There will be no carbon tax under the journalist I choose to talk to about Kevin's plot

ON the couch with Barrie Cassidy it's really comfy, but sometimes the truth can take a nasty turn.

ON the couch with Barrie Cassidy it's really comfy, but sometimes the truth can take a nasty turn.

Kerry-Anne Walsh on ABC1's Insiders, Sunday:

(SCOTT Morrison) picks and chooses basically who he wants to brief and he gives an interview to The Australian, sometimes known as the Liberal Party Daily Express.

That's rich coming from the author of The Stalking of Julia Gillard:

GILLARD has been hounded and pilloried for stating before last year's election that her government would not introduce a carbon tax. The quote, which has been hurled at her thousands of times by the anti-Gillardites in the Land of the Lunar Right in the tabloid and shock jock world, is this: "There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead." What is deliberately omitted - including in the mainstream political press, which uses the quote to flagellate Gillard - is the second half of her sentence. Her full comment on commercial TV during the 2010 election campaign was: "There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead, but let me be clear. I will be putting a price on carbon and I will move to an emissions trading scheme." ... It was Abbott who labelled it a "tax", and it stuck.

Hold on. What did Gillard say? The former PM on November 10:

ANOTHER bad error was effectively conceding the terminology "carbon tax". Our carbon pricing mechanism is an emissions trading scheme with a fixed price for the first three years and I should have clearly said so. If I had my time again, I would have been more precise in those election television interviews, in particular that Channel 10 interview about no carbon tax under the government I lead, and instead emphasised what I said to Paul Kelly and Dennis Shanahan.

The Australian, August 23, 2010:

JULIA Gillard says she is prepared to legislate a carbon price in the next term as part of a bold series of reforms that include school funding, education and health. In an election-eve interview with The Australian, the prime minister revealed she would view victory tomorrow as a mandate for a carbon price, provided the community was ready for this step. "I don't rule out the possibility of legislating a carbon pollution reduction scheme, a market-based mechanism," she said of the next parliament. "I rule out a carbon tax." This is the strongest message Ms Gillard has sent about action on carbon pricing.

Over at the taxpayers' ABC, Quentin Dempster (salary: $291,505), tweets:

I WORK my guts out for the ABC! Murdoch Press imputation that I'm bludging on the ABC is wrong, hurtful, offensive and defamatory.

Dempster in a letter to our editor, reported in Media Diary, yesterday:

YOUR personal targeting of me and my pay packet is clearly a reprisal for my analysis on freedom of the press in Australia and the UK phone-hacking scandal in which I came to the concluded view: "Rupert Murdoch is a disgrace to journalism."

We remember that devastating piece, kind of. Dempster writing on The Drum website, April last year:

THE big problem is that to be credible as a news source in Australia for which taxpayers are willing to pay, the ABC must maintain a strong journalistic presence across the regions of Australia. This is primarily achieved in radio. TV is capital city based.

Follow the money. Sarah Martin in The Weekend Australian, Saturday:

THE ABC has become increasingly centralised during the past five years, spending 33 per cent more on wages at its Ultimo headquarters in inner Sydney last year than in 2007. During this period, spending at head office blew out by $60 million while spending in the national broadcaster's regional offices grew just $4.6m, or about 14 per cent, in line with the rate of inflation.

Martin finds the ABC's life source:

ULTIMO now consumes more than 50 per cent of the national broadcaster's budget, with more than 600 people employed on salaries of more than $100,000 a year. The salary of ABC managing director Mark Scott is larger than the entire wage budget for the ABC's offices in Broome, Albany, Broken Hill, Port Pirie and Dubbo.