Whether it’s been confronting and dressing down Craig Kelly in the full glare of Parliament House TV crews, venturing onto Sky News to reveal that she doesn’t “like or respect” Scott Morrison, or fronting up on 2GB and 4BC to shoot the breeze on everything from rock music to classic literature, it has been hard to escape the all-singing, all-dancing Tanya show in recent weeks. And it’s clear that no conservative radio or TV outlet, once a wasteland for Labor politicians, is off-limits.
Such has been Plibersek’s embrace of the public appearance this year, that her media profile has skyrocketed. We’ve learnt that since the start of the year, the rise in Plibersek’s media profile has swamped that of any other federal shadow minister or minister.
Research conducted by media monitoring agency Streem for Diary shows that Plibersek’s metropolitan media mentions rose by a whopping 371 per cent compared with her daily average during the second half of last year.
That puts the shadow education minister’s rise to media prominence this year at a much faster rate of growth than even embattled Defence Minister Linda Reynolds (up 266 per cent) and Plibersek’s own boss, Labor leader Anthony Albanese (up 55 per cent) — both of whom have, of course, been up to their necks in negative headlines this year.
Could it be any coincidence that the meteoric rise in Plibersek’s presence has come just as Labor leadership speculation surrounding Albo has never been louder, because of his poor personal Newspoll ratings?
From what Diary is told, the bemused Albo camp have clocked Plibersek’s increased media profile lately, and are more than a little curious about its timing.
Plibersek, of course, has frequently been lauded by Sky’s Alan Jones as a future Labor leader.
What has also been interesting is that Plibersek has ventured well outside her shadow education portfolio, ever since she confronted Kelly in the Parliament House corridors last month and accused him of “crazy conspiracy theories” about COVID-19. Curiously, that unmissable encounter came just as leadership talk around Albanese re-emerged.
Plibersek has continued to up the ante by adopting a more combative approach to Morrison than Albo. Eight days ago, Plibersek told Sky’s Andrew Clennell what she really thinks of ScoMo: “He’s a clever politician and will do anything to stay Prime Minister. There’s a lot of people on the other side of politics that I like and respect; he’s not one of them.”
But just as she asks what ScoMo will do to stay PM, another similar question arises: will Plibersek do “anything” to take over as Labor leader?
In the traditional Labor dead zones of 2GB and 4BC, Plibersek’s media charm offensive, seemingly to show potential voters another side of her personality, continues apace. Early last Wednesday morning, she dialled into Ben Fordham’s breakfast open line on 2GB without warning, after news that an 88-year-old woman was studying for a doctorate in teaching Jane Austen’s work.
Her message? To gush that Jane Austen is “absolutely my favourite writer of all time”.
Later that day, Plibersek also popped up on 2GB’s Brisbane sister station 4BC, with still more personal revelations to ex-Queensland LNP minister and 4BC drive host Scott Emerson. This time, Plibersek shared with Brisbane listeners that she and her high-profile husband, senior NSW bureaucrat Michael Coutts-Trotter, went to an AC/DC concert on “our second date”.
That’s probably more information than we needed to know. But what Plibersek’s personal confessions on 2GB and 4BC do reveal is that the push to round out her image to the great unwashed is well underway.
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Aaron Patrick’s take on “office conflict”
Sometimes, a writer’s only way to process a troublesome incident is to simply get it down on paper.
That seems to have been the case with the Australian Financial Review’s senior correspondent Aaron Patrick.
Through the pages of the AFR, Patrick may have been reflecting on his run-in with the paper’s star columnist, Joe Aston, at Nine’s shiny new office a few weeks back. If you recall from this column, Patrick was emphatically rebuffed when he tried to shake hands with Aston after some earlier history between the pair that included Patrick’s much-discussed text message to Aston’s courtroom adversary, Elaine Stead.
Aston told Patrick at the time: “I’m not going to shake your hand, you’re a f---wit,” prompting Patrick to reply: “What did I ever do to you?”
Fast-forward to last week, and Patrick was clearly in a philosophical mood in an AFR column he titled: “The office is a force for good.”
What interested everyone was Patrick’s take in the column on “office conflict”.
He wrote: “Conflict is an added attraction of office life, if it involves others. The drama and sheer sport of a clash between co-workers is often thrilling, and can generate hours of conversation to fill … the meaninglessness of most work.”
