NSW Police seek a new spin doctor after months of chaos

The top media job at NSW Police might pay up to $329,583, but lately it’s been a real poisoned chalice.

To recap: after a series of plodding media performances, commissioner Karen Webb dumped her executive director of public affairs Liz Deegan, a public affairs veteran with stints at News Corp and the NRL, and the third person in the role since Webb started in 2022.

We feel bad for Deegan. After all, she wasn’t the one who went on breakfast TV and responded to criticisms of the force’s handling of a double murder with Taylor Swift lyrics.

Desperate to give Webb a bit of tabloid pizzazz, the cops hired Seven’s Spotlight producer Steve “Jacko” Jackson. That lasted one spectacularly scandalous fortnight. First came the deteriorating relationships between Webb and the office of Police Minister Yasmin Catley over the appointment of Jacko to the unadvertised role. Photos circulating of Jackson seated on a couch next to a naked former socialite didn’t help.

Neither did Jacko’s own role in securing an interview with Bruce Lehrmann. Jackson was dumped before the public had got wind of the full scale of the whole paying-for-Lehrmann’s-cocaine-and-sex-workers thing.

Anyway, the cops are now advertising, publicly this time, for a new executive director of public affairs. We reckon they’d be out for a clean-skin, with a thick skin.

UP IN SMOKE

When Health Minister Mark Butler went all-in on stopping the vapes, he probably didn’t imagine his task would get quite so Sisyphean.

After all, banning stuff is usually pretty uncontroversial in Australia, especially when the stuff in question is chock-full of nasty chemicals and keeps falling into the hands of children.

But Butler’s bill – to ban the import, manufacture and sale of vapes outside of pharmacies – faces the challenge of getting through a potentially sceptical crossbench if the government is to meet its goal of passing it by July.

With all that going on, Butler’s vaping crackdown has caused a bit of back-and-forth between doctors on different sides of the e-cigarette debate, which is playing out in the footnotes of a Senate inquiry into the government’s bill. Now, Australia’s medical establishment is almost entirely backing the crackdown, with the exception of a handful of dissenters, most prominently Double Bay-based doctor Colin Mendelsohn, who is bullishly pro-vaping as a smoking cessation tool.

In a submission to the inquiry written by leading public health experts Simon Chapman, Mike Daube and Matthew Peters, the authors pointed out that, despite Mendelsohn’s opposition to the prescription vaping model, he was listed as a medical adviser to Quit Clinics, which is essentially a prescription mill for people trying to get vapes.

But in a right of reply submitted to the inquiry, Mendelsohn denied ever being an adviser to Quit Clinics. “Interestingly, the complainants offer no evidence to support their false allegation,” he said.

But the complainants in question did indeed link to an archived webpage, where Mendelsohn is listed as one of Quit Clinics’ medical advisers. And he still appears listed as one on their website.

So what’s the go? Mendelsohn told CBD he’d never worked as an adviser for Quit Clinics, nor had any financial relationship. He had written an unpaid blog post for them and suggested that might be why he was still on the website.

The Director of Quit Clinics, Dr Samuel Murray, said: “During a website update, an error occurred which meant that all blog authors were identified as ‘medical advisors’. Dr Mendelsohn has never been a ‘medical advisor’ to Quit Clinics, and has never received any sort of compensation”.

But all this beefing in the footnotes aside, CBD remains sceptical about the government’s chances of stopping the vapes for good. It’s been illegal to import disposable vapes since January, and any punter can still walk into the local convenience store and buy a black-market lung lolly cooked up in some dodgy factory in Shenzhen.

LAUGHING MATTER

When you’re the wealthiest person in a country that drones on endlessly about “tall poppy syndrome” you’ve got to accept a level of piss-taking as part of the job description.

So we’re delighted to note that mining billionaire Gina Rinehart – who’s copped her fair share of, ahem, good-natured banter lately – appears to be taking some of it, at least, in good humour.

Rinehart’s official website has posted a piece by satirical website The Shovel – we’re big fans – reporting the mining magnate had been picked for the Australian Olympic swimming team, and an item from the Rear Window column from our stablemates The Australian Financial Review ripping the pee-pee out of Gina’s enthusiasm for the libertarian laureate Ayn Rand.

Now, we know what you’re thinking, and yes! You’d better believe we feel left out of the fun by Gina – not a sentence you get to write every day – and after all we’ve done for her over the years.

So we got in touch with Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting peeps who administer the site, asking if there was any chance we might be making an appearance there.

We were advised not to hold our breath.

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