Lest We Forget

On this Anzac Day, The Magpie Pays Tribute to the dedicated men and women who served – some giving the ultimate sacrifice – to defend the freedoms that make blogs like this possible.

We will never forget.

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If The Magpie Weren’t Such Humble Old Bird, This Week’s Headline Could Be ‘Told You So’.

Several matters that have featured in The Magpie’s Nest, both recently and over time, have moved into the spotlight elsewhere in the past few days.

Jenny Hill felt the heat of the Castle Hill handkerchief park and shelter shed cock-up strongly enough to allow the Astonisher to print her lame justification of this missed opportunity. Totally unconvincing, totally Jenny.

And News Ltd is forced to unceremoniously dump its invented readership measurement outfit, EMMA (Enhanced Media Metrics Australia) , and return to the more reliable and experienced Roy Morgan people. The dramatic back-flip forcing the print media back to honesty was demanded by the one group able bully the bully.

That news came a few days after Bulletin iditor Craig Warhust made a buffoon of himself with EMMA’s latest batch of figures. They were OK figures, but our iditor managed to make them ludicrous.

One of the initial instigators of the Cowboys NRL team says the Cowboys management has lost its way – and needs an urgent change of personnel … not on the field, but in the boardroom.

Is Les Walker in line for royal honours? It is certainly a possibility if Premier Alphabet continues her new enthusiasm for sprinkling laughable honourifics among her former failed colleagues.

But first, this being Anzac Day and we all being mindful sacrifices made to protect our way of life, this national story should leads us off this week. …

Canberra To Beijing: ”Hit The Road And Belt Up’

Good start.

Now for the Port of Darwin and then the massive water rights and agricultural interests owned by the Chinese government-linked companies.

And one supposes it would be too much to ask for the prosecution of the treasonous former minister Andrew Robb, who engineered the Darwin deal with Shandong Landbridge just before leaving government to take a lucrative job with that company. But of course it’s too much, because he was a minister in Liberal government which allowed him to broker this inexplicable sale to Australia’s greatest looming threat.

Changing Horses … And Jockeys

NB All mentions of the ‘Cowboys board’ in the following article refers to the ‘Football Club’, NOT the ‘Leagues Club’.

As regular readers know, The ‘Pie rarely delves into the braying zoo of sports reporting, but now that practice of large people running into each other or throwing balls amongst themselves is a billion dollar business, the off-field management is crucial to the supply of half-time oranges.

The Cowboys – sometimes cruelly lampooned here as the Cowplops – are at a low point in the established wave chart algorithm of success, a fluctuation that affects all sporting outfits at regular intervals.

But Doug Kingston, one of the men who actively promoted the idea and helped bring the Cowboys into being, says it is a failure at board level responsible for the Cowboys’ current low fortunes. Kingston says an upheaval in the board room is urgently needed because the club problem stem in part from the board not living up to its founding charter.

Everyone has an opinion about the Cowboys current situation, but Kingston is entitled to have his opinion considered more than most. He was the man who first floated the idea that North Queensland should have a Winfield Cup (now NRL) team in a story in the Townsville Bulletin  back in 1989, called and chaired the first meeting, and worked on a voluntary basis to help get the team into the national competition.

To air his current concerns, Kingston wrote a closely worded and well reasoned letter outlining his view to the Townsville Bulletin. But the paper, so closely aligned with the vested interests of the club’s business operations, not only refused to publish his letter, but ignored a offer to take paid space in the paper to publish his concerns in the interest of the teams fans. You can read Doug’s stopry for the paper that has so spooked the Bulletin and Cowboys board chairman and former News executive Lewis Ramsay here.

So good luck, Doug, but you can bet that the board of The Cowboys Football Club share the Townsville Bulletin’s affliction of a deaf ear to constructive criticism and transparent conversation.

