Strewth: Back Burney-ing

The Coen Brothers’ 2008 flick Burn After Reading was a frolic of espionage, idiocy and a quest for cosmetic surgery.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2008 flick Burn After Reading was a frolic of espionage, idiocy and a quest for cosmetic surgery. For anyone familiar with the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, it came as no surprise it contained much mayhem. As one synopsis concludes, “Predictably, events whirl out of control for the duo doofuses and those in their orbit.” Yesterday’s unexpected premiere of parliamentary farce, Burney Altered Reading, in which an ambitious bit of cosmetic surgery on a Linda Burney interview transcript soon had events whirling out of control, was almost as gripping. The Labor frontbencher’s transcript contained creatively reimagined details of what our learned and elegantly understated colleague Greg Brown described as “a difficult interview with Sky News host David Speers”. Brown continued: “The altered transcript substantially changed Ms Burney’s argument in favour of a time limit to get people off Manus and Nauru, and completely excluded criticisms of the government’s current policy.” Daringly, even the wording of a Speers question was altered. The belief that Speers — a much-awarded journalist with a noted ability to quietly and coolly carve up pollies over matters of fumbled detail — would somehow miss a tweak so big it was probably visible from space sets a new and exhilaratingly high bar for optimism. Rumbling soon followed, as did contrition with words such as “mistake” and “it wasn’t intended to be doctored” offered up. Still, it wouldn’t have been the full caper without the involvement of the Immigration Minister. But when Peter Dutton finally emerged to address journalists, his head gasket quivering and ready to blow, he didn’t really push the Coen brothers angle. Lost opportunity.

If there’s a disconnect

On Sky News, meanwhile, Speers’s colleague Kieran Gilbert gave it a nudge along with Labor’s Jim Chalmers.

Gilbert: “Finally, on the issue of offshore detention. Linda Burney said yesterday she thinks there should be an explicit timeframe and normally I wouldn’t care about a slight shift in a transcript, but when you see entire slabs of a transcript of an interview removed, is not really that transparent … She said that here with David yesterday, and then the office released something else. What happened there?”

Chalmers: “I’m not sure what happened there. I’ve seen you replay the interview this morning; I saw little bits of the interview with David yesterday afternoon, but I haven’t checked it against the transcript. If you say … there’s a disconnect, then so be it.”

All in all, it’s probably enough to make whiteboard aficionado Michaelia Cash realise how underbaked her own office’s effort was in March when it cranked out a cheerily redacted transcript of a doorstop press conference. All trace of sticky but pertinent questions from Guardian Australia’s Paul Karp had been diligently excised, replaced by the tersely bracketed message: “(Non-portfolio-related questions/answers)” — the transcript equivalent of a small scar after cosmetic surgery. Credit/blame for this innovative action was eventually pinned on an “overzealous staffer” elsewhere in the department.

Skip to the loo loo

It’s hard to say who won Senate estimates yesterday: Coalition senator Ian Macdonald (“I might live in a bubble perhaps but I find it very difficult to find any but very rare cases of racism in Australia”), or his brother in merit Barry O’Sullivan, who wondered aloud about whether he could identify as a woman and safely take all his smoko breaks in the ladies “loo loo”. (Yes, a Barry original.) “We’ve got to ask this question some time,” he noted.

Music and movement

During estimates questioning about SBS, Greens stalwart Lee Rhiannon queried whether the station still planned to broadcast Eurovision when Israel hosted it next year. Communications Minister Mitch Fifield said he thought Rhiannon would have been more a fan of the Intervision Song Contest. This was the Soviet bloc’s splendidly stodgy response to Eurovision, Radio Free Europe describing the “clunky scenography and martial style of (its) presenters and callers from other communist capitals”. It has been defunct a while and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to revive it have so far come to nought. But hope dies last! On the Aunty front, Labor senator Kristina Keneally made this suggestion via Twitter: “Given that Minister Fifield is a regular complainant to the ABC, tells the ABC how to find its own budget efficiencies, intervenes on the ABC’s enterprise agreement, and what ABC staff should be paid, maybe he should just apply for the job of managing director.” Fifield received this well, telling Strewth, “I’m flattered by her confidence in me.”

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