The curious case of PVO Yesterday was quite a day for Ten’s political editor and Australian columnist Peter van Onselen. He made the news in two distinct ways, being heavily featured in reporter Tegan George’s federal court complaint against the network, and then reading out bombshell texts to the prime minister which described him as a “complete psycho”.
PVO’s place in the Australian media landscape has always been an odd one. The professor of politics at the University of Western Australia started writing for The Australian in 2009, then spread out on to a series of hosting gigs at Sky News before moving to Ten in 2018. In that time, he has had several attacks of what we in the bunker like to call “columnist brain” — the inability to stop being actively wrong in public, until recently best illustrated in PVO’s case by the several pieces he wrote in 2018 insisting that the Nazis were socialists.
Indeed, during his recent chat with friend of Crikey Tom Ravlic, PVO was fairly amiable about the roasting he gets for being a “kiss of death” for any politician he backs. He cheerily admitted that he didn’t take his own predictions all that seriously, it’s just part of the “theatre”.
It’s with that in mind that we put together a list of the things he’s recently had the brass neck to do while presumably having some inkling there was serious turmoil in his own workplace:
- Wrote a piece criticising Grace Tame for her “lack of civility” towards Prime Minister Scott Morrison
- Following the backlash, he wrote a piece arguing that “it could be a case of the loudest voices are the least tolerant”. Interestingly, he did not mention his disagreement with his co-panellists on his TV show The Project in this, his regular column in the only national broadsheet
- Speaking to Ravlic, he airily admitted that he didn’t need to write the piece, that could just “think” things rather than write them down
- Reads texts out at the National Press Club purportedly from former New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian and a senior Liberal minister describing Morrison as a “horrible, horrible person” and a “complete psycho”.
RAT’d out Another from the “unwittingly revealing” file: yesterday, Morrison famously couldn’t tell you what it would cost to buy a loaf of bread, a litre of petrol and a rapid antigen test. This morning on Radio National, Employment Minister Stuart “Brother Stuie” Robert was asked about the stumped PM and gave what must have seemed the most natural answer in the world: well, obviously the missus deals with all that! “If he’d sat there and Jen was with him, she’d be able to rattle off all the prices of all the things they buy,” he said.
We’re not sure, given the endless calamity and indifference of this government’s approach to issues that affect women, this relegating of domestic duties to “women’s work” is quite the deflection Robert intended it to be.
Trump, go ahead Trump Via The Washington Post, yet another reminder that Donald Trump’s commitment to surreal and sometimes terrifying comedy will never be exhausted. The paper is reporting that when the National Archives and Records Administration handed over a tranche of documents to the House select committee, which is investigating the attacks on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, some of the Trump White House records had been ripped up and then taped back together.
This is part of a long-time habit of Trump’s — tearing records into shreds and tossing them on to the floor. As Politico reported in 2018, records management analysts regularly had to tape the fragments back together. It may be the perfect symbol of Trump’s time in office: chaotic, petulant, deeply weird and most likely illegal.
I’d like to thank the Academy As we get slightly nearer to finding out this year’s Oscar nominations, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s social media is going … a bit weird. Aren’t we all, I guess? Yesterday it posted a fun little fake category listing “lipstick messages in film“. So far, so standard. But then the follow-up. Under the heading “writing morning affirmations” the academy tweeted a series of four images of Natalie Portman writing the word “whore” on a bathroom mirror on the set of 2010’s Black Swan.
Anyway, someone obviously had a moment of clarity — the tweet is gone now.
