Scandal

Like all moral upstanding citizens of Australia, I have been shocked by the revelations about Craig Thomson.

This is a man who, if the allegations are to be believed, ripped thousands of dollars off his employer so he could blow it all on hookers, booze and good times.

But despite all of this he is still being criticised.

Continue reading "In defence of Craig Thomson" »

In perhaps his most extraordinary exclusive to date, Joe has obtained the credit card statement that could bring down Labor MP Craig Thomson and with him the whole Gillard Government.

See below for this truly explosive document…

Continue reading "The Bill" »

There are few spectacles more engrossing in politics than watching Craig Thomson squirm painfully amid insistences he has been falsely accused of particularly grubby conduct.

One of those few things is the sudden and carefully crafted indignation of the Opposition, complete with furrowed brows and head-shakes of disbelief at the enormity of the Thomson accusations.

It’s an interesting contest - allegations which could, if true, remove Mr Thomson from any role in public life; an Opposition which wasn’t interested in these claims of serious misconduct until it saw the opportunity for political gain.

Continue reading "Scent of an election fuels Tony’s faux outrage" »

So Todd Carney will still be a Sydney Rooster, despite about 183 indiscretions this year. In other unsurprising news, Bondi Beach has waves and airheads.

Carney is the troubled playmaker who last year won the NRL’s highest honour, the Dally M Medal. He won that award, and steered the Roosters from the wooden spoon to the grand final in his first year at the club, after a year out of the NRL due to numerous alcohol-related indiscretions.

Carney spent 2009 playing park footy at the Atherton Roosters in north Queensland. He lived and worked in a pub, which might sound crazy, but in truth it had the effect of rubbing a puppy’s nose in its own poo. For the first time, he saw drunks through sober eyes, and he said it was a genuine shock.

Continue reading "Roosters lash their star idiot with a feather – again" »

Kyle Sandilands is a genius. An absolute, out and out Einstein.

The 40 year old broadcaster has no talent, no decorum, no personality, no looks, no style, no charm and no knowledge of anything outside the vast universe that is his ego. Yet the guy is hugely successful.

I have rarely listened to Kyle Sandilands on the radio, nor indeed watched the talent shows on which he is a judge. That’s not snobbery. It’s just how it is. But just as you didn’t need to read Eat Pray Love to know it was bag of fertiliser-grade horse manure, you don’t need to listen to Kyle to know his shows are rubbish. And that, right there, is the proof that he’s so damn clever.

Continue reading "Is Kyle Sandilands Australia’s smartest man?" »

So much for the schadenfreudegasm.

Last night’s grilling of Rupert and James Murdoch by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee was rather more like a ‘rose ceremony’ in an episode of The Bachelor: slow and excruciating, but compulsive viewing nonetheless.

The entire event was full of tension and politeness in equal measure, and James Murdoch’s long-winded non-response to the first question was more heavily scripted than the episode of Winners and Losers which aired earlier in the evening.

Continue reading "Po-faced and pie-faced, what next for Murdoch?" »

It is one of the great dangers of this new technological age that we are all potential victims of “computer hacking”.

Computer hacking is an insidious and underhanded practice that infliltrates “computers”, which are like typewriters that you can play solitaire on.

The risks of hacking were brutally demonstrated in the 2007 documentary Die Hard 4.0, in which Bruce Willis spends two hours and eight minutes trying to send an email, only to give up and get someone from Generation Y to do it.

Continue reading "All this hacking raises this hapless hack’s hackles" »

The end of the News of the World as we know it. I can’t help but feel partly responsible. It’s not because I ever worked for the paper masquerading as a fake sheik exposing celebrity transsexuals, randy bishops and corrupt snooker stars.

It’s not because – as a writer for a News Ltd publication – I feel infected by some sort of communicable corporate unscrupulousness. It’s not even because I belong to the broad – and now broadly disgraced – field of journalism.

Nope. The real reason I feel partly culpable for the foul play of this nasty little tabloid is because I like reading about grubby celebrity scandals. And grubby celebrity scandals often require grubby journalistic tactics.

Continue reading "In our own way, we all love a little News of The World" »

The push by Bob Brown and Julia Gillard for a parliamentary inquiry into the media is so cynical, manipulative and transparently biased that if we really were as evil as they believe we’d congratulate them both for joining the dark side.

Both leaders are seeking to establish a connection in the public’s mind between the obscene and illegal practices exposed in the UK and perfectly conventional and legitimate journalism and commentary in Australia with which they just happen to disagree.

It is extraordinary both how blatantly they have hijacked the issue and how seamlessly the more naïve and ideological sections of the community have followed them to this at best offensive and at worst dangerous illogicality.

