The ABC Chair that Loved a Sailor
ABC Radio National staff in Melbourne this week were amused by a tongue-in-cheek email doing the rounds ahead of Friday’s planned Christmas party, titled “Singers needed for Xmas Party!”
The email said the chairman (ostensibly referring to ABC chair Kim Williams) had “promised to make an appearance” at the party, and was “looking [to] sing a culturally appropriate number based on Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore — he’s looking for some chorus singers to help out”.
Word is that rather than Williams actually stepping up to the mic, a member of staff pretending to be the chair might belt out a tune. We asked the ABC what Williams’ chosen Christmas karaoke tune might be, but didn’t get a response.
We’d love to hear your hypothetical suggestions for Kim Williams, dear reader — call us cliched, but we have him picked as partial to Paul Kelly’s 1996 classic How to Make Gravy, despite competitor streaming outlet Binge picking up the streaming rights to the recently released film adaptation.
Stop the TEAL
There is an interesting contrast in the narratives surrounding the Coalition this coming election. One narrative, from political commentators, is that through bloody-minded obfuscation, effective culture warring, an increasingly explicit propaganda arm in the media, and an increasingly flailing prime minister, Peter Dutton has unaccountably gotten a party that was utterly wiped out in 2022 back into a competitive position ahead of 2025. The other, which is coming from the Liberal Party itself, is that there is a growing threat from the forces that actually wiped them out in the first place: teal independents knocking off Liberal “moderates”.
First, we had Minister for Liminal Spaces Paul Fletcher use his one (and it turns out only) memorable public utterance to complain of a left wing conspiracy (a teal candidate) threatening his seat before, hilariously, just quitting anyway. Now, member for Berowra Julian Leeser is sending emails to his constituents expressing his worry about the same thing. “This campaign will be unlike anything Berowra has ever seen,” he darkly warns. “A teal candidate has been selected and will become a real threat.”
Leeser, like every moderate remaining in Parliament, must be wondering what he can sell as his major achievements, watching as the party lurches ever further to the right under Dutton. To pick one example; he took a principled stand on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, quitting the shadow frontbench over Dutton’s conspiratorial opposition. Leeser told the Sydney Institute in October last year that the argument that the Voice was “peripheral business” was:
As false as the argument in this campaign that Aboriginal people are privileged and this referendum is about special treatment and creating two different classes of Australians.
What concerns me about this argument is not that it is hopelessly false. It is the total absence of empathy for our Indigenous brothers and sisters.
Peter Dutton has apologised for boycotting the Stolen Generations apology, though not for his refusal to meet with Indigenous leaders at the Garma festival or his unsubstantiated claims of “rampant child abuse” in Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. Just this week, Dutton promised, apropos of nothing, his government would remove the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags from his press conferences. So apart from the ongoing threat of the teal movement to his seat, one wonders how Leeser must have felt, given his stated views, begging his constituents to help him make Peter Dutton prime minister.
Vance at a glance
Fresh from telling Viktor Orbán’s favourite US think tank that “recent migrants from the Middle East” were behind rising antisemitism, former prime minister Tony Abbott snapped a pic with US Vice President elect JD Vance — “an honour”, in Abbott’s words.
Abbott has long showered Vance in praise — perhaps after being turfed out of his gig on the UK board of trade, he’s looking for another foreign power to advocate for?
Fox in the hen house
See if you can spot a subtle difference in Fox’s tone in discussing two deaths.
Guests on Fox’s The Ingraham Angle were discussing with horror some of the veneration being lavished upon Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
“The Instagram posts from nutbag people, which I was sent in the commercial break earlier: crazy,” host Laura Ingraham said. “Like ‘he’s cute’ and people celebrating this. This is a sickness. Honestly it’s so disappointing, but I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.”
She had barely drawn breath before saying the following: “Up next, the other big news out of New York, Daniel Penny. A lot of people think he’s a hero and tonight he’s not guilty.” Penny was acquitted after being charged with manslaughter after he had choked a homeless man (“menacing lunatic” in Ingraham’s phrase) to death. His trial, according to Ingraham, should never have happened.
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