Patrick is right. From our information, the encounter between himself and Aston did indeed generate hours of meaningless conversation.
Patrick also wrote of working for a “small newspaper office” where “two highly talented journalists had to be physically separated to stop them exchanging blows”.
Patrick’s view is that at some point, “every office reaches an equilibrium where competing personalities learn to coexist, avoid each other or leave”.
From what we’re told, Aston and Patrick have gone down the “avoid each other” route. Smart thinking.
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Seven’s ‘Sherlock’ unmasks bike thief
Spare a thought for the unlucky thief who stole the $5000 electric bike of Mark Llewellyn, who heads up Seven’s investigations unit, a week or so back.
The bike had been very securely locked up on Sydney’s George Street, deepening the mystery of the disappearance. But we’ve just received word the case is about to be cracked. Diary hears Llewellyn immediately dispatched his right-hand man, Taylor “Sherlock” Auerbach — and it’s fair to say the thief wouldn’t have bargained for the karma bus about to come around the corner.
— 7NEWS Sydney (@7NewsSydney) February 27, 2021
Auerbach scrounged around nearby sites for CCTV footage — and hey presto, it was delivered to Seven’s Martin Place studios on Friday, complete with footage of him using an angle grinder to cut the lock.
With the poor petty crim about to be plastered on about a million TV screens on Monday night as “Sydney’s grubbiest petty thief”, Diary tips his great electric bike heist may be coming to an end. No shit, Sherlock.
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Craig McLachlan ready to talk
Craig McLachlan is ready to talk — and he is close to inking a deal with Seven, Diary hears.
After his acquittal on assault and indecent assault charges in the Melbourne Magistrates Court in December, the former Neighbours star is said to be keen for his narrative to be told in public.
Nothing is yet signed, but Diary hears McLachlan wants to tell his story on free-to-air TV. That has left Seven as the logical candidate to conduct the interview, because McLachlan is in the midst of defamation proceedings against Nine’s Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, as well as the ABC.
Current affairs show Seven News Spotlight is being lined up to conduct the interview, most likely as a 90-minute special. Seven sources say that there are some constraints around reporting on certain aspects of the case, which are currently being worked through, including suppression orders on some of McLachlan’s accusers.
While McLachlan was acquitted of all charges in the case, there were still some interesting comments from presiding magistrate Belinda Wallington.
She found that his accusers were “brave and honest witnesses” but that their accounts of alleged incidents were ultimately not enough to prove intent on McLachlan’s part. Wallington also said she was “unable to exclude the possibility that an egotistical, self-entitled sense of humour” led McLachlan to assume that one of his accusers “was consenting to his actions”.
Following the verdict, McLachlan said he would be speaking up in the new year. “As you can imagine, we have a lot to say,” he said in December. Should make for interesting TV.
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Hamish, Andy burn $130k on Bitcoin
Recently, a US investor named Stefan Thomas has been making headlines in the US because of his inability to remember the password for an account holding 7002 bitcoins — worth a whopping $400m or so.
The poor man has had eight unsuccessful guesses at the passcode, and is only entitled to two more — 10 wrong guesses will see the device effectively self-destruct.
Turns out the unfortunate Mr Thomas is not alone. Two of Australia’s best-known media personalities, Hamish Blake and Andy Lee, have also been having a cryptocurrency dabble — and they’re having their own password problems.
Lee quietly fessed up to the problem on Ten last week when revealing why he didn’t care about the current wild fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin, which has seen it trade anywhere between $40,000 and $70,000-plus per unit just in the past month.
Turns out Hamish and Andy recently had a Bitcoin dabble that saw them spend about $130,000 on the cryptocurrency.
“I don’t mind when Bitcoin falls because Hamish and I bought a couple but we lost the password and we can’t access it (until we do),” Lee revealed. “At the moment they’re worth about $65,000 each and we’ve got two of them.”
So desperate has the situation become that the pair have resorted to extreme measures to try to retrieve the password.
“We got a hypnotist in to try and hypnotise the password out of our web guy,” Lee said. But unfortunately, not even calling in the hypnotist worked.