Continue reading "Gillard and Brown are shootin’ the messenger" »

Wouldn’t it be a wondrous thing if we were all treated like sports stars? Adored, spoiled and treated like gods with a sense of entitlement that knows no bounds.

Never having to pay for a drink or stand in a queue, paid squillions to do what we love, nubile young things throwing themselves at us, wives willing to turn a blind eye and fans eager to defend us to the death no matter how impertinent or obnoxious we behave. Indeed any act of arseclownery is tolerated as long as we perform on the field.

Even if we descend into criminal behaviour, our extensive support network is there to catch us and the ever indulgent public is always eager to give us yet another chance. No behavior, no matter how abhorrent and criminal is going to see us robbed of the opportunity to redeem ourselves.

Continue reading "One rule for sports stars, another for us mere mortals" »

Claims of abuse with the ADF have emerged again. Community concern with a Defence culture has again been reignited; the continuing fallout of the ADFA Skype Affair and other occurrences like the HMAS Success and Cerberus sex incidents.

The more things change the more they stay the same. There comes a point when we must call a spade a spade and make a clean sweep. These may be clichés but I am in keeping with tradition.

In 1983 Major General Coates, the commandant of RMC, explained to the Melbourne Sun that bastardisation at the college was not of a ‘general or systemic’ nature. Major General Coates assured us, civil society, that he was ‘certain’ of this.

Continue reading "Defence’s head is in the sand, and I don’t mean Afghanistan" »

EUROPE: the IMF asks for EU members to share in a 78 billion euro bailout of Portugal. EU Finance Ministers unanimously agree.

NEW YORK: Head of the IMF offers to have his wife post $1million bail to get him out of Harlem police Cell.  Judge refuses.

The most minute details concerning the incident that lead to Dominique Strauss-Kahn missing his flight this weekend will no doubt become common knowledge over the next few weeks.

Continue reading "How you see le scandal rests beaucoup on your politics" »

Sex and alcohol used to be the weapons of choice if you wanted to attract fellow uni students to a meeting.  The ad industry has known for decades that sex sells. 

And now we have the internet to tell us in even more precise detail just how attractive humans find sex, scandals or booze – preferably all three.

So should we be surprised that, as Lindsay Tanner’s new book Sideshow highlights, the media don’t love good policy, but they simply adore “sexy” stories? 

Continue reading "We are all to blame for the dumbing down of politics" »

Safe sex used to be simple. Step A: take one vending machine prophylactic. Step B: use it.

These days, everything is much more complicated. These days, protecting yourself from “going viral” may also involve checking for hidden webcams and erasing your ex-partner’s flash drive.

Most of Australia is now familiar with the case of the 18-year-old Australian Defence Force Academy cadet whose peers called her a “skank” and a “dirty whore” after a male cadet secretly recorded the two of them having sex.

Continue reading "When old misogyny meets new technology" »

I grew up idolising the greatest politician the world has ever seen.

As a boy, I would sit, clutching sugary treats, as he performed all manner of administrative miracles.

He was the one who taught me about terrorism, the perils of cloning, the dangers of space travel and that CIA-style pencil-pushing can lead to muscular atrophy.

Continue reading "Politicians: The Masters of Charisma. Just add crazy." »

Just like that, the St Kilda scandal engulfed another victim.

On Channel 7’s Sunday Night was a much-hyped interview with Kim’s parents. Kim being the 17-year-old at the centre of the St Kilda scandal. Parents Tony and Susan went on television and spoke of their horror at being called “bad parents”, the death threats levelled against them, and their fears for the safety of their younger daughter, who is just 10.

Then there’s a gratuitous shot of Kim jogging through a park with her little sister. So now everyone knows what this young girl, who is arguably the only innocent one in the whole sordid mess, looks like.

Continue reading "St Kilda scandal: Guilty parents, an innocent child" »

For a blubbering, lonely, unlucky-in-love, toxic politician with a ‘hit-me’ sign on his back, SA Police Minister and former Treasurer Kevin Foley sure has risen in my estimations.

I can’t believe he’s still standing. I can’t believe he hasn’t packed his bags (no, not just for his latest overseas jaunt) and signed a lucrative deal for his own guts-spilling talkback radio show.

I can’t believe he only slightly teared up at his press conference last Monday. I’d have been pulling my hair out, frothing at the mouth and howling with sheer exasperation. Not least because of the double standards that have applied to him and Premier Mike Rann in the past 18 months.

