Saturday, April 25, 2015

Time to retire, Gerard

Gerard Henderson's weekly, self-indulgent bore sessions now appear (and not behind a paywall) at The Australian.  This week he gets to re-visit such compelling issues as an ABC Chairman 40 years ago writing a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald in which he defended the airing of a documentary program about pederasty.

Henderson interprets the letter as being a call for sympathetic understanding of pederasty, but it's a bit of culture war cherry picking if ever there was one, given how the letter goes on to refer to uncivilised behaviour.  How outrageous, says Gerard, that the current ABC Chairman refuses to apologise for this.  If it had been a Catholic Bishop who had done this, how different things would be.  (The implication - "everyone has to agree with how I read the letter.")

I think it's clear why Henderson raises this again this week:  it's one of the near routine, and pathetic, attempts at a counterattack you see from the Right wing culture warriors any week in which someone from the Churches has come out badly in the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse.  In this case, a retired Catholic Bishop who apologises for taking 3 years to stop a pedophile priest from having contact with children, and then writing a character reference for him.   Rather more dire, by a magnitude or three, than an academic head of the national broadcaster saying a documentary about pederasty was not intended to offend.  

Gerard is scrapping the very bottom of the faux moral equivalence outrage barrel on this one.  He really ought to retire, it's becoming so embarrassing some of the lines he chooses to pursue.   

He also has a characteristic that Andrew Bolt and a host of other Right wing commentators now routinely display:   they don't just spend time trying to explain why a particular take on a matter is wrong; they devote a huge amount of effort to complaining about how people - the media, celebrities, academics - don't agree with them.

It's boring and tedious, and I mainly put it down to a "chip on the shoulder" that they have developed about not being able to convince scientists, academia and sufficient politicians that climate change is a non-issue.

1 comment:

Not Trampis said...

Henderson does two things.

He never provides any eviodence to back up his claims. He claims for instance the labour market has been re-regulated to a large degree however al indicators suggest different ( industrial disputation, wage growth, employment growth, minimum wage as a % of median wage).

He also has a thin skin. If you criticise him on a number of things he will quickly move the topic.