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Last updated on August 8th, 2017 at 12:32 pm
“Re Maxine McKew,” emails Nick S. “It’s not a career change, it’s an internal promotion.”
- Is that not a standard practice for ABC employees. Remember Mary Delahunty, and the Victorian ALP. It’s almost like the taxpayer funded Broadcaster is a ‘groomer’ for AlP employment. Where do Commercial TV personalities go when their time is up, or they ‘retire’. Oh, thats right, they open events at shopping centres.Posted by BJM on 2007 01 22 at 11:04 AM • permalink
- Slightly O/T but certainly about taxpayer funded perks, CNN has picked up on this local council funded perk The wording in the second paragraph is unfortunate as well, “rooting” has a different meaning here in Aus.Posted by surfmaster on 2007 01 22 at 11:29 AM • permalink
- Both the current Premier of WA and Chief Minister of NT were formerly ABC Current Affairs journos.Posted by boxofmatches on 2007 01 22 at 11:40 AM • permalink
- #2 surfmaster
From your link – the 2nd paragraph
Nine local councils have paid private investigators a total of 25,000 Australian dollars (US$19,740) over the past three years to go undercover and root out the illicit trade, according to The Sunday Telegraph newspaper.
Oh dear – it does really say that!
I can just see the GM of the local Council giving the private detective some $$$ and asking him to go and r**t – out the problem
Posted by aussiemagpie on 2007 01 22 at 11:47 AM • permalink
- # 4 aussiem, I nearly choked on my raisin toast when I read it.Posted by surfmaster on 2007 01 22 at 11:55 AM • permalink
- #5 surfmaster
I can see the expenses sheet put into Council by the private detectives:
Condoms
Parking fees outside brothel
EtcI’d say the taxpayers in those councils would be a bit upset really
Posted by aussiemagpie on 2007 01 22 at 12:28 PM • permalink
- So when an Aussie gardener digs up weeds by the roots in order to get rid of them, what does he call it?Posted by Sonetka’s Mom on 2007 01 22 at 03:30 PM • permalink
- Back to the topic, although I’m sure every red-blooded male in the world would love to be on to THAT particular perk.
Good old Maxine. So predictable and all prearranged. Next, candidature for a safe Labor seat.
If Kevin Rudd were in touch with most of the Australian electorate, this just wouldn’t have happened. He and she will only be preaching to the converted and what’s the point of that?
I’m sorry to see that he seems to be self-destructing already. I was looking forward to a good stoush.
- #6
It’s not the council the taxpayers should be upset at. It’s the law.
All part of the trend toward ridiculously high standards of proof, driven on by the civil rights movement braying about our descent into fascism.
The more paranoid these people become about our ‘conservative’ redneck’ ‘bigoted’ society, the more they will redouble their efforts to protect
the weak and vulnerablecriminals.
- So when an Aussie gardener digs up weeds by the roots in order to get rid of them, what does he call it?
weeding?
Posted by Stop Continental Drift! on 2007 01 22 at 05:31 PM • permalink
- The ABC is a think tank for the ALP, and they need it badly. Tom Switzer had another go at them in yesterday’s Australian, still a bit soft-gloved. Diverging slightly, Paul Barry yesterday put Albrechtsen on the spot over her contention that we have no right wing cartoonists. Her diagnosis of the reasons underlying this may be incorrect, but where are the Oz versions of Day By Day (Chris Muir) or Cox & Forkum?
Bill Leak does a bit of a piss-take on Rudd as Tin Tin, but there is a lack of talent development which our newspapers should seek to correct by actually hiring cartoonists of a different outlook. Moir in the SMH is scarily one eyed, repetitive, and puerile in his depictions of Howard and Bush.
Institutionalised, cultural bias in the media is a fact, and correcting it will be a long war.
- Remember not long ago when the Fox News guy was appointed as Bush’s new press secretary? The lefties in my office went on about it how it just proved the republican bias at Fox (as if it needed too much proof anyway). Wonder what they’ll say when i repeat their lines back to them substituting the words McKew, ABC and ALP.
