Hold the front page: the Canberra press gallery has an Opposition to bring down

Barrie Cassidy on ABC1’s Insiders yesterday:

“On China, a difficult relationship for the Government to manage and yet, remarkably, the Opposition has made itself the issue. It was their approach that came under attack in much of the weekend media,” Cassidy said.

Referring to the “relentless obsession of the media with their [the Liberals'] failings”, Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt wrote on Saturday:

“You’d swear it was actually the Liberals who were in power, and in need of a good kicking for their manic spin, their new taxes, their broken promises, their wild spending, their empty promises, their bother with China. You’d also swear, incidentally, that Rudd’s office has been busy seeding some minds.”

Bolt quoted from weekend stories by five journalists who turned their guns on the Opposition in preference to holding the government to account.

On Insiders yesterday, with Barrie Cassidy, Annabel Crabb and Malcolm Farr, Andrew Bolt continued to press the point.

Cartoonist Peter Nicholson detected the same game in play 15 years ago when much of the media turned on Opposition Leader Alexander Downer after he told a meeting of WA Liberals that, if the Coalition was successful at the next election, he would consider repealing the Mabo native title legislation, if necessary, to resolve certain issues. From that point on, Downer’s leadership was subjected to frenzied media criticism and attack.

(Peter Nicholson, The Australian, 4 September 1994.)

Peter Nicholson’s cartoon archive can be viewed at:
http://www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au/