This is the Media.
Show with Jack outing, Hello and welcome to the Media Show. Tonight we look at reaction to a high profile sacking in the US media and we sit down with Sky News Australia's media watchdog columnist Jared Henderson, who takes aim and some pretty biased journalists. But first, the ABC is facing an identity crisis which stems from mismanagement, incompetence and
editorial double standards. Now I feel really sorry for the journalists who are genuinely trying to break stories at the ABC while management repeatedly runs what was once a great institution into the ground. Just yesterday's staff would have gathered around their computers to watch the court live stream involving their sacked colleague Antoinette Latouffe, whose shifts were canned based on her social media activity and potentially her race. The court has been told by her legal team to accept
that her dismissal was related to her race. They argued that white presenters such as Laura Tingle, who was directly named in court, repeatedly share biased content on social media and face no proportional punishment, and they have a pretty good point. The ABC has spent more than one point one million dollars arrogantly fighting Latoof in court. She would have settled for eighty five grand early on, plus a
public apology and reinstatement as a fill in presenter. They have nothing but contempt for your money, and these executives running the joint are not the kind of progressive people
that they pretend to be. It is no wonder that staffer disgusted at their own companies handling of the case, and we tend to agree Latoof never should have been hired, but once she was on the books, she should have been on a level playing field to the white presenters at the ABC, the ones who are aggressively protected sometimes beyond all reason. I am talking about people like Four Corners star Louise Milligan, who wasn't sacked after defaming a
politician with a falsehood on social media. Now that costs you four hundred thousand dollars no punishment, though, and they continue to praise and promote her at every opportunity. This clear double standard aside. Earlier in the week, the ABC had the opportunity to address staff and Australians paying for this mess, assuring them that they didn't racially target a woman based on her opinions or race, but instead this happened.
So I just wanted to firstly ask you about the two litigation. Could you provide the Committee with an update on that dispute which is obviously garnering a lot of headlines at the moment.
Yes, Senator, So the case is still before the courts. We have closing submissions Thursday and Friday.
Of this week, So can you please provide the Committy with an update on this litigation?
Senator? That is the update I'm able to provide at this point in time. The case is still before the courts.
But do you know what the ABC did have time for? Instead of being transparent about these issues and providing the Senate with a substantive update, they turned on their critics.
I can confirm that News Limited do have a strange obsession with sort of taking scrutiny beyond scrutiny and sort of regularly agitating against the work of our journalists. We're flatted with their interest, but despite the very small readership, we do engage and respond to a lot of their queries quite regularly, and we do defend the work of
our journalists. Almost every week. There's multiple careers a week having said that as a public broadcaster, we must be subjected to scrutiny and we must have a culture of accepting scrutiny and self reflect where we get things wrong.
That was the ABC's powerful news boss, Justin Stevens, who is responding to a question from Green Senator Sarah Hanson Young about standing up to News Corp. Now Justin wants to define what acceptable scrutiny is while also having childish digs at audiences being small, which is very ironic considering the massive audience issues the ABC faces. But all of that aside, this is not how scrutiny works. We are journalists and we ask all sorts of questions to all
sorts of statutory bodies every single day. The ABC isn't special. It gets probed exactly how we might probe any government department, all statutory body which has clear issues, and his journos do the exact same thing, and Justin Stevens does not get to dictate what level of scrutiny is appropriate. That's the whole point. You decide because you pay for it. The ABC costs you one point two billion dollars a year, which means for the thirteen point six million taxpayers in
this country. On average, you pay eighty six dollars a year, and in many cases that's against your will. And that's for the ABC to spend your money artificially inflating audience figures with cheap and asenine tiktoks. People like Justin Stevens, who is paid five hundred and fifty six thousand dollars every year, are shockingly reckless with your money, and his contempt for transparency is a contempt towards every Aussie paying his salary. The ABC spent three point four million dollars
in legal fees last financial year. Now are we not supposed to ask about those cases? And what about the humiliating apology the Justin Stevens had to deliver when his staff doctored gunshot sounds into a professional news report to make it seem like a soldier was shooting at unarmed civilians. Oh that's right. They cleared themselves of deliberate wrongdoing in this one by hiring a former ABC journal to review
the actions of Justin Stevens. Employ Not sure it makes it much better, though not deliberate, just shocking incompetence, but in a way.
I agree Justin.