Continue reading "Labor’s woes will not end with this man" »

On school visits, Benji Marshall has a fun and disarming way of introducing himself. He says “my name is Benjamin Quentin Marshall” as the kids look on with bemusement. Marshall will no doubt introduce himself with similar formality, minus the cheeky grin, when he fronts court on assault charges on April 20. But regardless of what happens that day, I’d still invite him to my kids’ school.

Marshall, who launched the 2011 NRL season last week, was allegedly racially taunted in the most vulgar possible way on Saturday night. This, after he’d MC’d a charity function for the Children’s Cancer Institute which raised $244,000, then stayed out in town for a few drinks, and a fateful 3am burger, which all made sense as he had a room booked in town.

Obviously, The Punch wasn’t there. But let me say this: in five years at Australia’s biggest sporting magazine Alpha, I met numerous topline footballers in all codes. And Benji Marshall was right at the top of the list of the players who struck me as intelligent, wholesome, and thoroughly unlikely to turn feral without the severest provocation.

Continue reading "Benji Marshall. Hero. Gentleman. Good guy" »

Enough. Unpopular though it may be, it is a time to take a stand.

We have to stop celebrating morons and their attendant antics. We have to stop defending idiots and their self-imposed tragedies.

Whether it be a middle-aged former cricketer with a penchant for romancing equally vacuous bimbos or drug-addled footballers with a natural gift for screwing up every fifth chance offered to them - it’s about time we drew a line in the sand and said “sod off!”.

Continue reading "The Stupid People: They are legion, and dangerous" »

From the very second those stolen/borrowed nudie rompin’ footballer photos were released, the “St Kilda schoolgirl story” has had me biting my tongue.

I bit down through the girl’s distribution of those handwritten “Women’s Rights” and “Fight the Power” flyers at the training session. Bit down a little more watching her YouTube testimonials. And while reading her Tweets. And her blog. And I bit down a whole lot more through her drip-drip video releases.

I bit down because biting down is exactly what’s expected of me. Women just aren’t supposed to criticise other women. Least of all not 17-year-old girls.

Continue reading "Women can critique each other without a catfight" »

Bought a new washing machine the other day. It works better than the old one, is quieter, and uses less energy. But one thing is the same. That spin cycle at the end of the wash still takes as long as it always did. Some things just can’t be rushed.

The same cannot be said for the spin cycle of modern sporting scandals. Wayward players and their handlers, wily to the imminent public outcry after a night-on-the-piss gone wrong or equivalent misdemeanour, move at lightning speed to ward off the damage.

This weekend’s Todd Carney drink-driving incident was a classic case. Early Saturday morning, the man who was proudly starting to wear the tag “former bad boy” was arrested for drink-driving.

Continue reading "Spin cycle relegates true remorse to the bench" »

It is part of every reporter’s mandatory training that any time a scandal erupts you have to put the word ``gate’’ after it.

Thus we have had Utegate, Wheatgate, Monkeygate and Wormgate, just to name a few.

Indeed according to Wikipedia—which is also part of every reporter’s mandatory training—Australia accounts for no fewer than six of the official ``gate’’ scandals, more than holding its own among tough competition from Camillagate, Nipplegate and Whitewatergate.

Continue reading "Nixongate in the Hotelgate with the Schoolgate Girlgate" »

Melbourne has a particular view of itself. You know what I mean – pretty, arty girls in cheese-cloth skirts running around after giant balls of string. All those laneway bars populated by smart people wearing Ted Bakers. Big sporting events and, of course, a footy code that’s so much more sophisticated than the one the “mungos” play north of the border.

Well, Melbourne’s image is a tad tarnished this morning folks. Just like that big ball of wool, it’s been unravelling for a while. The conga-line of AFL scandals is nothing new to league fans – we’ve been enduring them for years – but you do wonder how it’s going to be taken by the horn-rims-and-Converse crowd in St Kilda.

The extraordinary thing is that the most damage has been done with a man wearing a tight perm.

Continue reading "So who’s the screwed up code now, eh?" »

As Lainie Anderson wrote in this piece yesterday, it’s wrong for anyone, let alone the likes of Peter Costello, to cast aspersions on the character of all footballers based on a few sporadic incidents. Because really, when you’re dealing with up to 1,000 blokes between 18 and 32, a bit of Tony Abbott’s favourite phrase is going to happen from time to time.

But this stuff with The Girl at the heart of the St Kilda facebook pictures scandal, and her allegations about big time player agent Ricky Nixon is a bad business. This is some seriously low rent theatre we’re watching now.

Let’s start with the girl first. The 17 year old schoolgirl, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, first came in contact with St Kilda players who visited her school on a footy clinic.

