Commenter-in-chief
Seven West's Chris Dore takes on the haters.
They say to never read the comments, but it appears the editor-in-chief of The West Australian and The Nightly Chris Dore isn’t just peeking – he’s chiming in. Accounts by the name of ‘C D’ and ‘Christopher D’ have been posting for months in the comments section of the former Australian editor’s Nightly column ‘The Front Dore’, with both accounts sometimes posting on the same article.
Your average online comments section is a cesspit of vile hatred, but in Dore’s case, things can’t really get much uglier than what’s in the columns themselves. Take, for example, a line from this week that echoed some of the most dehumanising of Israeli propaganda: “[Penny] Wong again, as she has done countless times since the October 7 massacres, admonished the Jewish state for having the temerity, the gall, to defend itself against the vile beasts of Hamas and Hezbollah.”
C D kept coming back over days to respond to the latest from his readers. When I last checked, there were 82 comments on the piece, 28 of them from C D.
One user, Michael I, wholeheartedly agreed with Dore that Albanese was appeasing terrorists and committing foreign policy blunders, but wrote, “Pity Albo fails to read this.”
C D replied: “I’m sure Albo reads The Nightly”. After all, that’s the whole reason for the digital outlet’s existence – to exert Seven West Media muscle on a small audience of Canberra politicians.
Dore seems to particularly rankle at the suggestion he is out of touch with common folk. In one thread, C D pulled an Abanese-esque move by pointing to his own working-class origin story.
User Michael E wrote: “Wow half a page of elitist private school diatribe before you get to your political point.”
C D’s response: “Google Christies Beach High school”.
There are months' worth of comments to pore through if one is so inclined, but it gets tiresome after a while. As the editor-in-chief of two daily papers and 19 regional papers, you’d think Dore would be too busy to wage culture war in the comments, but turns out this keyboard warrior is deep in the trenches.
Is EPA chair appointment a ‘defensible solution’?
WA’s Environmental Protection Agency has a new chair – but his past employment in property development and environmental consultancy has raised fresh questions about the watchdog’s independence.
EPA board member Darren Walsh has been promoted to the top job, after previously working at Satterley Property Group and as executive director of environmental consulting firm JBS&G.
The JBS&G website reads rather ominously. “Contamination risk, potential liabilities or an unhappy community causing you concern?” the front page asks. “Through our specialist Consentium advisory business, we stand shoulder to shoulder with you and provide you with a wealth of experience, support and defensible solutions.” Elsewhere: “We remove complexity and solve problems.”
There is plenty of ‘complexity’ the EPA will have to deal with in coming months, including its final advice to the state government on Woodside’s Browse development, over which there are significant pockets of ‘unhappy community’. After leaked preliminary advice from the EPA that Browse was too environmentally risky, it might be hard to find a ‘defensible solution’ that will allow the body to recommend it proceed, but if anyone is up for the job, I imagine it might be Walsh.
As WAtoday reported this week, JBS&G made $30,000 worth of donations to WA Labor between 2021 and 2023 while Walsh was director.
Greens MLC Brad Pettitt told WAtoday: “The fact that JBS&G made donations totalling more than $30,000 to the WA Labor party at a time when the new chair was still working for them in a senior role does not pass the pub test and must be urgently investigated.”
JBS&G says on its website it has done “compliance and approval requirements” work for Yara Pilbara Fertilisers, which operates on the Burrup Peninsula where Woodside wants to process Browse gas. Yara has had multiple polluting chemical spills in recent years. JBS&G also does work for Seven Group Holdings backed gas company Beach Energy.
In November last year, as an incoming EPA board member, Walsh told a panel at the WA Energy Transition Summit that the agency in fact should shift its “mindset and culture” to focus on facilitating rather than holding up projects. “It’s about saying well, my job is to actually help this project through the process as quickly as possible,” he said, according to The West Australian. And here I was thinking the purpose of the Environmental Protection Agency was to protect the environment.
School’s out
It was revealed in Parliament last month that 1263 Western Australian public school teachers resigned last year. Since Covid, teachers have been leaving public education in droves. I’d know, because I’m one of them. This week, I reflected on why so many teachers are getting out, and why the trend will only continue. Read here.
Gerard Mazza
