The Outsider: Probing Adelaide’s obsessions
Today, Isobel Redmond decides against going back for more, The Advertiser overshares about its business model, lawyer jokes and the cruelty of random selection.
Once bitten
Isobel Redmond was dumped by her party as leader, but it seems that pales in comparison to being stood up by political opponent John Rau.
In far ago 2010, Rau invited Redmond to join him in a government box at the Festival Theatre for a Natalie Cole concert.
Rau thought his office had liaised with Redmond about the details, but, no.
After waiting, embarrassed and alone, in the foyer, she was eventually escorted to the box by a Festival Centre staff member, only to find Kevin Foley, Rau and two women (both identified rather superfluously in media reports at the time as being “blonde”).
This week, Rau invited Redmond, along with other Estimates Committee members, to a courtesy lunch at Parliament House (committee work is hard and requires regular sustenance).
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Redmond declined the invitation.
“I’m not going to fall for that again,” she said.
Charging out
Pat Conlon, the long-serving and combative former Labor minister, also had his nose to the grindstone in Estimates Committee yesterday.
Readers will remember that he spends some of his time in a new paid gig at law firm Minter Ellison, in preparation for his full-time exit from politics at the next state election.
But on the job for the taxpayer yesterday, he was interrupted by a phone call and rose to leave the Parliamentary chamber.
Vickie Chapman couldn’t resist: “We all know that you can charge for phone calls these days—and if a member of the committee wants to do other phone calls in here, could he do them quietly or go out, because I am having difficulty hearing the Attorney-General?”
Conlon, despite generally looking more relaxed than he has been for years, wasn’t a happy chappy, and gave one of his trademark sprays in return.
“Can I just put on the record the outrageous hypocrisy of my friend opposite,” he said. “I am doing nothing associated with any work. I don’t own a chambers. I haven’t gone out and said that I don’t work and then admitted that I do. Can I just make it clear that I have been doing nothing of the kind and it is an outrageous and hypocritical slur.”
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We won’t cry for thee, Mainstream Media
The Advertiser has been telling everyone about their financial struggles this week.
Affable Sunday Mail editor David Penberthy was tasked with explaining to readers why they would now have to pay for digital content (a handful of articles are free on the renamed Advertiser website, but thereafter you now need to pay).
Penbo had a real crack about why free news wasn’t sustainable – it was, he said, just like Baker’s Delight giving away free goodies in the morning after toiling away at the ovens all night.
He wrote an article about it, although many readers couldn’t access the piece because they’d already reached their quota of Tiser news for the day.
For the benefit of stingy freeloaders who were locked out, he made the straw-man argument that no news is free, apart from the ABC (the millions of commercial television viewers, radio listeners, and readers of news sites like this one with a different business model to the Murdoch press may beg to differ).
“The ABC is free all right, as long as you ignore the whopping $2.5 billion in taxpayer funding it has locked in for the next three years, in addition to the $109 million extra it pocketed in the May Budget at a time when the Federal Government is allegedly doing it tough. Maybe the Government is happy with its coverage.
“If you want to get all your news content from a government-owned media organisation that is your choice.
“Millions of Australians also want an independent media voice that is driven by a different set of editorial standards, which will campaign against political incompetence, unabashedly cheer for its favourite sporting teams, crusade for tougher sentences for criminals, proudly champion the free market by promoting shopping, commercial television and popular culture.”
That last bit is revealing, but probably not surprising.
It may also explain why today’s sobering report from the SA Centre for Economic Studies is buried on page 54 of the Tiser. The Australian managed to get it on to page 2. It’s on InDaily’s front page.
Random selection
Oh, to have been in the room when the honchos in Premier and Cabinet discovered that one of the 43 members of the State Government’s randomly-selected “Citizen’s Jury” was Opposition Leader Steven Marshall’s media adviser, Daniel Gannon.
The jury, readers will recall, is a right-on, groovy community engagement tool introduced by the State Government to give it advice on city night life.
Despite the gnashing of teeth in official and Government circles, Gannon insists he will complete his “jury duty”.
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