A PICTURE TELLS A THOUSAND WORDS ... JUST NOT THIS TIME
FOR my sins I spent a few days in Canberra and it was a stark reminder about how little most people in Parliament House care about vulnerable people and telling the truth about what really happened.
The week was dominated by the selfish actions of Julia Banks; only elected at the last election, fiercely loyal to Malcolm Turnbull, not the Liberal Party, and willing to do his destructive bidding.
As you know by now, she quit the Liberal party and will sit as an independent. We all knew it was coming. She had already said she didn’t want to run for a second term and a few weeks ago took the Liberal logos off her website and office.
It was reported that she was in frequent conversation with the former PM while he was waiting out the Wentworth battle in New York. He was pushing her to send Peter Dutton to the high court with the hope of making him quit the front bench and maybe being pushed out of the Parliament. The case against him was one Turnbull himself told Parliament wasn’t worth sending Dutton to the court, but all bets were off when Dutton helped knocked the king off his perch. Banks’ decision to jump now clears her to do her master’s bidding to punish Dutton.
The media says the “iconic” image of the week was Banks standing by herself as she quit the Liberals. The image showed her standing up to deliver her blow to the Government with several MPs walking away as she spoke. Twitter loved it, the perfect metaphor. She wasn’t leaving the party, the party had left her. Only problem is, that’s not what happened.
Her speech was the first of the day on Tuesday following prayers, and a certain number of MPs have to be there to formally kick off the day.
There is nothing special about the first speech of the day. Nothing major normally happens. So there was no sign nor expectation that Banks was about to do something big because she didn’t tell the PM or any Ministers she was going to pull the pin that day.
Instead of having the decency to look them in the eye, she stabbed them in the back with another of Turnbull’s disciples, Craig Laundy, looking on adoringly.
The photo is a good one, but the Canberra media was fundamentally dishonest when they say it was an image of Banks being abandoned. However, that didn’t stop people who report on politics for a living, who know house procedures from tweeting with glee the photo and implying its meaning was a reflection of what happened rather than a metaphor for the political spin they were putting on it. Our democracy is in a dangerous place when people who are paid to know the process, slant the news to fit their narrative.
I’m an opinion guy, and we all know the clear difference between straight reporting and commentary. But make no mistake, most in Canberra are dead set on bending the ‘news’; not just pushing for a Labor win, but making it a landslide to prove Turnbull’s world view that, despite losing every poll for two years, he was magically going to win and all should be punished because they dared to knock him off the throne.