ABC election panelist Tony Barry slams broadcaster’s coverage

Price is Wrong

Oh dear. Coalition Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was called on by the ABC to reflect on Saturday night’s dire result. She instead took a spray at the media, including this very column.

During the campaign, CBD and others revealed Price’s happy “from my family to yours” Christmas photo of the senator and her songwriter husband, Colin Lillie, decked out in special festive Make America Great Again headwear.

Asked by host Sarah Ferguson whether her embrace of US President Donald Trump, and her photos with the infamous cap, helped seal Peter Dutton’s fate, Price hit out at the “mudslinging” media.

“There is a whole lot of mud you just slung right there, can I just say, in terms of wanting this country to be great. Donald Trump doesn’t own those four words,” she said.

“Because the media can go through your personal Facebook photos, and find a picture that was taken, in jest, at Christmas-time, and then smear you with it, that is the problem.

“It’s the smearing that goes on, certainly within the media, just as you are trying to talk about this seriously. I’m deadly serious about this issue.”

Mud? Come, come, we at CBD are nothing if not great users of irony and prefer to take our cues from that journalistic enterprise Price no doubt greatly admires, the US Fox News Corporation, whose motto is: “We report – you decide”.

Late registration

Shortly after 10pm Saturday, as the hordes of boozed up, disbelieving True Believers listened to Anthony Albanese’s victory speech at Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL, one illustrious former Labor figure was still trying to get into the building.

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As CBD sought a single bar of reception to file our election night dispatch, we spotted former NSW premier Morris Iemma arriving midway through Albanese’s speech. Meanwhile, a handful of pro-Palestinian protesters unfurled a banner outside, their chanting drowned out by cheers from Labor supporters.

It wasn’t the protest that held Iemma back – he’d been busy scrutineering returns at a polling booth down the road in Beverly Hills.

Solidarity forever

Late in the piece, Labor was ready to spring one more surprise – a rare appearance, on a Saturday night in Melbourne, by Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan.

Allan is prone to spending Fridays and the weekend in her Bendigo electorate, but Labor’s landslide victory for the ages drew her to the car park behind Trades Hall in Carlton at 10.30pm as unionists and Labor campaign volunteers commenced an epic party.

Luke Hilakari, secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council, revved up the crowd with a “UNION … POWER” war cry and some pointed jokes aimed at vanquished union hate figures Peter Dutton and Michael Sukkar. Australian Council of Trade Unions president Michele O’Neil couldn’t stop smiling, and ACTU Secretary Sally McManus clutched a can of Mountain Goat Beer, rocking a black Don’t Risk Dutton T-shirt. CBD later spotted Labor campaign wunderkind Jett Fogarty, the party’s senior assistant state secretary.

“We have people power – not nuclear power comrades,” Hilakari bellowed at the crowd from a temporary stage in the carpark.

“We have definitely won Dickson,” he said, referring to Dutton’s seat. “Turns out Australians like their potatoes pretty smashed,” he said to cheers.

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