Compogate – Or Turning the Tables on Kathy Gallagher

I am rather embarrassed to admit this, but many years ago I was friends with a mad keen Collingwood supporter.  He was not typical of the rabid Collingwood supporter, mind you: he still had all his teeth, no tattoos, no criminal record, and had recently completed his law degree.

We were close enough friends that I was invited to his wedding, where we were all compelled at the reception to join him in singing ‘Good Old Collingwood Forever!’.   [It is to my lasting shame that I do know the words of that song.]

Apart from the rendition of the theme song, the reception was a pretty normal sort of wedding.  It was held in the hall next to his family’s parish church, there were the usual complement of groomsmen and bridesmaids etc, and all the right people made the sort of speeches about how great the newly weds were together.  [They divorced within a decade or so, in case you were wondering. Nor did I get invited to his second wedding as the friendship had died around the time the first marriage did.] 

And as happens at just about every wedding reception or gala dinner I have been to, the tables were numbered, although I do wonder whether or not my erstwhile friend was tempted to name them after Collingwood premiership coaches and captains.  It was not the fashion in 1991 to release doves from a basket outside the church, but it is just as well this idea did not occur to the wedding planner, as I don’t think releasing magpies from a basket would have ended well.

The news report that David Sharaz and Brittany Higgins have just officially gotten married in Queensland has got me wondering about how the wedding planning went, particularly the reception.

You see, the starter wedding of David Sharaz, current partner of Brittany Higgins, had some more bizarre features to ornament the wedding reception.  One was featuring official photos of the happy (not for long) couple holding rescue cats, rather than being surrounded by either the bridal party or close family and friends.  Another, more intriguingly given Mr Sharaz was a journalist at the Canberra Press Gallery, was that the tables at the reception were not numbered, but rather, they were named after Federal Labor Party leaders. [Although that might have had more to do with the fact that Mrs Sharaz mark 1 was a one eyed Labor tragic and staffer.]

You get the idea: the Shorten table, the Gillard table, the Rudd table, the Whitlam table etc.  I expect that the closest family and friends would have been put on either the Curtin table or the Hawke table, and that the C-listers would have been put on the Calwell or Hayden table.

I doubt very much that there would have been a Cook, Hughes, Lyons, or Latham table.

Knowing from news reports that Kathy Gallagher had been invited to this 2018 wedding, as she was regarded by Mr Sharaz as a dear friend, although she did not attend, has seriously picqued my curiosity.  Which table would she have been placed on if she had graciously RSVPed her attendance? Is she dear enough a friend to merit being on the Hawke, Curtin, Chifley or Whitlam tables?  Is she a little more than just a work friend, meriting the Keating, Gillard or Rudd tables?  Or is she just there as someone they wanted to curry favour to, and hence only getting placed on something like the Shorten table?  And what do they think of someone who gets placed on the Evatt or Calwell table?

I am not sure about the Forde table – probably where the doddering maiden aunt or embarrassingly drunken uncle gets placed in the far corner.

Which leads me to the issue which has been foremost in the minds of our Canberra Bubbleers this past year, given compensation payments and a certain defamation case – how well did Kathy Gallagher know David Sharaz, and when exactly did she find out about the allegations which were going to be raised around the alleged sexual assault of Miss Higgins at Parliament House in 2019?

This issue of foreknowledge is important to us taxpayers.  As Minister of State responsible for administering the Department of Finance, Senator Gallagher is responsible for making decisions under various Acts of Parliament, including those administering the Commonwealth’s worker’s compensation scheme (ComCare), and other related liability insurances (ComCover).  She also would be responsible for decision making on any Act of Grace payment outside of those liabilities.  

This means that she was responsible for authorising the confidential payment to Brittany Higgins in settlement of the lawsuit which she had bought aside the Commonwealth in relation to any injuries she may have incurred as a result of the incident in 2019.  She also would have been involved in the decision to settle the matter, although I suspect that under the terms of the ComCare and ComCover legislation, it would be possible to mount a vigourous defence in relation to claimed liabilities incurred where someone entered a Commonwealth premise outside of their normal working hours and in a severely intoxicated state.

