The thinking woman’s favourite man used to be ABC journalist Andrew Ollie who died at just 48.
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He had kind eyes, a great mind and, like another favourite, Matt Price, died catastrophically early.
Then there’s Alan Jones.
There’s a truth that a victim often becomes a perpetrator.
I know. Too heavy for a Sunday morning, but really, I’d like to believe Jones is more than a vile thug.
Perhaps, as a child, he was so badly bullied and damaged that his default behaviour became attack?
What I’d like to do to Alan Jones is not remotely compassionate.
I’d like to tattoo his shiny, white forehead with:
– Contents damaged
– Break in emergency
– A pair of golden arches
When I worked for a very small NSW newspaper our editor decided he would not publish stories or take advertising from an electoral candidate because he thought the contender threatened our community and its values.
It was the ‘70s and cowboy editors were inspiring in their arrogance and creative abuse of power.
“He doesn’t exist,” the newspaper’s team was told.
Likewise, Jones abuses his power and should be ignored. He doesn’t exist.
This week he was complicit in helping promote an event which was invisible to most of us south of Bega.
Unless you were off shore, off your face or under a rock this week, you could not have missed the controversy about advertising a horse race on the Sydney Opera House.
The community and media reaction was predictable.
It started when Jones, from his radio power tower, launched an appalling verbal attack on Opera House boss Louise Herron.
“Who do you think you are Louise Herron!?”
Well might we say, ‘who do you think you are, Alan Jones’? (sneaky, sexy Whitlam reference?)
Thus, he gave the event exactly what it wanted … an instant of fame.
I won’t name the event because I hope it disappears up a horse’s rear!
Cynical me believes it was a PR strategy that worked.
A year ago none of us had heard of the event.
We were played.
Public sentiment was manipulated and the event has been branded into the national psyche as ‘the horse race that devalued the Opera House’.
If Sydney wanted to compete with the race that stops the nation, it was delivered the perfect media coup by Jones aided and abetted by his state and commonwealth servants.
The fury, ignited by Jones, erupted on Friday, and filled empty weekend media with a frenzy of chattering rage that kept rolling through the week.
I heard the original plan was for the Harbour Bridge to carry the event’s advertising?
I reckon the Opera House was always the first choice for the advertising, exactly because it would generate the most controversy.
Australia was sucked in to a classic PR play of any publicity is good publicity.
The event organisers knew that Sydney’s famous rosé-drinking, left-leaning, ABC-watching, Opera House subscribers would come out loud.
Nothing like a righteous, angry and well-connected mob from the Eastern suburbs (with harbour views) to whip up a frenzy.
Of course, we also have a Sydney advertising man as PM; a dude who likes to be called ‘Sco Mo’.
He’s from ‘the Shire’ of Cronulla Sutherland whose people are the mortal enemies of Sydney’s Lower North Shore and Eastern Suburbs.