The Same But Different . . .

Guest Author Uncategorized

Today’s Guest Author is Victoria Rollinson, with a splendid piece first published at The AIM Network. Thank you, Victoria! And hat tip to Puffy and Leone for their recommendations.

(Image Credit: Angus Mordant; Fairfax)

When Turnbull ‘knifed’ Abbott a week ago after publically shaming Abbott’s terrible government on national television while announcing his intent-to-knife, I wondered how the mainstream media would treat this story. I couldn’t help but worry this would be yet another example of a Liberal story being treated with a completely different narrative to the same Labor story. A sitting PM is replaced by a member of their own cabinet. A late night coup. A first term Prime Minister. Abbott lasted a shorter time than Rudd and had already been challenged 6 months earlier. By my reasoning, the white-anting, destabilising activities of Turnbull and his supporters over the last 6 months was far more bloody and underhanded than Gillard taking the opportunity to lead the Labor government when it was offered to her within hours of her colleagues’ decision that Rudd’s chaotic leadership was not going to improve, second chances or not. However you argue it, overall a fair observer would see great similarities in the two situations. But these similarities are clearly ignored by the media and it turns out my worry was well founded. Low and behold, the Turnbull/Abbott story is being treated completely differently to Gillard/Rudd. Of course everyone in the mainstream media is very busy mansplaining to little-old-us the voters why the two situations are apparently completely different. But I don’t need this situation explained for me, because I can see with my own eyes that Turnbull just did to Abbott the same, if not worse, thing Gillard did to Rudd.

If you haven’t already noticed for yourself the differing tone of the stories about new-PM-Gillard with new-PM-Turnbull, take a look at this apple-with-apples comparison.

Here is a transcript of Gillard’s ABC 730 interview with Kerry O’Brien the evening she became PM on 24 June 2010 and Turnbull’s ABC 730 PR campaign interview with Leigh Sales a week after he became PM.

If you can’t be bothered reading these transcripts, take it from me that Gillard was interrogated about her ‘knifing’ of Rudd for the entire interview, and framed as the ‘villain’ who couldn’t be trusted, a tone which continued throughout her time as PM. Gillard was also hectored about what she would do about the mining tax policy, not forgetting she had become PM that day. Turnbull, on the other hand, was treated like a ‘hero’ and provided with the invaluable opportunity to outline his vision for the country on an unchallenged soap box where he was allowed to sell his government’s refreshed credentials. He wasn’t even tested when he claimed Direct Action was working to reduce emissions when there was no evidence backing this claim. Two interviews in similar political circumstances, yet chalk and cheese in their treatment and tone.

A simple word count showed Gillard spoke for 65% of her interview with O’Brien. Turnbull spoke for 77% of his interview with Sales. Sales even apologised for asking a question Turnbull might ‘find offensive’ and then again said sorry for cutting him off. Soft doesn’t even come close to describing this cringe-worthy excuse for journalism. But it gets worse. Check out the word clouds of both interviews and see if you notice the same thing I did.

Here is Gillard’s interview, where the most used words were obviously Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. So the main topic of the interview were Gillard’s villainous replacement of Rudd.

Now here is Turnbull’s interview.

Can you see what is missing amongst all the positive words? Yep, that’s right. The word Abbott. You can do a Where’s Wally search for it if you like, but I’ll save you the trouble and tell you it appeared twice in the interview. Hardly there at all. Abbott’s already gone and the media aren’t dwelling on the part Turnbull played in his demise. Unlike Gillard, who had to put up with the media’s obsession with the Rudd leadership spill throughout her entire tenure as Prime Minister, even after she went straight to an election to prove her legitimacy in the role. Yet Abbott has been erased and shiny-Turnbull-with-a-sly-grin has got off scot-free. See what I mean about same story but very different treatment? How do you even begin to explain this other than to say Labor is always bashed by the media, and the Liberals always excused? Sadly this is the only explanation that makes sense.

322 thoughts on “The Same But Different . . .”

