“Concerned citizen” watch We’re big fans of the “concerned citizen” trope, where a news organisation polls an everyday citizen only for it to come out that this person is far from a dispassionate and quiet Australian. And Four Corners skirted awfully close recently when promoting its interview with Tony Seabrook on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, with its caption promoting the episode only finding space to describe him as a “farmer”.
Except “farmer” doesn’t quite cover it.
Seabrook is president of the Pastoralists and Graziers Association of Western Australia, and has been regularly quoted in West Australian and national media since the late 1990s. He’s addressed No campaign events in Perth organised by “conservative GetUp” Advance. Gina Rinehart has singled him out for praise as part of her campaign against “government red tape and taxes”. He was recently the loudest voice in the successful campaign to scrap the WA Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act — introduced to ensure another calamity like the destruction of Juukan Gorge could be averted. He called it the “greatest attack on private property rights since Federation”.
Some of this — though by no means all — is in the Four Corners episode, but not in the quickly shareable tweet, on which the ABC at first turned off comments, then deleted altogether.
Voicing no dissent What were we saying about how the script never changes? The SMH had only just published its exposé on the muddying language being used by the No campaign in the lead-up to the Voice to Parliament referendum when the Tasmanian Liberal Senate team sent out the email below. It landed in the inbox of a Crikey tipster, who passed it on to us, saying they don’t know how they ended up on that particular mailing list (are they a GetUp supporter, possibly?). Check that sign-off:
Incidentally, Tasmania is home to the most popular Liberal government in Australia — in as much as it has one at all. And the party supports the Voice, as does perpetual Liberal troublemaker and member for Bass Bridget Archer.
A real Downer The belly laughs continue from Alexander Downer’s Monday musings in The Australian Financial Review opinion pages — the latest offering under the headline “Establishment should learn a lesson from Qantas”. It seems Lord Downer is blaming Qantas’ woes on the fact that the airline supports the Voice, rather than having an incompetent board full of various claimants for “establishment” membership and a dud CEO.
Which is a hell of a thing — surely there could be no-one more conclusively “establishment” than Downer. His grandfather, Sir John Downer, served two non-consecutive periods as premier of South Australia before Federation, before joining the first batch of federal senators in 1901. Downer’s formative years were in London from 1964 to well into the 1970s while his dad was the high commissioner to Her Majesty’s government. Then in Canberra he was unaccountably a senior minister for many years and the briefest of opposition leaders. Were it not for his daughter Georgina pulling the handbrake and inadvertently kicking off the investigation into sport rorts when she ran in the ancestral seat of Mayo, the dynasty would have continued. But please, do tell us more about out-of-touch elites, Alexander.
His contribution was joined by that of fellow perpetual up-failer and former attorney-general George Brandis, who presumably saw the general grubbiness of his old rival and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s approach to the debate and thought “I can go lower”, ventriloquising the late Indigenous senator Neville Bonner and concluding, conveniently, that Bonner would have “hated” the idea of the Voice.
Great moments in brand Twitter This past Monday was the 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, and a further failed attempt on an unknown target. It is without doubt the most consequential single day in this author’s lifetime, a monumental tragedy both in its immediate toll (just shy of 3,000 killed) and the world that it gave us, all that it took and continues to take. What better, and more noble form of tribute could one conjure than having a flutter?
Yep, unaccountably in this, the year 2023, sports betting website DraftKings had to apologise after offering a 9/11-themed bet on its platform, offering a three-team parlay that would reward betters if the New York Jets, Mets and Yankees all won on the 11th.
It put us in mind of other truly incredible commemorations of the day over the years:
And of course, from a future president of the United States:
His prince are all over it How can we say for sure that Prince Harry knows he has extremely good PR people? Well, it’s not just the fact that he and wife Meghan can announce that they are “stepping back” from the royal family, while three years later still having access to Crown estate property. Or that he can put out a book credited to Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and no-one asks if either of those things are in any kind of conflict.
The real confirmation came this week when on German telly the duke, in Dusseldorf for the Invictus Games, lost a penalty shootout with Germany’s foreign affairs minister, was told he would have to put on a German football jersey, knew it would receive glowing coverage, and that no-one was going to draw any connection with the last time he jokingly donned a German uniform.
