier Dan Andrews’ office to see if any similar moves were afoot in Victoria. But a spokeswoman for Andrews assured us that Dan TV was going nowhere: “We will not be dropping the daily update.”
Phew! Losing Gladys TV and Dan TV in the same week would have been a disaster for Diary.
Berejiklian’s remarks on Friday prompted Seven’s chief Sydney reporter, a perplexed Chris Reason, to grill the NSW Premier with the question: “Are you going into hiding?”
It also prompted infighting, even among colleagues in the same newsrooms. Nine’s NSW political editor Chris O’Keefe backed Berejiklian, saying the daily briefings served “no purpose” because they were feeding “collective anxiety”. But his Nine colleague Lara Vella contradicted him: “Sorry, Chris. Totally disagree … The least they can do is provide a live daily update. Especially with cases still so high.”
A narrative also started to emerge around the press gallery over the weekend that her decision might have something to do with Yoni Bashan’s exclusive in The Australian last week, where he reported that ICAC may soon resume hearings into disgraced former Wagga Wagga MP Daryl Maguire.
It’s perhaps not surprising that with the largely frosty reception her announcement received, there were already signs over the weekend that Berejiklian might be walking back her announcement.
NSW government sources tell Diary that the comments by the NSW Premier overstated the change to her schedule, saying that she would still be appearing multiple times each week. “It was meant to be a slight shift, but it came out on Friday as if she was going cold turkey on the daily press conference. But she is absolutely not dropping it. She’ll be out almost as much as now – just not every day of the week.”
But we hear there will be changes to the weekend press conferences, which are likely to revert to a “one briefing per weekend” format.
–
ScoMo promotes ABC critic to target ‘bias’
The Senate is about to become a crucial battleground in the war between the ABC and the federal government ahead of the election.
Diary can reveal that — in a move that apparently came right from the top — the Coalition has in recent days quietly promoted Andrew Bragg, NSW Liberal Senator and key ABC agitator, to chair the upper house’s crucial Environment and Communications Legislation Committee.
Bragg will replace the mild-mannered South Australian Liberal senator David Fawcett in the role, in a clear signal of intent to sharpen the Coalition’s stance on the ABC.
Bragg’s focus, we’re told, will be the ABC’s coverage of what is emerging as the pivotal issue in the federal election campaign: the government’s much-debated JobKeeper scheme.
The Coalition is believed to be agitated about the ABC’s coverage of JobKeeper, which it sees as slanted against the scheme.
When we reached Bragg on Sunday, he confirmed his promotion, also making it clear that the ABC’s coverage of JobKeeper would be in his sights.
“The ABC is a very important institution. It must not be biased. I want the ABC to report fairly and squarely on key policy issues, particularly JobKeeper,” he said.
Bragg singled out a story about JobKeeper on the ABC News website on Saturday, which used the headline: “The biggest corporate welfare fraud in Australia’s history.”
The timing of Bragg’s elevation is particularly interesting — ABC managing director David Anderson’s is scheduled to appear at Senate Estimates next month.
And Bragg has wasted no time in making Anderson aware of his presence. In a four-page letter to the managing director, Bragg has outlined a series of issues and requested a “timely response”.
JobKeeper is one of the issues, particularly a January story by Dan Ziffer, which was headlined: “JobKeeper payments for prisoners, the dead and other fraud cases probed by ATO”.
After correspondence between the government and the ABC, the story was updated with an “editor’s note” on April 14. The note stated that the story had been changed “to make clear that the ATO's investigations into potentially fictitious employees occurred at the application stage, prior to JobKeeper payments being made”.
The updated version of the Ziffer story includes the ATO’s statement that it is not aware “of any ultimately successful JobKeeper claim for deceased or other fictitious employees”.
In his August 30 letter to Anderson, Bragg complains about “sustained and erroneous targeting of the JobKeeper program”, which he claims is “one of the most successful wage subsidy schemes in the world”.
Bragg alleges this is an example of “systemic bias within the organisation against the Morrison government”.
Elsewhere in the letter, Bragg proposes a “three strikes” rule for reporters who fail to comply with the ABC’s “editorial standards”.
Bragg also wants a policy of the BBC introduced last year, in which it can now keep its staffers off Twitter where there are transgressions of the Beeb’s social media policies. Should get interesting.
–
Nine’s tribute to Nadia Bartel’s ‘strict moral code’
Timing, as they say, is everything. One of the AFL’s most famous former WAGs, alleged “influencer” Nadia Bartel, is in a career pickle over the explosive video that emerged, showing her breaching Melbourne’s lockdown and sniffing a mystery white powder off a $3 Kmart plate.
Last week Bartel lost Instagram influencing partnerships with key personal sponsors after the video went viral.
But spare a thought for the Nine papers’ Domain section. One day before the scandal broke, reporter Jane Rocca published a gushing article in Domain titled: ‘‘Nadia Bartel: Breath of Fresh Air”, which remains online on Domain’s sites.
The story is dripping with unintentional irony.
Diary’s personal highlight in light of recent events is Rocca’s description of Bartel’s “strict moral code” as a businesswoman and mother.
Other highlights come from some of Bartel’s quotes.
At one point, she talks up her breathing-driven spiritual development. “In the last few years, I have done a lot of work on my spiritual self … I went to see a breath work teacher and it was amazing.”
But the story’s final quote is hard to top: “I have definitely changed a lot in the last few years. I am probably a totally different person – evolving and getting wiser.”
We’ll take your word for it, Nadia.
–
The Age’s declaration of Faine’s interest
There was an interesting change to Jon Faine’s Sunday Age column on the weekend. For the first time, the paper included a declaration that Faine “has worked on contract for the state government”.
The disclaimer was in reference to his role last year making Covid-19 TV ads for the Victorian Health Department featuring Waleed Aly, Magda Szubanski, Tayla Harris and others.
When we reached the ex-ABC Radio Melbourne morning host, he said he was “not embarrassed” by the declaration: “Every space in society now seems to be contested and subject to intense scrutiny. If people don’t like an opinion, they look for a way to discredit the person who’s giving it.”
Faine wryly notes that he’s also available for “weddings and bar mitzvahs” … Covid restrictions permitting, of course.
-
Making the news
More Coverage
Hubbl targets families and young people for growth
Foxtel has set its sights on families and young people to drive growth for its streaming aggregator Hubbl with a hefty media spend behind its new campaign.
Overseas streamers ‘eat our lunch’: Stokes
Seven West chairman Kerry Stokes has accused the federal government of failing to regulate overseas streaming platforms and social media giants.