Peter Dutton has finally had enough, after years of Twitter abuse. The mooted Defence Minister-in-waiting has revealed he is now ready to go on the attack in court to “sue” anyone who defames him on the social media platform — even those hiding behind fake names and accounts.
“Some of these people who are trending on Twitter or have the anonymity of different Twitter accounts: they’re out there putting all these statements and tweets that are frankly defamatory (and) I’m going to start to pick out some of them to sue,” he has revealed.
Not only that, but Dutton is now proposing that Twitter should face regulations and responsibilities in the same way that newspapers, TV networks and radio stations already do.
“If somebody printed (defamatory information) in the newspaper, or somebody made these defamatory comments on your program or somewhere else in a public setting, they would be sued. And they should be sued on social media,” he said.
Dutton told 2GB’s Ray Hadley on Thursday that his own personal “red line” was when Greens senator Larissa Waters dubbed him “an inhuman, sexist rape apologist” on Twitter in February.
The first clue that there had been correspondence behind the scenes between Dutton and Waters came on Wednesday night, when two tweets on her account unexpectedly appeared containing a grovelling statement from the Greens Senator under the heading: “Apology to Peter Dutton”.
“On 25 February 2021 I … (made) false and defamatory statements that Peter Dutton is a rape apologist, that he has sought to conceal and dismiss reports of rape, and that he has no sympathy for victims of rape,” she wrote. “I accept that there was no basis for those allegations and that they were false. I unreservedly apologise to Minister Dutton for the hurt, distress and damage to his reputation I have caused him.”
Dutton has confirmed that the Waters apology followed legal correspondence sent to Waters, who also deleted the original tweet: “I have taken action against Larissa Waters because there’s a lot of crap that I cop, my colleagues cop and the Prime Minister cops, that you cop, and you let a lot of it go through to the keeper. But there has to be a floor. There needs to be a red line … I’m not going to be defamed in that way, and people should know that if they want to do that, there’s a price to pay for it.”
The big question now is whether Dutton will next take similar action against Twitter adversaries with fake identities. Get out the popcorn.
“Apology to Peter Dutton On 25 February 2021 I published a media release on my website, posted on my Twitter account, and made in the course of a press conference false and defamatory statements that Peter Dutton is a rape apologist, that he has sought to conceal and dismiss 1/2
— Larissa Waters (@larissawaters) March 24, 2021
reports of rape, and that he has no sympathy for victims of rape. I accept that there was no basis for those allegations and that they were false. I unreservedly apologise to Minister Dutton for the hurt, distress and damage to his reputation I have caused him." 2/2
— Larissa Waters (@larissawaters) March 24, 2021
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ACA’s Grimshaw wins the ABC vote
Tracy Grimshaw has become a darling of the Twitterverse after her high-profile interview with PM Scott Morrison on Thursday night about the treatment of women in politics.
Never was it more obvious that an issue had jumped into the ’burbs from the inner-city audience of the ABC and the Guardian, than the sight of Scott Morrison having a chat about women on, of all places, A Current Affair, not usually a home for extended political interviews.
And even ABC talent temporarily abandoned watching their own network for the wilds of ACA, which, let’s face it, is also not a show Aunty types would normally confess to watching.
Four Corners’ Louise Milligan, Caro Meldrum-Hanna, The Drum host Ellen Fanning, ABC news and current affairs boss Gaven Morris and 7.30 executive producer Justin Stevens were just some of the senior ABC talent who took to Twitter to out themselves as ACA watchers, and to bestow bouquets on Grimshaw for her performance with ScoMo.
Milligan applauded an “excellent, uncompromising, flinty job of what all good journalists do: Holding the government of the day, whatever its persuasion, to account”, while Morris simply tweeted: “Well done @tracygrimshaw”.
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Shock jock Price takes on 2GB, 3AW
After Alan Jones’ departure last year, a new competitor from an unexpected quarter has emerged in conservative talk radio.
Nearly a year after Alan Jones announced his retirement from Nine’s radio operations, a surprise new right-leaning talk rival to ratings powerhouses 2GB and 3AW is about to be unveiled.
Diary has got wind of the venture, and can reveal the new competitor for Nine Radio will be spearheaded by former 2GB/3AW shock jock, The Project’s Steve Price — whose return to breakfast radio will see him go head-to-head with former colleagues and ratings leaders Ben Fordham and Ross Stevenson.