  1. One in five large private companies paid no tax last year: ATO

    … a campaign by private business, supported by some Coalition MPs, convinced the government that disclosure would increase the risk of targeted kidnappings of company owners.
    Advertisement

    Fairfax Media revealed in June that the government had not asked for or received any security advice to confirm such a kidnap threat is real.

    University of NSW financial disclosure expert, accounting lecturer Jeffrey Knapp, has called the decision “the stupidest excuse for non-disclosure I’ve ever heard”.

    A Senate hearing on Tuesday into the tax transparency amendment bill was told that the Australian Federal Police were never asked to assess the risk.

    Typical for this government.

  2. I agree with you, Stonyhabit. Keep posting please.

    BB I am in raptures over snoop. I know of two 12 yr old beagle sisters needing rehoming because of a child with allergies.

  4. Good morning Dawn Patrollers! Hopefully the plastics team will be here in the next 30 minutes to let me get out of here.

  5. Snoop and I spent a pleasant night last night curled up in the “spoons” position under two doonas. At one stage he tried to burrow under the bed clothes, but I was worried he might suffocate, so wrenched him out. I received a slurpy lick for my troubles, but I insisted. I woke this morning with Snoop’s head on the pillow next to mine.

    You wouldn’t be a pig’s ear for quids around here. He’s already demolished two of them. These are those chewy treats you can’t break with a hammer, but a puppy can break with needle teeth and persistence. I’ve given up cleaning around the little daytime digs he’s set up for himself (ex Cozzie’s Cushion). Empty floor space to Snoop is like a red rag to a bull: the mess expands to fill any vacant real estate. He goes searching for new things to chew, that could end up being valuable, or fatal. So I’ll let him enjoy the collection he’s accumulated, as I’ve removed all the dangerous bits (I hope). It’s just mostly cardboard and bits of pig ear now.

    To those who think we’ll end up keeping Snoop, think again. He’s going back with the grandson to the farm. The boy needs responsibility, and we don’t, not after 40 years of looking after house pets. We haven’t exercised our new-found freedom – there haven’t been any whimsical dashes off to a romantic B&B in the Blue Mountains yet – but it’s nice to know we CAN do it, if we want to.

    Snoop is a lot of work, requiring literally 24/7 attention at this moment in his life. I have the patience to do it for a few days, but not long term.

    The good thing – and unexpected – is our positive response to Cozzie’s toys and bedding being used again. We’ve broken the spell. Until Snoop arrived Cozzie’s stuff was in a corner in the lounge room, neatly folded and stacked away, but in plain view… like a shrine. As youse might garner from the photos, it’s no longer a shrine. It’s the busy day donga of a working dog again. It’s “B-A-R: BAR” for Snoop, his base. We can now put Cozzie’s stuff away until next time Snoop comes down for school holidays. It’s not a hallowed ground anymore. That’s a good thing.

    On other matters… HI has had a small win in the ongoing saga, and we have seen off yet ANOTHER HR person, taken off the case for lack of fighting spirit. We’re wearing them down. They still have fight left in them, of course. HR never forgets or forgives, but we have two secret weapons in our back pocket. One is The Truth. The other is… well, I can’t tell youse that, because then I’d have to shoot youse.

    Rest assured, we live to fight another day.

  9. I linked this last night. In case you missed it, listen to the interview sound clip.

    Not only is Turnbull repeating the same old government line on asylum seekers, but he shows his complete arrogance and rudeness by constantly talking over Patricia Karvelas, not allowing her to get a word or a question in to interrupt his flow of garbage.
    http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/drive/prime-minister-malcolm-turnbull-tough-stance-on-asylum-seekers/6799610

    I hope all those Green-leaning people who constantly tweeted their longing for Turnbull to become PM are happy now he is in the big chair.

