Politics/Media Series

The author was among many outraged by the media's role in the Princess of Wales's tragic death in August 1997. Like most, he thought the media had hunted Diana to death. Roused to indignant anger, he went to work and had a book, The Media of the Republic, ready for publication in 1999. Two connected happenings brought him to revisit the Diana story. First was Lord Dyson's shocking report (14 May 2021) of his investigation into the BBC's handling of the accusation that Martin Bashir of the BBC Panorama program tricked Diana into giving her sensational 1995 interview. Second was Prince William's address to the world on Dyson's findings. William accused the BBC of significantly contributing to his parents' divorce and his mother's end. Bashir's interview, the BBC's inability to see and accept the deceit, and Princes William and Harry's responses are crucial parts of the Diana story. With these recent developments, the author proposes to round off the story of Diana's death, its purpose, and its causes. This new edition is a thoroughly revised, rewritten in parts, and added-to version of the Diana story with a sharpened refocus. In the first edition, the author was keen to explain the ideological presuppositions behind the media's reporting and to challenge their claims about who was to blame for the accident. Attacking the system of Monarchy by inciting mob hatred was their chief aim. Greed took second place. He wanted to refute the dodgy arguments they ran to shift blame from themselves to the public's (allegedly) vicious, insatiable appetite for sensation and gossip. The public, they claimed, was driven by a prurient indictable interest in the private lives of people like Princess Diana. The subject of republicanism—its ideology, motivations and purposes—and the viability of Monarchy in our modern world came in for extensive discussion. His intention in this new edition—The Media of the Republic: Who Killed Diana?—is to examine and refute the same arguments, but he has shortened and refined the somewhat long ideological explanation in chapter 2 to make clear the distinction between a general idea of republicanism and what he calls theoretic-republicanism. Theoretic-republicanism is a form of republicanism based on the rationalism and materialism of the Enlightenment. Edmund Burke, who vigorously rejected forms of government based on abstract theory, had a different idea of how people form into a nation. The author explains how Burke's idea of a republic differs from that implicit in the media's reporting of the death of Diana with their undisguised attack on the British Monarchy. The debate over whether Australia should discard its Constitutional Monarchy and replace it with a republican form of government is as robust today as twenty-five years ago. The 1999 referendum on whether Australia should become a republic was defeated, but the supporters of the republic have not accepted defeat. They continue their campaign behind the scenes, waiting for the right moment to reignite their public struggle. The author claims their idea of a republic is essentially based on the theoretic-republicanism he explains in chapter 2. It seems from occasional reporting that the republican movement in Great Britain is growing stronger. His explanation of theoretic-republicanism and analysis of the media reporting of the death of Diana are of as much interest to the defenders of Britain's Constitutional Monarchy as it is to Australians.

In October 2000, The Canberra Times broke a story about the misuse of Liberal MP Peter Reith's government funded Telecard. (Note: The Liberal Party is one of the two main conservative political parties in Australia). The card was for member's personal use to have access to a public telephone when no other telephone was available. Mobile phones at the time were not in common use.   Unauthorized calls to the tune of $50,000 had been rung up on the Workplace Relations Minister's Telecard after he had given his son, Paul Reith, the card's PIN in contravention of the Remuneration Tribunal's guidelines.   For more than two weeks the media was in uproar, smelling the blood of a hardnose conservative politician.   Editorial writers, political commentators, and radio talkback hosts charged Reith with the Telecard's misuse. This was another case, they said, of a rorting politician coming to grief over his all too frequent nose in the trough.   The author took a different view. In the opening chapter of The Telecard Affair: Diary of a Media Lynching Second Edition, he writes: 'While the media and the Labor Party had Peter Reith battered and strung up as a public warning, I will argue that the Telecard Affair is not about former Workplace Relations Minister, Peter Reith. It is not about MPs' rorts. It is not about the usual 'snouts in the trough.' It is essentially about the media as the sharpest corrupting influence in our social and political life. It is about those media groups who function as amoral commercial enterprises. It is about journalists who betray their calling and are seduced, or coerced, by people who rule themselves according to their materialist objectives. It is about the slow death of public justice.'   The Telecard Affair was a paradigm case of the media's irresponsible and ideologically driven misuse of their disproportionate power in the state.   The author's analysis of the media's reporting of the Telecard Affair is unrelenting and targets some well-known media figures. He has undertaken a thorough revision of the text and added further comment to the political uproar of twenty-three years ago.

2021 REVISED EDITION AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL HISTORY. The author intertwines three themes: the character of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott as displayed in his fearless no-holds battle with the far-left radicals at Sydney University (1976-1980); what it means to be a philosophical conservative in a leftist world; and the author's critique of the student rebellion and the radicalism driving it. The author lived through the tumultuous years of the 1960s and 1970s revolution. Tony Abbott becomes a vehicle through which he expresses his scathing critique of the student rebellion.   In 2012, a passage in David Marr's book POLITICAL ANIMAL: THE MAKING OF TONY ABBOTT caused uproar across Australia. Leftist Marr is an out-and-proud passionate critic of Abbott's. Barbara Ramjan, wife of a top-gun criminal lawyer and hitherto unknown to the public, accused Abbott of subjecting her to an act of violence that (allegedly) occurred in 1977 when they were students at Sydney University. Marr made Ramjan's accusation public thirty-five years later. Abbott's many critics in politics and the media swallowed the accusation and treated the alleged violence as more evidence for the views they had long held about him. The scenario they propagate is that Abbott is sexist and hates women; claims men are the natural leaders of society; and in politics he is brutal and insensitive. Above all this, is the irrational discriminatory religion that motivates him. Abbott has no place in politics. Indeed, feminist Susan Mitchell strove to make the case in her book TONY ABBOTT; A MAN'S MAN that Abbott was 'dangerous'. But how well do the many books and reports attacking Abbott stand up to scrutiny? How well does their judgment of Abbott bear close investigation? How much is a caricature for political purposes, and how much is supported by the evidence? What is the evidence for Ramjan's accusation?   In TONY ABBOTT AND THE TIMES OF REVOLUTION, the author investigates. He traces Abbott's political development from school through to the end of his time at Sydney University (1963-1980). A contemporary of Abbott's and sharing a similar background, the author draws on his experiences and reactions to the tumultuous times of the 1960s and 1970s in addition to the documentary research.   The book is in four parts: the school years and the 1960s revolution; student radicalism at Sydney University 1973-1975, the prelude to Abbott's arrival on campus; Abbott's engagement with the far left (1976-1980); and the media and Abbott. What emerges from the author's tracing of Abbott's combat with the far left on campus is the waging of a heroic battle on behalf of Western Civilisation against the combined forces of Marxism in its multiple manifestations. In the final chapter, the author reviews the evidence in Marr's book for the alleged violence and finds none of it makes sense. There are holes through which a herd of African elephants could pass without touching the sides.   The book contains an index of names.