As the seemingly endless six-week election campaign drags into its final days, relations have become decidedly frosty between two Canberra press gallery leaders, Nine’s Chris Uhlmann and The Guardian’s political editor Katharine “Murpharoo” Murphy.
Any pretence of civility between two of the press gallery’s best-known members disintegrated last week, after Murphy fired off an insult-riddled 1000-word opinion piece, which eviscerated Nine’s Sunday night ‘Great Debate’ under the 60 Minutes banner.
That went down like a lead balloon with Uhlmann, the main public face of the debate as one of its chief architects, and member of the panel that interrogated Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese. Uhlmann launched into a mocking assessment of his own of The Guardian and its journalists, who he described as behaving like a “medieval church” driven by “witch hunts”.
‘The complaint about the paltry “60-second slivers†featured in what ranks as the performance art piece of outrage thundered at Nine’s debate by The Guardian.’ https://t.co/0P8lD1aKiZ
— Chris Uhlmann (@CUhlmann) May 10, 2022
The furious response came after Murpharoo lobbed an opinion piece on the Guardian website shortly before midnight on the night of the debate, in which she labelled Nine’s Great Debate as everything from a “genuine shit blizzard” to “a public affairs atrocity”, “the Jerry Springer of leaders’ debates”, “completely ridiculous”, akin to “a bout of freestyle jelly wrestling” and “the glib Olympics”.
“Morrison is a glib grand master, but neither of these two knew they were entering the glib Olympics, so neither of them had conditioned to hit peak performance,” she wrote.
... made it often very difficult to hear in the room itself".
— Katharine Murphy (@murpharoo) May 9, 2022
Possibly because of the yelling?
Just a theory. Spitballing here. #auspol
But Uhlmann showed in the Wednesday editions of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that Murphy wasn’t the only one who could deliver an insult. Inserting a hyperlink to Murpharoo’s opinion piece lashing it as a “performance art piece of outrage”, Uhlmann then devoted much of his column in response to a scathing assessment of The Guardian’s culture.
Starting by describing The Guardian as “the love child of Malcolm Turnbull”, he launched into an epic lampooning of what he described as its “moralising” mentality.
“It is odd that an organ so angrily post-Christian behaves so much like the medieval church, because it has appointed itself the guardian of the constantly shifting sands of modern virtue, and routinely conducts witch-hunts,” Uhlmann wrote.
“I have some sympathy. I lived in a monastery myself once and appreciate it’s a hard life. All the rules, the endless stress of having to avoid the occasion of sin. But imagine that trauma multiplied a thousand times by having to keep pace with today’s morality: the chance of misgendering someone; the angst that could be caused by accidentally eating a caged egg; or knowing that your Tesla really runs on coal.”
There is also a sarcastic note of sympathy to his Guardian counterpart for having to go to the great lengths of — horror of horrors — turning to commercial TV to witness the debate!
“For a Guardian journalist, even tuning in to Channel Nine would be the equivalent of landing on Mars. Here is a strange world of suburban bogans who watch rugby league and Married At First Sight and – quelle horreur – are allowed to vote!”
Murphy waited until after Seven’s comparatively civilised leaders’ debate on Wednesday night — hosted by its political editor Mark Riley — before turning her attention to Twitter with a brief post that left no one in any doubt about who she thought was the winner out of Riley and Uhlmann’s debates: “Thank you @Riley7News.”
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Inflation spreads to Lisa’s book launch
Diary noted a fortnight back that Lisa Wilkinson’s autobiography, It Wasn’t Meant to Be Like This, had been bucking the general inflationary trend throughout the economy at present.
If you recall, just as Wilkinson embarked on her belated book tour of Australia, the price of the tome at Kmart and Amazon went into free fall at big retail outlets. Paperback versions of the tome were slashed by 75 per cent from $24 to $6 at Kmart, and hardback versions from $45 to $12 at Big W and Amazon.
Those hot prices for Wilkinson’s book definitely weren’t on offer at her breakfast book launches hosted by female events group Business Chicks across the country. For example, Diary’s spies from the Melbourne launch last Tuesday at Crown Palladium say Wilkinson was charging the full $45 for the hardcover version to attendees. The event’s MC, Shelley Horton, dangled the tantalising carrot that if recipients bought the book at full price, they could queue up to “get it signed by Lisa” and even “take a photo” with her.
