Judge the book not by the character of Mal's content but by the colour of the prize money

IN recognition of his services to the art of fiction, let us sing: Fraser's a jolly good fellow.

Shelley Gare blogging on the Sydney Institute's website yesterday:

So, have I got this right? A major political memoir can come out, can include serious errors according to creditable commentators . . . and the authors can also be accused of what is basically rewriting history in the subject's own favour and it can still walk off with top honours in a literary award that is funded by taxpayers. Hello? If this book were to be included on reading lists for secondary and university students, would lecturers feel obliged to make sure their students read other accounts of the events and characters to make up for the book's errors and interpretations? If so, why has it won such a prize for nonfiction? The trouble is, it's now more likely, as a result of the prize-giving, that students, perhaps teachers, lecturers, will feel it must be a sound account.

Gerard Henderson in the current The Spectator Australia:

The final page contains a note in which Fraser acknowledges that his memory is "notoriously fallible".

Surely The Age could come to the rescue? Er, no. Reviewer Michael Sexton on March 18 last year:

Margaret Simons is a modern-day version of Pollyanna. She has written what is essentially a third-person biography of Malcolm Fraser, although it is styled as his memoirs. And she has looked at his political life through the softest of rose-coloured spectacles . . . [Fraser] now says that the [Vietnam] war was a "mistake" but that these were "innocent days" . . . Most unbelievably of all, he says that he learnt for the first time in 1995 when reading Robert McNamara's memoirs that the US administration had been involved in the coup that led to the deposing and assassination of the South Vietnamese PM, Ngo Dinh Diem, in 1963. Can this be for real?

The Guardian on ABC boss Mark Scott, on Monday:

Unlike the BBC, ABC is not a great exporter of shows: Scott observes that its investment in and focus on local material matters because stars such as Nicole Kidman "all got their first break on Australian television".

Close, Mark, but no banana. The Daily Mirror on December 22, 1983:

Nicole's first film, Bush Christmas, is opening at the Hoyts Centre . . . and her second film, BMX Bandits, is making its debut at Village Cinema City . . . And one month after filming on BMX Bandits, Nicole was given another leading role in a television series called Chase Through the Night [her first TV role] which has been bought by the BBC and the ABC . . . "I like acting, but I'm not sure I want to be an actress when I'm a grown-up," [Kidman] explained. "I wouldn't mind being a public relations officer or a barrister, or even a politician."

We'll take that as a comment. Canberra ABC TV newsreader Virginia Haussegger on ACT Chief Minister Katy Gallagher in The Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday:

It was the sort of refreshing honesty from a politician that slips under the radar but gives a clue as to how progressive politics might handle the "women issue" in the future. "I am different," she insisted, when asked about her political passions. "I am not trying to sound silly here but I think women in politics do behave differently from men. That doesn't make us weak, it just means we work differently." Such candour comes at a time when mainstream politics appears confounded over how to talk about women and how to place them in the political landscape. It takes spunk to say I am a woman and I am different. Gallagher has proven she has spunk in spades.

But the ABC was not always so impartial. Hansard, March 21, 1968:

Senator Francis McManus: Can the minister suggest how the ABC news service can be induced to give both sides and not one side of this issue?

Senator Gerald McKellar: Honourable senators will realise that the government has no control over the ABC radio news service or ABC television news. I do not know whether this is a good or bad thing, but I think it is regrettable that there is not a better balance in the ABC news programs.