  11. What a joke!

    Today Turnbull will announce more than $41 million to be spent on combating domestic violence. Poor Rosie Batty is going to be dragged along to stand beside him while he makes his big announcement. If I were Rosie I’d have a few words to say, and they would not be good words.

    http://www.9news.com.au/national/2015/09/24/02/42/federal-government-to-pledge-forty-million-to-overcome-domestic-violence

    Look at the time frame – everything is over three or four years, which boils own to very little being spent straight away. The bulk of the funding – $36.5 million – goes into policing. Why? Is this a sneaky way of sucking up to the premiers by putting more funding into state police forces, where it will be spent on anything but the needs of victims of domestic violence?

    $500,000 will go to more training for GPs – that boils down to about $2 per GP per year. What are they going to do? Sending a form letter would cost more than that.

    A supreme insult – the Better Schools website will get $5 million to expand its services. This comes after the May budget took away funding for a long-running and valued program, REALskills in northern NSW which had been doing excellent work in educating teenagers about domestic violence and healthy relationships as well as providing a trusted support service.
    http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/federal-government-axes-funding-for-domestic-violence-education-in-northern-nsw-schools-20150423-1mripe.html

    No mention of complete restoration and expansion of the legal services taken away by Abbott, just crumbs thrown. No mention of extra funding to the states to re-open womens refuges. No mention of anything useful at all. We need more refuges, more crisis accommodation, more legal services. All these important things have had their funding slashed by this government and Turnbull has done nothing to replace that money.
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-20/states-and-territories-again-unite-over-cuts-to-legal-assistance/6482254

    A run-down on just how much was cut in the last budget.
    http://greens.org.au/node/11823

    And yet Turnbull expects us to swoon in gratitude for less money thrown at dealing with domestic violence. What a fraud.

    Thje MSM, of course, will fawn and grovel as they al;ways do and will ignore the blatant hypocrisy behind this announcement. It’s a taste of what we can expect from future Turnbull announcements. Lots of waffle about ‘this government really, really cares’ and then little, if any improvement in existing services.

  13. Since I can’t post the very long rant about Turnbull’s useless, hypocritical domestic violence announcement today, let me just say – What. A. Joke.

  14. Victorian women who had taken out AVOs were issued with personal alarms in the time of the Bracks Brumby ALP governments, the alarms were proved to stop offenders so Baillieu Liberal government discontinued the program

  17. Turnbull announcing new funding for domestic violence that goes mostly to policing and goes nowhere near restoring the funding, services and programs Abbott took away.

  18. All this lovely talk about respect for women – I did not notice one Liberal MP, male or female, including
    Turnbull, show the slightest crumb of respect for Julia Gillard during her time as PM. They all joined in the guffawing, the trash talk, the dirty jokes, the disgusting comments. There was not one ‘Hang on, that’s a bit much’ from any of them.Their nasty, sexist, misogynist (even the women) behaviour set the tone for the nation. It became OK to be a bastard as far as women are concerned.

    Now, because Turnbull has made a speech, all that is supposed the change, immediately.

    As for Peta Credlin and her moaning about being a victim of sexist behaviour – Diddums! What goes around comes around.

  22. Leone,

    I rescued your long post. Unfortunately The Boss is away and I don’t know how to ban you for half an hour, which seems to be the only solution. I think Bushfire Bill knows the trick, so fingers crossed he can help!

  24. Leone,

    You are welcome. I’m sorry I wasn’t around earlier to liberate you, but had things to do over at the flat.

  25. I agree with Rosie Batty on the DV issue. It’s not only the specific measures – which seem sensible and practical – but also the language of our leaders. Turnbull got it right and so did Shorten. The tone of political debate is changing – for the better. And about time.

  28. The wife of a prime minister should not be involved in the political debate, she is not an elected representative of the people.

    I’m sure Lucy will be able to exert a lot of influence on Malcolm’s policy decisions privately. I’ve always thought she was the brains in the family.

  30. Minister for women Michaelia Cash ‘appals’ legal centres with funding claim

    Representatives from community legal centres which provide advice to disadvantaged people, including women fleeing domestic violence, have expressed anger at comments made by the minister for women, Michaelia Cash.

