Sex scandals, mass media mayhem and politics as usual

After wading through your expose of the latest sexual harassment tell-all that strangely is affecting only one side of politics — and everyone’s favourite conservative punching bag Craig Kelly through the agency of his ex chief of staff — it’s apparent that a legal trial process is redundant.

Although the individual in question is named the accusations are made anonymously because the accuser has a career to pursue, unlike the accused who now may have none irrespective of whether he is found guilty or innocent.

Indeed given the publicly aired complaints, and that we are in a febrile “me too” era, this person should simply go straight to the big house for an indeterminate period, perhaps based on a straw poll of the female journalistic class.

Ashley Georgeson, Cumberland Park, SA

Witness the current examples of an alleged rape in Parliament House and an inadequately trained doctor administering a vaccine; it is natural that political parties will attempt to keep possible blunders on serious issues under or away from major radar. While the media have a responsibility to discover and expose such blunders, it is the unadulterated glee and tone of self-righteous condemnation with which many in the media announce blunders that encourages much political subterfuge. And regretfully the national broadcaster is often a leading exponent.

Peter M Wargent, Mosman, NSW

With the passing of legislation requiring Google and Facebook to pay news organisations for content, the ABC will become, at least in part, a commercial organisation by selling news to social media entities.

Having argued for years that they were above the mighty dollar, unless it came out of the pockets of taxpayers, they have now signed up to sell content. Hopefully this will lead to broader commercialisation of the ABC with less demand on taxpayer funding.

Brian Barker, East Brisbane, Qld

Brian Doherty (Letters, 26/2) regards the Scott Morrison-led Liberal Party as insufficiently conservative. Perhaps Mr Doherty could join forces with Cory Bernardi and reinvent the right-wing party that he founded: the Australian Conservatives. This began life in July 2016 as a conservative political activist group and became a political party in February 2017. Alas, it met a premature death when it was deregistered on 25 June 2019. Mr Doherty and Mr Bernardi as a team may be able to resurrect their natural political home.

Douglas Mackenzie, Deakin, ACT

It is an absolute no-brainer that political donations from property developers should be prohibited (Letters, 26/2). But why stop there? Political donations of all kinds should be banned even those from “mum and dad” donors. At the moment there is far too much scope for dubious donations to sneak through.

What we should be doing is having a tax payer-funded election process whereby each political party is given a capped amount of money to spend on their election campaigns.

This would make political parties work much harder to get their message across to voters. And it would put an immediate stop to sweetheart deals and those who have a quid each way.

Peter D. Surkitt, Sandringham, Vic

Ross Garnaut has written a book titled Reset about how Australia should tackle its post-virus recovery and future economic planning. It is not flavoured with dogma or ideology. It sets out a plan based upon fundamental economics and the conclusion that we cannot consider success as getting back to where we were before the virus struck.

We need to take the opportunity provided by virus-driven international turmoil to completely reset our economic and social reasoning patterns.

Robert Harcourt, Hahndorf, SA

Am I the only one to feel disgusted with the way politicians have politicised aspects of the pandemic? When a doctor at a Brisbane aged-care facility accidentally gave an overdose to two elderly residents, our Premier made a beeline to the airwaves to blast the Prime Minister for this bungle.

Do premiers really believe that federal politicians are making the professional decisions about this serious health matter, or personally attending to all the micromanagement issues involving the rollout of the vaccinations?

Will Muskens, Bardon, Qld