Prime Minister Julia Gillard has taken aim at what she says is the "Americanisation" of Australia's rancorous political debate.

Recent anti-carbon tax rallies in Canberra and Sydney have featured coffins, "Ditch the Witch" signs, and "JuLiar" chants, in an echo of similar angry scenes at right-wing Tea Party rallies in the US.

Ms Gillard was asked at a community forum in Sydney last night whether those kinds of attacks demeaned her office and Australia's democracy.

The Prime Minister at first was a little hesitant to respond, saying her critics would target her for being thin-skinned.

"I don't like it when I get a sense of a kind of - with all apologies to our American friends - a kind of Americanisation of our debate," she said.

"It's not in us generally, I don't think, to talk about 'people's revolt' and very, very harsh words of the nature that we've seen in the public debate.

"It is in us to have a robust public debate.

"We have politicians come from overseas and look at our Question Time and go 'it's a robust go', and that is an Australian way of doing it," she said.

"I don't think it helps us as a nation deal with some complicated questions.

"I think there's a temper and tone question which, you know, we want to be uniquely our own and uniquely Australian, and I'm not sure we're seeing that on display now."

Last night on 7.30, former prime minister John Howard rejected the notion that politics was more brutal now than it has ever been.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-31/gillard-decries-americanisation-of-debate/2863460

I could agree with Rattus on this one.... The only difference is that, in the past, protests were about better justice on all front and against illegal wars issues... Now the protests are about the sensitive hip-pockets which are not plundered while being claimed to be, as if the sky was falling down... The sad part is that a political leader such as Tony Abbott is joining such groups of ignoramus ratbags who DON'T WANT TO KNOW anything but the value of their own arse...

From Tim Dunlop

...

While The Australian acknowledged no attempt was made to contact the Prime Minister's office, comment is rarely if ever sought in relation to opinion pieces," he said.

"This is a widely understood and accepted practice in journalism."

His comments almost beggar belief. Milne's "opinion piece" was based on certain claims of fact about the PM and the idea that he shouldn't seek confirmation from the subject of his article is nonsense on a stick. First-year journalism students know that they are obliged to contact their subjects under such circumstances and Milne's failure to do so is horribly compounded by Mr Hartigan's attempt to justify it.

To understand how stupid Hartigan's claim is, you only have to look to how key people at News Ltd reacted in regard to another matter of defamation.

That case involved the editor of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, and journalism academic, Julie Posetti. Posetti had tweeted a conference speech by journalist Asa Wahlquist who used to work for The Australian. Mitchell claimed the tweeted information was wrong and announced that he would sue Posetti.

Mitchell's lawyers sent Posetti a letter seeking redress. It included the following comments:

"It is apparent that Ms Wahlquist did make some of the statements whilst at the conference.

In any event, your election to publish the material in the form of Tweets without seeking to verify the material with our client has led to you being liable for those publications."

Yes, that's right. One of the things that concerned the editor of The Australian was that Posetti didn't contact him for verification. And that was in regard to the live tweeting of a conference speech!

And yet we now have John Hartigan claiming that one of News Ltd's most senior journalists wasn't really obliged to contact the PM about his now-discredited claims because it is "a widely understood and accepted practice in journalism" that "comment is rarely if ever sought in relation to opinion pieces".

Talk about double standards.

Journalism in its purest, fourth-estate manifestation may be impossible, but when leading figures at major media organisations seek to mitigate their bad behaviour by pretending that certain standards don't apply - or at least, don't apply to them - then we have reached a whole new level of failure.

If there is an inquiry into Australian media, the media will have nobody to blame but themselves.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2864816.html

Apparently Rattus-the-First — who has done a revisionist job on "Lazarus" with an extra chapter of bile — is to appear on the Screwed Report hosted by Andrew Bolt on Channel Ten this coming Sunday.

Be sure to miss it.

At last, the ABC has broadcast a program that accurately reflects the debate over climate science.

That is, a program in which a large body of eminent scientists with an overwhelming case built and tested carefully over many years using the best procedures of science meets a politically-motivated coterie of ratbags who manipulate the truth, endlessly repeat falsehoods, harass their opponents and grandstand at every opportunity.

The program in question is the episode of Crownies aired last Thursday night. In it, DPP solicitor Richard Stirling (played by Hamish Michael and one of Crownies' real stars) reluctantly has to prosecute an eminent climate scientist who allegedly punched a climate denier in the face. The denier James Watt (played with disconcerting accuracy by Richard Healy) had been harassing Professor Tim Coghburn for years, turning up at every public event to demand answers to his inane questions lifted uncritically from some denialist website.

