The Week in the West: Party favours
You would cry too if it happened to you.
When you Google ‘Christine Forster’, the headings for the search panel are “Politician” and “Tony Abbott’s sister”. Her website leads with a 2021 campaign for Lord Mayor of Sydney, but you have to read a fair way down to discover that since 2016 she has also been the head of media relations for Woodside. She does a pretty formidable job too, in my experience, but it never hurts to get some family support. And on Tuesday last week her brother, the former PM, popped up as he periodically does in the opinion pages of The Australian newspaper.
'PM’s Woodside snub says a lot about modern Labor' was the much-to-ponder headline and, while the tagline noted that our modern Archimedes was one of “two former Coalition PMs at Woodside’s 70th anniversary dinner in Perth”, it failed to mention that his sister runs their PR. “It says something about the mindset of the modern Labor Party that not a single federal Labor MP turned up at the weekend’s 70th anniversary celebration of our largest gas exporter,” Abbott reckoned in the lengthy piece. It says something else that said fossil fuel giant needed a family connection to whinge about the WA Premier failing to prioritise Woodside’s party over Labor party commitments in the Pilbara, “even though [Cook] has his own private plane that could easily have taken him to Perth and back in a couple of hours.” It’s one thing that no one wants to come to your birthday – it’s another to have Tony Abbott to whinge about it on your behalf.
It was nothing compared to The West’s above tirade, however, fulminating on the front page in all caps without even a question mark to soften the accusatory tone. Presumably, Woodside had called in the hit, which doesn’t make the tantrum any less embarrassing, but another resources company with a bit less skin in the Seven West game were also copping some collateral cringe this week as well. Say you run Regis Resources, a mid-tier mining outfit currently trying to extract gold from the hills of the Central Tablelands around Bathhurst in New South Wales. A few years ago, traditional custodians of the area filed a cultural heritage application to stop you building a massive tailings dam they say would destroy parts of their songlines. This week, you find out the federal Environment Minister has upheld their appeal, and banned your dam. On Friday afternoon, the Minister puts out a statement confirming the decision. You decline to comment. Nonetheless, the ASX declares a trading halt, as the decision is likely to blow out the cost of your project by hundreds of millions of dollars.
You probably don’t particularly want that news pulled splashed on the front page of the weekend paper on the opposite side of the country, right? Yeah, but what about if the headline is (probably?) a reference to a joke from a ‘90s sitcom? Well, tough shit buddy. Chris Dore’s in charge at The West Australian now, and he’ll do whatever the hell he feels like. And what he wants to do more than anything is run photos of Tanya Plibersek looking mean and saying no to something irrelevant to his readers. If you get cucked in the crossfire, that’s too bad.
We’ll have more on The West’s front page fixations soon.
Last week, we also spent some time doing what the WA government seems unable to do - listening to the families devastated by the ongoing youth justice crisis. Former Australian of the Year Fiona Stanley AC has spent years trying to get the Premier’s attention on this as well, and we were in the Coroner’s Court last week as she laid out everything she’d tried to show the government before it was too late. Will this inquest fall on deaf ears like all the warnings from experts and families before this entirely predicted tragedy?
Gerard Mazza