As a decision maker in such matters, it would have been appropriate for her to declare any potential conflicts of interest and prior relationship with any of the parties privy to this settlement.  

However, it appears that Senator Gallagher has denied any fore knowledge of the 2019 incident before it was made public by Miss Higgins, and any imputation that her conduct in making decisions on the settlement were influenced by either personal friendship or political expediency.

Parliament House is a workplace where occupational hazards and incidents will and do occur  – and it appears that this particular incident has resulted in an exceptionally fast and generous compensation payout (it is a confidential figure so we do not know the exact amount).  However, in other cases, where there are incidents or workplace injuries which occur that do not involve high profile or well connected employees, they do not get the expeditious settlement of their workplace injury claims by ComCare or ComCover.

In this case, a settlement was reached which is both generous and expeditious.  If this is a reasonable standard, then other employees in Parliament and elsewhere deserve similar treatment?  And to what extent should the taxpayer wear the significant expense of this standard, which is in this case significantly beyond what victims of crime in similar cases can expect.

I consider that it well may be that this settlement was a reasonable outcome, and that it may have been appropriate for Senator Gallagher to make the decision herself rather than step aside for someone else to do so.  However, if she has misled the Parliament and the public about her relationship with Sharaz and her foreknowledge of the 2019 incident, then it is reminiscent of the Watergate scandal – Nixon was forced out of his job not because of the burglary committed by his henchmen, but by his involvement in covering it up.

Hence I call this current matter Compogate.

But I am dying to know answers to several current burning questions, namely: whether Senator Gallagher was invited to David Sharaz’s latest wedding, whether the tables were again named after Labor leaders, and which such-named table she was seated at?

Just Like The Road Runner: Mad Max Remains Fun And Relevant

As a child, I was fond of watching the old Warner Brothers cartoons, you know: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat, and of course the Road Runner.

Road Runner is an amusing cartoon series, where the laws of physics, particularly those of gravity, are defied, and there are frequent explosions and high velocity crashes as the Coyote pursues the Road Runner across the desert. Apparently this did inspire the most violence amongst children of any cartoon show, although I have no source to cite for this assertion other than one of my high school teachers.

The closest thing to Road Runner in modern cinema is the Mad Max franchise. The plot of each film consists of a Road Runner-like hero (Mad Max) defying the Coyotesque villains (all of whom seem almost to be mutants in their grotesqueness) in a race across a post apocalyptic wasteland involving high speeds, ultra violence, and many crashes and explosions.

One of the improvements over Road Runner in Mad Max is that the villains have some pretty good lines – particularly the Lord Humungus (the Ayatollah of the Rock and Rolla) in Mad Max 2. Not Shakespearean by any means, but the villains are quite entertaining.

I believe that Mad Max 3 (ie Beyond Thunderdome) might have been the last film I saw at the Grand Footscray, back in August 1985. [For those who are curious, the Grand closed down as a cinema in 1987 and became a bingo hall for a few years, and has since then been disused for very many years.]

It took 30 years for Mad Max 4 (Fury Road) to come out. Sadly, Mel Gibson was gone from the role that made him a star, but I did not mind seeing Tom Hardy step into it, and for Charlize Theron as the Imperator Furiosa (although as a student of Latin, I am offended by the incorrect gender usage – she should have been the Imperatrix Furiosa).

Now, almost a decade later, we have a prequel to Mad Max 4, Furiosa, which focuses on that most interesting of the supporting characters in that film. Anya Taylor-Joy takes over the role originated by Theron a decade ago, and does a great job of it.

Commentators have been talking about the failure of Furiosa at the box office, despite all the hype leading up to it. There probably will be some arguing that having a female lead is another of those instances of Go Woke, Go Broke, and perhaps that is the case, as it appears to be in the Disneyfication of Star Wars.

But that does not really matter to me. Furiosa is a very fun film, just as the Road Runner cartoons are fun. We have everyone having fun playing the roles of monstrous and narcissistic villains, and lots of car chases and explosions. The henchmen are, as they always have been, a heady blend of pathetic and grotesque, particularly Scrotus and Rectus (I laughed out loud when they were introduced).

