Free (speech) money
If you were wondering what former Nationals MP and One Nation Senate candidate George Christensen is up to these days, we’ve got you covered. Christensen, pointedly not speaking in his current capacity as a local councillor in Mackay, joined an all-star meeting of conservative minds this week to raise money for the Human Rights Law Alliance, an Australian Christian Lobby-associated group that has taken on the case of Dave Pellowe.
Pellowe is a Queensland preacher claiming he has been brought before the state’s human rights commission for quoting the bible in lieu of a Welcome to Country at a “Church and State” conference, a set of meetings organised with the Australian Christian Lobby that has featured the likes of Tony Abbott.
Tuesday night saw a telethon in support of his cause, with Christensen sitting alongside Pellowe, both proclaiming their love for freedom, free speech — about which Christensen knows a great deal — and Christian values as they cycled through a procession of friends, asking them what they thought about the crisis of free speech in Australia.
Whether listening to them proselytise about how the ’70s truly were a better time with Sky after dark’s Daisy Cousens, or muse on masculinity with Victorian Senator Ralph Babet, it was one hell of a ride we went on so you didn’t have to. One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts, NyunggaiWarren Mundine, Lyle Shelton and Avi Yemini also appeared in support.
While the event aimed to raise $1 million, it fell a little short, with the fundraiser sitting at $145,991 at the time of writing.
Which media companies does the PM give the most attention to?
Kicking off on Friday is News Corp’s 2024 National Bush Summit, where the keynote speaker is Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. He recently complained, on the ANU’s Democracy Sausage podcast in May, that some elements of the “right-wing media” act more like a cheer squad and transcription service for Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. He didn’t specify which publications, shows or broadcasters, but he was obviously referring to all the non-News Corp media in Australia, given how much time he makes for the Murdoch clan.
Since meeting with a collection of News Corp executives and editors in 2021, and again shortly after taking office in 2022, Albanese has turned up at The Australian’s 60th birthday party, will be addressing the Bush Summit for his third time, and attempted to “woo” the company into favouring the Indigenous Voice to Parliament in 2023 (with a quite notable lack of success).
And what of Nine, a company apparently so pro-Albanese that Dutton (clearly used to better treatment) keeps calling one of their top journalists an unpaid Albo speechwriter? A handful of (sometimes secret) meetings aside, Albanese has been less engaged with them since assuming office. Indeed, one of the possible reasons the last AFR summit was cancelled was the discomfit of some Labor MPs (though not specifically Albanese, who was not down to speak) with crossing the then picket line of striking Nine journos.
What have we missed? Who else in the media has had the prestige of a PM address? Let us know.
How the Daily Mail DECIDES what parts of its OUTRAGEOUS headlines to SCREAM
As any true fan of online tabloid media would know, the Daily Mail has a trademark quirk in its headlines: making certain words SCREAM by hitting caps lock (the headings are also known for being very long, but that’s a topic for another time).
We’ve certainly been curious about what the deal is. So we decided to find out by speaking to five experienced Mail staffers, including some who were formerly employed with the outlet in Australia and some who worked for it abroad.
At the Mail’s online publications — the daily newspaper in the UK is quite a separate beast and has little overlap with the digital editions — reporters are often assigned headlines prior to writing the story. Other times they suggest their own headlines, which are then generally tweaked by editors.
“I think the only hard and fast rule is that the words ‘very’ and ‘really’ are always capitalised,” one person said. “It’s definitely just whatever someone feels like.”
Another said: “I feel like I just tried to capitalise whatever was the most outrageous part of the story”.
The same source said words that often became capitalised would include raunchy ones like “penis”, and words appearing immediately after an impressive number: “Any word after a big number, like ‘37 dogs’ or ‘six wives’.”
A third person said the decision was based on the “feeling” of the sentence and described the process thusly: “If you were going to read it out loud, which one would you emphasise the most?”
All that being said, everyone we spoke to appeared to agree that they weren’t guided by any official rulebook for the headlines — “I don’t think there’s a method to the madness,” as one person put it.
Or, as another source phrased it: “I don’t think fine art can be explained”.
Walk and talk
We’ve long been baffled by Labor’s social media choices, and a tipster got in contact to give us a new reason, with their candidate for the “worst West Wing episode ever“. Why Australia’s politicians love a Sorkinesque “walk and talk” (except stilted and with dreadful sound) will forever remain a mystery to us — who can forget Scott Morrison’s DEFCON 1 response to the 2018 scourge of strawberry tampering? Or this piece of Josh Frydenberg performance art?