But money-savvy fans attending the event could have saved themselves $33 a copy by purchasing the hardcover version of the book on Amazon and then bringing it to the event to be signed by Wilkinson.
As reported by Diary’s colleague Sophie Elsworth, Wilkinson used last week’s Melbourne launch last week to fire a surprise salvo at the women’s magazine industry in which she started out at 21 as the editor of Dolly magazine. Wilkinson described the industry as bringing out “the worst in human nature”, in which “women exist only to be ogled at, picked on, ridiculed, pitted against each other, laughed at or scorned”.
And even if some present brought their own cut-priced books along to be signed, Wilkinson would still be laughing all the way to the bank after the events.
With a sold-out crowd of 500-plus largely-female attendees at the Melbourne Crown Palladium event, and Business Chicks charging $145-$185 per seat even before book sales are taken into account, the Lisa breakfasts across the country are turning into a highly lucrative affair for both Wilkinson herself and the events group.
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Letter urges ScoMo to avoid Shorten ‘curse’
Much has been made of Scott Morrison’s avoidance of several ABC personalities, in particular, as evidenced by our item last week about Virginia Trioli’s cranky on-air claim that the PM had boycotted her for “three years”.
Now Diary has obtained a private letter sent on behalf of the National Press Club to the Prime Minister’s Office to address ScoMo’s apparent unwillingness to commit to the traditional “leaders’ week” at the Press Club during the last week of the campaign.
While Anthony Albanese has confirmed he will appear with Press Club president Laura Tingle in Canberra on Wednesday to answer questions from the press gallery, Morrison has so far made no such commitment for a similar audience — even though we’re told the club has specifically kept Tuesday and Thursday open for the PM.
The letter from National Press Club CEO Maurice Reilly starts by telling Morrison that if he doesn’t front in the last week, he will be the first PM in more than 50 years not to do so.
“Since 1969, there has been a long standing democratic tradition of the Prime Minister and Leader of Opposition making their leaders’ election addresses to the National Press Club in the final week of the campaign,” Reilly wrote to the PM’s office last week.
The letter also hints that Morrison should show up to avoid the curse of the only two major party leaders who hadn’t fronted for the Press Club in the last week. “Notably, only two Opposition Leaders (John Hewson & Bill Shorten) in 53 years did not take up the invitation.”
Without spelling it out, Reilly’s reference to Hewson and Shorten as the only leaders’ absences since 1969 appears particularly pointed, given both lost elections thought at the time to be “unlosable”.
Reilly’s letter goes on to note that the Press Club was “yet to be advised” of his attendance, urging Morrison to “continue tradition which has been respected by both sides of politics”. Morrison himself observed the tradition in 2019 by showing up on the Thursday of the last week of that campaign.
But Diary hears that despite Reilly’s urging, the PM is unlikely to accede to the request. The latest claim from government sources on Sunday was that Morrison at this point views heading back to Canberra as “pointless”.
This apparently has nothing to do with the fact that his Press Club session would be moderated by its president and ABC 7.30’s chief political correspondent Tingle, with whom the PM’s relations have been bumpy for some time.
Instead, the reasons are much more practical. Morrison is said to believe that heading to Canberra to face journalists at such a critical juncture could waste valuable campaigning time in a frantic last week, when he could instead be meeting voters in marginal seats face-to-face.
When we reached Reilly, he said he remained a “democratic optimist” that Morrison could still show up. “It’s been a longstanding tradition,” Reilly told us. “As a democratic optimist, I’m also a traditionalist. Clearly, a lot of people will be disappointed if he doesn’t accept the invitation.”
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Wong’s PTSD over 2019 TV election night
Penny Wong remains deeply scarred by her 2019 election night in the ABC studio – and Diary hears that not even the growing prospect of an Anthony Albanese victory will convince her to return to the screen this Saturday.
During the ABC’s election night special in 2019, Wong had to sit before the cameras for hours, looking increasingly grim-faced as Bill Shorten’s predicted cruise to power morphed into Scott Morrison’s “miracle” victory.
