Barilaro of laughs Australia has just come to the end of a shameful episode, with the punitive charges finally being dropped last week against lawyer Bernard Collaery for his role in whistleblowing Australia’s bugging of Timor-Leste for commercial gain. It was one of many outrages committed under the auspices of national security. And as if to show just how versatile a camouflage the “national security” defence can be, it’s shown up in our favourite recent scandal: the now-abandoned attempt to give former NSW deputy premier John Barilaro a plum trade commissioner role, despite the earlier appointment of a qualified and less conflicted woman.
The NSW government is refusing to make several documents relating to the appointment public, claiming (you guessed it) that releasing the material would “damage national security“. If the use of national security to ruin the lives of Collaery and his client Witness K was tragedy, we can probably say this counts as farce.
In the Nick of time It was almost admirable how, but for a brief interlude, the assault charges levelled at Nick Kyrgios changed almost nothing about the way he was covered by the media. Overnight Kyrgios lost what must be, as one Twitter user pointed out, the first Wimbledon final where both players have been summonsed by an Australian court in the same year.
Almost as soon as it was revealed, the issue was memory-holed by much of the media, presumably trying to work out how far to push the “troubled genius” narrative if he ended up being Australia’s first male champion since Lleyton Hewett (whose history of claiming anti-white racism underwent a similar process when he started winning).
So the press went back to clutching its pearls about his lack of civility (“What do we make of Nincompoop Nick?” asked The Australian) and getting “former tennis greats” to give him counsel. Did it feel legally dicey to focus on the charges, unfairly prejudicial for a case yet to be heard, or was the lure of other Kyrgios sugar hits — yelling at his player box! Yelling at a woman he claimed had drunk “around 700 drinks”! Corrupting the royal youth! — just too tempting as ready-made content? We in the bunker suspect it’s the latter.
That was then, this is now You may have been surprised to see Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s “beaming” face (weirdly, the picture looks about five years old, perhaps the warmest smile a camera was able to capture of him?) and offering his “warm wishes” to Australia’s Muslim community in honour of Eid.
We wondered if he offered similar well wishes in 2016, a few months before he described the influx of Lebanese Muslims into Australia under former Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser as a “mistake”, and then doubled down on it in Parliament, making the case that they were more likely to be terrorists than other groups, and then tripled down on it, saying he was only being “honest”. This is the problem with trying to segue your public persona from hard-right hard man to “leader for everyone” — the past keeps getting in the way.
Bad PR With costs of living skyrocketing, natural disasters afflicting great swaths of New South Wales, and national instability, it is time for the government to act. As such, we in the bunker wholeheartedly endorse the call of Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) to add PR guys on the longer-term strategic skills list.
Yep, we are apparently perilously short of “professional communicators” in Australia. We wish them the very best of luck — we’re sure if anyone can argue for this overdue change, it’s them.