Stevens is the face of incompetence because this is the modern ABC. It has lost the faith of its own staff and mainstream Australia Bill. Joining me now on the panel is Managing editor of The Australian, Darren Davidson, and of course Sky News contributor Kel Richards. Now Kel the ABC it's having scandal after scandal, and you would think go into senate estimates, that's an opportunity for a newsboss such as Justin Stevens to lay it out, really explain
to Australians where they've gone wrong. Instead, it's quite defensive. And this is not that long after this doctoring scandal that happened on his watch with his staff.
Yes, they've got so much that has gone wrong. It's really hard for them to be comfortable and open. They can't just roll action say we're doing well and here's what happened one, two, three, four four, because too much has gone wrong in too many areas over too much time. I mean the business are putting in five extra gunshots, for example, into that report about what happened in Afghanistan. Now I have sat in ABC editing rooms beside the vision editor. I know how it's put together. I'm just
puzzled by what they say. I cannot comprehend how that could happen by accident. For a start, you have to have the sounds, the sound effects available to insert on the audio track, so they're not hanging.
It turned them into an audio file.
That's so they're not floating around the room somewhere and just fall into the machine.
That doesn't happen.
Someone makes a conscious decision to isolate and pull out the gunshots, and then they don't go onto the audio track unless someone presses a button and puts them onto the audio track. It can't happen. It just can't happen automatically. And I cannot, for the life of me, having spent far too long in my life doing that kind of thing, I cannot understand the explanation. It's incomprehensible. It makes no sense.
In an editing suite, someone somewhere makes a decision, a reporter, an editor makes a decision, let's beef up the battle scene by putting in some extra gunshots. Now, if they'd said we just thought we were beefing up the battle scene, it never occurred to us that we were in fact treading on.
Legal ground that there was a broad that's right. Now.
If they'd said that, we would have said, okay, stupid thing to do, but we understand people can make stupid decisions on occasions. They haven't said that. They've said somehow these sound effects of rifle shots fell onto the soundtrack, and during all the screening afterwards, every time they checked the story, every time they went.
Through it, no one noticed.
Now that's just beyond my comprehension.
He has no credibility to get his own team to publish a headline saying ABC cleared of deliberately. What's he saying they're guilty of incompetence? It's so absurd. I won't be lectured to with a man who's that incompetent. But Darren, what did you make of his Senate estimates hearing there where he did take an aim at News Corp. I know a lot of your reporters at Australian have been asking some very tough questions the ABC.
Is that fair?
Is that fair for them to do that?
Absolutely? I mean the ABC, as we all know, is funded by the taxpayer. They've just had a new five year cycle locked in with the federal government. Kim Williams has been given an extra forty million, and yet there are serious problems with Justin's news operations. Kel gave one example there with those you know, with the very questionable editing around that story. Another example would be nearly a year ago, now we had that national tragedy at the
Westfield shopping center in Bondi Junction. Now that story was covered comprehensively and at speed by organizations like Sky and News Corp. Yet the ABC with a fraction sorry, they did that with a fraction of the budget that the ABC has. Yet the ABC was behind them. It moved at glacial pace during that story, as we and others and yourself reported at the time. And I think a lot of the ABC's problems are kind of born of
its vast size and this billion dollar plus budget. I think it's very easy for the ABC's reporters and their friends and their circle to forget that that they're not the people that they are serving. There's millions of Australians out there that don't align with their align with their values, and you know, they often forget that it's about reporting the news, not a pining and Justin's you know, failed to rain those instincts in. There are a lot of
the that the ABC News operations seems to have. We've got a new incoming managing director, Hugh Mark's former Channel nine CEO. He's pretty good, he's pretty solid. You know, he's got a big job here now in terms of bringing some much needed discipline to the public broadcasters, editorial
decision making process and judgment. And you know that's important because he has to address a sharp decline in their audiences, ABC audiences, particularly on radio, which just reflects that what Justin's doing is not serving the needs of Australians, particularly those outside of the mainstream.
Well, let's move on now to a story about a sacked radio star who took aim at the Matilda's You know what, they remind me of Year ten girls. Now, I'm sorry to undermine the whole sport, but that's what I think that so you can stick it up your ass. I'd rather hammer and nail through the head of my watch.
That got any men's sport.
Now.
He rightfully got a lot of flak for those comments, which I think were bizarre considering how much Australia rallied behind this team during the World Cup. But soon after another eclipse surfaced and this one was actually quite disgusting.
The end of matriosis.
