Posts Tagged Miranda Devine

The Devine Miss M

Miranda Devine is not impressed. During last weeks episode of Qanda, Aboriginal activist Bess Price was on the panel. As the debate ventured onto the topic of the Northern Territory intervention there were a few nasty tweets from those who disagreed with her stance. One from Barrister Larissa Behrendt ruffled a few feathers when she said that a show she had seen where a man had sex with a horse was less offensive than Bess Price.

For this Miranda Devine went into moral outrage overdrive!

THE bestiality tweet by inner-city barrister Larissa Behrendt against the Northern Territory activist Bess Price, was offensive.

We should be grateful for the tweet because it gave us a rare undisguised insight into the depraved and rancid core of the reflexively leftist, inner-urban, ivory-tower thinking that infects every level of politics, in every political party, at every university, in every protected job and every comfortable suburb shielded from hardship, and immune to reality.

Wow, she got all that from a single childish tweet? As Miranda took such offence from it then surely she would never ever be caught saying something similar? Oh wait.


I guess some bestiality jokes are all classy and witty and others are an obvious sign of moral bankruptcy. It’s so hard to tell the difference between the two though.

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Damn it, I want Janet

There seems to be a misconception that the ABC’s Q&A program is engaging and rewarding television. It’s not. In actual fact, it is vaudeville bullshit.

In more recent times and with the advent of the twitter machine, this misconception has only grown. Many observing the twitter hashtag on a Thursday evening (AEST) see #qanda become a “trending topic” and start to get giddy, thinking “Our ABC has really made it on the world stage now”. Unfortunately this popularity spike occurs all too frequently and I hate to spoil things but it’s actually our communist Asian neighbours mistyping their lovable bamboo eating mascot.

As you may not know, ABC star employee contracts frequently stipulate that as soon as the first Christmas decorations appear in shops, programs must begin to wind up or cease to broadcast for the year. Not much happens in November and almost nothing in December, so the view is that little should keep the ABC luminaries away from Paris in winter or the sanctity of Pearl Beach. In keeping with this, Q&A has already packed up for the year and it is a good time to reflect on what could have been.

The worst part of Q&A is how unbearably predictable it all is. Watching the self-righteousness of David Marr with that smug grin and all knowing whine or Sophie Mirabella. Well, two words are enough to describe her.

In fact the only participant that I honestly enjoyed watching was Janet Albrechtsen. Seriously. She knows what she thinks and she just says it. No façade, no sensitivity or groupthink (if you can excuse the irony there). Sure, the underlying sado-masochistic, power suit/corporate lawyer look is pretty stale but as a form of political entertainment, I think she is a star.

I rarely read her column in the Oz because it is predictable and equivalent to unpacking seventeen gaffa taped boxes to find little inside, but on TV she is great. She is so great that I think she should have her own ABC program. Before the wowsers start wailing about ABC Board members being ‘impartial’ – what about Quentin Dempster, he somehow manages to walk the impartial tight rope? I’m sure Janet can too.  Instead of the conservatives constantly complaining about Left wing bias or the lack of conservatives on the ABC, why shouldn’t Janet have the chance to have a chat with those forgotten people ignored by our Leftist media!

The other thing that has become apparent is the complete lack of engaging female conservatives. Besides Ms Mirabella, Helen Coonan, Julie Bishop or Bettina ‘Blackshirt’ Arndt, there isn’t a lot of media talent. Poor old Miranda Devine belts out columns but she hasn’t got it for TV. Mind you, she’d be great to play Scrabble with, “Hey MD, can I borrow an UM?”

As an interim measure, I suggest Mark Scott punts Tony Jones into a new show where he can truly blossom, reading his own poetry. I think Q&A in 2010, hosted by Janet Albrechtsen would be compulsory television.

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Miranda Devine cops heaps from cyclists. Pfft, that’s so 2005!

Miranda Devine wrote something to upset cyclists and is so surprised that she upset some of them that she wrote another column about the vitriolic feedback she copped. I have some advice for Miranda — best move on!

In a past life I was the editor of a little mag called the Emerald Hill Weekly, which any of you living in the City of Port Phillip, may know.

I had a weekly column, which was an absolute pleasure. It was like a blog but with a lot more responsibility as people actually took it seriously. So I’d often comment about local issues, of which there were plenty to write about, and take stances that may or not have pleased the Council or residents who were members of one of the many action groups or alliances protesting about everything from park closures to the opening of a skate park for kiddies to play on – yes, you Trevor Marmalade!

One day I was hard up for a column and I was about to go on an eleven-night cruise. Care factor was at the lower end of the scale so I followed that tried and tested cure for the weary columnist; when in doubt go the cyclists! Luckily I had a hook. Then Mayor of Port Phillip Darren Ray had been quoted as saying in a new story we ran, ”It was about time motorists subsidised pedestrians and cyclists, rather than the other way round”.

I liked Darren Ray, but took issue to this comment in that motorists pay registration, fuel levies and stamp duty on new cars so it was a bit unfair to say they were being subsidised — though I may have taken things a little too far.

This is what I wrote back in July 2005.

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Vegetarian cyclist hits back

Last week Sydney Morning Herald columnist Miranda Devine wrote a piece about how cyclists are all bastards who have no place on the road and how motorists would be justified in running them over and how she hopes they will all just fuck off.

Whoever made up the Roads and Traffic Authority’s 1990s slogan ”the road is there to share” has a lot to answer for. It’s a big fat lie. The road is not there to share. Roads are built for cars. Pretending otherwise is unfair to motorists and cyclists alike.

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The ideologues who have fostered the road-sharing lie must think a few dead cyclists and pedestrians are a small price to pay for getting cars off the road, because that is their ultimate aim: to make driving so unpleasant, slow, expensive and fraught with hazards that motorists give up.

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