The scene where the warlord Dementus comes with his bikie hoarde to the Citadel and tries to persuade the denizens of this fortress to displace their ruler, Immortan Joe, has the sort of soliloquy that is reminiscent of the Lord Humungus in Mad Max 2. It is not going to get Chris Hemsworth an Oscar nomination, but I enjoyed it just as much as when I watched the earlier Mad Max films.

And having Furiosa as the main character? I did not mind it at all, particularly as she has been given more depth than what we had previously known about her, and arguably more than Mad Max himself (although character development is not really that important or necessary in Mad Max).

And she does a fantastic job of shooting people, running people over, and blowing things up, which is what Mad Max movies really are all about.

Just like the Road Runner.

The McBride Case – A Plea For Mercy

The sentencing of War Crimes whistleblower David McBride to over 5 years in prison last week was a sad day for justice in Australia.

He is, to this point in time, the only person to be imprisoned in relation to the war crimes which were allegedly committed by Australians in Afghanistan.

Six months ago, when he pleaded guilty after his main defence, that his conscience overrode his legal obligations, was rejected by the courts, I wrote about the situation in this blog:

Australia’s Own Dreyfus Affair

As I conceded then, the law has been broken and it is the place of the courts to punish the law breaker in accordance with the law.

A couple of days ago, I watched the commentary by the popular political vlogger Friendly Jordies on the sentencing on his YouTube channel:

My political beliefs are on the whole, rather different from those of Friendly Jordies, but I think we do share a sense of justice and fairness.

David McBride has been dealt with very harshly by the courts in comparison to some legitimate criminals who commit rapes and similar violent crimes. His only crime came from following his conscience to do what he believed served a higher purpose of justice.

He is now being punished for that. Given that the decision was made to persecute him under the laws of the land, and to reject the legitimacy of the defence argument he raised, this is as it should be.

However, the issue of conscience, and whether there are other, extenuating, circumstances here beyond that of a typical lawbreaker, is something which really should be examined further.

I believe, given that the bipartisan decision was made to initiate and persist with the prosecution, that it is up to the elected leadership of the nation to determine whether justice has been sufficiently served now, and whether it would be appropriate to consider pardoning David McBride and releasing him.

An example has been made which will deter others from whistle blowing on national secrets which will trouble the consciences of the secret keepers. He is no on going threat to either national security or to the community. Showing mercy and pardoning him now would be a just outcome, and make us think better of our elected officials.

Broo removed from ASX

Discovered just now when checking my Commsec account that Broo is no longer listed on the ASX.

When a company is removed from the ASX or changes its code, the result is rather Orwellian: it’s as if it has ceased to exist and never existed. Finding information about it needs to be done by other means than just your stock broking app or the ASX website.

As it turns out, an announcement last Monday was made by ASX compliance that as it has been suspended from trading for two years, it is removed from the ASX list.

The listing itself was one of the few items of value remaining as a tangible asset to Broo. This makes it coming back in some form ot other that little bit harder.

Ain’t I glad that I did not participate in the float at 20 cents per share 8 years ago.

Someone really doesn’t like our local MP Ben Carroll…

Saw the below when in Keilor Road yesterday. Obviously someone has gone to a lot of effort to express their dislike of our local state MP.

Not sure whether it’s anything particlar in relation to his ministerial duties or simply that he is a senior member of a government who ruthlessly suppressed legitimate expressions of protest during the pandemic.

In any case, we are lucky in Australia that this is about as extreme as political protest gets.

Brisbane Olympics 2032 – A Missed Opportunity?

I first visited Brisbane in July 1989, and I happened to go along to see the Britain – Australia Rugby Union Test (I think these days Rugby Union in the UK is so well developed that they have four separate teams instead of one, but I am not one to pay close attention to Rugby Union at the best of times).

The test was at Ballymore, a Rugby Union ground which was far less than a stadium at the time. I get the impression that it was two embankments bulldozed upward on either side of the pitch for the benefit of spectators rather than properly constructed pavilions or stands. Very outer suburban.

I was used to the VFL crowds of the era, but Queensland Rugby Union fans were next level (even when compared to Collingwood supporters at home). On the way into the ground, my friends and I encountered an acquaintance who already seemed quite drunk (it was 11am), and what appeared to be mostly still full beer cans were flying around the ground during the match.

