Anthony Albanese’s crusade to ‘change’ the media

Anthony Albanese has already laid down the blueprint in his early encounters with the media as new PM. Picture: Getty Images

Much has been made of Anthony Albanese’s claims since his election win that he wants to “change the way politics operates in this country”.

But it’s not just politics that the new PM wants to change – he wants to change the media as well. Diary hears that Albanese has told confidantes that he was “appalled” by the behaviour of a press pack that became increasingly vocal during the campaign to try to catch him out.

We’re also told that, emboldened by his win, he’s now on a one-man crusade to improve the “civility” of discourse in press conferences under his leadership. And if that means journalists who yell or interrupt him are actively demoted down the pecking order of those allowed to ask him questions, so be it.

Albanese has already laid down the blueprint in his early encounters with the media as new PM. For example, at his Canberra press conference before jetting off to Tokyo for the Quad meeting a fortnight ago, Albanese bristled when one reporter dared to interrupt him.

“You will not get the call earlier because you yell,” Albanese told the reporter. “Can we just on day one, get that clear?”

Diary hears that staffers associated with both Albanese and the man he deposed, Scott Morrison, privately raised concerns with media outlets during the campaign about how they were being treated. Albanese hasn’t forgotten since his election win. As one insider tells Diary: “I think Albo is keen to cauterise the problem right now, so it doesn’t get out of hand.”

The Albanese camp believes the tone for aggressive questioning started on the first full day of the campaign. Famously, the then-opposition leader stumbled when journalists travelling with him on the campaign trail caught him out not knowing the official interest rate or unemployment rate.

We’re told there’s a perception in the Albanese camp that in the weeks that followed that day, many reporters competed to yell over each other, in what he sees as being more “theatre” than an attempt to seek genuine information.

It was in the last week of the campaign, while in Perth, that Albanese first unveiled a ‘‘carrot and stick’’ approach to aggressive questioning. He pointedly gave priority to one reporter, telling another who had unsuccessfully tried to ask a question that he had “a polite incentive scheme going on here”.

Just to rub it in later in the same press conference, Albanese awarded a bonus question to another reporter who hadn’t interrupted a particularly long answer: “You’ve been polite. That’s why you get the bonus question.”

What many in the press gallery are now pondering is whether the “polite incentive scheme” is just an establishment of Albanese’s ground rules in the first weeks of his prime ministership – or a more permanent feature of his briefings going forward.

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Hedley Thomas takes on Palaszczuk

Journalist Hedley Thomas. Picture: Glenn Hunt

What was meant to be a triumphant press conference by Annastacia Palaszczuk on Thursday to celebrate the return of cruising to Queensland hit some rough waters when it was gatecrashed by The Australian’s Gold Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist, Hedley Thomas.

By the end of Thomas’s appearance, the Queensland Premier was left stumbling over her answers about a topic entirely unrelated to cruising: the much-publicised case of murdered Mackay woman Shandee Blackburn, the subject of Thomas’s hit podcast and new Sky News documentary to screen on Tuesday night.

Thomas, who clearly had little time for cruising, instead wanted to pursue an issue that Palaszczuk’s Health Minister Yvette D’Ath had been skirting for months: the apparent failure in the Blackburn case of DNA technology at the Queensland government’s flagship John Tonge scientific centre.

While there have been some vague announcements by Palaszczuk and D’Ath about a “review’ into the DNA failures, there seems to be little to show for them so far – including who will actually run the review. And Thomas, tired of what he saw as being “fobbed off” by D’Ath, had finally had enough and decided that Palaszczuk’s cruise press conference was the only place to get answers.

It would be fair to say Thomas caught Palaszczuk on the hop, with a visibly unnerved Premier forced to deny that D’Ath was trying to avoid scrutiny on the DNA lab.

