Relations between the newly re-elected Daniel Andrews and the Victorian media aren’t at their warmest right now, after a highly combative election campaign.
But with his third election victory now in the bag, Andrews has already turned his attention to how to bypass the mainstream media altogether.
Diary can reveal that Sabina Husic, Andrews’ famously forthright media boss, will shortly be posted to an entirely new role whose primary purpose appears to be bolstering the digital channels that the Premier has already used so effectively to cut out the media middleman.
We’re told Husic is about to be bestowed with the fancy new title of Director of Communications and Digital for the Premier’s Office. The rise of Andrews’ digital strategy as an alternative to the media has been a key part of Husic’s remit during her time with the Premier, and her new title is seen as an acknowledgment of that role.
Andrews, it seems, has been emboldened by his newest voter mandate. It is understood the move of Husic is part of an aggressive push to take the Premier’s bypass of the media to the next level, by expanding the way he communicates directly with voters through both his current social media platforms like Facebook, his personal website, and on other key platforms.
Already, during the first year of the pandemic in 2020 – when Andrews fronted for a record 120 consecutive days of Covid briefings – the Premier made his on-camera pronouncements directly available through streaming channels as a way of getting his message out directly to the public.
At the time, this column facetiously dubbed Andrews’ alternative media channel as ‘‘Dan TV’’.
As a further plank in the strategy, Husic’s current deputy chief spinner, Brendan Donohoe (one half of a high-profile Melbourne power couple with his wife, The Age and Nine sports journalist Caroline Wilson) will move with Husic to become her Deputy Director of Communications and Digital. Meanwhile, Reed Fleming – currently Andrews’ ‘‘digital manager’’, will be promoted as a second Deputy Director of Communications and Digital with Donohoe.
Ben Foster – currently Andrews’ key relationship conduit with both Labor MPs and the private sector – is also moving to a new role as the Premier’s director of strategy, where we’re told he’ll focus on navigating some of the government’s election promises with the corporate sector.
With Andrews’ election victory meaning he is now guaranteed a statue at 1 Treasury Place Melbourne, it seems the Premier no longer feels the need to win any popularity contests with the media.
However, in Husic’s absence, Andrews is still set to maintain the position of Director of Media in his office. Diary hears that a search for the media role will commence shortly.
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Ardern’s ‘worst week with NZ media
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is facing the biggest media challenge of her tenure in charge of the country, as the combination of a tanking economy, a crime wave and an increasingly emboldened group of senior journalists and radio commentators have put the blowtorch on her performance.
For much of her five years running the nation, Ardern has been given a rails run by a NZ press gallery seemingly awed by her exalted status on the global stage and strong domestic popularity.
But that has started to change over the last year or so. Opinion polls in recent months have increasingly underlined a sharp souring of Ardern’s popularity, matched only by the rapid escalation of criticism of her performance as PM by some of the biggest names in the NZ media.
The major Newshub-Reid Research poll released in November showed that support for Ardern’s NZ Labour Party had sunk 6 per cent to just 32.3 per cent – the lowest level of support since she became PM in 2017.
The bad press towards Ardern culminated last Thursday in one of the toughest media assessments of the PM’s performance since she took office.
The nation’s No.1 talk radio personality, Newstalk ZB’s breakfast host Mike Hosking, took to the national newspaper, the NZ Herald, on Thursday to unleash a brutal take-down of Ardern’s administration, starting with the claim that last week was “the government’s worst”.
“The sum total is every day this week, the government has seen an avalanche of bad news, upset, anger, protest and disbelief, from one end of the country to the other, and I haven’t even got to the recession yet,” Hosking wrote.
“All governments have bad weeks, all governments eventually run out of puff, but a year out (from the general election), this one is setting new records in setting fire to itself.”
Hosking also claimed that if Ardern “ever had any link to the common folk, it’s gone”.
Hosking’s assault on the PM’s judgment came after an escalating wave of robberies and ram raids on convenience stores in New Zealand reached its zenith with a killing – not just anywhere, but in Ardern’s own inner-city Auckland seat.
