Previously on Tenuous Link with Piers Akerman: The Matthew Johns scandal and the chk-chk BOOM girl.
This week on Tenuous Links with Piers Akerman: The Chaser controversy.
What starts out as an innocent article about Joel Fitzgibbon …
Appointing Joel Fitzgibbon Minister of Defence was branded as a bad decision by most students of Canberra when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd unveiled his Cabinet.
… quickly segues into this week’s tenuous link between the controversy of the day and Kevin Rudd.
In fact, we don’t know yet exactly where Rudd’s boundaries of unacceptable behaviour lie and that, too, is a mark of Rudd’s own lack of judgment.
His limit, based on the Fitzgibbon precedent, seems to be based on what he and his government can reasonably expect to get away with without suffering a knock in the polls.
It’s exactly the same standard our ABC applies to its programming, really, as exemplified by its handling of the nauseating attempts at humour by the middle-aged men who run The Chaser program.
Just as Rudd has to take ultimate responsibility for retaining Fitzgibbon in Cabinet, despite the fact that Fitzgibbon was serially submitting parliamentary declarations of his interest with serious omissions, so the ABC management approved Chaser programs of progressively grotesque interpretations of humour.
Coming up next week on Tenuous Link with Piers Akerman: Air France Flight 447.
7 Comments
I watched Ackerman on ‘Insiders’ on Sunday – he really is losing the plot these days, he has become a parody of himself.
He always was.
Which plot? Any of the ones he lost back in the 1990s, costing him the “respected” in “respected journalist”? {Specific allegations in the absence of supporting evidence removed. The allegations and controversies, with supporting citations, are noted at Wikipedia and in this profile; note that Piers Akerman has stated that the Wikipedia page contains “grossly inaccurate content” – Toby}
BTW: Did he really get the whole way through that rant without mentioning Rudd’s “role” in the Heiner affair, Scott? If so, he must almost have run out of possible plots to lose. He certainly has lost the last shreds of the “coherence” and “credibility” plots.
Parody? IMO more like a troll-like monster out of a Wagnerian nightmare.
Honestly, Scott, get a grip.
It’s a perfectly reasonably premise.
Rudd didn’t even see that skit, yet he feels entitled to bang on about it in Parliament. This is a populist PM who will leap on any band-wagon as long as his pollsters have OKed it.
This is a craven, cheap and utterly unprincipled Government.
Hearing newspapers columnists carp on about ‘responsibility’ really is hilarious. Even politicians can be voted out.
I hope you held the last government to the same low standard, Joel B 1.
Anything else would smack of an Ackerman Upstairs College level of self-awareness…
Anyway, PA pulls the long bows in his weekly columns because it’s much easier than writing more content, every day, about different topics. The man leads a life of leisure, how dare you expect more of him.
Oh c’mon off it Joel, cheap? I wish you would get your story right, this government is being continually criticised by the conservatives for being too expensive.
So which is it?