Full disclosure Last year, the Nine Entertainment board vowed to stop holding Liberal Party fundraisers — not something we’d expect a news organisation to need to promise, but there we are. So the news that it donated $27,500 to the Libs last year had to be “clarified”: it was a hangover from the previous management, and it doesn’t plan to do that any more.
So is the following detail on Wednesday’s disclosures from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (originally spotted by Twitter user Belinda Jones) that it paid for his ticket to the men’s Australian Open final a similar hangover?
AEC v Twitter It’s a sign of the times, we suppose. The Australian Electoral Commission has been getting into scraps with what we can only describe as a Drip Twitter splinter group.
It appears to be connected to the farrago around boy-journo and real life Wes Anderson character — he started his own news network at the age of 12 — Leo Puglisi, who put out a fact check dismissing persistent claims that Scott Morrison was going use the pandemic to delay the election post-May 21 (he can’t delay the election proper on state of emergency, and the likelihood of technical possible but practically ruinously costly and politically catastrophic split election is dealt with here by Antony Green). This led to some well-adjusted folk accusing Puglisi of being funded by Rupert Murdoch or a government front — as well as threatening to turn up at his school or home.
This shemozzle has spread to the AEC Twitter account, with accusations it’s run “by a corrupt LNP stooge” as well as an attempt (since deleted) to dox whoever runs the AEC social media accounts. The account has become fairly willing to use the block function, and has taken to clapping back at the users making these kinds of accusations (as well as engaging in more jokey discourse with supporters). It hasn’t blocked anyone for raising the Gladys Liu “purple advertising” situation, so far as we can see.
Regardless of whether you think it’s appropriate for an agency like the AEC to get into biffo with anonymous Twitterers, the brain poison required for a decent number of people — in some cases with big followings — to decide that a 14- year-old and an independent body are in league with the ruling party to very slightly delay half the election for unclear political gains is … well, it’s new.
Mask-off moment It feels like the past five years have created as sharp a turn in reality and the language we need to describe it as any comparable time period in living memory. Just as saying to someone pre-2016 that “Twitter drips think Leo Puglisi is an LNP stooge” would have you shuffled quietly into a quiet corner, the phrase “several judges walked out when the masked singer was revealed to be the president’s lawyer” would take a lot of explaining.
Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and inspiration to visibly melting men everywhere, was a contestant on The Masked Singer, where celebrities don surreal masks and sing, and then other celebrities act way too excited when they take their masks off.
Via CNN: “Robin Thicke and Ken Jeong walked off stage following the revelation of Giuliani as a contestant on the popular Fox reality show in which contenders perform in full costume until they are eliminated.” Just when you think the guy can sink no lower, he finds out that Thicke thinks being seen with him would be a blow to his reputation.
