Nick Tabakoff
Moira Deeming to become Peta Credlin regular; Patricia Karvelas set for Q+A after Stan Grant exit
Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto faces yet more political headaches in the wake of his decision to drum MP Moira Deeming out of the party.
In the latest development, Sky News host Peta Credlin tells Diary she is now planning to make Deeming a fortnightly guest on her show, giving the now-crossbench MP a potential platform from which to make her case against former colleagues.
The move comes after another tumultuous weekend for Pesutto at the Liberal State Council, in which he was booed and heckled with cries of “shame” by several members of the audience.
For her part, Credlin believes Deeming has been mistreated by the Liberals. “I think the way she’s been treated is appalling, both in substance and when you measure what has happened against the party’s views,” she tells Diary.
The path to Deeming’s expulsion from the Liberals started with her involvement in a Let Women Speak rally in March which was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis. Ms Deeming and the event organisers had condemned the presence of the men, who performed the Nazi salute. But Pesutto saw her position as untenable, and started moves to expel her from the party.
Credlin tells Diary she believes Deeming is “basically being expelled for guilt by association”, and will give her a regular platform that the Liberals have now denied her: “She’s been painted as a single issue politician, but she’s actually got a lot of depth in issues that motivate her. She’s got plenty to say, and people will be pleasantly surprised at the breadth of issues she’s interested in. She’s an advocate of the forgotten people.”
For their part, sources close to Pesutto claim to be relaxed about Deeming’s fortnightly appearances on Credlin’s show. “She’s now a free agent,” the sources told us.
Meanwhile, Credlin hasn’t ruled out having Pesutto back on the show, despite her strong criticism of his moves to expel Deeming. Pesutto last appeared on Credlin’s show in March. “If he doesn’t want to go on Sky, more fool him,” Credlin said. “I wouldn’t be opposed to having him on. I don’t blackball anybody.”
Karvelas set to front Q+A after Grant’s shock exit
With Stan Grant’s shock decision to step away from Q+A after Monday night’s episode because of racism, the ABC is being forced to scramble to find a temporary host for the show.
There is understood to be uncertainty in ABC management about when Grant will return to Q+A, or even if he’ll come back at all.
In his viral column published on the ABC website on Friday about the racism that drove him away from the show, Grant left the question of his return open. “On Monday night I will present my Q+A program, then walk away. For how long? I don’t know.”
The large void left by Grant’s sudden departure means that the ABC has been forced to scramble to find interim hosts for Q+A until Grant’s long-term position becomes clearer. Grant is rumoured to have more to say about his leave on Monday night’s show. But in the meantime, Diary is reliably informed that RN Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas is likely to be the initial replacement while Grant considers his future, with a stint of two shows from May 29 seen as most likely.
Another who has been mentioned around Aunty has been ABC Radio Melbourne host Virginia Trioli – who Q+A executive producer Erin Vincent immediately turned to for several weeks after Hamish Macdonald hurriedly departed Q+A to return to The Project in mid-2021.
The word is that Trioli is willing to act as a pinch-hitter for the ABC amid the current situation.
However, she is unlikely to undertake a long-term stint on Q+A, because of the ongoing ‘family issues’ that saw her take leave earlier this year. Trioli tweeted on Friday that she was ‘appalled and saddened’ by the racism Grant had faced.
One person said not to be on the list to stand in for Grant is David Speers. The circumstances which saw Grant’s Indigenous heritage become part of the online vitriol directed towards him mean that Speers, as a white male, is unlikely to be considered for the role – even on an interim basis.
Another who has previously hosted Q+A, and currently has time on her hands, is Fran Kelly, after her tonight show, Frankly, was cut by the ABC. But the word is that Kelly won’t be considered this time, after she made headlines for losing control of a Q+A panel in 2019 involving Egyptian-American writer Mona Eltahawy.
Meanwhile, Diary hears that one long-term Indigenous candidate to succeed Grant on Q+A is Dan Bourchier, the ABC’s correspondent on the Voice to Parliament and co-host of The Drum.
Grant has long firmly maintained that there is not enough Indigenous representation on ABC shows. In an opinion piece for The Australian in 2014, he said: “As I write there is no Indigenous person serving as an ABC foreign correspondent or anchor of a major prime time program, no Four Corners reporter.”
