Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan. Source: HWT Image Library <\/p>\n
WAYNE Swan. World champion treasurer and twit. <\/p>\n
Over the years you accumulate a list of stories or commentaries that in the cold light of subsequent day you would prefer not to have written. <\/p>\n
You also accumulate a second list of stories and commentaries that you regret NOT having written. <\/p>\n
Some on this second list were written, or written better, by others. Then there are the ones that just slipped by, unwritten, as the moment passed. <\/p>\n
One of the latter that I have continually regretted not writing is an observation on Julia Gillard's instruction to journalists to \"just don't write crap.\" Serendipitously, her deputy Swan has now given a new sense of relevance to that previously unwritten observation. <\/p>\n
Gillard's instruction came in response to a 'Dorothy Dixer' from Seven Network's Canberra correspondent Mark Riley: to paraphrase, please tell us how to report on, as he ingeniously - others might say, inanely - put it, climate change opposers? Presumably, some of those \"climate change opposers\" will now be out in the streets \"opposing\" the floods in NSW and Victoria. I look forward to Riley reporting on them. <\/p>\n
Riley's question could have spawned a whole series of commentaries on the fawning failures of the Canberra Press Gallery. <\/p>\n
Its collective failure to even report on, far less scrutinise, substantive policy. Of which so-called climate change aka global warming is the all-time but by no means only standout. <\/p>\n
But when the Gallery turns to rolling up supine 'Dorothy Dixers,' as Riley did last July, we have truly moved into the realm of the nauseating surreal. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
See the article here: Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan. Source: HWT Image Library WAYNE Swan. Continue reading
\nSwan's assault on free speech<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"