Remains of the AJ
Former Sydney media kingpin Alan Jones remains one of the online faces of conservative television brand ADH TV, despite being on hiatus for the best part of a year and this week being arrested and charged with 24 counts of historic sexual and indecent offences, as well as two of common assault.
Jones, who strenuously denies the allegations and is yet to face court, is prominently featured on the main page of the ADH website alongside its other commentators, which include former Sky News personality Chris Smith, former Australian Christian Lobby boss Lyle Shelton, and former Liberal candidate Katherine Deves. This is despite Jones having not been actively presenting on the network since January.
The conservative haven has reportedly been seeking to expand into regional television by buying up Southern Cross Austereo’s TV assets. The company, which counts 24-year-old Jack Bulfin as its CEO and Jones protege Jake Thrupp among its founders, was also backed by tycoon James Packer.
Jones did not respond for comment.
Yellow journalism
There are banana republics, and then there’s Sweden, which has had its fair share of scandals over the past few years. Since the current government was formed, there has been an eel scandal, revelations that a major party ran a “troll factory”, and the unfortunate invitation of a bikie gang boss to the wedding of the leader of a party that’s marketed itself as tough on crime.
But none of these incidents have broken through on the international stage quite like the latest one: the revelation that Gender Equality Minister Paulina Brandberg has demanded she never be forced into the same room as a banana.
“Paulina Brandberg has a phobia against bananas: ‘It’s like a kind of allergy,” read the headline in Sweden’s Expressen newspaper, which first had the scoop. Politico, the BBC, The Guardian, and many other international outlets covered the story.
The hoopla stirred up a memory we here at Crikey thought we had forgotten: we had actually heard of the banana phobia earlier, and while it appeared to have been common knowledge among Swedish politics insiders, we had not been able to report on it.
The yarn we heard earlier in the year went like this: ahead of a ministerial meeting, Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson stepped into a room and noticed Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer eating a banana. She immediately leapt into action, telling Strömmer he needed to get rid of the banana right away because Brandberg would be arriving soon — words to the effect of: “For heaven’s sake, Gunnar, you know Paulina can’t handle that.” According to our sources, Strömmer stuffed the half-eaten banana in his pocket where it remained for the rest of the meeting.
We reached out to the press shop of each of the three ministers, but none wrote back. Frankly, the whole thing is… I don’t know, what’s that word, when something is deeply unusual or wildly eccentric? It’ll come to us…
Shellenberger game
“Free speech advocate Michael Shellenberger is visiting Australia for the Institute of Public Affairs”, the IPA announced yesterday. Is that what he’s up to these days? When he first became a darling of the Australian right, Shellenberger was an “environmentalist” — the kind of environmentalist that gets published in The Australian.
Then he was an investigative reporter, working on the “Twitter Files” and arguing that he had “gotten to the bottom” of the politics of Paul Pelosi’s attacker David DePape, arguing that the attack had “far more to do with drugs, homelessness, and paedophilia than QAnon, antisemitism, and January 6”, deftly leaping over the mountains of evidence it had rather a lot to do with QAnon, antisemitism, January 6 and general far-right conspiracies. Certainly, DePape’s recent trial didn’t help Shellenberger’s stance.
Anyway, now he’s a free speech advocate, in which capacity he heavily implied, in print and in front of Congress, that the head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate might be a spy, before it was pointed out to him that he’d simply mixed up two people with similar names. He’s in town, says the IPA, to “brief federal MPs on the dangers” of the government’s increasingly friendless proposed misinformation laws. Perhaps in a year or two he’ll be back again to be an expert on trans issues or the importance of Australia Day, or whatever else the Australian commentariat is then sustaining itself on.
Bunnings Scarehouse
Bunnings Warehouse more or less immediately fired back at the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s finding that it had breached its customers’ privacy by using facial recognition technology without gaining proper consent.
The hardware behemoth, which will be applying for a review, set up a website dedicated to explaining its use of FRT and has sent journalists a video compilation of attacks on or threats to their staff members. It’s confronting viewing, and certainly, no one should have to deal with that kind of thing at work. But not all of it makes sense as a justification for FRT — what, for example, would it do in this instance:
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