Even this year, Grant was critical of the ABC’s election night coverage for the March NSW state poll. In a leaked letter to ABC managing director David Anderson, Grant wrote: “In 2023, how is it at all acceptable that an election night coverage features an entire white panel?”
Grant has privately mentored Bourchier. It is believed that Grant had previously planned to front Q+A in 2023 and 2024, but sees Bourchier as a potential long-term host of Q+A beyond that.
Some within the ABC believe Bourchier could host an upcoming special episode of Q+A from the Garma festival in the Northern Territory in the first week of August, if Grant hasn’t returned.
‘Cheerleader’ backs Harry and Meghan … again
He’s the royal reporter and author who always seems to be first with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s version of events in the media, whether it be one of their many run-ins with King Charles or even last week’s disputed claims of harassment by paparazzi in New York.
But Omid Scobie – co-author of international bestseller Finding Freedom, the highly-sympathetic account of Harry and Meghan’s decision to exile themselves from the Royal Family – defiantly claimed last week he’s not the mouthpiece of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex that many think he is.
Ever since Finding Freedom came out, there have been claims that Harry and Meghan’s advisers openly collaborated with Scobie on the book.
But in evidence he gave in support of Prince Harry last Monday, Scobie – editor-at-large of Harper’s Bazaar and a royal correspondent for America’s ABC News and Good Morning America – claimed widespread innuendo that he is the chief “cheerleader” in the media for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex is unfair.
Scobie was appearing on behalf of Harry in a case the Prince has brought in London against Mirror Group Newspapers in which he has alleged phone hacking by the media group.
But he said that his appearance in the case did not signal that he had crossed the line into becoming a mouthpiece for Prince Harry, or for that matter, Markle.
Asked by the Mirror’s lawyers if he had a “vested interest” in helping Harry in the case, Scobie maintained that he was actually making his own life “more difficult”.
“What I am doing right now is giving ammunition to the tabloids to continue calling me his friend.” He went on to claim to have “never socialised” with Harry and Meghan, despite being accused of being the couple’s “friend, mouthpiece, and cheerleader”.
But mere days after his appearance on behalf of Harry, Scobie seemed to once more be cheerleading for the royal exiles.
Early on Thursday morning Sydney time, Harry and Meghan made their now-viral claims that they were involved in a “near catastrophic” car chase of “over two hours” by “highly aggressive paparazzi”. And who else but Scobie was first in the media keeping up the hyperbole, tweeting that it was a “terrifying” paparazzi pursuit “involving six blacked-out vehicles in a chase that could have been fatal”. He also claimed that the paparazzi had been “driving on a sidewalk, going through red lights, reversing down a one-way street, driving while photographing and illegally blocking a moving vehicle”. There was only one problem: the cabbie who drove the couple didn’t characterise it as even a chase, at least while he was driving them. Asked about their version of events peddled, the cabbie told the BBC: “I don’t think that’s true, I think that’s all exaggerated and stuff like that. Don’t read too much into that.”
But Scobie continued to peddle the “dangerous” chase line in a swag of international interviews. He even managed to get in a jab at the royal family in one of his paid interviews with America’s ABC News, telling it he was “really shocked” that Harry and Meghan hadn’t “heard from any members of the Royal Family” about the alleged near-disaster.
Kerry O’Brien: ABC not ‘biased’ to Labor
In this column a week ago, departing ABC director Joe Gershnoted that the ABC’s “vibe” was “more to the left than the centre-right”.
But in the wake of those comments, another very senior former ABC figure has taken the opposite viewpoint, refuting any suggestion that the ABC leans left.
Former 7.30 host Kerry O’Brien became audibly irritated with 3AW’s Neil Mitchell last week over the suggestion the ABC favoured Labor over the Liberals.
It started when Mitchell asked O’Brien during a podcast interview if he felt the ABC “generally leans to the left regardless of who’s in government”.
After O’Brien initially answered “No I don’t”, a surprised Mitchell couldn’t help asking: “You don’t? Really?”