- McKew is sufficiently close to the Labor mainstream that she earned a spray from Mark Latham in his notorious diaries, as reported in Slattsnews.
Crazy Latham in his vitriolic diaries reveals McKew to be a snob of Hyacinth Bucket proportions.
“We had it all lined up before the 2001 election,” (Arbib said). “Irwin was going to the state upper house and Maxine McKew was going to run for Fowler.
“She would have been fantastic but then she backed out, said she couldn’t stand living in Cabramatta or Liverpool.”
Isn’t that just soooooo bourgeois bolshevik.
- I remember Maxine and Kerry O’Brien anchored the ABC tally room coverage of the October 2004 election.
As the night wore on, denial of what was happening (“it’s only early days yet and the outlying booths are more likely to favour Labour”), gave way to lemon lipped wild eyed disbelief. Red Kezza shook his head at one stage muttering “this can’t be happening”. Mrs Hogg looked like a stunned mullet.
Funniest night of TV I’d seen for ages.Maxine has a particular range of facial ticks and frowns and lip pursing that totally give the game away. A deep suck in of breath through gritted teeth is always effective. Her words say one thing, her body language, or rather, her facial language tells a completely different tale.
And so it is with the ABC whenever they interview a conservative or share a platform with a conservative – there’s always something there, either a frown or a quizzical look, or a sigh, or just a single loaded question that gives the game away. They are only human after all, and the group-think environment at the ABC always ensures that the central leftwing message ALWAYS prevails.
If the rest of the ABC news and current affairs crew did the same as Maxine and left to work for their favourite party, the ABC would have to resort to the tea lady to read the news.
- The ABC is a nursery for Labor politicians and a retirement village for their PR people. Former NSW premier Bob Carr and present NT chief minister Clare Martin are two who headed to head office, while Kerry O’Brien and George Negus made the short trip to the craft and carpet bowls room at the ABC village. Most notoriously was David Hill, who ran the ABC and later stood as a Labor candidate in the 1998 federal election – and failed. Whatever happend to him?
- O/T but this from the real cuba site is a claim I havent seen on any other site. It may not be true but in the best interests of the public it should be considered “truthiness”
“El Pais: Castro was the one who told the doctors the type of surgery to perform (Updated)
The Cuban dictator has always considered himself an expert on everything, from the economy to what to do in case of a hurricane affecting the island. We have seen the disaster that has resulted from the dictator’s alleged “expertise.” Everything that Castro has touched, he has destroyed.
And now it seems that Castro, who also considers himself an expert on medicine, was the one who told his doctors which type of surgery to perform and it may end up costing him his life.
According to additional information published on the Wednesday edition of the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Castro himself told surgeons not to perform a colostomy, opting instead for a course of surgery that produced a complication that left him in far worse condition.
After removing an inflamed piece of Castro’s large intestine in an operation last year, the doctors connected the remainder directly to his rectum, rather than attaching a colostomy bag, El Pais said, quoting two medical sources at Madrid’s Gregorio Marañón hospital. The operation failed when a suture burst. “The Cuban dictator and his advisers are the ones who decided on the surgical technique that has led to the complications,” the paper said.
El Pais reported Tuesday that Castro is in “very grave” condition after three failed operations and complications from the intestinal infection diverticulitis
“What an idiot.
Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2007 01 22 at 07:22 PM • permalink
- #18
From memory, it was Ms Max Hogg who elicited the ‘please explain’ from Pauline Hanson, by using the term ‘xenophobia’ which, I’m sure, she knew was outside of Pauline’s vocabulary … I saw a snippet recently [ABC 50 Years of TV, Current Affairs] where Max’s character came across as an extreme champagne socialist snob wherein she seemed to get great pleasure from the cruelty that she showed Pauline: uncalled for, whether one agrees with her policies or not.
