Any self-respecting journalist (or even a former one who, after 55 years, “jumped the shark” to become a senator) would have had to lead this week’s diary with salacious details of the Lionel Murphy scandal.
I mean, what a feast for an investigative journo, after the Speaker of the House of Reps Tony Smith and the Senate President Stephen Parry agreed, surprisingly, to release the suppressed details of an inquiry into the murky work of former Whitlam Government Attorney-General, and controversial High Court Judge, Lionel Murphy. An inquiry shut down and details sealed when Murphy got terminal cancer.
As his cesspool hometown local paper, the Daily Telegraph, headlined it this week: “Sin City”.
It did have everything, starting with that famous (infamous) Murphy quote to a magistrate about the immigration solicitor Morgan Ryan: “Now, what about my little mate?” And it went on to implicate the real “Mr Sin”, Abe Saffron, the pre-Ibrahim lord of King’s Cross, plus crooked magistrates and Murphy’s (alleged) intervention with Premier Neville “Nifty Nev” Wran to get the new long-term Luna Park contract flick-passed to Abe.
(Remember that Tunnel of Love fire that killed all those kids before the transfer? Was that possibly arson?)
There were further allegations that Murphy conspired with Saffron to have a witness roughed up and that he not only sampled the offerings at one of Mr. Sin’s brothels, he part-owned it.
All of this, when I was actually in the NSW Parliament building for another gruelling week of Senate committee public hearings into the transvaginal mesh scandal. We talked to some Scottish mesh survivors. I said, last year in the Senate speech, which triggered our public inquiry, that it was “the worst medical scandal for Australian women since Thalidomide”.
The Scottish witnesses said they had the backing of Thalidomide supporters, who said this scandal, internationally, was even worse. There was one new expression I heard this week I did not need to hear: A crippled mesh victim talked about “forever pain”. Day and night, 24/7. Diabolical.
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I mentioned being in the ornate NSW Parliament House. In a side room, while making a phone call about Murphy and Wran, I looked up (see picture). The Wran bust startled me. Weird timing.
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Anyway, I won’t concentrate on Lionel, nor transvaginal mesh, because, as I started writing this, I saw a promo on SKY News for “Jones & Co”. Alan Jones and Peta Credlin were going to interview former prime Minister Tony Abbott. Hold the front page.
First we had to plough through the corn. Jones: “Welcome to the Peta Alan show”. The pair discussed their matching (Liberal) blue ensembles. And then Alan Jones went into a TV editorial rant that must have lasted 15 minutes. On television, not radio. I did tweet in frustration: “SKY invents radio on TV. Fifteen minutes of Alan Jones’ ranting head on prime time. No overlay, no background pics. Just a full-on rant.”
The Credlin-Abbott show was incredible. Niki Savva would have been scribbling furiously. At times, Peta looked like a leonine, dark-haired, Nicole Kidman on a facially-enhanced expressionless day. Amazing muscle control. She did interrupt her former boss to say “correct me if I’m wrong”. He didn’t. And he didn’t slip and call her “Chief”.
Throughout it, we had to suffer Jones’ saccharine simpering. Like when he said “you should be running the show,” and “we can’t win the election with Turnbull as leader,” and I’m sure, in the next breath, he then endorsed Peta for PM. Vomitsville.
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I did preserve one Alan Jones quote from the Abbott lovefest for posterity. The breakfast serial spruiker did say, on the record, to Peta Credlin:
“You’re a farming lady and so am I.”
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Speaking of Lionel Murphy. It prompts one of those “what if” moments that could change the path of history.
Not many people know this, but, Lionel Murphy gave the phone number of Canberra femme fatale, Junie Morosi, to Andrew Peacock — before Jim Cairns got hold of it, bedded her and hired her. Years later, Peacock told me that, late one night, he looked at the phone number, on a crumpled piece of paper and decided not to dial it.
Reminded me of a possibly apocryphal “what if” story when President Nixon first met Chairman Mao. Behind the Bamboo Curtain, as we used to call China’s isolation, Nixon was himself burbling on with a “what if” story about the slain President Kennedy: What would have happened to the world if it had been the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who was assassinated in November, 1963 and not JFK?
Mao supposedly ruminated and then sagely opined: “I’m sure of one thing. Aristotle Onassis would not have married Mrs Khrushchev.”
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That queen of the punsters, Kathy Lette, this week tweeted a wonderful indictment of social media, especially the scourge of text messaging.
She reported, straight-faced or straight-keyboard, that the inventor of predictive text had left this world. As Kathy put it, he had “pissed away and his funfair will be held next monkey”:
“You’re a farming lady and so am I.”
Best laugh of the week.
Any particular reason you’re blocking more comments than the entire Crikey stable put together?
I thought the fire at Luna Park started in the ghost train. Though that was next to the tunnel of love as I recall..
I think you’re right but this is Hunch and he’s not one to let the truth get in the way of telling a story.
Self obsession is rarely attractive.
Only some as delusional as the H/H could allude to himself as “self respecting journalist” – assuming that a journalist is someone who seeks, finds & assembles unknown facts into an informative narrative of relevance to the reader.
None of that here, as usual just another self advertisement.
Another waste of electrons.
And as if to make your point, he’s blocking comments left and right.
No. They would not.
An unfinished inquiry that had NO frames of reference, accepted ANY accusation from ANY source (even those a court had dismissed), and STILL had to throw half of them out before setting pen to paper – and was only released because this slo-mo train wreck you call a government needs a distraction?
NO self-respecting journo would go NEAR it. Nor would even the average self-loathing hack.
A suicide-ideating stain like Hinch on the other hand…