Message to The Australian subs’ desk: Have the week off guys and plug these into the paper over the coming few days. The production instructions are in brackets next to the headlines. Pick up wires from there:
1. Labor Loses the Mothership (SPLASH)
A humiliated Labor Party was left surveying the wreckage at the weekend as the party’s birthplace in New South Wales was claimed by a resurgent Liberal-National coalition riding a national wave of anger at the proposed carbon tax.
2. Gillard Goes to Ground (SIDEBAR)
Prime Minister Julia Gillard has gone to ground to disassociate herself from an angry backlash from Labor votes in the nation’s biggest state and to prepare for an almighty assault in federal parliament against her contentious carbon tax.
3. Heartland Attack (ANALYSIS)
Tony Abbott’s Liberal-National Coalition, plugging into the real concerns of working people, took back Labor’s industrial heartland at the weekend and threw down the gauntlet to a shamed federal minority Labor government ruing its decision to propose a carbon tax.
4. Voice of the People (COLOUR STORY)
Australia’s blue-collar birthplace defied its political heritage at the weekend, turfing out a Labor state government and signalling to Julia Gillard’s teetering federal regime that the patience of the battlers will not countenance a carbon tax. Joe O’Reilly is a heavily tattooed building contractor in Penrith….
5. Opinion: Paul Kelly (SPELL CHECK ONLY)
Let there be no mistake. This is a profound seachange in Australian politics. Freed from the shackles of the old class wars, Tony Abbott has made his own imprimatur on a Liberal Party that has reinvented itself as a classless and populist expression of the national soul.
6. Opinion: Miranda Devine (USE THE SMIRK PICTURE)
So much for the bicycling premier. Most NSW voters don’t have the luxury of cycling to work to make them feel good about making a carbon impression that is meaningless in the scheme of things. So at last, we can drive our cars and chop down our neighbours’ trees with impunity once more. And doesn’t it feel good!!
7. Opinion: Janet Albrechtson (LOOKING OVER HER GLASSES)
In relative terms, the NSW Labor Party will say it won the election. Well, at least that is what their agents in the NSW Teachers’ Union will be telling your children this week. You see, there are no ‘losers’ in our schools any more. So there can be no losers in politics either.
8. Opinion: Andrew Bolt (NEXT TO SPORTS)
The defeat of the Keneally government is a mortal blow to those who would claim that immigrants to this country make a positive contribution. Would they have only have stopped the boats when that woman crawled into port 15 years ago.
9. Business: Terry McCrann (HIT UP RIO FOR AD)
Now business can breathe easier again. Tax and spend interventionist government has been given a red card by a community more interested in pursuing profit than killing initiative. The NSW election ends further attempts to tax mining and extract unfair rents from a bleeding fossil fuel industry.
10. Media: Caroline Overington (ADD ‘WALKLEY-WINNING’)
The power of the fourth estate, led by the probing efforts of News Ltd, has given new power to Australia’s proud democracy by exposing the short-comings of a Labor Party on its last legs and undermining the case for standalone action on alleged climate change.
(THE REAL EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes, NSW Labor was rotten and deserved to be tossed out. I didn’t vote for them either. But don’t underestimate the power of the News Ltd machine to turn this into something else).
15 Comments
Anonymous · March 27, 2011 at 1:04 PM
Your so-called satirical piece proves that the media is full of left-wing elites – just have a look at that line-up.
Anonymous · March 27, 2011 at 7:55 PM
A enjoyable post Mr D.
Unfortunately what may be presented here as satire will end up as reality in The Oz!
tigtog · March 27, 2011 at 8:38 PM
Nice one, Mr D. The spin will certainly just following deeply rutted tracks this week.
Robert van Aalst · March 27, 2011 at 9:18 PM
Brilliant. You may now also take the rest of the week off!!
Anonymous · March 27, 2011 at 9:42 PM
Close, but Bolt completely distracted by thinking he's got a scoop from Flannery who 'revealed'(in typical News Ltd groupthink where there is no such thing as science, only politics) that it's going to be really hard to get rid of the carbon that's already in the atmosphere… and in Bolt's mind that somehow means we should put more carbon in the atmosphere.
Anonymous · March 27, 2011 at 9:56 PM
Champagne satire and comedy!
Notus · March 27, 2011 at 10:16 PM
Far too close to the truth to be satire.
David Irving (no relation) · March 28, 2011 at 2:08 AM
I'm reminded of the remark that Tom Lehrer is alleged to have made when Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize.
Roger Wegener · March 28, 2011 at 2:22 AM
Hilarious – love it.
Anonymous · March 28, 2011 at 3:41 AM
Mr. D, This morning I saw the Australian headline, which seemed to suggest that Mr. O'Farrell promised to take the fight up to the Gilard Government on a number of issues such as health, but also including the “carbon tax”. I didn't hear his public statements (and can't find transcripts of his speech on Saturday night or his press conference yesterday), but I truly wondered if he'd explicitly made such an inclusion.
I checked the date of your post, to find that this spin was ready to go, and like the prescient observer you are, it was for the Monday edition; brilliant work!
PF
Anonymous · March 28, 2011 at 4:05 AM
And Piers, what did HE have to say?
Mr D · March 28, 2011 at 4:08 AM
I started writing Piers' contribution, but he says it so well on his blog that it is really beyond parody:
“NSW has delivered a tectonic shift in Australian politics – a shift so dynamic it has the capacity to alter the cultural course of the nation for the next decade and longer.”
Or maybe people just decided the Libs could govern better?
Felix · March 28, 2011 at 4:21 AM
Now doubt we will all be taken on a tour of the Potemkin Village that is the NSW ALP and the boys and girls from the Murdoch stable will add some of thier own embroidery. I'm willing to bet that by about Wednesday we'll be thinking more about the Golden Slipper (another race but this race features thoroughbreds as opposed to nags) and we won't care much about the political post-mortems.
Anonymous · March 29, 2011 at 5:30 AM
What, no Nikki Savva? Something about the alleged theological import of a Catholic being lected versus the a beleiver in the new religion of climate change?
Mr D · March 29, 2011 at 6:09 AM
Oh, Nikki was in the fashion supplement but we had to dump due to lack of advertisers