A just-married worker at a convenience store in the suburb of Sandringham in Ardern’s Mount Albert electorate was stabbed to death after chasing down an offender who had robbed the store’s cash register.
But rather than immediately visiting the grieving family to empathise, something she has famously done for previous tragedies, Ardern instead persisted with a visit to New Zealand’s remote Chatham Islands – attracting widespread media and political criticism. Hosking described her decision to ‘‘push on’’ with the Chatham Islands visit as a ‘‘PR disaster’’ for Ardern.
“(Her) excuse was the grief of the family and the ongoing police investigation, and yet the day after, clearly having been got to by those who saw this as the PR disaster it was, she got in touch and followed it up with a press conference,” Hosking wrote. In the wake of the killing, Ardern belatedly offered $NZ4000 subsidies for shopkeepers to buy ‘‘fog cannons’’, which allegedly prevent potential robbers from being able to see anything to steal.
But Stuff.co.nz’s respected political editor Luke Malpass, a former editorial writer at the Australian Financial Review, attacked the subsidies as an ‘‘admission of failure’’, because they showed the government could ‘‘do little’’ to prevent the crimes.
Ardern later claimed that there was a global shortage of fog cannons and that there would be a delay. But Hosking’s wife and fellow top morning radio host, Newstalk ZB’s Kate Hawkesby, attacked that as an ‘‘outright lie’’: “There is no global shortage of fog cannons. The supply issue is due to the government not placing any orders for them. They’ve dropped the ball, again.”
Hawkesby claimed the other crisis facing New Zealand was a ‘‘spin crisis’’ coming from what she sarcastically dubbed Ardern’s ‘‘Pulpit of Truth’’: “We are being fed a steady diet of BS, from a government that has no idea what the words accountability or responsibility mean.”
Meanwhile, Malpass also lashed out at Ardern’s attempt to offload responsibility for rapidly rising mortgage rates for consumers onto the banks.
With the current cash rate in NZ at 4.25 per cent amid spiralling inflation, Ardern has turned to distraction tactics, asking whether banks were behaving “the right way” by making “significant profits”. But Malpass said that Ardern’s “bank-bashing” would not distract the NZ public “from the one real-life indicator that rules them all: inflation”.
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Are the Teals schmoozing Bob Katter?
Why were a group of teals – led by ex-ABC foreign correspondent Zoe Daniel – having a cosy dinner with Bob Katter at one of Canberra’s poshest restaurants?
That was the question asked by Diary’s spies and fellow diners last Monday night when a group made up of Katter, a bunch of Climate 200-linked MPs and staffers took over pricey Canberra steak house Capitol Bar and Grill at the start of parliament’s last sitting week.
All in all, it was quite the political nosh-up on the ground floor of Canberra’s chic QT Hotel.
Our informants tell us that initially the dinner was looking very much like a progressives-only affair, led by Daniel (seated in pride of place in the heart of the table), Climate 200 communications director Jim Middleton and fellow Teals Kylea Tink (the member for North Sydney), and Kate Chaney (member for the WA seat of Curtin).
The gathering was just a short COMCAR limo drive away from Parliament House – although surely the highly climate-aware pollies jumped on public transport to save on emissions.
But just when our spies thought the guest list was complete, Middleton, the ABC’s one-time chief political correspondent, departed, only to return with the renowned parliamentary maverick Katter.
Sudden seat-shifting ensued as Middleton escorted Katter with great deference right next to a beaming Daniel, who greeted him warmly at the heart of the table.
The steaks were plentiful, and the table only got louder as the red and white wine flowed at the Capitol Bar and Grill – which describes itself as a place of ‘sheer indulgence’, where a steak can set you back anything up to $180 for a 1.4KG bone-in rib eye, and an exhaustive wine list caters to the most exacting taste. (And who knew there were so many carnivores on the progressive side of politics, given the recent hand-wringing over climate change-inducing methane emissions?)
So, was the dinner a summit to discuss a future Katter Australia Party/Teal merger? Sources close to the Katter camp concede to Diary that closer relationships between Katter and the Teals would help them to form a formidable lower-house voting bloc, and that he had become friendly with the likes of Daniel and Chaney.