That prompted O’Brien to answer more emphatically: “No I don’t, Neil!”
O’Brien said that even journalists who went on to work for politicians – such as when he himself went to work for then-Labor leader Gough Whitlam as press secretary in the 1970s – maintained their impartiality while working for the ABC.
“Those journalists, when they were operating at the ABC as journalists, were straight down the line, just as I always endeavoured to be before and after I went to work for Gough Whitlam,” he said.
O’Brien took issue with persistent suggestions that the ABC has a left ‘bias’ because more of its staff go on to work for the Labor Party than they do for the Coalition.
“I’ve seen people try to use an argument that a certain number of ABC journalists have ended up working for Labor politicians as proof positive of bias,” he said. “Well, I can tell you now, the last time I saw that one trotted out … it took me about 20 minutes or less to jot down a long list of journalists who have worked for conservative politicians from prime ministers down.”
At another slightly testy moment in the interview, O’Brien took issue with Mitchell’s stated belief that some ABC journalists were “working for their mates around the water cooler” and “not for their public”.
“Sometimes, they’re wokeish, they’re self-righteous, and preachy and out of touch,” Mitchell added.
But O’Brien returned serve, telling Mitchell: “Aren’t you getting preachy now!” He disputed Mitchell’s suggestion that the ABC had become woke, saying that it was simply applying “strong standards of broadcasting” rather than to be popular in a conventional sense.
“The ABC’s primary role is not to go chasing ratings, and when they do start to have to do that, that’s when they run the risk of losing their way,” he said.
He also suggested that the conservative side of politics had at times antagonised the ABC – particularly over what O’Brien maintains is a highly trusted relationship between the public broadcaster and the bush.
O’Brien says that former Prime Minister John Howard’s team, led by his former chief of staff Grahame Morris, described the ABC’s relationship with regional Australia as “our enemy talking to our friends”: a claim which created tensions with the public broadcaster.
“It (the ABC) is a fantastic purveyor of info to the bush,” he said. “One of the points of friction that the ABC had with John Howard’s office when he was prime minister (is that) his office used to refer to the ABC and its relationship with the bush was: ‘Our enemy talking to our friends.’ How bloody juvenile is that?”
O’Brien said the perception of the ABC as an ‘enemy’ was an acknowledgment that the ABC’s information channels were a threat to the Howard government’s own channels: “What they were really saying was that they didn’t like the fact that the ABC was reporting … factually and responsibly to the bush.”
Biden’s woes cost Australian media big bucks
US President Joe Biden’s last-minute change of heart about coming to Australia for the Quad meeting – which was originally set to take place in Sydney this week – has proved a very expensive exercise on both sides of the Pacific.
Among Australian commercial TV stations, it led to a mad and costly scramble to dispatch reporters to the G7 Summit in Hiroshima, Japan. Originally, there were no plans to send Australian-based reporters to Hiroshima because PM Anthony Albanese had originally intended to go to the meeting purely as an observer.
But the decision to hold a full Quad meeting on the sidelines of the G7 on Saturday night prompted a mad scramble to send Australian-based correspondents to Tokyo to cover the event.
Diary hears that favours were called in by both the Prime Minister’s office and the Seven, Nine and Ten networks to dispatch a decent Australian media contingent to Hiroshima within 48 hours of Biden’s announcement on Wednesday morning that he was cancelling his trip to Australia. (The move was allegedly made because of the US President’s urgent need to return home after the G7 to attend crisis talks in the US about raising the nation’s debt ceiling).
We’re told the Japanese Embassy in Canberra was ‘very helpful’ in organising for journalists’ visas to be issued on arrival in Japan, expediting a process that would normally take much longer. In the end, no expense was spared as Ten’s Hugh Riminton, Seven’s Rob Scott and Nine’s Charles Croucher, along with crew, all managed to make it at breakneck speed to Hiroshima in time for the formalities.
Still, none of this comes cheap to news operations reeling from a series of unanticipated one-off costs during the 2022/23 financial year, first in covering Queen Elizabeth’s funeral last September and then King Charles’ coronation earlier this month.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post revealed on the weekend that US media outlets are on the hook for tens of thousands because of Biden’s cancellation.
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