And this is controversial. I'm going to say it's controversial here.
It's made up.
Most people watching tonight would personally know a woman who has been impacted by endometriosis and it is a very real issue and he was an absolute moron to suggest otherwise. Let's bring the panel back in, Darren, what do you make of this whole saga.
Yeah, they're really shocking surprising comments to hear on the mainstream national radio broadcaster. I mean, it's more like something you might hear on a fringe podcast. I don't think his employers really had a lot of choice there. Many of his you know, listeners and audience would have been turned off by those comments and they would have made a lot of the sponsors and advertisers, not that they should dictate editorial, but quite uncomfortable being alongside that content.
And as you said, you know, the Matilda's a huge success story. They've elevated football soccer in Australia and with the twenty twenty six feet World Cup around the corner and Matilda's going through a qualifying campaign At the moment, it's just a shame that this has become the focus of the attention around that team, and you know, so many young girls look up to them and the comments is very unfortunate and unfortunately. I think it's probably the right decision to to n his employment.
Yeah, I'm a big free speech guy. I definitely draw the line. If you're mocking a chronic illness, particularly leads to fertility issues, I've got no time. Good luck to him join the centilent cumate exactly.
Look, I'm with you because we all know someone like that. I personally know a young woman who in her teens would be up vomiting twelve thirteen times a night because of endometriosis, wake up in the morning in enormous pain and say can you drive me to school? I mean, that's what these people are going through.
Now.
I don't know Marty, he's got daughters as well.
Yeah, I don't know if he's been this bad all along and we've only just discovered it, or whether somehow an epidemic of stupidity has suddenly hit him. But if that's what he's going to talk about, and that's what he's going to say, I'm really pleased he's off the year and no one should allow him anywhere NEU a microphone ever again.
Yep, And I'll delete him from my mind as soon as we move on to this next segment. But we're going to take a quick break. When we return, we'll play you a clip of MSNBC hosts Joy Reid having a public meltdown on camera after getting sacked. Welcome back to Stars and Gripes now where we pick apart the absurdity, the hypocrisy, and the blatant bias in the US media. First, one of America's most divisive TV hosts, who we have spoken about a lot on this show, has been sacked.
Joy Reid's floundering show was axed, and in her last show she spoke about resistance and fascism with the typical inflammatory language that she has become infamous for.
And we begin tonight with what I think is the question, when you are in the midst of a crisis, and specifically a crisis of democracy, how do you resist when fascism isn't just coming, it's already here. So what if anything, can you do about it? Well, for one thing, you can try to learn from history from what people in this situation, in countries around the world and in America.
Have done before.
Reid considered herself to be a student of history, so much so that she spent a great deal of time using awful people from history to describe her modern day political opponents.
Vladimir Putin's Russia, Victor Orbon's Hungary, or Nicolas Maruro in Venezuela. Today that suppresses the rights of women and minorities, uses the military to execute the whims of a strong man dictator, and controls and suppresses the press, education, the arts, rewrites history to suit a favored and dominant racial class, and foments extravagant corruption in order to enrich the dictator and his friends.
It really is extraordinary that Read lasted this long. She did not appear to have any principles as a journalist. Her entire personality seemed to be personal attacks on people who voted differently to her. She even managed to turn this Thanksgiving into a message of division.
You right wingers shouldn't have to suffer the consequences of your votes. You don't want to be around me because I voted for fascism. No fair, I am coughing on you with COVID, But you want me to wear a mask for your safety. No fair, my body, my choice. Well here's an alternative thought. Make your own dinner, Magan, make your own sandwiches, wipe your own tears, troll amongst yourself with Elon, and leave us alone.
This is a person who was getting paid three million US dollars a year, although that was slashed to one point five million last year following a ratings disaster. But now the gravy train has run out of track. And that woman who wanted families to fight on Thanksgiving about politics, and he calls anyone who disagrees with her hitler. She believes that she is the victim.
My show had value and that.
I'm sorry that what I was doing head value had value and in the end, I'm sorry, I'm not I try not to cry on TV, and I say, this is kind of like me on TVs. I apologize.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that's misinformation. Her show did not have value, which is why the company acted it. It's pretty simple, but this fact was also lost on her colleagues. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow was infuriated that her friend Joy Read was sacked.
In all of the jobs I have had, in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than joy Read. I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her, so much more to learn from her. I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC, And personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door.