The Leagues Club Also Has A Unique View On Board Make-Up

Over the years, The’Pie has been regaled with unhappy tales by disgruntled members that The Cowboys Leagues Club board, while not shrouded in membership secrecy, has always been the fiefdom of Laurence Lancini and News Ltd figureheads. Critics say the board make-up membership is far from democratic, it is more a manipulated tap-on-the-shoulder to ideological fellow travellers. They say election by club members is a manipulated joke, to the point that one outspoken candidate who polled more than four times the votes of a board-favoured rival was booted for ‘not being a suitable person for a position”. Not that the membership was much fussed, only a handful full of the hundreds of members even bothered to leave the pokies or the bar/buffet long enough to cast a ballot … just the way the hierarchy likes it.

Mayor Mullet tells It How It Isn’t.

Ouch, that must have hurt.

Apparently stinging from the shit and derision that has been piled on by social media – and this blog, which started the ball rolling – Mayor Mullet’s has taken to the Bulletin to try to lamely justify her $2million waste of council funds on a pocket handkerchief park and sun shelters on Castle Hill. An Astonisher reporter followed up the Magpie’s exposure (do you pay for news tips, you lot? ) of the criminal waste of funds and the long trail of fancy dancing around this vexed issue. He received a classic serve of full weasel words and a litany of lame excuses (COVID) and blameable incidents (monsoon – which was two long years ago). Things like this ‘The zip line plan was scrapped after the unprecedented monsoon of February 2019, combined with community concerns.’ The famous old catch-all ‘community concerns, eh ? Ah, yes … “Council also received expressions of concern from the Gurambilbarra Wulgurukaba peoples, the traditional owners of the area about the possible impact of the zip line on the cultural heritage of the Castle Hill.”

This mob are worried about the cultural heritage of Castle Hill? Then how come they haven’t been loud and proud about the unforgivable graffiti of a stick figure saint scarring one of the most beautiful urban edifices in Australia, whose culture so concerns them? If just about every tourist who sees it are disgusted by a British linked and irrelevant piece of public vandalism, why aren’t the Gurambilbarra Wulgurukaba people. No money in it?

Then there was the mayor’s much ballyhooed café at the top. Here Jenny is at her evasive best, saying the plan was abandoned after the tenders failed to deliver on council’s vision. But hang on, don’t TCC tender documents outline the council’s ‘vision’ for any required project ? Clearly it was nothing to do with the tenderers, one of whom was willing to stump up $2million to snare the project. But, astoundingly, that was not enough, quoth the mayor, who displayed as much vision and fiscal nous as her beloved ‘bogans’, and opted instead for … wait for it, at what is about our city’s only a must see tourist spot … an occasional food truck. That’s about the speed of our motor mouth mayor, populist promises of a glorious and sure fire money spinner that end up landing us with with a fucking food truck. Nothing wrong with a food truck’s fare, it’s the mayor’s bullshit that sticks in the craw.

But Hey, Why Should The Magpie Bitch …

… at least he knows that, out of the entire staff who read it every week,  someone at the Bulletin is willing to follow up on the matters mentioned in this blog. They’ve also been forced to ask Prins ‘The Prince’ Ralston if The Magpie’s report that he is a FIFO CEO was true, to which the Prince replied that he’s ‘renting at the moment’,  but what the reporter didn’t say in that article is that he flies out every Thursday to his Brisbane home and back on Monday … an business-class arrangement that costs Townsville ratepayers a princely $100,000 a year.

The Astoniosher forced the council into providing a completely implausible reason why a couple of Magpie readers reported the council budget had an unusual and unexplained  amount of around $3million a year for rubbish remediation work at the Total Tools stadium (it was an accounting entry, folks, not real money they reckon … problem is that it was in their budget, you tossers.) Transparency and being seen through are two very different things.

It is heartening to know that The ‘Pie has such devoted followers at the paper that’s ‘All For You’.

PLEASE NOTE: The long promised list of Jenny Hill’s proposed projects that have bitten the dust remains a work in progress, so there is still time to jog The ‘Pie’s memory with suggestions for inclusion. Just send in your contribution, anonymously if desired, to comments – might not get posted there but will published in the final compilation in the blog when sufficiently complete.

EMMA’S Number Is Up – But They Always Have Been, Haven’t They?

One of Rupert’s most cynical exercises … the creation of head counting organisation Enhanced Media Metrics Australia (EMMA) … is being ditched, and readership reporting will go back to the independent and reliable Roy Morgan crowd. She was a bastard child when born in the fevered Murdoch mind about a decade ago.