We’re told the venture will be announced as early as this week, with Price’s national show to air from about 7am to 10am.
And who is bankrolling the new venture? In another surprise, it’s national music radio group Southern Cross Austereo, owner of the Triple M and Hit networks.
Why does Austereo want to get into talk radio? Because it senses a void in the area of conservative opinion on radio, after Jones’s departure to Sky. Austereo has long dabbled in the area, with talk radio experiments like Triple M’s Hot Breakfast with Eddie McGuire and Luke Darcy, which ended last year.
Making the rivalry with 3AW more delicious is that Diary is also hearing talk that Stevenson’s former radio co-pilot, John Burns, could become a guest player in Price’s new program in some form — potentially putting him head-to-head with Stevenson and his new co-pilot, Gruen’s Russel Howcroft.
It’s still unclear if the new show is part of a broader talk line-up. But Diary understands that in a bold experiment, it won’t be aired on conventional radio — instead being livestreamed through Austereo’s radio and podcasting app, LiSTNR.
Once the show is aired at breakfast, it will then be cut-up into segments for the podcasting section of the LiSTNR app, which last year replaced Austereo’s former PodcastOne network.
We hear Austereo chiefs believe that with Nine returning to local content for most of its radio shows, there is a “great hunger” for national opinion. They also see digital livestreaming as the future of radio.
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Hugh’s last hurrah before weekend chaos
It’s probably just as well nothing major was going down at Nine on Friday afternoon, in the blissful hours before the extraordinary weekend cyber attack on the network that entirely knocked out Sunday’s Weekend Today program and left the network ordering its staff to stay home until further notice.
But back on Friday afternoon, a large chunk of Nine’s executive leadership team gathered at the network’s unofficial Sydney canteen, Chinese dining institution Peacock Gardens in Crows Nest in Sydney’s inner-north, for a celebration to mark the last day of Hugh Marks’s five-year reign as CEO.
Incoming CEO Mike Sneesby (who is now facing an initiation of fire), Nine’s director of television Michael Healy, content boss Adrian Swift, Nine Radio chief Tom Malone, sales chief Michael Stephenson, program director Hamish Turner, broadcast operations boss Geoff Sparke and corporate affairs chief Victoria Buchan were all present.
Their common link? All were members of Marks’s original crew when he was appointed CEO late in 2015. Diary’s spies say all of the big events during Marks’s reign were celebrated, including Nine’s takeover of Fairfax and its decision to switch from cricket to tennis as its summer sport.
Notably, all of those present gave speeches presenting their own unique take on Marks’s time as CEO. The lunch ran long into the afternoon, before the Nine bosses eventually stumbled on their separate ways.
Little did they know what was about to unfold.
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Speersy’s nightmare show after PM knockback
Insiders host David Speers has had a week you might describe as “challenging”.
First, he wanted to get Scott Morrison on after the Prime Minister’s blow-up with Sky News’s Andrew Clennell last Tuesday. Morrison did three broadcast interviews last week with the ABC’s Sabra Lane, 2GB’s Ray Hadley and of course, Tracy Grimshaw of A Current Affair. Diary is told Insiders put in a bid for ScoMo on the day of the Clennell stoush, giving the PM as long as possible to accept. But Speers was rejected on Thursday.
Diary hears Insiders also didn’t have much luck with its second choice, Minister for Women Marise Payne. Once again, the request was declined.
Finally, Insiders lined up interviews with Victorian senator Sarah Henderson and MP Katie Allen.
But, alas, that was just the start of Speers’ nightmare. The airing of Sunday’s show proved the real battle. First the opening video package refused to play, showing only a black screen with one word — “Shame” — for several seconds.
Speers then stood in front of yet another blank screen displaying the word “Wallpaper”. That forced directors to cross more quickly than usual to the panel, where a woman could be seen fixing the microphones for guest Jennifer Hewett. Viewers were entertained as the woman scuttled off stage.
At least they were able to get a show to air, unlike Channel 9 — which battled a suspected cyber attack — but it was an episode Speers would probably prefer to forget.
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Isentia boss’s oversized pay packet
He runs a well-known media company whose value has now fallen below $20m — 87 per cent below the $152m it was worth when he first joined in 2018. But luckily for Ed Harrison, CEO of media clippings group Isentia, dire market performance is no barrier to him being up with the big boys on pay packet size.