Okay, they didn't let her walk out the door. She was fired. I mean, surely Rachel knows this. I mean, this is the level of spin and duplicity that these people go to wear with. They cannot even be honest about the fact that her ratings were bad, so she was fired. Instead, they dress it up as they let her walk out the door, whatever that means. It is extraordinary, really that management let this go to wear, and it
just gets worse after this. Madow implied that management fired her because they are racist.
It is also unnerving to see that on a network where we've got two count of two non white hosts in primetime, both of our non white hosts in primetime are losing their shows, as is Katie fang on the weekend, and that feels worse than bad, no matter who. Now, that feels indefensible, and I do not defend it.
Okay, if that is true, and this is an indefensible racist decision, then resign. Surely you do not want to work for a racist institution, and you, a white privileged woman, is taking up the spot of a woman of color, So surely she resigns.
Right.
I think I'm safe in saying for all of us anchors who you know through the TV, please know that what pins us the most is not what happens to us.
It is what happens to.
Our coworkers on whom we depend and who you don't necessarily know, but we respect and love them and depend on them. And did I mention we respect them?
Okay, So she is staying, but she respects all of her colleagues who just got sacked, and she will continue to earn twenty five million US dollars over five years. Let's bring in Sky News contributor Koshergata to DISCUSSYV.
Kosher.
I've got to say, good old MSNBC for letting that go to where I'm really glad that I got to kind of witness this meltdown in real time, and to their credit, they gave her a bit of independence and they let her call them racist on their own TV channel.
They were definitely generous. Jack gray Budo has always both in letting Joy Read have her final episode. Oftentimes hosts her canceled and are not afforded that courtesy because you do serve at the pleasure of management and the company
that employs you. And also Rachel Matta over here. But I have to say that the level of sanctimony and insubordination that she showed and that she was dripping within subordination was actually really really stunning, where she basically, as you said, accused her bosses of making a bad management decision and being racist. I think this is a real
test for new management. They've got Rebecca Cutler, a newly minted president of the network after the previous one, Rashida Jones, resigned in January, and I don't know, I think it's a really interesting test for her to know who is ultimately in charge over here. Notwithstanding Rachel Maddow is their
biggest star. It hasn't happened yet, so I don't expect that it will, but I think in most other workplaces this would be considered rather brazen for an employee to publicly say this about their boss.
Oh, definitely brazen. I think there is also a little bit of an issue in the logic that she's using. If representation based on racial lines really matters, it's always these white liberals and these top positions that say it. You never see them stand aside and say, okay, well Joy Read can have my job, then she can have my show.
There are twenty five million reasons I can think of for why she's not doing that, even after her pay cut. That's a very pretty package for one hour of content a week. After the first hundred days of the presidency, she literally does one hour per week. So most people
will never have a deal like that. But ultimately, you know, as you said at the top, this does come down to a business decision because the product that Joy Read was putting out there has been what it's been, and MSNBC had no problems keeping it on when she was
at least bringing readings. You could argue if that ethically or morally that was the right thing to do or not, But from a business perspective, she used to get about three million people a night back in twenty twenty, that dropped about one point one to one point two in twenty four last year, and now she's not even cracking
eight hundred thousand. So when you just look at those numbers, Ultimately, with new management in place, the whole network is being spun off from the parent company, Comcast, so they're gonna have to stand on their own two feet. Economically, it just was no longer sustainable for them, and she had to go.
Yeah, it was clearly about the numbers, but these people have to make everything about race. Anyway. Let's move on now to the world of newspapers. There is a war going on between Amazon owner Jeff Bezos and his own staff at the Washington Post. The Washington Post staff is outrage a Jeff bezos stunning plan for opinion pages that prompted top editor to quit. So what on earth are these people upset about. Well, as this is right, Bezos
has changed up the editorial direction of the paper. He took to x earlier this week to write, we are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars, personal liberties and free markets. Will cover other topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars
will be left to be published by others kosher. This is quite common in newspapers, and there may be some people watching us who disagree that a newspaper can take a stance, but it's quite normal for various papers to take on these pillars of advocacy for their constituents and
their readers. That's why you have editorials, etc. I think what's happened is the Washington Post has right now been run by the loonies, so to speak, and this is the first time that he's really putting his thumb down and saying no, I've got a different vision for this paper and we're going to play it my way. It's extraordinary that it's led to resignations.
