Bizarre ride Last week came the latest stop in the strange journey of former 60 Minutes journo Ross Coulthart. He’s been snapped up by NewsNation, the reinvigorated US network where such luminaries as Chris Cuomo, Mick Mulvaney and Sean Spicer ended up after, for whatever reason, leaving their previous roles.
The network said Coulthart will produce “special projects” and “short- and long-form documentary-style pieces”, language reminiscent of packaging that tries to make an Aldi-brand meat substitute appetising. His first piece for the network was a special called “Unsolved: The JFK Assassination“, timed to coincide with the 60-year anniversary of the assassination of former president John F. Kennedy.
Australian audiences law saw Coulthart when he was being commissioned by Seven commercial director Bruce McWilliam to investigate the war crimes allegations against Ben Roberts-Smith. Coulthart claimed to have evidence that would vindicate BRS and, according to journalist Chris Masters, went so far as to text Nine’s group executive editor James Chessell to offer his help in fixing “a looming disaster for him and the paper”. So convinced was he by his findings — which haven’t been made public — Coulthart also joined the soldier’s PR team. In June this year, the Federal Court found that Nine’s reporting on Roberts-Smith was substantially true, a judgment Roberts-Smith is appealing.
Oh, but that’s not the weirdest part of Coulthart’s recent career — he’s also a much-beloved figure in the UFO conspiracy movement, having released a very successful book on the subject. In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science is, according to writer and critic Jason Colavito, who dedicates a bit of time to the subject, “less a serious analysis and more of a book report on the last works of the leaders of the faith. It also serves as an application for Coulthart to join … the lucrative UFO speakers’ circuit, a ‘serious’ journalist with paranormal conclusions.” All of this gave us this gift of a line from News Corp last year: “A court has been told a UFO expert created a report for Ben Roberts-Smith’s bosses that is so closely guarded even the soldier and his barrister haven’t seen it.” And from the looks of things, this is all just fine by NewsNation.
Secrecy on the agenda Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, in announcing strengthened shield laws for journalists, affirmed a commitment to a “strong and independent media”.
“I don’t think that embarrassment alone to a government should ever be a reason for maintaining secrecy,” he said. As Crikey noted yesterday, these reforms represent a genuine shift in the long-term approach of the office he now holds, and is to be welcomed. But we’ve got a few suggestions if the government really wants to sort this stuff out.
For one, the prosecutions of whistleblowers David McBride and Richard Boyle could be chucked out with the stroke of a pen. Plus, you could entertain that phantom recommendation from the robodebt royal commission for freedom of information reform to make it more difficult for governments to shield decisions from the public simply by describing them as a cabinet document.
A climate of change Hearings this week continue in the first Australian climate court case brought on behalf of First Nations peoples. Torres Strait community leaders Uncle Paul Kabai and Uncle Pabai Pabai have taken the federal government to the Federal Court, arguing it has failed to protect First Nations groups from catastrophic climate change.
Court cases as a theatre of protest are an increasingly popular tactic. And unlike the grandparents from the ACT who tried something similar, the two Gudamalulgal Traditional Owners — who are arguing that the failure to reduce emissions will result in their communities becoming Australia’s first climate refugees — were allowed to call their expert witnesses. On the first day of the hearing earlier this month, Professor David Karoly from the University of Melbourne gave expert evidence about the impacts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on Earth’s atmosphere, which led to a, shall we say, denial-y line of questioning from the government’s lawyer:
Would you accept it’s not possible for Australia by itself to set any greenhouse gas emissions target or take any other action that would hold global temperatures to 1.5 degrees above the baseline?
We’ll keep an eye on proceedings this week for any similarly edifying moments.
His own Milei Javier Milei, the radical libertarian economist and “Argentinian Trump”, has won the Argentinian presidential election. Like many in the modern right-wing populist game, he’s not short of a “colourful” turn of phrase regarding his opponents, promising to rid the country of “the parasitic, larcenous, useless caste that is sinking the country”, and calling Argentina’s central bank “the worst garbage that exists on this earth”.
So we’re sure he won’t mind that a tipster pointed out that his look — once described in these pages as akin to “murder-trial-era Phil Spector on a relatively quiet day” — is getting a bit of feedback (particularly among genre film fans, for whatever reason):
Hell, even his fans call him “the madman” and “the wig”. Let us know what you see. Those who describe him as a ’70s pub band member or reserve goalie for a lower league football team in 1988 get no marks, given he literally was those things.