    Cash accused community legal centres on Thursday morning of running a “false and misleading campaign” about funding cuts given that in March the federal government halted funding cuts which were due to take effect on 1 July.
    …
    The chief executive of the Federation of Community Legal Centres, Liana Buchanan, said she was appalled by Cash’s comments that a “misleading campaign” had been run.
    …
    “The bottom line is in the government’s national partnership agreement that the former prime minister signed in July this year. It is clear and explicit that funding for community legal centres will still be cut by $12m in 2017, so the funding will go from $42m in 2016-17 to $30m in 2017-18.”
    …
    Arc Justice’s chief executive, Peter Noble, who oversees the Loddon Campaspe community legal centre in Bendigo and the Goulburn Valley community legal centre, said it was Cash who was being misleading, not the legal centres
    …
    The government has previously sought to explain that rather than actively cutting funds, they are simply letting funds lapse.

    “Whichever way you look at it, $12m will come out of the budget of community legal centres nationally from July 2017. Whether you want to call it non-renewable funding or a cut, that doesn’t matter in my books, and it won’t matter to women in court who receive our help.”

    Because ‘letting funding lapse’ isn’t at all the same as ‘cutting funding’, is it? …….. *facepalm*

  31. leone

    I meant a bit like what Hazel Hawke did:

    Honours[edit]
    In June 2001 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia. The citation read: “For service to the community, particularly through the promotion of the reconciliation process, support for continued improvement in the quality of children’s television, as a contributor to the preservation of heritage items, and involvement with environmental and wildlife preservation groups”.[9] Wiki

  33. The review confirmed the credibility of the Bureau of Meteorology in its report released in June 2015, which did not find any evidence that the BoM had been adjusting its figures to fit a pattern of global warming.

    “There is a clear trend [of temperature] increase in both the raw and homogenised temperature data, and the temperature patterns exhibited in a variety of other datasets have a similar character,” the report said.

    However, it did recommend improving the clarity and accessibility of information and refining some of the Bureau’s data handling and statistical methods.

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-24/government-discussed-bom-investigation-over-climate-change/6799628

  37. Michaelia Cash is lying, and she knows it. Funding for community legal centres will stop in 2017, no amount of spin can hide that. There is even documented proof – perhaps in the true Liberal tradition, Ms Cash has not read it.

    Here is the link to the agreement which chief executive of the Federation of Community Legal Centres, Liana Buchanan refers to. You can see for yourself, in Schedule C, right at the end, a long list of community legal centres which will have their funding run out in 2017. You will also find a table on pages 10 and 11 showing fundng amounts until 2020 and which categories of legal assistance services will lose their funding and which will not.
    https://www.ag.gov.au/LegalSystem/Legalaidprogrammes/Pages/National-Partnership-Agreement-on-Legal-Assistance-Services.aspx

    My local community legal centre is on the list. Locals and Rob Oakeshott fought hard to get it, the Labor government approved it in 2010. Like all the other centres it does a fantastic job, helping people from Taree up to Kempsey. We don’t want it to close because it lacks funding. no-one, anywhere, wants to lose these services.

    What will Malcolm do? Nothing, probably.

  39. BK,
    I’ve just had the stitches removed after excise of a SCC from my neck. I mentioned your situation and he gave it a name I had no hope of remembering. He emphasised that it could be potentially dangerous if not treated promptly. Glad to hear you sought help urgently and all is now OK.

  48. I will take the liberty of offering a little advice to all pubsters. If you have anything you think is abnormal on your skin, get it checked out. SCCs (Squamous Cell Carcinomas) can manifest in various shapes and sizes from hard scaly growths to fleshy pollops. They can metastasize and travel to internal organs. A high percentage of lung cancers and all cervical cancers are SCCs. The earlier they are diagnosed and excised the better the chances of successful removal. I have an appointment next Thursday for the removal of one on the side of my right heel. This will be number 19 in the last five years. It will require a small skin graft to close the wound. I have had them removed from face. neck, arms, legs, and even one inside the nose. Don’t take the risk, get checked out.

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