- On the bright side, guys, at least your leftie news starlets aren’t made Governors-General like here.Posted by andycanuck on 2007 01 22 at 08:16 PM • permalink
- I’ve always thought that Maxine McKew was quite a dim bulb. She would ask the scripted question, clearly not understand how the answer fitted into the big picture and then follow up with a question that proved it. How she would add anything in way of reliable research is beyond me.
Old pock-faced socialist, Red Kerry, must be shitting in his fat-arsed pants that he’s been overlooked for an ALP gig for yet another ABC intellectual dimwit.
Posted by Jack Lacton on 2007 01 22 at 09:13 PM • permalink
- Egg,
I think it was Tracy Curro who did the famous Please Explain Hanson interview which was on 60 Minutes.
Ms Curro is now scaling the heights as a very occasional fill-in host on their ABC radio 774.
Comrade Maxine though did rough up Hanson on occasion and came to realise that the punters didn’t much like the ABC’s witch-hunting approach as she revealed to the comrades at The Age:
McKew is aware that she is in a glass house, and that she is not above reproach. She came in for some stinging criticism after her heated interview with Pauline Hanson in May last year, which ranged from “aggressive” to Hanson’s political adviser David Oldfield’s view that McKew was “very biased” and “basically lost the plot”.
“I’ve now re-thought that,” McKew says of the interview. “I was a hero to my colleagues after that interview. It was splashed all over the paper – `Maxine McKew takes on Hanson where politicians won’t’.
“But it was quite the opposite (reaction) in the community. We had an immense reaction, it was an avalanche of mail. Even people who would normally never have a bar of Hanson’s politics condemned me for the way I tackled her.
“The reaction was, `Here’s smarty pants Maxine McKew taking on poor Pauline’ and whatever you think of her politics she has a right to be heard. In Queensland, people said to me, ‘You people in the media don’t get it: the more you criticise her, the more we rally to her.’
“It was a sneering, slightly patronising view that many felt I adopted was not the way to address the concerns of a million Australians.”
Hanson had little to say of value I think but it is hardly surprising that the blood- thirstiness of the ABC and other lefty journalists in pursuit of her attracted sympathy even from those who opposed her.
Interesting that Rudd – known for being tough on his staff and reasonably discerning in hiring – has chosen someone with form in generating public relations own-goal catastrophes.
Posted by Andrew Landeryou on 2007 01 22 at 09:26 PM • permalink
- I made the transition from meeja (aside from a brief stint straight out of school at then publicly owned Radio NZ, all for private enterprise) to politics and now kind of meddle in both with varying degrees of success.
More to the point I’ve seen lots of colleagues make the same transition. For every ‘true believer’ there were at least half a dozen whose motivation was money and power.
Of course the pollies extend the hand to the journos they know or suspect are intellectually in tune.
But it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find a former ABC journo as Pauline’s new minder; or Bill O’Reilly spruiking Kevin Rudd for that matter, if the price were right.
We journos are a venal lot.
- I think Maxine is a lot smarter than some of you have portrayed her here. When she worked on The Bulletin she used to do a lunch thing with various pollies, and there was a number of occassions were she got some confessions out of ALP heavies that portrayed the party’s machinations in a rather poor light. And then there was the famous Latham interview: “I’m a hater”
As for the famous ABC election coverge in 2004, she coped one hell of a lot better than Red Kezza. He looked like he had a lemon wedged in his mouth all night. Comedy gold. Sure you could see her disappointment, but she still was professional enough to get on with business. Red Kezza looked like he was about to burst into tears.
- #25 AL
Thanks for the memory jog and link.
Max’s rude handling of Hanson could only be viewed as unprofessional; Red Kezza treats his guests with much more dignity; he also enjoyed a longer stint on commercial TV?Only recently was dear Max rudely interrupting Gerrard Henderson: she hasn’t learned a thing.
A pinko of my acquaintance once referred to Mad Maxine as “the Thinking Man’s Sex Symbol”,
The ABC has a monopoly on thinking man’s sex symbols. Geraldine Doogue was once so described. The thinking men they are talking about are those who think an ABC woman would be understanding about their impotence.
