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The Mocker

How does je suis un hypocrite sound?

The Mocker
The MockerThe Mocker
@Oz_Mocker
6 min read
11:20AMJune 13, 2019.
Updated 8:46PMJune 13, 2019
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Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young and (inset, clockwise from top left) Jane Caro, Richard Di Natale, Patricia Karvelas and Wendy Harmer.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young and (inset, clockwise from top left) Jane Caro, Richard Di Natale, Patricia Karvelas and Wendy Harmer.

How pleasing and surprising it was to see so many of the commentariat suddenly in favour of freedom of the press. Some of us had been warning for the last few years it was being compromised by executive and legislative censorship, but our progressive betters were at best indifferent to or contemptuous of such protests. But last week’s “raid” on the ABC by the Australian Federal Police led to a mass outcry among the intelligentsia. Aunty had been violated.

“An attack on the press for doing their job is an attack on our democracy,” tweeted Greens leader senator Richard Di Natale.

How noble. I have been thinking of designing a hashtag for such converts — how does #JeSuisFullofIt sound, Senator? In March Di Natale revealed his inner tinpot when he told his admiring Melbourne inner-city audience of his plans to silence conservative journalists.

“We’re going to call out the hate speech that’s been going on,” he said. “We’re going to make sure that we’ve got laws that regulate our media so that people like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones and Chris Kenny — and I could go on and on and on. If they want to use hate speech to divide the community then they’re going to be held to account.”

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young labelled the AFP’s actions “an attack on the press for doing their job” and “an attack on those who tell the truth”.

Compare her purported principles to her reaction in 2011 when a Federal Court found Herald-Sun journalist Andrew Bolt had breached section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in questioning the motives of light-skinned Australians who identified as indigenous. “Diddums Andrew Bolt,” she tweeted, “Diddums”. Proving this inanity was not a mere case of spontaneity, Hanson-Young repeated these puerile sentiments in a letter to this newspaper for good measure.

“Without a strong media that is fearless … our country will be weaker,” lamented ABC broadcaster Patricia Karvelas. “It is in everyone’s interests to know the truth”. I agree entirely, but I was reminded of the reaction to Herald-Sun cartoonist Mark Knight’s excellent depiction of tennis player Serena Williams’s US Open tantrum last year.

Knight had spoken the truth in depicting Williams as a spoiled brat and a bully. It resulted in his suffering appalling online abuse. He was called a “white supremacist”, he and his family received death threats, and he was forced to leave town for a week while he was protected by security guards. The Australian Press Council subsequently dismissed complaints about Knight’s cartoon, finding that its publication was in the public interest.

So did Karvelas fiercely defend Knight’s right (and obligation) to speak the truth? “Main lesson from today is that listening is always a good start to building a respectful and civilised community,” she tweeted the day it was published. “If people of colour are telling you they find depictions of them hurtful and offensive that matters”. So much for a “strong media”.

The AFP’s actions, claimed ABC broadcaster Wendy Harmer, amounted to a “chilling effect”, and “one that goes beyond just media outlets”. Welcome to the free press cause, Wendy, albeit it has taken you a few years to get here.

It was a very different Harmer who on 15 December 2014 tweeted “Andrew Bolt’s blog is a forum for vile hate speech. A blight on this nation … Get rid of him!!” That was the same day the Lindt Café siege began at the hands of an Islamist terrorist. Two innocent hostages would later die. It says it all that Harmer was preoccupied with “hate speech” and silencing a conservative columnist.

Inexplicably journalists these days play a leading role in not only suppressing politically incorrect statements, but also in calling for retribution against those who perpetuate them. Take for example former Wallabies player Israel Folau, whose $4 million contract was terminated by Rugby Australia last month after he twice posted on Instagram that homosexuals were destined for hell unless they repented.

In the 13-month period between Folau’s first Instagram indiscretion and his eventual sacking, Sydney Morning Herald columnist and sports journalist Peter FitzSimons wrote at least 11 columns about Folau. They are not what you would call reporting or objective analysis. Rather, they were shrill denunciations. “Israel Folau has to go, and will go,” he wrote in April. “Quick. Clean. Gone. At least until such times as he repents.” FitzSimons was also quick to dismiss Folau’s right to free speech. “While he has broad freedom of speech, he has no freedom from consequences,” he wrote.