The old pickled walnut was frustrated by the accurate numbers being supplied by the industry’s long serving and trusted head counter, the Roy Morgan people, and veiled threats didn’t work with them. So Rupert got together with Australia’s other big publishers and they decided to create their own outfit; thus EMMA was born.

Or maybe suffered some birth defects. The results were the stuff of fairyland, often hilarious, and The Magpie wasn’t the only one to question the weird and often impossible outcomes EMMA reported. Like the metric that said that every single paper printed by the Townsville Bulletin was read by eight different people, giving the Astonisher a truly astonishing readership over 80, 000,  mark never reached in the paper’s history,  all when in reality it was dropping like a stone down through the high thirties. This all led to a rich vein of scornful humour, here and in other sites that saw through the self-serving bullshit.

But the end has come, brought on by the one crowd capable of bullying the publisher bullies … the money men of the media buyers across the industry. Seems they, or more likely their clients, had had enough of being made fools of … and paying rates based on such shonky figures when the communications industry was going through such a traumatic transition. Their revolt and campaign resulted in this weeks announcement.

But It Was Bad Timing For One Tosser

The announcement was not in time to stop our local jester-in-chief, Astonisher iditor Craig Warhurst, indulging in some mind-bending nincompoopery at the start of the week. This from comments last Monday.

The Magpie 

April 19, 2021 at 10:41 am  (Edit)

And the Astonisher’s wrassle with ’rithmetic goes right to the top, it seems. In his iditorial,  Iditor Warhust has given us a perfect example of a ‘false syllogism’ … that is, taking iwo known facts and reaching a false conclusion (short version: 2+2=5). And in this case, it seems deliberate for a reason.

Here’s how this three card trick works: yes, 128,000 is about 72% of the paper’s circulation area, and yes, if you’re going to believe Rupert’s bastard child EMMA, 128,000 people read the paper every month. BUT THAT SO CONVENIENTLY IGNORES THE INDISPUTABLE TRUTH THAT ALMOST ALL THOSE READERS ARE THE SAME ONES WEEK ON WEEK. SO THAT MAKES IT AN ACTUAL MONTHLY READERSHIP OF 32,000.

But that doesn’t sound like a good thing to tell advertisers on the rate card, does it?

But our jester can’t help himself, with that last line about ‘rivals’. NEWSFLASH, Craig: YOU are the only newspaper in town, so what rivals? You’re surely not referring to the solid performing stable mate the Courier Mail, are you? Heaven forfend, man!! Touch paranoid?

Time For A Cutlery Count?

American literary giant Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most famous one liner was pithy and to the point:

“The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.”

Old Emmo was on to something there – those that self-proclaim their virtue are often quietly dishonourable … and if they are also former politicians, they always are. This came to mind when this bobbed up.

But perhaps your jaw dropped like The ‘Pie’s beak when you see that last line there …The latest decisions were gazetted for Kate Jones and Coralee O’Rourke on Friday, after their former colleague Anthony Lynham was added to the list in March.

Our own Coralee O’Rort, one of the most ineffectual ministers of the past few years, who did and achieved nothing of note for her electorate or Queensland, and was simply given a ministry for winning her seat, now in her retirement may fashion herself  ‘The Honourable Coralee O’Rourke’. And The Honourable Kate Jones? The ‘Pie would’ve bought The Kinda Once Scrumptious Kate Jones, but The Honourable? Nah.

They apparently don’t care this they’re fooling nobody. What next? Will Palaszczuk be seeking a peerage for Aaron Harper – a count, perhaps, which is just one letter off the truth. Les Memory Blank Walker will be in line for KCMG, but he will not be eligible for the British title, Knight Commander Grand Cross, but is fully qualified for the Australian version Knocked Cold Memory Gone.

You’ll recall the famous exchange on Yes Minister between Jim Hacker and his Private Secretary, Bernard about what various royal honours initialisms stand for.

Bernard: In the [civil] service, CMG stands for “Call Me God”. And KCMG for “Kindly Call Me God”.
Hacker: What does GCMG stand for?