- Mad Max as impartial chairperson:
DR GERARD HENDERSON: What has influenced my argument is not a right wing historian or commentator but Fred Halliday, the British commentator and historian who’s a critic of Bush and Blair who has made this point about the Left. He’s actually said that the international Left is essentially sucking up to Islamism because they see it as an anti-imperial force and they see Bush and Blair as the embodiment of wester imperialism and the enemy of my enemy is my friend, that kind of thing. It is not me that started this. People can read Fred Halliday’s speech; it is a very good article.
MAXINE McKEW: Gerard, you’re talking as if the Left is united, the Left is a fragmented beast in many ways, as is the Right. The Right is split on this issue as is the Left. I could nominate any number of Left individuals who in fact are vehement opponents of militant Islamism.
DR GERARD HENDERSON: Well, give us some names internationally. I can give you names on the other side. Who are they?
MAXINE McKEW: Internationally, Christopher Hitchins – – –
DR GERARD HENDERSON: He wouldn’t call himself on the Left anymore. In Australia there are Social Democrats. There are people like Jim Nolan.
MAXINE McKEW: He calls himself a contrarian now.
DR GERARD HENDERSON: Give me the name, any name, of a figure on the Australian Left who was stood up on the terrorism issue including the need for counter-terrorist legislation.
PROF ROBERT MANNE: Robert Manne.
DR GERARD HENDERSON: You haven’t stood up on the need for counter-terrorist legislation.
PROF ROBERT MANNE: I have written a recent – – –
DR GERARD HENDERSON: Hang on just a minute. Jim Nolan does not regard himself on the Left anymore. He is contemptuous of the Left. I was talking to him this morning.
MAXINE McKEW: He was writing on behalf of the Left the other day and he opposes the jihad as do many others.
DR GERARD HENDERSON: I was talking to him this morning and he said he was contemptuous of the Left because none of his colleagues were going with him. There are a few people the Social Democrats like Michael Costello. He doesn’t regard himself that way, he regards himself a Social Democrat. But by and large on the Left there is virtually no one and the situation in Britain is worse than it is in Australia. All these people around it’s pretty easy to name them. The Left has effectively gone under on the issue because they don’t want to be seen to be associated with Bush and Blair and Howard who they absolutely hate and because of their hatred for that they’ve gone quiet on the issue.
MAXINE McKEW: Robert Manne.
- Red Kezza on the 7.30 report this evening was unbelievabale. Interviewing Howard, each question (more like potted lectures) could be summarised as:
” Kevin Rudd says that…. etc. etc. Kevin Rudd also says that …..etc.etc. Mr Howard, do you agree with Mr Rudd’s view?”
I reckon Howard’s answers were almost shorter than Red Kezza’s questions.
And as soon as the Red Kezza lecture + Howard soundbites was finished, guess who popped up for a cosy little chat? The combat pixie possum himself.No bias on the ABC. No, nothing to see there.
- Firstly, I wish I could have been here to see teh ABC election night coverage, but we were over touring in the US and only read about the landslide on the internet, how good it would have been to see some of the reactions and disappointment that night…
Second, I thought Mary Kostakidis of that other basket case public broadcaster SBS was the thinking man’s sex symbol, but when you alternate reading the news with Lee Lin Chin, andything with a pulse and breathing would look half appealing…
And yes, KRudd can look forward to many more “stern grillings” like he got from Red Kezza tonight as they perform their tag team duo’s over the next couple of months….
- Gotta concur on Lee Lin chin- she looks like a poodle that’s stuck its tongue in a light socket.
ans I’s like to think that a thinking mans sex symbol would be someone who’s actually achieved something of merit rather than some pillock who frames up well and can read off an autocue.
- The only ABC journo who seemed to achieve anything near ‘balance’, was the late Andrew Olle (who also spent some time on commercial TV); those remaining are amateurs, in comparison.
Geraldine Doogue, Max’s forerunner, appears a lot more ‘comfortable & relaxed’ in her old age than Max.
Max reminds me of an uppity school vice captain, no wonder KRuddy’s got her on board SS Messianic.
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