Despite Isentia now being one of Australia’s smallest listed media companies, Harrison earned a generous $748,000 last financial year, including short-term benefits. Not to mention another $430,000 in shares.
Compare that with just-departed Nine boss Hugh Marks, who has until now run a much larger company, nearly 270 times the size of Isentia on market value. But with annual earnings of about $1.5m, Marks’s pay and short-term benefits were only double the amount of Harrison’s last financial year — or just 0.03 per cent of Nine’s valuation.
Harrison’s annual pay packet, by comparison, represents a whopping 3.4 per cent of Isentia’s entire market value.
We’re not sure who calculates Harrison’s remuneration — but Diary would sure love that expert to do some restructuring on our pay packet!
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Stress levels up after Sunrise host change
Stress levels always go up in breakfast TV in the nervous first weeks after a change of host.
So Diary imagines the tension in the Seven camp must have amped up to the max last week when the margin between breakfast TV leader Sunrise and its Nine rival Today shrunk to 15,000 viewers last Wednesday on a five-city basis — one of the lowest margins between the shows in years.
That number came less than a fortnight after Nat Barr took over from Sam Armytage as the show’s co-host with David Koch.
Barr had gone on the road that day to undertake her hosting duties from flood-affected areas of NSW, while Koch remained in the show’s Martin Place studios.
Lesson learnt.
The next day, Seven went for a more conventional approach — putting Barr and Koch back in the studio together once more. With the emphasis once more on the hosts’ in-person chemistry, the margin between the two shows on Thursday and Friday blew back out past 50,000 — soothing the no-doubt frayed nerves of Seven news bosses.
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ScoMo’s ‘empty chair’ at Hamilton
After being given Leigh Sales’ now-famous empty chair treatment last week (which she saves for politicians of both sides who have knocked back multiple interview requests), PM Scott Morrison was again steering well clear of the 7.30 host at Saturday night’s full-house opening night of Hamilton in Sydney.
While a who’s who of Australian media and politics (including Sales and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian) were at Hamilton at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre, ScoMo was otherwise engaged — journeying 30km away to Parramatta’s Bankwest Stadium, only to see his beloved Cronulla Sharks get thrashed 28-4 by the Eels.
Maybe he should have been at Hamilton after all, instead of delegating that golden ticket to Communications Minister Paul Fletcher.
From the media companies, it was hard to top the ABC contingent for sheer numbers from across the country, with chair Ita Buttrose, managing director David Anderson and news supremo Gaven Morris all present, along with most of its biggest on-air names, including Sales, Annabel Crabb, Lisa Millar, Virginia Trioli, Laura Tingle, Hamish Macdonald, Wendy Harmer and Jeremy Fernandez.
We’re assured the interstate ABC crew paid for their own plane tickets to the show.
But Aunty was far from alone. The heads of News Corp, Nine and Seven, Michael Miller, Mike Sneesby and James Warburton, were also present, along with former Nine chief David Gyngell and wife Leila, as well as a smattering of the two companies’ newspaper editors and executives.
The commercial networks were also well represented with breakfast TV talent like Today’s Brooke Boney and Sunrise’s Nat Barr, Edwina Bartholomew, and executive producer Michael Pell, as well as The Project hosts Waleed Aly and Lisa Wilkinson.
It was extremely busy on the political front as well. Apart from Gladys, her predecessor Mike Baird, Opposition leader Anthony Albanese, ex-PM Malcolm Turnbull, his former deputy Julie Bishop, Fletcher and opposition industrial relations spokesman Tony Burke all turned up.
Little wonder that Diary hears Uber’s surge pricing in Sydney’s eastern suburbs went through the roof around 10pm on Saturday, after the show finished.
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Nick’s Crowning glory
He won the night’s big gong — and he also had the line of the night. Nick McKenzie, who doubles up as investigative journalist for both The Age and 60 Minutes, took home the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year award at Friday night’s Quill Awards at Melbourne’s Crown casino — primarily for his work exposing the highly flawed culture at, yes, Crown Resorts, the very company that owns the venue.
The irony of that awkward situation was not lost on McKenzie: “I never thought I’d be at Crown casino being celebrated for taking down Crown casino,” he said dryly in his acceptance speech.
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