You can take the editor out of The Oz, but you can’t take The Oz out of the editor
Australian Financial Review editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury in his newsletter yesterday afternoon:
Surprisingly, Malcolm Turnbull ends the week on the verge of a defining political win on company tax cuts.
Hmm, “Turnbull … on the verge” is familiar, but it’s not in the AFR story Stutch linked to. Where did we see it? Oh yes, in big letters on the front page of The Australian yesterday:
Turnbull on the verge of tax victory.
Why I used the F-word. The start of Greens senator Nick McKim’s entry on Facebook yesterday:
This week, I called Peter Dutton a fascist and a racist. It is not the first time I have done so, and it won’t be the last. I understand that some people are uncomfortable with that term, and I want to explain why I used it. We owe it to ourselves to confront difficult truths …
John Curtin Research Centre executive director Nick Dyrenfurth responding on Twitter yesterday:
Plainly @NickMcKim doesn’t understand what fascism is. Dutton’s politics & policies are reprehensible, but he is not a fascist. Fascists murdered & ran my family out of Europe. This is a grotesque abuse of history. And it doesn’t help the cause of refugees or migrants one jot.
The Australian’s Greg Sheridan v Ellen Fanning on ABC’s The Drum on Tuesday (and recorded for posterity by Gerard Henderson in his Media Watch Dog yesterday):
Ellen Fanning: Greg Sheridan, was it laying it on a bit thick for well-heeled retirees on the front page of The Australian newspaper — and saying that they were low-income earners when they in fact had a low taxable income because they’d organised their affairs so that they pay very little tax in retirement — who wouldn’t? …
Sheridan: Let me refer to you, in particular, the articles of my colleague Adam Creighton, who has dissected this matter, I think, quite brilliantly …
Fanning: Is your advice to the people watching tonight, ignore the headlines in The Australian newspaper about low incomes because …
Sheridan: No, no, no. Don’t verbal me, don’t verbal me about this.
Fanning: Read the economics correspondent and sometimes Drum panellist Adam Creighton and he’ll give you the real news.
Sheridan: No, no, you’re quite — that’s most improper. No, Ellen that is most improper. No paper has dissected this issue better, more honestly or more thoroughly than The Australian … our economics is a lot better than Emma Alberici’s economics.
Fanning: Oh that’s — I’ll have to pull you up there, Greg.
Agreement on 2SM yesterday:
Malcolm Turnbull: Every Australian election is close, I mean every Australian federal election is close.
John Laws: It’s close.
Turnbull then edging dangerously closer to raw, bad memories:
At the last election, despite the fact that we went into the election roughly level pegging, most people thought we were a certainty to win …
Certainty shaken. From James Jeffrey’s election night Sketch in The Australian on July 4, 2016:
Beneath chandeliers, drinks flowed, canapes cooled, hopes sank. Analogies ranging from a wake to a colonoscopy were traded. There were whispers Turnbull might be a no-show, but then he appeared on TV screens starting the journey from Point Piper. The media formed a wall, their reflections on the lift doors as distorted as at a funfair. Also waiting was paper mogul Anthony Pratt, who shared with your correspondent a philosophy: “Better to nearly die than nearly survive.” After midnight, he arrived. Less than a week after he had addressed the party with the word “Stability” glowing behind him, there Turnbull stood, ambushed by democracy in all its agility, innovation and vicious ingratitude.