Luckily for the pair, they’re not exactly short of a quid. Blake recently forked out nearly $9m for a harbourside mansion in Sydney’s Vaucluse, with the pair both said to make around $2m a year.
As Lee, host of Ten’s new show, The Cube, noted dryly: “We are running a charity event and a telethon for the both of us.”
We’ll rattle the tin, Andy.
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Introducing “Melissa Caddick: The TV Thriller”
Shortly after NSW Police found the remains of Sydney con artist Melissa Caddick your columnist heard whispers that a TV drama based on her life was already being made.
Diary has now confirmed that the drama was given the green light by Nine hours after the police press conference on Friday — after some work had quietly been put in behind the scenes since her disappearance.
Until Friday, there had been no certainty that the Caddick biopic could be made in the foreseeable future — because it could have been limited by court proceedings if she was alive.
But the discovery of Caddick’s decomposed foot off the NSW South Coast seems to have cleared the way for a story that has all the makings of a new Underbelly set in Sydney wealthy eastern suburbs: the charismatic con artist, the many people she robbed of their life savings, and her strange disappearance.
When we caught Nine’s head of drama, Andy Ryan, over the weekend, he confirmed the move as a Nine-Stan joint effort, with an external production house to make the show.
“The mystery of Melissa Caddick’s disappearance and the missing millions has all the elements of a gripping crime thriller, as well as a moving personal tragedy,” he said.
Ryan stressed that Caddick’s victims and the family she left behind would be treated with “sensitivity”.
But down to the real item of interest: who’ll be playing Melissa Caddick?
Most likely candidates, we’re told, are Rachel Griffiths, Toni Collette, Danielle Cormack, Asher Keddie and Yvonne Strahovski.
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No more ‘fake names’ for Armytage
Sam Armytage may have fronted the top-rating breakfast program in Australia for many years now — but Diary has a revelation: what she really craves is “anonymity”.
In a new podcast, Something to Talk About, with Sarrah LeMarquand, the editor-in-chief of Stellar magazine, Armytage confesses to giving “fake names” to escape the attention: “I give fake names to Uber drivers and Deliveroo guys and furniture delivery people.”
Luckily for Armytage, she may not have to fake them anymore. She is planning a last name change after her recent marriage to Richard Lavender: “I like the idea … of being a little bit anonymous.”
Good luck with that.
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Fordham’s sleep-free fortnight
If anyone wants to reach Ben Fordham in the next two weeks, including his wife, Jodie, and his three young kids, Diary can only wish them the very best of luck.
As of Monday, Fordham is redefining the term burning the candle at both ends — with a marathon round the clock on-air schedule that involves no night-time sleep at all.
He will directly follow his 6pm-3.30am recording sessions for the upcoming season of his Channel 9 show Australian Ninja Warrior at Olympic Park in Homebush with a cross-Sydney trip straight into Pyrmont for his top-rating Sydney breakfast radio show. That will leave him just a few brief hours in the middle of the day to try to catch some precious zeds.
Luckily, there’s a bed set up in Alan Jones’ old office at the 2GB studios in Pyrmont, plus a crash-pad hotel room has been provided opposite the Ninja Warrior venue. The thinking is apparently that with three mini-ninjas running around back at home, Fordham may on occasion need to catch some daytime shut-eye elsewhere.
We’re told Nine Radio boss Tom Malone has also prepared a further precautionary measure if things become too much. Chris Smith, 2GB’s weekend morning host, is on standby to host Fordham’s breakfast radio show at short notice if Fordham is caught snoring under his desk during the day, a la George Costanza.
Thankfully for the 2GB host, the Ninja Warrior season is brief. Fordham will be back to (comparatively) normal 3am wake-ups by mid-March.
Journo’s response ‘is a pyramid of lies’
Nine reporter Nick McKenzie ‘threw his lawyers under the bus’ by suggesting they knew he’d been given privileged information but done nothing about it, a court has heard.
Nine journalist Nick McKenzie to face cross-examination on secret Roberts-Smith recordings
Nine investigative reporter Nick McKenzie will face cross-examination in Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation appeal, as the ex-SAS soldier demands files from the ABC’s MediaWatch program.
If you’re thinking you’ve heard or seen a lot more of opposition frontbencher Tanya Plibersek in recent weeks than ever before, you’d be right.