Oh my! This makes the utter tossers who support Melbourne Victory in the domestic soccer competition seem well behaved in comparison! (Of course, we are all familiar with the private schoolboy saying that Rugby Union is a thug’s game played by gentlemen. And presumably watched by thugs too.)

Queensland sport, both in terms of its spectators’ behaviour and the facilities for viewing it, have improved a lot since then. I was in the Storey Bridge Hotel near the Gabba in April 2005 when there was going to be an AFL game that night, and I was told by the staff that after the recent threepeat, the Brisbane Lions were as popular on game day as the Brisbane Broncos (ie the long established Rugby League team). In August 2015 I went with a friend to see the Bulldogs-Brisbane game at the Gabba and was quite delighted by the comfort and accessibility of the relatively recently rebuilt Gabba stadium. (The Bulldogs lost a see-sawing game, but I did not mind too much, and the following year we did win the premiership, which made up for decades of disappointment.)

Ballymore too apparently is a somewhat improved stadium, although no longer as important for any form of football as it was 35 years ago.

The upcoming Brisbane Olympics in 2032 initially raised high hopes for taking sporting stadia in Queensland to a much better level. The original plan was for the Gabba to be rebuilt as a 50,000 seat stadium rather than the current 40,000 seat configuration.

The Labor government has since reviewed its plans and shelved the idea of rebuilding the Gabba. Whilst this is not as ruthless as the Andrews Labor Government in Victoria first accepting the 2026 Commonwealth Games and then cancelling it in what appears to have been a cynical exercise in pre-election pork barrelling, it is prima facie a matter of some concern. After all, the Olympics is usually the sort of event that the overseeing government goes insane about, regardless of costs.

If I were the IOC, I would right now be rather nervous about the intentions and capacity of the Queensland Government to actually host the Olympics, and start drawing up contingency plans.

But the economics of building large sporting stadia, even in large cities like Brisbane, is somewhat questionable.

Brisbane is a city of about 2.6 million people. It hosts one AFL team, and various other teams in the various inferior football codes. The AFL team, the Brisbane Lions, plays its home games at the Gabba. At best, this makes for 11 home games in a year, plus possible home finals matches. (The exception to this is when in the Covid cursed 2020 AFL season, the AFL lifeboated the entire competition to Brisbane.) There is also a cricket test sometime in the summer, as well as various international limited over matches.

Let’s compare that to Perth Stadium or Adelaide Oval. They have two AFL teams each, so in a usual year, those fine stadia will host a minimum 22 AFL games (to say nothing of the current Gather Round in South Australia), possibly more if their teams are firing up in the finals. And they are as likely to have as many cricket matches as Brisbane.

And then there is the MCG, the global cathedral of both Australian Rules Football and Cricket. Aside from the usual number of cricket matches, including the marquee Boxing Day Test, the MCG also hosts a minimum of 45 AFL matches per year, plus AFL finals, including the AFL Grand Final (ie the most highly attended domestic competition final in the world). With 9 AFL teams located in Greater Melbourne, there is considerable economy of scale to enable both the successful existence of the 100,000 seat MCG and the 57,000 seat Docklands Stadium.

Plus Taylor Swift and similar concerts. Top tier acts are going to perform at the MCG, whilst second tier will go to Docklands, and third tier acts like the sort I like seeing will perform at Melbourne Park. (Sadly, the sort of musicians I really really like, eg Suzanne Vega, are related to the Palais these days, and previously to Hamer Hall and Crown Casino.)

Ultimately, and I hate to say this (especially as I have been a loud advocate for rebuilding the Gabba much much bigger than it currently is), it makes very little economic sense to build any major sporting stadia anywhere approximating half the scale of the MCG anywhere but Melbourne, as they will not be used sufficiently enough to warrant the large expense.

For this to change, there would need to be more AFL matches held in other cities, which would necessitate more AFL teams being admitted to the competition – something I do not think is viable except in Perth or Adelaide. Alternatively, more Rugby or Association Football matches would need to be held in such stadia common used for AFL or Cricket.

And would we really want that?

