Thanks to a goof somewhere in the ABC, this week’s Insiders featured a little more must-see footage than usual. Regular viewers would have seen Liberal Senator Jane Hume, last seen on the election trail conjuring George Bush’s rhetorical gifts, announce with admirable candour that the Liberal Party was not really into this whole “policy-making” lark.
When asked by host David Speers about where the Coalition now stands on the fuel excise policy it put in place, she said “we don’t have policies, we are in opposition, not in government”. But the real candour came from Speers himself, captured on a hot mic in uncut footage seemingly uploaded accidentally by the ABC.
In the minute or so leading up to the broadcast, Speers suggested a picture with his guests — Hume and his panel of The Herald Sun’s James Campbell, news.com.au’s Samantha Maiden and Guardian Australia’s Katharine Murphy — “for those lovely folks on social media”, which earned a mild laugh.
However, Speers then continued, unprompted, as if it had perhaps been weighing on him for some time: “No, it’s a horrible, horrible place and after years of copping it, you just have to tell yourself, there are hundreds of thousands watching and a few hundred who tweet mean things, so you just gotta remember…” and then the guests speculate about whether it’s even that many. (Given how vocal people get about News Corp journos or Coalition politicians appearing on the ABC and the supposed bias that represents, I’m sure the response to Speers’ comments will give us some indication of their numbers.)
You’ll be happy to know Speers doesn’t reveal any kind of dark egomania beneath his reassuring air of rigorous and scrupulous decency — he’s unfailingly polite and personable, which leads to our favourite detail in the footage.
Speers, having landed on 15 as the number of people who tweet mean things about Insiders, says in that half-joking-half-not tone that “there are far more who are just loving our work”, and there’s a slightly painful pause before someone says “Yep”. The response is so clipped, space-filling and toneless that we genuinely can’t tell if it’s Hume, Maiden or Murphy.