When Watt, after disrupting a public lecture, followed Coghburn out of the venue haranguing, insulting and poking him in the chest, the scientist finally lost his rag and lashed out. Who hasn't wanted to do that?

Crownies scriptwriter Chris Hawkshaw must have attended a few public meetings to take notes on the boorish tactics of the deniers - bombastic old white blokes who stand to declaim their crazy views, insensitive to how foolish they appear and deaf to all counterarguments. Healy captures perfectly the ignorant self-certainty and Aspergerish insensitivity so typical of the breed.

I have to take my hat off to Hawkshaw. In 15 minutes of sharp dialogue and brilliant characterisation he has done more to skewer the arguments and expose the true character of climate deniers than my three books and 15 years worth of newspaper articles and public lectures.

More power to ABC TV drama. Meanwhile, over in its news and current affairs programs, the ABC continues to present the fiction that the there is a genuine debate about the science of climate change, repeatedly giving unqualified climate deniers equal time with serious scientists.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3207072.html

There are many books and articles demonstrating with precision the science of global warming, in part or in whole... but no-one has the time to read them... For many people global warming is a hoax because it does not fit our carbon economy model or is too "complicated" thus it's can't be right... Idiots.

A bit like the young team of would-be shock jocks during drive time today on Radio Rabid Liberal (conservative) North Shore FM... There, the hot topic of the afternoon's discussion was whether one should tie one's shoe-laces before going into a public toilet... Obviously the pimply teens, had not hear of global warming, have been told not to talk about global warming unless it satisfies the denialists' side or never heard of Shakespeare.

The future is bleak... and now getting damp like loose shoe laces on the wet smelly concrete floor of a public ammenity...

see toon at top....

Devoid of any announcement on GST, Morrison has no real material to offer. Instead, he fumbles an austerity budget plan that depends on a couple of meaningless slogans. 

ABC's Chris Uhlmann gives him a boost in introducing him as the kind of guy who did what had to be done. "Stop the boats, they said and he did".

Many watching recall today is the anniversary of 23 year old Iranian Reza Berati who was bashed to death on Manus Island in circumstances which Morrison has never given a candid or upfront account of, despite being the minister responsible at the time.

#auspol says much about Canberra gallery that they praise Morrison forgetting his crimes against humanity.

Perhaps Morrison could be given indefinite leave of absence to attend to this unfinished business in a previous portfolio. His Backing at Transitioning Australia at the Press Club yesterday is so seriously inept that someone needs to get him to stop pretending; get him out of the portfolio before he is “not responsible” for further unspeakable cruelties and unnecessary suffering on his watch.

read more: https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/morrison-divides-the-nation-national-press-club,8693

First, Chris Uhlmann is a right-wing journo at the ABC who has no clue on how to sit on the fence as a good boy should. See toon at top. Meanwhile ScottMo is totally inept. His choice of checkered tie is atrocious, but I believe designed to distract from his chequered understanding of nothing about the economy.

Chris Uhlmann should mind his language on 'cultural Marxism'

Jason Wilson

On Saturday, the Australian published a column by the ABC’s political editor, Chris Uhlmann. In it, Uhlmann repeated a disturbing theory about the origins of 20th century social change. It’s one that appears to have firmly lodged itself in the minds of many conservative Australian journalists.

It begins in its familiar way with the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who, after realising that open calls to revolution were falling on deaf ears in the west, argued that Marxists, in Uhlmann’s words, should seek the “commanding heights of the bureaucracy, universities and the media”, and “scrub the landscape clean of Western values”.

...

Before Uhlmann, Kevin Donnelly and Nick Cater also gave potted versions of the story. (I noted the latter instance in an earlier column.)

The SPLC worried about this happening, because it may lend respectability to a narrative that “in its most virulent form, (it is) an antisemitic theory that identifies Jews in general and several Jewish intellectuals in particular as nefarious, communistic destroyers.

The far right thinkers who popularised the story of cultural Marxism from the late 1980s were not above peddling it to political antisemites. Paul Weyrich who, along with William S Lind, promoted this theory at the Free Congress Foundation from the late 1980s onward, was known to propound in speeches to Holocaust-deniers.

Not everyone who critiques cultural Marxism is an antisemite and there’s no suggestion being made here that Uhlmann himself is antisemitic. But in the context of this history, his metaphors of infection and internal subversion are exceptionally poorly chosen. He should have been more careful with his metaphors and should have not got himself entangled in a theory that the right – mainstream and extreme – are increasingly happy to use to paint themselves as history’s victims.

We might remember what made Uhlmann so incensed: criticism of him, and some further, vaguely drawn, and uncited criticisms of Abbott.

When the response to such disagreement is a hysterical repetition of a shibboleth of far right thinking, who is betraying our journalistic and civic values?

