Diplomats avoid Markson, Liberal candidate’s surreal dance party
Making a Markson
For the first anniversary of the October 7 attack last year, Sky News’ Sharri Markson broadcast live from Israel for a week. She spoke with Israelis who had been kidnapped and even had a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, albeit off-air.
Notably absent from her programming that week? Any Australian diplomat. We were curious about what the boffins in Canberra (or those posted abroad) were saying about the trip, so we put in a freedom of information request to DFAT.
While their communications regarding Markson’s meeting with Netanyahu were all redacted — presumably all speaking neutrally about a controversial Australian journalist having a private one-on-one with a man accused of war crimes — we did get some documents back about Sky News’ attempts to interview Australia’s ambassador to Israel, Ralph King, while in the country.
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Internal discussions from people across the department were fairly unanimous: no way. Even King himself weighed in, saying “at this juncture, I’d recommend declining”. The emails also said the FMO — foreign minister’s office, we presume — were consulted, but provided no clue as to what the FMO’s response was, if anything.
We asked Penny Wong’s office but heard nothing back. Markson acknowledged our request but didn’t get back to us in time with comment. And a DFAT spokesperson didn’t give an inch when asked why it had ducked an Australian journalist like this.
“As part of their work, Australian ambassadors focus on building relationships and communicating to audiences in the host country to which they are deployed,” they said in an email.
On the Hunt
Sometimes Tips and Murmurs is dedicated to the important journalistic work of revealing offensive, conflicted or hypocritical behaviour by the powerful. Sometimes, like this time, it’s just fueled by the need to share with you, the reader, something truly baffling.
Steph Hunt is the Liberal candidate for the federal division of Melbourne. It’s a seat that the Liberals have never gotten near, and has been the increasingly comfortable home of Greens leader Adam Bandt since 2010.
Perhaps in an effort to show she shares the progressive social attitudes of her electorate, Hunt posted a reel to Instagram earlier this week of her having “a ball” at this year’s Midsumma Festival. But for reasons we can’t begin to understand, sometime on Wednesday she appears to have deleted it
Thankfully it was captured by an X user who was just as bewitched as we were:
The Lib candidate for Melbourne may have just posted the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen pic.twitter.com/nzhV0tysI7
— Michelle Ananda Rent Hikes 4 the Senate ? (@Michelle_Rent) February 11, 2025
Hunt’s friends are just off screen, also having a ball. Except, as you may have picked up, the footage has an eerie I Think You Should Leave vibe, with Hunt very obviously pasted on top of footage of the event; the background image zooms in on the stage a bunch of times while Hunt stays in place, the light on her is clearly different from the surroundings, and then there’s the small matter of the fact that her limbs routinely disappear and she blinks out of existence entirely a few times.
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We’re not accusing Hunt of trying to deceive anyone with this video, any more than we’d accuse Georges Méliès of trying to trick people into believing the moon has a human face. But it’s very strange that nowhere in the original video or caption was there even an offhand reference to what was happening or why.
Lattouf and nothing but Lattouf
It’s been otherwise for so long that it’s hard to remember, but the final days of evidence in the Antoinette Lattouf case — replete with Norma Desmond-like performance from Ita Buttrose, simply fizzing with contempt for the process — reminded us that there was a time the ABC stood by its journalists.
Way back in 2003, AM’s reporting of the Iraq war attracted 68 complaints from then communications minister Richard Alston (a ludicrous number of largely ludicrous complaints). Alston even threatened to impose an “independent censor” on the public broadcaster.
Were Linda Mottram and co derided as activists and suddenly taken off the air? Not a bit of it: then director of news and current affairs at the ABC Max Uechtritz wrote a piece defending the ABC’s journalism in the then Fairfax papers. Managing director at the time Russell Balding stood “vigorously” by his journalists and how they reported the war. The then ABC chair (and man with apparently very unimaginative parents) Donald McDonald, whose appointment was initially criticised on account of his personal friendship with then PM John Howard, also refused to allow the ABC to be bullied.
For what it’s Woolworths
A Crikey tipster alerted us to an alarming sounding email that turned up in the inboxes of some Woolworths and BWS staff in Melbourne.
With the subject line “!! URGENT INFORMATION !!”, a BWS area manager warned staff against giving “unauthorised” contractors access to their stores.
“We had a couple of people dressed as tradies enter stores in the CBD claiming to do work and remove / steal our routers which has impacted all IT equipment,” they wrote, adding a blurry still from CCTV footage for effect.
Concerned about the scourge of fluorescent-clad tech thieves, we asked Woolworths about the extent of this crime wave.
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A spokesperson told Crikey that, no, there wasn’t a crew of criminals conducting low stakes heists on supermarket networking gear. This email, the spokesperson said, was the product of a panicked staff member who wasn’t told about a legitimate IT worker commissioned by the retailer, and subsequently assumed wrongly that they had been robbed.
So to those of you cradling your TP-Link Archer AX55, you can rest easy.
A Hanson approach
We suppose it’s a Freudian slip. Senator Pauline Hanson has never encountered a problem that couldn’t be solved via deportation, so why should Australian families doing it tough be any different?
Arguing that only One Nation has “real solutions” for the cost of living crisis, she posted that “families should be deported”.
To be fair, she was cool about it when this was pointed out to her. “Thanks”, she replied, and then, “That was supposed to say ‘supported’.”
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