All Care, No Responsibility? Bonza Airlines Crashes (Metaphorically)

Having a particular interest in the English language, I like reading books like The Story Of English and Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue, and biographies on lexologists like Dr Samuel Johnson and the murderous lunatic (I kid you not) who helped build the original Oxford Dictionary.

One word whose obscure origins do vaguely confound me, but which does fascinate me, is the Australian English term ‘bogan’. Prior to the late 1980s, we would use words like yobbo or ocker to describe someone of somewhat uncouth or vulgar mannerisms and behaviour.

Since then however, bogan has gradually become the word we commonly use across Australia for such individuals.

It appears to have its origins in the Irish surname Bogan. I met someone with that surname about 15 years ago actually, and there is a wine (I have a bottle of it in fact) which is named The Bogan, which was gifted to me last year on retirement and which is far more expensive than what actual true bogans would drink.

There is a Bogan Court in Boronia, in the far outer eastern suburbs of Melbourne. I have never visited it, and I have only very briefly passed through Boronia itself, but I have always had a vague feeling that bogan started as a description of people from that area, permeating out in to the rest of Melbourne from there.

In the early 1990s, there was a TV show called the Comedy Company, featuring a faux school girl Kylie Mole (stage name for the comedienne Marianne Fahey) who would rant at the camera in a mock Broad Australian accent, regularly using the word ‘bogan’ to describe various of her acquaintances and frenemies.

And hence it spread out on the airwaves across Australia, displacing other more local words which had similar meanings.

Let’s look at the words I have collected from my travels and acquaintances across our nation which have meanings similar, if not identical, to ‘bogan’ and which have been largely displaced by our fond Melbourne term of endearment:

Sydney – Westie

Brisbane – Bevan

Perth – Turbo

Canberra – Booner

Hobart – Chigger or Chigwell.

I have not yet discovered what similar term might have existed in Adelaide, and that does bug me.

But this does go to show how Melbourne is culturally dominant in Australia, that our particular version of the Australian English dialect is the one that is most influential. [Editors of the Macquarie dictionary, please do take note. This is important for lasting records of our language.]

Vires Acquirit Eundo! As our Founding Fathers would have said!

Bogan is, to put it mildly, a term used to describe a lot of things that people from my side of the city might like, or that people from my home town might be.

I don’t really mind that. After all, I just fessed up on Facebook to a former colleague as to why I am so fond of Titus Andronicus (mostly because it is Shakespeare’s equivalent of a Road Runner cartoon).

The elitist armchair socialists at The Guardian recently wrote about the existence of a bogan airline. They could have been talking about Jetstar or Virgin Australia (neither of which I am particularly keen on travelling with), but they were not. It turned out they were talking about a challenger called Bonza, which was going to offer direct disounted flights to the bogan market.

Bonza is very much the sort of colloquial Australian expression which could be used by a bogan to describe something which provides one with joy, a bit like Germans use Wunderbar! and Cartman’s Ginger hordes of the night use Huzzah!

Indeed, a google search under the term ‘bogan airline’ yields Bonza Airline’s website as the top hit, greeting us with the sentence: ‘G’day, we’re Bonza, Australia’s new, and only independent, low cost airline servicing regional domestic routes.’

Routes included flights from the Sunshine Coast base (near Australia Zoo, former lair of the Crocodile Hunter) to Newcastle, Mildura, Albury and Melbourne (Avalon Airport). Having been to Newcastle, Mildura and Albury, I can assure you that these are places which bogans would greatly enjoy, although not as much as Bali.

Sadly, it appears that Bonza has just collapsed, leaving its employees and (presumably disproportionately represented) bogan passengers owed considerable money, and employees in particular extremely anxious as to whether they are going to paid in a hurry.

The collapse of Bonza does raise various questions about the morality of the conduct of its owners, who, despite the name, are not exactly bogans, nor even Australian.

Using my online subscription with The Melbourne Age as my source, I have learned that Bonza is owned by a private equity firm based in Miami, 777 Partners. At the end of 2023, two of the planes in the Bonza fleet were redirected to other airlines owned by 777 Partners. Last week, the remaining four planes were seized by AIP Capital, an investment company owned by ACAP, the parent company of 777 Partners. Those planes have been transferred to the aptly named Phoenix Aviation Capital, which is owned by ACAP. This was all apparently a surprise to the Australian based board of Bonza.

