Media blitz Whether you think the Victorian government’s decision to cancel the Commonwealth Games was an overdue correction of a dumb decision or a generational humiliation from which the state may never recover — or in Neil Mitchell’s case, seemingly both — it was always going to cause a flurry of media activity.
The government kicked things off by just happening to send out a flurry of reminders of their good work in the regions within minutes of their announcement that the games — which were to be held outside Melbourne, with lots of lovely pricey infrastructure to boot — weren’t happening:
Our favourite take was that of the Australian Monarchist League (AML), which saw the dreaded hand of anti-monarchist sentiment in the decision. The group breathlessly announced via a statement:
People are now asking ‘was it the cost, or are there deeper motives behind this fiasco?’ Was it because the king may attend his first Commonwealth Games? Would this have happened had it been the Chinese Games, if there was such a thing? These are all questions that must be asked and must be answered.
Back when former Liberal senator and oldest man ever to be whatever age he currently is Eric Abetz joined, the AML insisted that they be given as much media time as the republican movement. Believe us guys, if you keep this kind of gold coming then we’ll be writing about you a lot.
Merchandise watch Network 10’s national affairs editor Hugh Riminton noted some… rather odd merchandise from news.com.au, with the website’s logo wrapped around a toilet roll:
Because it refers to a website and not a newspaper it sort of maybe only just avoids the obvious gags about the best use for such material, but even so, it’s very rare to see a News Corp publication putting out material that Kevin Rudd would so readily agree with.
In the early days of COVID-19, when people were stripping supermarkets bare of toilet paper, the former PM and ongoing anti-Murdoch warrior tweeted an image of the Queensland tabloid The Courier-Mail as a possible stand-in, arguing “Aussies are resourceful people”:
Flying heap of crap watch Here’s a real two-for-one; a reminder that government agencies aren’t all that tech savvy, and a check-in with one of our favourite disaster-prone projects. Back in 2009, the Australian government approved $3.2 billion for the purchase of 14 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. Since then we’ve been giving Crikey readers updates on a venture that has had the same effect on piles of money as a fire pit.
Via a report from the Financial Times, which would be hilarious if it was the basis of a subplot in Whoops Apocalypse but is terrifying in real life: For more than a decade, “millions” of emails associated with the US military have been getting sent to Russia allied Mali, thanks to nothing so malicious as a typo.
Via The Verge: “Instead of appending the military’s .MIL domain to their recipient’s email address, people frequently type .ML, the country identifier for Mali, by mistake.” And thanks to the FT report, we know the plane we’ve come to affectionately know as the “flying heap of crap” got a mention:
Eight emails from the Australian Department of Defence, intended for US recipients, went astray. Those included a presentation about corrosion problems affecting Australian F-35s and an artillery manual ‘carried by command post officers for each battery’.
The Australian defence ministry said it does “not comment on security matters”.
ALA ALA ALA what’s all this then Sometime on Monday afternoon, The Sydney Morning Herald quietly added a little bit of context to the story of Fiona Martin, who lives with her children “in a rented home that she can’t afford to buy. Luckily, her rent is subsidised by income from a modest investment property she is paying off”.
Contrary to the view of landlords as callous slumlords lighting their cigars with blazing $50 notes, the piece sketched the woes of battling property owners who are “now selling their investment properties because they are no longer financially worthwhile due to rising interest rates, and the time it takes to manage them is ‘just a pain'”.
The piece featured a comment from Australian Landlords Association president Andrew Kent, but failed initially to mention that Martin was also a board member of that organisation. The one demographic the SMH apparently hadn’t counted on — readers with access to Google — raised an eyebrow when this detail was added. Of course when it comes to property ownership in this country, the Australian media has often shown a grasp of tone that would do Florence Foster Jenkins proud.
