Pop gun goes off in West as business editor morphs into a reviewer of election editorials

The West Australian’s business editor tries to play with the big boys in post-WA election rant.

The West’s business editor Ben Harvey tears into The Australian for our endorsement of Colin Barnett. The West Australian, yesterday:

That voters did the polar opposite of what The Australian suggested is yet more proof that the paper’s power is vastly overstated … How arrogant for a newspaper which has long treated WA with disdain to tell its local readers they are completely wrong …

Our endorsements are based on policies, not which way the wind is blowing. The Australian, Friday:

The (Labor) party has produced no timetable and no policies for repaying the debt … Mr Barnett has a credible strategy, costed independently by the Treasury, to slash net debt by $12bn and ­return the budget to surplus within three years.

And our West Australian chief reporter, Andrew Burrell, was very critical of Barnett. The Australian, yesterday:

The Liberals will need to face up to other tactical errors that contributed to the horrendous scale of the defeat.

The first mistake was failing to explain the preference deal with One Nation adequately … The second big error was sticking with 66-year-old Colin Barnett as leader when it was obvious to everyone that he was deeply unpopular in the electorate and had long outstayed his welcome.

But the only Australian journo Harvey named in his spray was Margin Call columnist Will Glasgow. The West Australian , yesterday:

The mind-numbing preoccupation with internal party politics and backroom business dealings — on rude display each day through the likes of Will Glasgow’s incestuous ode to financial rumour-mongering — will guarantee The Australian’s cringe-worthy descent into obscurity.

Harvey and The West’s owner Seven West must be a bit sore at Glasgow and co-columnist Christine Lacy’s recent coverage of their WA operations ... Margin Call in The Australian, December 23, 2016:

Local boss Chris Wharton is on long-service leave until March … Meanwhile, his CFO Mark Shelton left the building at about the same time, when staff were told he was taking a role with “another company”.

And tributes continue to flow in for The Australian’s Bill Leak. Henry Ergas in The Australian, yesterday:

Bill’s cartoons offered what Robert Frost once said a good poem ­provides: “a momentary stay against confusion”. But if Bill’s work was so widely admired, it was also because of the genius he brought to the task, not merely in terms of technical virtuosity but of deep thought …

(Bill Leak) had the unflinching willingness to speak out with what the Germans call zivilcourage.

Bill Leak wrote this message to a concerned reader who reached out in the middle of his struggle with 18C. If anything shows Bill’s ‘zivilcourage’, it’s this. Leak writing in October 20, 2016:

As you can imagine I’m under the pump right now. Fighting against the dark forces of tyranny is a time-consuming business. For someone who needs 12 hours a day to draw his cartoons, it’s certainly adding an extra level of stress. Like you, though, I think it’s a fight worth having.