[As an aside, ‘phoenixing’ is a term often used, usually pejoratively, to describe the way bankrupt businesses can resurrect themselves under a new company structure, leaving creditors behind in the ashes of the previous company structure.]

Whilst I am not an expert in finance, nor a lawyer, I do have the normal sense of morality and decency of the ordinary person in the street. It appears to me from my above paraphrasing of the news report that the owners of Bonza have suddenly chosen to cut their losses on the business, leaving employees and customers significantly out of pocket. This does not seem at all moral or decent or ethical to me, to say the least.

But that might not be the least, even though that alone smells to high heaven to mug punters like me.

News reports in The Age on Monday have raised accusations of fraud on the part of 777 Partners. Lenders to that company have lodged a lawsuit claimed that it borrowed millions against $US 350 million of assets which either did not exist, or did not own, or which were already committed elsewhere. The lawsuit alleges that there have been fundamental breaches of agreements and double-pledging of assets backing loans to the company. Further, the relationship between 777 Partners and its parent ACAP is extremely entangled.

The people involved as the architects in this debacle are not our loveable bogans. They are sharks in suits who are feeding on our bogans. I really do hope that the courts in New York hold those people accountable, although I fear that this is not going to help the employees or passengers of Bonza in the short term.

Broo Holds Two AGMs Back To Back

As the few readers of this blog would know, I am a shareholder in Broo, a craft brewing company which is listed on the ASX.

As a recap, I acquired most of my shares in early 2011 when, as an inspired marketing stunt, the founder of Broo offered a number of shares per slab for everyone who bought a slab (up to a maximum of 50 slabs) online from his venture. I bought two slabs, and then, a few years later after it listed on the ASX and was short of cash, stumped up 36 cents to buy another 20 shares, giving me 120 shares in the company.

The company has, this week, marked 2 years since it was suspended from trading on the ASX. At some point in this period, I framed and hung the ornamental share certificate I was emailed 13 years ago onto the wall behind my toilet bowl, as a symbol of how much value I ascribe to those shares.

Yesterday was another landmark day in the recent history of Broo. It held AGMs for both 2022 and 2023 back to back.

I did not bother attending the AGMs. I was en route to the Station Hotel in Footscray to start celebrating with two of my friends the fact that one of them has just started his pre-retirement leave (something similar to what I am still enjoying for another two months). We ended up doing yum cha in a Chinese restaurant in the Footscray Market, followed by some drinks at various other locations around inner Footscray.

Today the three of us are pondering whether drinking bourbon and cokes around a pool table at the back of the Courthouse Hotel (a rather rough pub) in Nicholson Street Footscray makes us bogans.

Anyway, back to discussing my nominal investment in a craft brewing company.

The AGM results and other recent company announcements are accessible through the Commsec app, so I read through them this morning. In summary, the remuneration report for both years was adopted, and the three directors were reelected, two in one of the AGMs, and one in the next.

The AGM seems to have been very vanilla, as the only votes against the resolutions were by proxy, so no disgruntled minority shareholders showed up to vote against them. The proxies voting against the resolutions added up to just under 45 million shares, or a bit under 20% of the votes exercised. 45 million shares, if they were valued at the 0.9 cents they last traded at in May 2022, would still be worth about $400,000, slightly less than what my entire diversified share portfolio of mostly blue chips and ETFs is worth. So whoever sent in their proxies in absentia with directions to vote against the current board does have a lot of skin in the game.

But company AGMs are rarely a place where disgruntled minority shareholders will air their grievances (aside from the serial pests who pass themselves off as shareholder activists). I do note from my google searches that there was an attempt by Kent ‘Groges’ Grogan, the founder of Broo, who was ousted just over 2 years ago, to have the company wound up in the second half of last year in the Federal Court over monies owed to him. Obviously that has been resolved in some way or other, as Broo still exists as a corporate entity.

An activities report from 30 April on the Commsec app indicates that Broo is well advanced into its plans to relaunch one of their craft beer brands and resume producing beer, and is also getting new investment into the brand.

