On the Leveson Inquiry

Peter Matters writes: Re. “Murdoch’s incendiary, red-headed ‘up yours’ to the Leveson Inquiry” (Thursday). By wasting a whole long article seriously trying to answer Murdoch’s mischief making, Crikey has given a has-been a sense of importance he no longer deserves. The public media as a whole are now quite capable of turning the outright lies as well as the near lies of deliberate misrepresentations of Murdoch’s yelping hounds into laughing stock, nor will the same doggies ever again succeed in brainwashing a sufficiently large section of the electorate to elect one of Murdoch’s hangers-on as prime minister of Australia. You can rest assured that history will in the near future honour Julia Gillard as a highly effective prime minister operating in the face of uniquely unsavoury malice and poor Tony Abbott will be seen as a buffoon.

Rundle clarifies

Guy Rundle writes: Kirill Reztsov asks me what I mean by ‘Australian “attacks on the Islamic state” ‘. Nothing, because I didn’t say it. Reztsov has added the adjective ‘Australian’ to the phrase I used. I said that the right-wing culture warrior Paul Monk’s call for a truth and reconciliation commission by the Turks was simply propaganda to buttress current attacks on the Islamic state, being conducted by the Iraqi army, with US, Australian and other Western assistance, including substantial air-strikes — on which I took no position. Islamic State does indeed massacre, rape and kill, and make slick videos celebrating the fact. Bu they have years to go before they meet the body count of the Assad government, with whom we are unquestionably actively co-operating, and who kill in vast numbers but supply no audio visual material.

On jobs data

Marcus L’Estrange writes: Re. “Business Bites” (Friday). Friday’s item claims that 231,600 jobs were created in the year ending March 2015. This is a gross figure (not a net one) and is largely irrelevant until the ABS tells us how many jobs were lost and how many of these “new” jobs were old jobs reclassified, or had a name change. Additionally, how many of these new jobs are simply posted as a head hunting exercise? It is clear the Abbott government needs to direct the ABS to more accurately measure the net number of jobs and the Australian unemployment and measure and release under-employment on a monthly basis, which is now available in the USA.