Indeed, I think they're just not used to leadership from management and yes, including management taking a look at the editorial side and the product. So you know, of course, journalism is a different type of product than say a widget that you would sell on a shelf, and there is some truth to that. So they believe that they're sacred and management shouldn't step over that line too much. But at the end of the day, it is a product. It is a business. Jeff Bezos paid two hundred and
fifty million dollars to acquire The Washington Post. It's losing one hundred million dollars a year, and that's trending only worse and worse so now in this era and just all the structural changes that are happening in media where they have so much more competition, and newspapers in particular are structurally very very challenged in terms of eyeballs and
reach relative to digital and television and everything else. He's taking a look at this, and one thing is the product strategy, good old fashioned product strategy, just as he would have done at Amazon and has done at Amazon and other products and companies that he leads, he's doing the same over here. He's identifying that those two pillars might be a gap or an opportunity in the market. And it is going to lead to a lot of churn. I think of people who are there now who do
not agree with those pillars. They want the pillars to be other things, maybe anti trump Ism or something else, and you will see some churn. But it's also an opportunity for new people to come in and start lifting and pivoting the strategy of what the Washington Post stands for yeah.
Well said, well, let's move on now. Because cn n's Jake Tappa. He's one of those prominent journalists who continuously lied to people about Joe Biden's health. Now, Biden was clearly deteriorating before our eyes, and in my opinion, the establishment media's attempts to ignore this fact made a lot of moderates really lose faith in it. Now he's a reminder of the spin that Tapa would use to protect his mate Biden.
I think it makes little kids with starters feel when they see you make a comment like that. First and foremost, I had no idea that Joe Biden ever suffered from a stutter. I think what we see on stage with Joe Biden, Jake is very clearly a cognitive decline, and that's what I'm referring to. It makes me comfortable you are.
That's so amazing.
It's so amazing to me that in try and figure out an answer.
Cognitive decline, trying to tell.
Me that what I was suggesting was marking his stutter.
CNN finally started telling the truth on this after the disastrous debate which ended Biden's political career, but they ignored the reality of his cognitive issues for years.
Now.
We all know this, but Tappa thinks that we were all stupid. He's written a book and it is about Biden's self delusion in wanting to run again, and that the cover up of his health decline the goal of these people. Kosher for him, who was one of the most prominent people covering up the cognitive decline issue, to write a book about it about the cover up? Is there anything that's just crazier than that?
Also very brazen. The book is going to be title The Original Sin, coming out on May twentieth, and I think he is papering over his original sin as one of the biggest cover uppers of that decline that now history is going to continue to judge very unkindly in
terms of the media's role in that cover up. And I think what he's doing is playing to that still present cohort in the market of low news media consumers, low information consumers who actually don't follow this stuff day in and day out the way we do, and their first exposure to the level of cognitive decline that was taking place with Joe Biden was that infamous debate against Olive Trump and he literally had front row seats to
it because he was the moderator of that debate. So I'm guessing that's who he's targeting, that cohort of people who honestly didn't know about it until that point in time. We shall see what the book sales look like. That
might give us a clue about that. But over the span of history, as people go into this and look into this, I don't think this is going to work well for him, and it will damage his credibility that he's pretending to be against the very thing that he's writing about in this book, and we do all see it.
Yeah, you might a good point about sales, though, I mean, I'm certainly going to have to buy it now, and maybe that's all part of the strategy. But Koshergarta, thank you so much for your time and your insights. A quick break, but when we return, we speak to Jared Henderson, who has his sights set on the ABC Welcome back. Joining me now as he does each and every week, is Sky News, Australia's media watchdog columnist Jared Henderson. Now, welcome back.
Thank you.
It's been a really big week in the media week, but you've been looking at some stuff of the ABC, including some of the more self promotional efforts. Tell us about it.
Well, I noticed David Spears came on the television and said, you know that the finest reporters, the top of the brand, you get on inside as if you get up and Sunday morning you have a listen. But what I found out that it wasn't really true, because if you look at some of the finest reporters, they're often remarkably wrong. And I looked at Laura Tingle saying twenty eighteen that the Liberal Party was dead. I looked at Nicky savasaying in twenty nineteen that.
The Liberal Party couldn't win that election. I looked at.
David Crowe, who's also went Insiders. He was saying the same thing. Then I looked at Mark Kenny, who's one of the great geniuses that David Spears talks about, and he got the voice totally wrong. He said he realized when the voice Verte came out that he didn't understand his own country.
Well, if he didn't understand his own.
