Angus Taylor
Minister for Energy Angus Taylor (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

Pie in the Sky thinking As the COVID-19 cluster in South Australia grows worse and more restrictions are imposed, we’re looking forward to seeing Sky’s After Dark carnival barkers sent to Adelaide to abuse the Steven Marshall government over its COVID-19 mishandling.

Leading the charge, we’re sure, oddly worn mask and all, will be Peta Credlin — who will bring her unique and “forensic” questions to Marshall’s daily briefings. Andrew Bolt will chip in, no doubt, with some columns and editorials attaching the origins of the outbreak to the South Australian Liberal’s party’s embrace of multiculturalism.

A special documentary on what went wrong will no doubt follow.

Is that all there is? We’ve been following the saga of Angus Taylor, Clover Moore, the apparently forged documents Taylor’s office shared with the press and the investigations that followed for quite some time. First the News South Wales police and then the Australian Federal Police left several questions outstanding. The Commonwealth Ombudsman has spent the year investigating the AFP’s nominal investigation.

The Ombudsman has now concluded that it was a “lawful exercise of discretion” for the AFP to cease its investigation (though it’s worth noting the conduct of Taylor and NSW police is outside the scope of the investigation). So, the mystery persists, not only about who forged the documents, but why the AFP abruptly abandoned the investigation.

But the accompanying press release at least gave us a classic “just sayin'” aside:

We have concluded, however, that it would have been preferable for the AFP to have undertaken at least one more step prior to making a decision to cease its investigation, namely to have made direct inquiries of Mr Taylor or his office.

Ruddbot Well, looks former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s “record breaking” petition calling for an royal commission into News Corp has fallen apart at the seams. From The Australian this morning:

An investigation by The Australian into the petition, which Mr Rudd instigated as an attack on News Corp, has also revealed the document is littered with fake and absurd names, including “Nacho cheese”, “Jesus Christ” and “this sucks”. Many of those were generated offshore, easily sidestepping parliamentary measures set up to prevent fraud.

The number of fakes “littered” through the petition? A cool thousand, my friend. A one with three zeros, a lousy thousie. You take those out, and you’re left with a pathetic 500,876 people who legitimately want an inquiry in the influence and reach of News Corp in Australia.

Going Nahan-as Rudd and his new ally Malcolm Turnbull are not the only former party leaders who feel they’ve been royally dicked over by the media and have an axe to grind.

And certainly whatever valid concerns they have about News Corp and the concentration of media in Australia, that’s nothing compared to the domination Seven West and Kerry Stokes in WA.

Former WA liberal leader Mike Nahan used his valedictory speech to blast Seven-West — with whom he had a major falling out, via The West Australian, shortly before his resignation back in 2018:

To be effective, the media sector should be diverse, competitive and independent of commercial interests. These are not the characteristics of media in the state now. The traditional media is highly concentrated, with one outlet having near monopoly on newspapers combined with the dominant free-to-air TV. This is not healthy.

The West had many criticisms of Nahan, but we’re sure that what drew his ire the most was that they were not above noting his resemblance to Ned Flanders.