I wish the directors well. Trying to resurrect a beer company is a noble aim, and I do not envy those who wear the crown of thorns which is the directorship of a struggling listed company, people whom I suspect have probably invested a lot of their own funds and those of their friends and family into trying to pursue this particular dream.

But I am a realist. All of the money which was raised in the Broo IPO in 2016 was spent on buying the Mildara Brew Pub and the land in Ballarat intended for a brewery. Those assets are all gone, and there is little remaining capital. In the 13 years that I have followed Broo closely, each and every endeavour has not ended well, or even, for that matter, gotten far off the ground. If the directors were to go out to ordinary shareholders like me with another rights issue, I am happy to come up with some loose change to acquire more shares, but that is more out of amusement value than any expectation that Broo is actually, under its new management, going to suddenly change the direction of its fortunes.

Channel 7 Versus The World

I doubt many people are familiar with the movie Scott Pilgrim Versus The World. Dorky guy who likes video games meets a suitable girl (vaguely goth, likes comic books and video games), but to win her, he must defeat each of her formidable seven ex boyfriends. It is like a series of challenges in a video game, each leading up to the Boss Fight at the end.

Or I guess so. I don’t really have the patience for video games.

The announcement yesterday of the verdict in the Bruce Lehrmann defamation case against Channel Ten reminded me of the Scott Pilgrim movie, except that the main character is Channel Seven (a far less sympathetic character than Scott Pilgrim), and that it is using various other actors of dubious integrity as proxies in its fight against the other television networks.

This of course started with the defamation action which now disgraced war hero Ben Roberts-Smith VC fought against Channel Nine and its various associated outlets, including the several former Fairfax newspapers, for having the temerity of accusing him of war crimes in Afghanistan.

Whilst Channel Seven was not directly involved in those proceedings, they did bankroll Roberts-Smith in his defamation action, given that he was then a senior employee of the network and well regarded by the management of the company.

Effectively, Channel Seven used Ben Roberts-Smith in a proxy war against the Nine Network, where the risks to itself mainly consisted of losing the money put upfront to fund the litigation, but where most of the possible liability and all of the potential reputation damage would be incurred by the litigant.

The Bruce Lehrmann defamation action against Channel Ten was finalised yesterday with a judgment that, on the balance of probabilities, Bruce Lehrmann had committed the rape. Whilst Channel Ten’s manner of reporting the allegation in question was not laudable, it was not defamatory.

But it was not just the alleged actions of Lehrmann and Channel Ten in question at this trial. Just before the judgement was due to be handed down, a disgruntled former Channel Seven producer raised details of circumstances relating to the year that Lehrmann had spent living rent free in a luxury apartment paid for by Channel Seven in return for his exclusive interview. Accusations of the provision of prostitutes and party drugs flew wildly.

This represents the second proxy war that Seven has been involved with in relation to its rival television networks.

Both cases do not reflect credit on Channel Seven. It shows a tendency to encourage people aligned with the network to litigate against its rivals, regardless of the collateral damage that these people may suffer from undertaking such actions.

Also, and this is what is far worse for the state of telejournalism in Australia, the Higgins – Lehrmann saga in particular shows not only the relentless way commercial networks like Seven and Ten are going to use their cheque books to pursue ratings for news stories, but the extremely partisan way that they are going to choose to report the news on such serious topics as criminal investigations. Channel Ten was Team Higgins, and Channel Seven was Team Lehrmann. Justice was served in no way whatsoever by the conduct of either network.

What this says, going forward, for potential partisan media conduct on sub judice criminal cases, is ominous for the integrity of the criminal justice system.

Reflections on being a Footscray / Western Bulldogs Supporter

About 8 months ago I rather reluctantly joined Facebook, mostly because it was a relatively painfree way to make contact with an intricate web of second cousins in Reggio Calabria during my imminent visit.

Since then, the number of fake profiles and would be scammers I have encountered have given me renewed cause to lament the 2019 demise of Google Plus, which was a far superior social network. Similarly to the fake profiles, the poor quality algorithm continues to feed me repetitious nonsense, such as the same reddit-lifted stories about cheating spouses, wicked stepparents and unfairly favoured children, reinforcing my impression that Facebook is only useful for making contact with people whom, for the most part, I have either lost touch with, or only known about indirectly.

