No, I'm not going to write about the poor person shot dead in Denmark. Instead I'm just going to point at the abject idiocy of finding in an audit that Sarah Ferguson was not respectful enough in her questioning the treasurer. It strains credulity but somehow, we have these things:
While acknowledging the Ferguson-Hockey interview was "compelling television", Ms Ryan finds: "I felt that the 'tone' of the questioning in this particular interview could have been interpreted by some viewers to be a potential breach of the ABC's impartiality guidelines."
Ms Ryan singles out three points of the interview for criticism, starting with Ms Ferguson's first question to Mr Hockey.
"Now, you've just delivered that budget," Ms Ferguson said. "It's a budget with a new tax, with levies, with co-payments. Is it liberating for a politician to decide election promises don't matter?
Ms Ryan found the question was factually correct but said its tone made the Treasurer seem "under attack".
"In my view, the language in Ferguson's first question was emotive," she found. "I also believe that the average viewer would consider that the Treasurer was not treated with sufficient respect by the interviewer."
Ms Ferguson later told Mr Hockey that she had asked a "yes or no question". She then said: "I don't need to teach you, Treasurer, what a tax is. You know that a co-payment, a levy and a tax are all taxes by any other name."
I mean, really? Naturally the finding has been rejected by the ABC. Well, of course it would it's so clearly stupid. Ms. Ryan felt the tone could be interpreted by some viewers to be a potential breach of the ABC's impartiality guidelines? I mean really? She feels (not thinks, perhaps vaguely or even strongly, show won't say which) that maybe some minority in the audience-land watching might be doing some interpreting in such a way that it's not impartial? And that makes it a breach? Just how stupid is this auditor?
If I said I was impartial and made a statement 'X' (fill it in any way you like, It's hypothetical), of course I can expect somebody out there in the readership to maybe interpret that statement to be not as impartial as I say it is; but the onus is on that person to argue that case. Sarah Ferguson is right to ask the Treasurer whether election promises don't matter, after he delivers a budget that completely flies in the face of the election promises. It's a legitimate question that at least 50% of the population would like to know.
It's not the ABC's or Sarah Ferguson's or Emma Alberici's fault or problem that the government finds itself trying to squeeze a budget through which contravenes their own election promises. If the folks in government can't handle the questions that come from such budget, let alone consequences of their actions, maybe they're in the wrong profession. It is most certainly not the job of the press to let this kind of thing go by to the keeper. We all know this; we all know how this works; anybody watching the interview would be watching on the basis that they understand this as a fundamental tenet of the position the press holds in our democracy. So Colleen Ryan has invented a straw man, not to beat down, but to wave around and say, "this straw man right here might have missed the context! The ABC is biased".
I mean, "hullo".
Drawing the kind of conclusion that this Colleen Ryan has drawn is so stupid it blows my mind that she was one the editor of a newspaper. But of course she was the editor of a Murdoch rag. Surprise! Ms Ryan, try this advice for size: one might feel that the act of the ABC audit itself could be interpreted by some observers to be an abject failure at reasoning. But of course there is a lot of stupidity going around at the moment.
The government wants to muzzle the ABC because it asks blunt questions. Yet it says Freedom of Expression is an important thing in a democracy when a terrorist shoots a cartoonist or film maker. If they hold both positions, there's a lottos cognitive dissonance going on in this government and it's not helping the electorate at all.
The Death Penalty Thing Over In Indonesia
As the execution looms for Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumuran, you get the feeling that Australia is inexorably being dragged into a weird orbit of Indonesian legalism. Indonesia for its part is arguing the death penalty as good deterrence and that the law is the law and if the punishment is not meted out, it discredits the whole legal system. Australia is trotting out all the emotional arguments about the death penalty and amazingly seems to have forgotten the reasoning behind its own end to capital punishment in Australia.
Personally, I am against the death penalty so it goes without saying that I do not wish to see the two men executed. But it does embarrass me greatly when I watch the arguments put forward as reasons why mercy should be shown to these two men. Surely there is a deeper point of jurisprudence that is universal and appropriate to appeal to the Indonesian government. It strikes me as very odd that we only seem to have our own personal moral objections as something that should apply to Indonesia. It's a really bad argument, and is hardly likely to succeed.
There's got to be a better argument to be mounted.
Also, it seems rather ironic that the former lawyer who fronted for big tobacco and James Hardie in the asbestos trials is now the foreign minister trying to stop the execution.
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