Woolley (deadpan): “God Calls Me God”.

That’s the one PM Smirko is after.

Whoops!! Courier Lets The Olympic Cat Out of The Bag

It is undoubtedly the truth, but we are trusting that it was the Courier Mail who said it, and that the paper wasn’t quoting the Premier – otherwise, there will be political hell to pay. Note how the Courier – or the Premier – describes just who is making this Olympic bid in the second paragraph.

The reasons we should hope that we don’t get the Olympic nod just keep on coming. This is verging on the disgusting, the pinnacle of craven political populism, given the parlous state of so many public sectors in Queensland. All of Queensland that is, Premier.

Proof That Les Walker Has Lost His Memory? Or That He Just Isn’t Honourable?

From comments.

The Magpie

April 21, 2021 at 9:39 am  (Edit)

Really the hypocrisy is breathtaking … when Walker was sworn in as an MP, he must have thought he was taking the Hypocrite’s Oath.

Now that he’s a state MP, this coward decides to urge the council to act on a purely political point scoring exercise, knowing he is in no danger of being called upon to lift a finger or – heaven forbid – answer a phone call, as he’s no longer a councillor.
LIKE HE DIDN’T OVER ALL HIS YEARS IN COUNCIL WHEN THE BACKYARD SEWAGE SCANDAL STARTED AFFECTING HIS DIVISION 10 RESIDENTS. BUT NOT ONE SINGLE FUCKING WORD ABOUT THAT ON-GOING DISGRACE FROM THIS ARCH FUCKING HYPOCRITE.

And add an extra dollop of dishonesty because these businesses whose loss he bemoans from days of yore all migrated to the glitzy new Fairfield Waters Centre, which he voted for in council.

Nothing wrong with the Fairfield Waters development, that’s progress in the form of natural market forces, but why should an owner be penalised when tenants leave a property under these circumstances, a property that doesn’t look derelict, just empty – unlike a lot of places in the CBD, a sink hole for council funds which Walker assisted in wasting.

Here’s a question you certainly won’t answer Les: if the property to complain about was not owned by Peter Dutton’s wife, but, let’s say, Labor bagman Barry Taylor, would you have made the same demand for a petition and of council.

In a pig’s eye you would. As said, arch-hypocrite.

America Faces Up To Its Post Trump Challenges …

… and the world welcomes the USA back from the wilderness and wildness of the last four years of the Mobster Presidency of Trump. The murderer of George Floyd may have found guilty, but the mass murders continue, dampening the spirits which had started to life across the nation. Frustration was expressed in grim humour.

The Magpie Is Constantly Wondering About Things … Including His Readers Who Make Comments.

In moments of fond speculation, The Magpie likes to think his readers share his goals of soaring intelligence, informed worldly wit and eloquent writing. Alas, both The ‘Pie and his readers aren’t within cooee of any of those targets, a fact brought home when this was the mild joke that attracted most comments during the week … but vyes, The ‘Pie did start it himself, s’pose.

The Magpie

April 23, 2021 at 1:03 pm  (Edit)

Ummm … Big frontages?

Actually, typical click bait .. The New Daily’s answer is that both promote getting a covid jab.

Reply

• Chester

April 23, 2021 at 3:58 pm  (Edit)

They both have aisles wide enough to park a trolley in between?

Reply

• Achilles

April 23, 2021 at 4:16 pm  (Edit)

Hardware?

Reply

• Wally

April 23, 2021 at 5:19 pm  (Edit)

They both have lots of silicone up there aisles?

So, with that response in mind, The ‘Pie decided he wouldn’t make another sly joke about  this pic that floated into the Nest ..

 Just so you know, they were talking about the gals charitable thoughts and pure, if chilly, lifestyle. I think.

And NO … this is just a screen shot, there is no slide show.

And Ya Gotta Love Those Guys From The Shovel

 

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Another week down the gurgler, and we start all over again. Keep up with comments – and have your say – they can be great fun and run 24/7. And as always, because the problem will always be there, a hand with costs of the blog would be greatly appreciated, the donate button is below.