But perhaps what I dislike most about Facebook is the platform it provides for toxic people to rant in an offensive manner about many things – and in a manner which usually involves poor grammar and spelling (something which really offends me).

I usually encounter that sort of offensiveness on one or other of the several Western Bulldogs fan pages I have joined. Where the moderators are either non-existent or weak, such pages have become soap boxes for the most toxic and mono-maniacal supposed barrackers to rant about how the Club needs to immediately sack our coach, Luke Beveridge, and perhaps even our president, she of the hyphenated surname I cannot recollect right now.

I find myself taken aback by such toxicity. Whilst we have had some disappointing seasons during the 9 year reign of Bevo as senior coach, we did win our miracle premiership in 2016 (see above photo for the Brothers Zanatta celebrating on the evening of 1 October 2016) and took us into another Grand Final as recently as 2021, ie approx 32 months ago.

The reality of the situation is that the Footscray Football Club has had a club culture not only inimical of success for many years, but where it was going to fail at each step it took on the final rungs of success. Aside from the 1970s where we would fail at elimination finals, we had the preliminary final defeats of 1985, 1992, 1997, 1998, and so on which made me despondent about us ever making into an actual Grand Final.

And then we had Luke Beveridge, a coach who is some sort of sports psychology guru. He saw that we had a serious cultural barrier in the way of success, where we saw that coming third was good enough for a season, and where the club believed that we could never make the grand final.

In his second season as coach, he destroyed that culture. In four decisive weeks in a row, his team defeated the runners up on the road in Perth, then Hawthorn at the G (Hawthorn being a team we had never beaten in a final in my life, plus setting a record by both winning two finals in a row and two in a year which the Bulldogs had not done in my lifetime), and then set up a grand final appearance by defeating GWS at their home ground somewhere in the obscure suburbia of western Sydney.

And then we won the miracle premiership.

Doing that, coaching a team from a club which has a significant number of cultural and psychological issues preventing them from seizing success, was a much more significant achievement than it would be if you were to do so by coaching a team like Hawthorn, or West Coast, or Carlton, or Essendon. It is a greater achievement than Collingwood breaking its drought in 1990 or Richmond in 2017 or Melbourne in 2021. The only greater possible challenge would be to get St Kilda a flag (FYI, I am old enough to have supervised a colleague whose brother was in the 1966 St Kilda Grand Final team).

The achievement of Luke Beveridge in 2016, in winning an AFL premiership with a club like ours, which did not believe in itself, is hard for outsiders to totally appreciate. For insiders to now revile him is totally graceless and ignorant.

Like, can anyone else achieve that result?

He almost followed it up again in 2021, which is not that long ago. No other coach has been able to get our team into two grand finals, let alone that close to each other in proximity in time.

I do think that this is the Golden Age for the Footscray Football Club. All we need is a Brownlow Medal or two to make it really so.

Bevo has done so much to cause the team to believe that it can achieve what previously was thought impossible for the team, and to cause it through its unpredictability to be feared by the competition at the serious end of the season (ie September).

He needs to be respected for that.

Until we can find a credible coach who might be able to conjure grand final appearances the way that he has, and miracle fairytale premierships, I do think that those toxic critics need to shut up.

Aside from that, I think I need to reflect on the general joy I feel as a Footscray supporter. We rarely ever succeed, and I have only ever met one person who was at the 1954 Grand Final. When we feel the unadulterated joy we get from a premiership like the sheer miracle that was 2016, not only is it sweeter than those which supporters of more successful teams might enjoy, but it also does go a long way to heal us of the suffering and hurt and disappointment we feel when we fall short, like in 1985 or in 1997.

And is not footy an exciting and unpredictable sport? One of the main reasons my dad as a new migrant claimed he got interested in it was its unpredictability. Even if our team does not win that often, we know that it does win sometimes, and that we have a coach who has made it believe that it can win, and has delivered on that.

Is that not enough to continue to love Australian Rules Football and the Western Bulldogs, and to want Bevo to remain as our coach for the foreseeable future?

CARN THE DOGS!!!!