The exchange went as follows:

Thomas: You’ve got a DNA lab with problems mounting week after week and all you’re doing is announcing a review that won’t even look at specific examples and you haven’t even announced a reviewer seven months after these problems were first raised.”
Palaszczuk: “Ahh, well umm, that’s exactly not correct. The Health Minister is taking these issues very seriously.”
Thomas: “How long will the review take?”
Palaszczuk: “You’ll have to ask the Health Minister, I don’t have those details on me.
Thomas: “You’re the Premier.”
Palaszczuk: “Urrghh …. OK. I’m happy to get the Health Minister to talk to you today, Hedley, OK?
Thomas: “The Health Minister has not answered, we have put in multiple questions and have only been stonewalled.”
Palaszczuk: “OK, I will get the Health Minister to talk to you directly today, OK … The Health Minister is taking action. She is absolutely committed to see what is going on.”
Thomas: “Why is she doing it in ­secrecy?”
Palaszczuk: “Noooo, she’s not doing it in secret, it’s not in secret.”

After that exchange, no other reporter wanted to ask Palaszczuk about the alleged subject of her press conference, the return of cruising to Queensland.

With Thomas blowing the lid on the Brisbane DNA lab’s performance, it’s yet another unhealthy development for the beleaguered D’Ath who just can’t seem to stay out of the headlines when it comes to crises in her health department.

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ABC’s Swan hits back at critics

The ABC’s medical specialist Norman Swan says he “couldn’t care less” about criticism he has received in the media that he has become a Covid fearmonger, saying that his most important mission is to “save lives”.

Dr Norman Swan.

Swan has been copping flak in some sections of the media over a comment he made on ABC News Breakfast last month that Australia was currently experiencing “jet crashes” worth of Covid deaths on a weekly basis. He told News Breakfast host Lisa Millar that the current death rate from Covid was unprecedented, with the likely deaths of “13,000 people in a year”.

“These are jet crashes every week,” he said. “This is the worst year of the pandemic – and nobody’s talking about it.”

However, 2GB’s breakfast host Ben Fordham, among others, has lashed out at Swan’s stance, describing the face of the ABC’s medical coverage as the public broadcaster’s “resident Covid bogeyman” who wanted to “take us back to the bad old days”.

“I think he must be bored, because we’ve learnt to live with the coronavirus so he’s not as relevant as he used to be,” Fordham said. “We’re trying to get on with our lives after losing two years of our lives. So Dr Swan has come in off the long run up and he’s bowled another frightening fear campaign about Covid.”

But Swan tells Diary he has no problem with Fordham’s description of him as a ‘Covid bogeyman’ if it helped to lower deaths from the virus. He tells Diary: “I’m quite happy to be called a panic merchant on that dimension. I’m not calling for a lockdown or anything. All that I’m saying is that I’m worried about how many deaths are preventable.

“I couldn’t care less what people call me: I just care about lives being saved.”

Of Fordham’s claim that Swan wanted to return Australia to the “bad old days” despite the fact that Australia had “learnt to live with the coronavirus”, the ABC doctor responded: “There’s no question that hospitalisations and rates of deaths are much lower. But because so many people are now infected, the absolute numbers of deaths are high.”

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No serious sanctions over The Weekly’s ‘accident’

Carrie Bickmore and partner Chris Walker were on holiday in Europe when he accidentally exposed himself to ABC co-workers. Picture: Getty Images

It’s been the water cooler story of the week, but Diary hears Chris Walker is unlikely to face serious sanctions after exposing himself to ABC staff.

In one of the increasingly common pratfalls of endless online video calls in the post-Covid world, Walker – the executive producer of Charlie Pickering’s The Weekly – accidentally revealed himself to co-workers for up to two minutes after failing to disconnect from a Skype meeting.

Walker’s representatives have since revealed he was undressing for a shower.

Walker just happens to be the partner of Carrie Bickmore, the absent host of Ten’s The Project. The pair and their kids were on a European sabbatical when Walker dialled in to the Melbourne meeting.

But someone involved with the Skype call was clearly unhappy, as the details were quickly leaked to Melbourne’s Herald Sun.

The ABC was forced to confirm it was offering a “counselling service” to witnesses of Walker’s unfortunate incident, and that measures had immediately been put in place to ensure it “does not occur again”.

But Diary now hears that while the ABC is taking the incident “seriously”, the measures already undertaken will “probably” be the limit of the response.

As one insider told Diary: “It was a genuine mistake. Obviously, the ABC is taking it seriously if people were traumatised.

“But if serious action was taken against Chris Walker for an accidental flash, there’d also be an outcry.”