But we’ve established that the dinner was specifically for Daniel, who was celebrating her 50th birthday in style with her closest political mates: one of whom just happens to include Katter. Fascinating.
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Ten readying for World Cup bid
The heroic efforts of the Socceroos being beamed into Australia on SBS in recent weeks haven’t gone unnoticed by the Ten Network, which controls virtually all of our soccer rights except for the World Cup.
Ten’s US owner Paramount in 2021 reportedly paid a total of $300m over several years for the rights to the A-League, W-League, and Socceroos and Matildas internationals leading up to and after the World Cup.
But the deal for the big dance in Qatar had already been negotiated with SBS a decade before Ten made its big commitment to broadcast Australian soccer.
However, Diary hears that for the 2026 World Cup (to be jointly hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico), it’s increasingly likely that Ten will provide stiff competition for SBS, which for decades has been the primary host broadcaster for the event in Australia.
The unexpected brave performance of the Socceroos to make to the knockout stages of the World Cup has been a ratings bonanza for SBS. For example, a whopping 618,000 patriotic viewers tuned in at the ungodly hour of 2am to watch the Australia/Denmark match live.
The sentiment on Sunday’s SBS broadcast of the World Cup match with Argentina was that the young Australian side had not yet peaked. Several emerging stars such as 18-year old Garang Kuol (who very nearly stole an equaliser for the Socceroos in the last minute against Lionel Messi’s Argentina) are likely to only reach their full potential in four years’ time.
SBS won the rights to screen both the 2018 World Cup in Russia and the 2022 version in Qatar all the way back in 2011. But it is understood that FIFA – which controls not only the event, but also the media broadcasts for soccer’s big event – will formally open the 2026 World Cup media rights tender for Australia next year.
In its favour, as current holder SBS will have the right of first and last refusal to attempt to secure the rights. But will it have the money to match it in a David and Goliath tussle with the US media giant Paramount?
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Murray eyes return to old Sky slot
Could Sky News host Paul Murray be planning a return to his old 9pm timeslot?
Sky insiders clocked Murray, along with Chris Kenny and Chris Smith, filming a promotional shoot in the Sky Sydney newsroom in recent days.
We’ve subsequently heard that Murray – whose eponymous show Paul Murray Live is currently in an 8pm home – may be keen to return to his old stomping ground of 9pm (previously occupied by Piers Morgan Uncensored, which earlier this year was shuffled back to a later timeslot).
Murray, a well-known night-owl, is said to prefer the later-night vibe of the 9pm slot to his current home. If that scenario were to prove correct, and Murray moved one hour later, it would open up his current 8pm slot. Diary is told the most likely contender for that time if it opened up would be current 5pm host Kenny, who has lifted ratings and is liked by Sky bosses. Taking the possible domino effect one step further, if Kenny were to move to 8pm, that would open up a further slot on Sky at 5pm.
Could the other man spotted filming the Sky promo – Sunday night host and regular weekday fill-in Smith, who also hosts morning radio on 2GB on the weekends – be the most likely contender to win Kenny’s old spot?
Word around the traps is that there could be further surprises involving fresh talent in other slots, with whispers of a full Sky 2023 schedule announcement shortly.
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TV’s musical chairs game continues with Bartlett
Sarah Abo’s move to the Today show a week ago appeared to put a full-stop on the seemingly endless game of musical chairs that seems to have taken over Australian news and current affairs in 2022.
But it turns out Abo isn’t the only 60 Minutes figure off to greener pastures. Diary is reliably informed that long-time 60 Minutes presenter and reporter Liam Bartlett is all but certain to join Seven in 2023.
In early October, Bartlett surprised media watchers when he announced that he was leaving his roles as both reporter on 60 Minutes, and host of the morning program at Nine-owned Perth radio station 6PR.
Now the word out of the Seven bunker is that while final details are still being ironed out, Bartlett will almost certainly be moving to 60 Minutes’ arch rival weekly current affairs show, 7News Spotlight, where he will join the show’s EP Mark Llewellyn.
The pair go back many years to Llewellyn’s long stint at Nine, where he was once head of news and current affairs and also oversaw 60 Minutes.
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