You may recall former SBS sports journalist Scott McIntyre, whose employment in 2015 was terminated over a number of provocative tweets on Anzac Day that vilified the WWI and WWII diggers and those who commemorated them. “Wonder if the poorly-read, largely white, nationalist drinkers and gamblers pause today to consider the horror that all mankind suffered,” he sneered.

So what was FitzSimons’ reaction? “I disagree as passionately with those comments as I do with his ludicrous sacking for making them,” he wrote. There’s that hashtag again.

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Turning to another subject, let’s give a big shout out to whatever committee does the short-listing for the Queen’s Birthday honours. In recent years, there have been calls for these to be balanced according to gender, and the committee has responded accordingly. There was intense competition — think of all those worthy female entrepreneurs, scientists, nurses, ADF members, foster parents, and police officers — but social commentator, author and feminist Jane Caro was judged more worthy. “For significant service to the broadcast media as a journalist, social commentator and author,” reads the citation.

Indeed. As a tribute to the great lady and polymath with lungs so capacious they could capture a third of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions, I have assembled just a few of the many Caro gems. We shall begin with her eschewing of material things in the spirit of egalitarianism. “This is delicious,” the Sydney North Shore resident and farm owner tweeted in 2014 upon reading a Guardian article on the virtues of collective ownership. “Socialism better for economic growth than capitalism”.

In the field of international relations, her analysis is unsurpassed. Witness, for example, her performance on ABC’s The Drum regarding proposed peace talks on the Korean Peninsula. “It’s a dance between China, South and North Korea and the US President,” she postulated. “There is only room for one crazy person in that dance and America’s taken that space, so Kim Jong-un has to act sane. He hasn’t got any choice.” Move over, Kissinger, perhaps even von Metternich.

Our Jane will never lose the common touch, but be assured this purported republican still walks with kings. “Diana and I are near contemporaries,” she wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald last month regarding the late princess. “She was born in July 1961 and I was born in June 1957.” Contemporaries? Way too modest. Besties, surely!

She is also Australia’s most in-demand woman. “I cannot indiscriminately read manuscripts, research proposals or judge competitions,” she protested in April, writing for Women’s Agenda. “What I cannot do is endlessly have coffee with people I hardly know (or do not know at all) so they can pick my brains.” Lord only knows how she finds time to tweet prolifically or appear every other day on The Drum.

Although she presents as a fearless climate change warrior, Jane frankly admits she is “existentially terrified” about the phenomenon. Question her expertise in this area and she will angrily remind you she breeds cattle and is a part owner of a wine company. Her fear hasn’t curtailed her numerous domestic and overseas sojourns fortunately, and she is on first name terms with the staff at the Qantas Club lounge.

These are but a few examples, and I am sure I speak for all of us when I say she falls into the category of those Australians who, as Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove said this week, “constantly put others ahead of yourself, served tirelessly and made a difference”. We truculent turds congratulate Jane and beg of her never to make good on her threat to leave us for luvvie utopia across the Tasman.

“I think a lot of people say things they don’t mean,” Caro told Seven News this week in reference to her ill-advised election night Twitter spray. She is right in one sense: a lot of people spend their days regurgitating sententious platitudes on social media pretending to be someone they are not. The only time these tolerance tartars say the things they do mean is when they don’t get their way and especially when they’ve had a few sherbets. If it were not for their making a spectacle of themselves this column would be nothing. Keep tweeting and bleating, Jane.

The Mocker
The Mocker

The Mocker amuses himself by calling out poseurs, sneering social commentators, and po-faced officials. He is deeply suspicious of those who seek increased regulation of speech and behaviour. Believing that journalism is dominated by idealists and activists, he likes to provide a realist's perspective of politics and current affairs.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/je-suis-un-hypocrite/news-story/57893becb6097b43fea103f39dcfdaef