Country, he shouldn't beyond he shouldn't beyond Insiders telling us about his own country. But then he said, oh, perhaps he did, meaning he now understands as and.
It's very very bad.
So I just had to look at all that and I thought, well, if these are the top minds, perhaps you might stay in bed, or better still, watch guy news.
Now, Jared, you've been looking at another issue as well. It's the protest at Grenville Boys' High School. What can you tell us about it?
Well, the report in the ABC, in the print edition of the ABC online said that certain chants were made from the river to the sea and bring back the teacher who had been stood down for a while. I understand he's back at school now. The sheikh who had expressed sympathy for the words that were said at at the Bank's Town hospital about how certain nurses were prepared to kill certain Israelis, now that's going to go before the courts, or some of it's going to go before
the courts. But what they didn't say was there were very very aggressive chance of allah Ubah the Muslim cry, very aggressive chance of that, and the ABC didn't cover that, and the print edition it was like it was never said. But if you watched all the other television stations or pretty well all of them, they showed the footage, a very vivid footage. It was very angry footage, but the ABC didn't cover It's like.
It never happened.
I mean, you talk about fake news, but there was an example of no news because it just wasn't put in.
Well, it's biased by a mission, isn't it. It's a suggestion that they're very scared of trying to depict this as being a broader issue with the population. They don't want to ever have that conversation. But it's an important conversation if you have groups of people chanting a life, but it's a conversation you need to have.
It's very aggressive and as the ASA chief is said now, I mean in terms of threats to life, Islamophobia is not the major issue. Anti Semitism is the major issue. And what you had an example at Banks Down Hospital, whatever else it might have been, it was certainly an anti Semitic statement because it was statement made against an Israeli because that Israeli was a Jew. So that's a very clearly anti Semitic statement. And the ABC is just covering for another word, just old fashioned censorship.
Yeah, well said finally, we've got another ABC personality venturing a little bit away from news reporting and editorializing. Let's have listened to the grab and then we'll discuss it.
Mel Clark, what.
Do you make of those comments from Andrew HASTI look what we have heard from the shadow Defense Minister. There is really highlighting the concern which the coalition views these latest actions from the Chinese Navy and their belief that a more aggressive approach is warranted. What we didn't hear is an articulation of how or why a more aggressive approach might be received differently or lead to a different outcome.
So he's pointing to what he sees as a weakness in the current approach being taken by Anthony Albanisi and Labour's front bench, but not yet an explanation of why a different approach would be more effective.
Now, Jared, you're getting very good at pointing some of these and finding these clips. Melissa Clark is she's putting for the coalition's argument, and then she's saying, but here's why the coalition's argument isn't quite accurate.
Well, it should be assumed if you're an interviewing someone seeing your like mister Hasty, you hear him out and you should assume the viewers are bright enough to work out what he's.
Saying and form their own conclusion.
But now the ABC is putting in these commentators who then interpret what the the interviewee said and tell us not only what he they're an idea of what he said, but more importantly what he should have said but didn't say.
But he has no right of reply.
So this is kind of editorial, but it also is demeaning to the viewers because it means the viewers are so stupid.
You've got to have mss Clark.
Telling you not only what he did say, but what he should have said if he had have said it.
It's also not that it's the point, but I would also argue it's not true. I think there's a huge point of criticism with the alban Easy government of them saying that we have restored, you know, this relationship and you've got these firing drills happening off the coast. Clearly it's not restored to that level, and that's the coalition's argument. You've gone soft and you've had no benefit.
What it is the argument, because this relationship is not going to be restored, not because of anything Australia does whoever's in government, but because of the current attitude of the Chinese Communist Party, which may change, but it hasn't changed. In the last ten years have been fluctuations. So what Andrew Hasty was saying was perfectly reasonable. If it wasn't reasonable, viewers should have been able to work it out for themselves without Melissa Clark coming in and telling them.
It's almost like a fact check that they're trying to insert these fact checks. But the problem is the fact check, you would say, is contested evidence as well.
Well, most of these are matters of opinion. I mean they're not matters of fact. They're really matters of opinion. I mean as defect you what does that really mean, because it basically means that people's got a different opinion, and we know what Melissa Clark's opinion is.
They love to have their opinion.
Well on this program she comments about six times throughout the whole program, so we know where she stands.
And you pay for that opinion. Jared Hennes, thank you so much for joining me. As always. Well, that's all the time that we have for tonight, but up next is Newsnight