Continue reading "Grubby & grubbier: The sad girl and the wayward agent" »

St Kilda, you’ve done it again. After escaping to New Zealand to train in peace after the shocking, dragged-out nude photo-schoolgirl scandal, a group of Saints have disgraced themselves.

Alcohol, drugs and late nights are often on the agenda of young people wanting to have fun. It acts as a form of escapism, as the youths unwittingly rebel against strict team rules, in the case of the four St Kilda bad boys. They’ve been like naughty boys on school camp, rather than a bunch of committed, professional athletes.

What was Zac Dawson thinking? After being caught in an embarrassing photo with a fully naked Nick Reiwoldt (Dawson’s skipper, mind you), Dawson, 24, got up to strife with three younger players - Rhys Stanley, Jack Steven and Paul Cahill. The players have been disciplined, including a six-week ban and a hefty fine each - but they have dented their reputations.

Continue reading "Exorcising the devil in the Saints" »

Another day, another footballer caught up in a scandal.

Today it’s Riewoldt fronting the media in defence of explicit pictures a teenager posted on Facebook.

He says he asked the photographer to delete the photos. Smart. He didn’t make sure that happened. Dumb.

Continue reading "Football scandal spreads on internet. Again." »

Few of us will ever know how it feels to be as wealthy or perhaps as drop-dead gorgeous as Elin Nodergren, but plenty of people following the Tiger Woods saga will understand how it feels to be betrayed by someone you love. 

In her first and only interview with US People magazine this week, Nordergen admitted to have been completely “blindsided” by Tiger’s actions, that their marriage for her was a “real one” and that she had never doubted Woods for a second.

“For the last three-and-a-half years, when all this was going on, I was home a lot more with pregnancies, then the children and my school. 

“I was blindsided…I felt stupid and embarrassed,” she said of her reactions to the seemingly unending revelations of Tiger’s infidelities.

Continue reading "Elin Nordegren is stronger on her own" »

Updated 7.25am: Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reports it was known inside cabinet for years that Campbell had been visiting gay clubs and saunas. There’s analysis here and you can watch a video report including the Channel 7 footage here.

NSW transport minister David Campbell has just resigned after being sprung using his taxpayer-funded car to visit a gay sex club (funny how it’s always the car that does them in).

Seven News showed footage of the married father, who has actively campaigned as a family man, leaving the club where you pay $22 to spend time with like-minded blokes.

On Tuesday night just gone he’d ditched his driver, and driven himself to the establishment known as Kens at Kensington. The Kens website says: “Ken’s is the spacious, clean and safe place to meet sexy guys. Ken’s has everything you want in a venue — ideal for a short lunch-break, a long hard evening or day, or meeting up with (or finding!) someone special!”

Continue reading "Just another day in the swill that is NSW politics" »

Denials do not get any more categorical or absolute than this - and as of his press conference an hour ago, Mike Rann is being hailed as Adelaide’s own Bill Clinton after looking straight into the camera and declaring that he did not have sexual relations with that woman.

But unlike Clinton’s twitchy and unconvincing handling of the Monica Lewinsky allegations, Rann came out all guns blazing, specifically denying key aspects of the bombshell interview by his former friend and parliamentary barmaid Michelle Chantelois, hammering the fact that she was paid bucketloads of cash to sell her story, and declaring that he will sue both Channel Seven and New Idea for peddling allegations which he says are categorically false.

Rann also seized on the fact that Channel Seven got a key part of its story wrong, in falsely asserting that Chantelois’s estranged husband Rick Phillips had not been charged with assault after he punched the Premier in the face with a rolled-up magazine in a chance encounter at the Adelaide Wine Centre last month.

Continue reading "Rann’s emphatic sex denial might not end this affair" »

Update 1.20pm AEDT: Rann is due to speak to the media at 2.30pm AEDT today. Passing waiting journalists heading into a cabinet meeting earlier he refused to deny outright having sex with Chantelois.

Today could decide the career of Australia’s most popular premier and Punch contributor Mike Rann. “It is disappointing and distressing that a friendship I had with Michelle Chantelois more than four years ago has become the subject of such sensationalised publicity,” the SA Premier said this morning. There’s more from his statement over the jump.

The publicity, which you may have caught, was the airing last night of a detailed account of an affair that former parliamentary barmaid Michelle Chantelois claims to have had with Rann. She claims it involved sex on the premier’s desk and clandestine trips to a golf course for romps in the dark. The trouble for Rann is that he has been insisting there was never any sex.

As one senior Labor figure said: “At the end of the day, she has either made the whole thing up or he’s lying.”

Continue reading "The Mike Rann sex scandal: is it a sacking offence?" »