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He’s back: Turnbull’s quiet return home

He took himself out of Australia to allegedly “stay out” of the media during the federal election campaign – but now Diary hears word that, almost ghostlike, Malcolm Turnbull has slipped back into the country unheralded in the last few days after a three-month international escape.

Malcolm Turnbull. Picture Kym Smith

As we previously noted, Turnbull made a solemn vow to RN Breakfast’s Patricia Karvelas in line with his previous undertaking not to haunt politics as other “miserable ghosts” like Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd did. He emphatically told Karvelas from his overseas base in April: “I’m staying out of the election contest.” Despite being thousands of kilometres away, Turnbull wasn’t entirely removed from events back in Australia. There was, of course, his comments that made front pages in May that seemed to encourage voting for teal independents. Turnbull noted at the time that if the teals won, it would mean “the capture of the Liberal Party (by the political right) will be thwarted by direct, democratic action from voters”.

Mere hours after the election result became clear, Turnbull also couldn’t resist a chat with the Nine papers from New York in which he took a few more jabs at the Liberals, once more over the teals.

Of John Howard’s claim during the campaign that the teals were “anti-Liberal groupies”, Turnbull responded: “What a disrespectful thing to say!”

He also claimed the loss of the teal seats was a financial “disaster” for the Liberal Party: “These are the seats which had not only been ultra-safe but where the party raised most of its money, where it had the most members – literally the Liberal Party bedrock.”

So much for “staying out” of the election. Apart from his interventions in the campaign, we’re told Turnbull was able to collect a few decent pay cheques while he was overseas. Indeed, Diary has learnt from agents that the ex-PM has been in hot demand on the international speakers’ circuit since borders opened up.

Most prominently, Turnbull gave the welcome address to the Green Hydrogen Global Assembly & Exhibition in Barcelona last month, as well as a keynote address to Waterpower Week 2022 in Washington. Nice work if you can get it.

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McGuire signs up with Nine AND Ten

Eddie McGuire. Picture: AFL Photos

They don’t call him “Eddie Everywhere” for nothing. Diary can reveal that an in-demand Eddie McGuire – whose current Nine contract is due to expire at the end of June – has managed the rare feat of sealing lucrative deals with two free-to-air networks.

First, McGuire has confirmed to your columnist that he has inked a deal with Nine that will keep him at the network until the mid-2020s, and see him continue to host Millionaire Hot Seat and Footy Classified, as well as fronting and producing other shows.

“Yes, I can confirm that I continue what has been one of the great experiences of my life: working for the Nine network,” he told Diary on Sunday.

But there was one component of his new multimillion-dollar deal with Nine that McGuire wasn’t as forthcoming on. With others also chasing his services, Diary understands that the Hot Seat host was able to convince Nine to give their blessing for some flexibility to allow him to pursue a hosting gig on a rival free-to-air network.

We’re reliably informed that by the end of next week, McGuire will sign a separate two-year deal with Ten, which has pinched him for the vital job as host of the Melbourne Cup, for 2022 and 2023. Not only will McGuire host the Cup itself, but also the four days of the Melbourne Cup carnival between October 29 and November 5, including Victoria Derby Day and Oaks Day. Nine, we’re told, has given its blessing to the deal.

When we asked him whether he was about to announce a Melbourne Cup hosting deal with Ten, he would only say: “They’re not announcements that I can make.”

Meanwhile, McGuire’s new deal at Nine will see him broaden his hosting role there, with sporting events such as Stan’s push into boxing believed to be on the radar.

The deal will see McGuire’s production house Jam TV produce shows for Nine and its streaming service, Stan. Earlier this year, McGuire’s company made Show Me the Money, a documentary about the growing role of player agents in the AFL, for Stan.

The recruitment of McGuire for the Melbourne Cup is part of a concerted pitch by Ten to shake off its tag as the bridesmaid of Australian sport, with a dearth of top-tier sport on the network.

Already, Ten is in a dogfight with Seven to retain the Melbourne Cup rights when they come up in 2024. With star host Francesca Cumani having departed her Ten Cup contract to have a baby, it was felt Ten needed another big name like McGuire to boost its coverage.

As this column revealed last month, Bob Bakish, the global boss of Ten’s parent company, Paramount, met for a secret lunch with Gillon McLachlan to convince him that Ten was willing and able to open the chequebook and pay billions for the AFL rights.