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/22/chris-uhlmann-should-mind-his-language-on-cultural-marxism

See toon and article at top...

When he leaves the ABC soon, Mark Scott is leaving his seat with a bomb under it. Hopefully the new CEO will be able to defuse it pronto. NO-ONE WANTS THE ABC MERGED WITH SBS. I mean no-one except, those inclined to destroy the ABC and SBS with a deadly pythonesque embrace. 

Merging ABC, SBS and NITV would free up funding to spend on news and Australian content and allow the multicultural broadcaster to drop advertising, according to a discussion paper by the thinktank the Australia Institute.

The Special Broadcasting Service was launched by the then Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, in 1974, as a service for local non-English speakers but has evolved into a diverse, multi-platform broadcaster that provides more than just multilingual services.

Merging the three separately funded public broadcasters could also ensure that culturally diverse voices reached wider audiences while improving the ABC’s current lack of cultural diversity.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/feb/23/merge-abc-sbs-and-nitv-to-free-up-funds-says-australia-institute

One should ask what pressure or what idiocy has made the Australia Institute come up with this idea. Placing three trains on the same line does not speed up the transport especially when these trains are going towards each others. The idea would be to re-gauge the purpose of each network. SBS has mellowed (mostly due to its budget having been cut and having to allow advertising content) and become a bit like Canal+ of Europe. The ABC has gone to the right with a dose of bad balance demanded by the likes of Abbott and Turdball. 

The next step of course with the AI would be to have advertising on the ABC, which would totally compromise its news network.  NITV is specific and would become the "network of white waspish people for the blacks". 

Time to re-establish and maintain delineation of entities. 

On Monday the Oz kept it going by publishing all those letters under the headline“Chris Uhlmann strikes a blow for freedom of speech”. One reader wrote: “Chris Uhlmann is a great journalist and an intelligent man so it came as a surprise that he has only just discovered that not all journalists are in favour of free speech. He only needs to look around at his colleagues at the ABC to see a whole pack of socialists who feel they can attack every tenet of our society and then take umbrage when society hits back.”

The ABC says Uhlmann asked permission from a superior to get the piece published in News Corp and management is quietly pleased that one of its journalists has made it in the Oz. It improves perceptions of balance.

However, one of Aunty’s veterans pointed out to Weekly Beast that the column may be in breach of the editorial policies. In a guidance note on opinion it says it is “almost always inappropriate to offer opinion” if you are an ABC journalist and there is “particular sensitivity for ABC staff working in news and current affairs, where there is the need to demonstrate impartiality and independence on all newsworthy and topical issues”.

It has come to Beast’s attention that there is an ulterior motive behind all this love that the Oz is giving to Uhlmann. They want to hire him as a political correspondent for the paper’s Canberra bureau.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/feb/25/the-weekly-beast-abc-braces-for-budget-cuts-as-mark-scott-exits

See toon and article at top...

Regular ABC consumers aren’t surprised to hear the free-market views of the Centre for Independent Studies aired regularly, and it’s not just because the Radio National presenter Tom Switzer is the executive director of the conservative thinktank, as well as the host of Between the Lines. Like the Institute of Public Affairs, the CIS has a significant footprint at Aunty.

On one recent weekend three representatives of the centre were on air, in three separate Radio National programs.

The Right Rev Robert Forsyth, a senior fellow at the CIS, appeared on God Forbid, a religion program hosted by James Carleton; Carlos d’Abrera, a psychiatrist and research associate at the CIS, was on Amanda Vanstone’s Counterpoint to discuss the libertarian view on homelessness; and the John Bonython lecture hosted by Switzer at the centre last year was featured on Big Ideas. The lecture by the Brexit supporter Daniel Hannan was titled How Identity Politics Are Undoing the Enlightenment.

Nick Cater, a former editor of the Weekend Australian and now executive director of the Menzies Research Centre, also made an appearance on the show.

This week Eugenie Joseph, a senior policy analyst at the CIS, was a panellist on Big Ideas.

A few months ago Wayne Swan saidthe right had invested “huge sums of money” on getting a seat at the table of ideas. Labor’s federal president said the Institute of Public Affairs had revenue of $6.1m in 2016-17 and had raised $29.9m since 2009, and the CIS had revenue of $3.9m in 2016-17 and had raised $25.9m.

“Which means that since the global financial crisis, those two organisations alone have raised over $55m to argue for less government, less financial regulation, less power for working people, less equality and less action to combat climate change,” he said.

An RN spokesman said the network’s program teams “ensure they follow the ABC’s editorial policies”.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/15/daily-telegraphs-attempt-a...

Read from top. 

Bugger these praying monkeys...

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/12749

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31482

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35033