Labor’s shadow foreign minister was left like a deer in the headlights in attempting to explain how Shorten had lost the unlosable election. Under brutal questioning from Leigh Sales and Andrew Probyn – the latter dubbed the result “disastrous” – Wong first had to acknowledge that Labor was “not where we hoped we would be” before admitting it had been a “very tough” result.
Diary hears Wong was so devastated she swore off appearing on the ABC’s election night panel again.
From all accounts, the ABC would have loved to have Wong on again this week, but the chance of redemption could not persuade her to return.
Wong’s absence has now been confirmed — the ABC’s 2022 election night panel will include Labor frontbencher Tanya Plibersek.
Government Senate Leader Simon Birmingham will replace the Coalition’s 2019 representative, Arthur Sinodinos, now ambassador to the US.
Insiders host David Speers will make his ABC federal election panel debut (he was still with Sky News during the 2019 poll).
Speers will join the night’s anchor, Leigh Sales, along with Probyn, Annabel Crabb, Laura Tingle and, of course, ABC election guru Antony Green.
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Tanya’s pitch: ‘Stop ideological ABC cuts’
As has been frequently noted this election campaign, Tanya Plibersek has been adopting a relatively low profile on Anthony Albanese’s campaign trail. But it has been a different story in her own personal pitch for the seat of Sydney. The Labor frontbencher has decided that among the big ticket inner-city issues like climate change, there’s another that resonates with her constituents: the ABC.
In a letterbox drop to constituents in recent days, a Plibersek pamphlet used the ABC as a key part of her pitch to inner-Sydney voters.
Featured prominently in a section next to a giant photo of Plibersek, headlined in block letters “PROTECTING THE ABC”, she outlines a three-point manifesto.
Her boldest plan is “delivering a greater level of financial stability and certainty” to the ABC to (in bold type) “protect against arbitrary ideological cuts and political interference”.
Another is to “reverse Scott Morrison’s cut of $83.7 million to the ABC”. A third is Labor’s stated policy platform to “provide certainty for the ABC and SBS by providing them with five-year funding terms”, as opposed to the current three-year funding cycle.
In a highly polarised election campaign, the word is that this type of ABC pitch has tested well for Labor in selected progressive inner-city electorates.
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AFR’s Melbourne drinks go viral
Spare a thought for Australian Financial Review editor-in-chief Michael ‘Stutch’ Stutchbury. At a critical point in the election campaign, he’s had to deal with a staff rostering problem of epic proportions, after half of the AFR’s Melbourne newsroom caught Covid-19 after attending an impromptu post-work drinks catch-up at the local pub last Thursday week.
Nine sources have confirmed at last count, about 10 members of the 20-strong AFR Melbourne office in Docklands have gone down with the dreaded lurgy.
It was highly unfortunate timing for Stutch. Diary hears that staffing got so bare at one point that some AFR hacks even volunteered to return from annual leave to help cover the Melbourne journo void.
Thankfully, after a deep clean last week, the outbreak seems to have been quarantined to the AFR’s seventh-level office (wryly dubbed ‘The Chairman’s Lounge’ by Age journalists), and not spread to Nine’s other TV and print divisions in the same Bourke St Docklands building.
Meanwhile, as if Stutch needed any more Covid issues, his political editor Phil Coorey also went down with the bug. However, given the critical timing, we hear he bravely managed to soldier on with his coverage of the campaign from isolation, without taking a sick day.
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Nine news boss’s call to Fordham
Back to Nine’s ‘Great Debate’ — it didn’t go unnoticed by the company’s bosses last week that some criticism of the leaders’ face-off came within the Nine stable itself.
Ben Fordham, 2GB’s breakfast host, noted that the debate was “all over the shop”, and noted that people had “better things to do than waste their Sunday night listening to two people talking over each other. It’s like watching two blokes at the pub arguing over the colour of the carpet.”
Fordham has confirmed that Nine’s news boss Darren Wick, who was involved in organising the debate, called him soon after those comments, but insists his comments were positive: “We’re both big believers in free speech,” he tells Diary. “It’s great to work for a joint where everyone can have their say.”
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