No mere Spectator, Tudge sets the record right on robo-debt

Save articles for later

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.

Here at CBD, we take a tragically close interest in the afterlives of former politicians. So the question of what one of the Morrison government’s most scandal-prone ministers, Alan Tudge, would do in the real world has long intrigued us.

School principles: Alan Tudge and Gina Rinehart.Credit: John Shakespeare

We recently reported that Tudge had dipped his toes into private consulting, and now the former education minister has found a gig as a columniser.

Not with The Australian, or even one of the News Corp tabloids, but with The Spectator Australia, the conservative magazine that shares the politics but none of the gravitas of its British parent publication.

Amid the affair with a staffer, robo-debt and commuter car park scandals, it’s easy to overlook that Tudge was one of the last government’s truest culture warriors.

And his hot-taking in The Spectator continues that theme. His first piece, published last month, appears to be a bold defence of the robo-debt affair.

While a recent royal commission described some of Tudge’s actions as “a reprehensible abuse of power” (findings he denies), the minister in charge had a different take.

“Scott Morrison referred to the robo-debt royal commission as a ‘lynching’. I call it a missed opportunity,” Tudge wrote. Specifically, a missed opportunity to properly crack down on welfare compliance.

Tudge’s latest effort is a gushing tribute to Campion College, a Catholic liberal arts institution in western Sydney that recently named a building after Gina Rinehart. The college, Tudge wrote, stood out “among the postmodern rot that infests most of our universities’ humanities faculties”, owing to its focus “on the origins and brilliance of our Western civilisation”.

We asked Alan if all this hot-taking was going to become a regular thing. He never responded.

WATCH THE PENNIES

A fascinating snippet from the ABC’s freedom of information disclosure logs caught our eye.

Paul Barry is reportedly paid over $200,000 to host Media Watch.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Someone – and we have our strong suspicions who it might be – has invoked the legislation to find out how much of your hard-earned tax dollars go into bringing the ABC’s Media Watch to our screens each week.

Forty-five grand, on average, is the answer, which our newsroom TV experts reckon is “dirt cheap” (the show’s critics might think it’s a bit steep) for a weekly standalone show requiring a big research effort.

And for which host Paul Barry is reportedly paid in excess of $200,000.

We called the ABC on Wednesday to see if it thought it was getting bang for its buck, but the broadcaster had zero interest in sharing its thoughts on that question.

So we’ll just have to let value be in the eye of the beholder.

FULL DISCLOSURE

It’s amazing what passes for being in the public interest these days and the federal Department of Industry, Science and Resources appears to have developed a novel understanding of the concept.

Our WAToday colleague Peter Milne asked the department to supply, under the freedom of information (FOI) legislation, some official documents about the decommissioning of Australia’s clapped-out offshore oil and gas infrastructure.

You can have them, a departmental official told Milne on Monday. But in the “public interest”, he would have to wait until Thursday to get them, so as not to “affect departmental operations and ministerial considerations”.

CBD has had its share of FOI knock-backs, lord knows, but that’s a new one on us.

Milne wondered if ministerial considerations included a carefully planned and strategic drip-feed of the information from federal Resources Minister Madeleine King’s office on Tuesday, culminating in the “announceable” of an issues paper on decommissioning, with a big number – $60 billion – attached.

Minister for Resources Madeleine King.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

We asked King’s office if it was indeed the political desire to tightly control the message on this job that trumped the public’s timely right to know.

“No,” said a spokesman. “The minister’s office did not ask the department for a delay in the release of the document.”

And we’ll just have to leave it there.

JUSTICE, SERVED

Most Collingwood fans were quietly pleased on Tuesday night at news of Brayden Maynard’s acquittal by the AFL Tribunal over that challenge on Melbourne’s Angus Brayshaw.

But former Pies president Eddie McGuire was loudly ecstatic.

Video posted to the socials by former Pies player Dale “Daisy” Thomas shows McGuire stopping proceedings dead in Hawthorn eatery Choi’s – where he was dining with members of the club’s 2010 premiership side – to declare to the roomful of diners that “justice has been done!” and that “Maynard is free to play for the Pies!”

Eddie told us on Wednesday morning that he was simply providing a public service broadcast to his fellow diners, many of whom had stopped him on the way to his table asking for news from the tribunal.

The former journalist was happy to oblige once the marathon tribunal session had confirmed its verdict.

McGuire reckons it was an opportunity not to be missed for a lighter moment after a tense few days in the game.

“We need to get a bit of fun back into the footy,” he told us. “It’s been pretty tough this week.”

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.

Most Viewed in National

From our partners

Source: Read Full Article