Today, a government minister gets punted, Rupert Murdoch gets a journalistic hot oil massage, Adelaide’s minds and belt buckles are blown, and much more.
Penbo punts Hunter
Relations between radio FIVEaa and the State Government are about to become a lot more frosty.
There is fury within the Government about the treatment doled out to Environment Minister Ian Hunter this morning, with breakfast presenter and hard-boiled journo David Penberthy leading the charge.
Hunter annoyed Penbo from the start, with a pedantic correction to his introduction about the growing contamination fears in Adelaide’s southern suburbs.
Hunter, who himself has seemed perpetually annoyed by this pesky toxic chemical stuff, defended his decision not to front up to Mitchell Park to talk to residents about the expanded investigation of contamination, preferring to leave that to the boffins at the Environmental Protection Authority.
The interview was going nowhere when Penbo abruptly pulled the pin.
“We might leave you for today Minister because I don’t think you’ve really got anything more to add with particularly with that specious non-clarification you tried to make at the start…
“I mean the buck stops with you, you’re a Minister, that’s why you are being paid almost a quarter of a million dollars a year.
“I don’t think you could find Mitchell Park with a GPS. You haven’t even been there. These are poor people, they are put-upon people, half of them live in public housing, they’ve got kids, a lot of them are pensioners. All they want to do is be able to get down to the local park, sit there at the duck pond…
“They might be living on a toxic waste dump and you haven’t got the backbone to go there yourself and you haven’t got the backbone to hold a proper public meeting so we are done with you.”
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A bit of background for Hunter’s benefit: Penbo grew up in Mitchell Park.
Hot oil massage
The Murdoch media’s business commentator Terry McCrann is going to need a long cold shower after the journalistic hot oil massage he gave his boss Rupert Murdoch today.
The dear old Tiser gave McCrann’s hagiography a full page today – all based on Murdoch’s bid to take over US media giant Time Warner.
This is Tezza’s opening paragraph, and it just gets more icky from there:
"“Rupert Murdoch, media entrepreneur extraordinaire, 83 years young. When most men of that age are focused on what soup might be coming up for dinner, Murdoch is embarked on the biggest deal of his 62-year march through the media establishments of three continents.”"
And then his juices really started to flow, with florid flourishes about Murdoch’s “never-ending journey”, and how he “stretched the boundaries of the believable and the achievable”.
But, at the end of the day, writes McCrann, the US citizen and multi-billionaire is still just a dinkum Aussie at heart.
“He remains and always will be quintessentially Australian. That’s why it was so exquisitely appropriate that news of this deal broke while he was in Australia, celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Australian newspaper.”
True to the recent form of Murdoch’s dizzy foot soldiers, McCrann then used the piece to attack the ABC – apropos of absolutely nothing.
“… NewsCorp is now the country’s unequalled private sector media player – bizarrely, challenged and increasingly confronted only the nominally publicly-owned but ‘their’ ABC.”
All it was missing was a Barry White backing track.
(If you’d like something less gushing and more analytical on Murdoch’s Time Warner bid, go here.)
Doughnut delirium
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You almost have to admire the PR genius that has turned the rather ordinary Krispy Kreme products into an Adelaide obsession.
The chain opened its fat-and-sugar dream factory in Adelaide this week – but locals have been obsessed by the product for years.
Until now, if you saw someone in trackies at an interstate airport lugging a couple of boxes of the Krispy Kremes (which are oddly neither crispy nor creamy) you could be certain it was a South Aussie.
We thought we would explore the secret to the Krispy Kreme success, so we took a look at the ingredients. It’s quite some list.
The standard “glazed” doughnut has 34 components, reproduced below.
Doughnut: wheat flour, vegetable shortenings (sunflower, palm, canola), water, sugar, yeast, wheat gluten, egg powder, salt, non fat milk solids, firming agent (516), emulsifiers (471, 481, 322), acidity regulators (263, 500), thickener (466), antioxidants (300, 306), natural and artificial flavours.
Glaze: sugar, water, wheat starch, vegetable shortening, stabiliser (mineral salts 170, 339), thickeners (406, 410), emulsifiers (471, 491), salt, natural and artificial flavours.
Some of the more exotic flavoured varieties have even more ingredients – as in heaps more ingredients.
If you want to read the full bafflingly long list, go here.
Meanwhile, if you want to hear a rather robust view of the health properties of doughnuts, our friends at the podcast Another Boring Thursday Night in Adelaide have interviewed University of Adelaide obesity expert Gary Wittert. Listen to his views here.
No tricks can be taken
Poor Kay Mousley has had a rough trot.
The state’s Electoral Commissioner copped plenty of media heat during and after the election, and was subject to an unsubstantiated slur from former Liberal leader Isobel Redmond under Parliamentary privilege (for which Issy eventually apologised).
Yesterday, in a Budget Estimates committee she revealed that both she and the Speaker Michael Atkinson had – wrongly – received “please explain” letters for failing to vote.
Yes, she accidentally sent herself a letter threatening herself with legal action.
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