ABC reporter Anne Connolly (Image: ABC)

Anne unexpectedly tough press conference Yesterday’s prime ministerial press conference for the aged care royal commission report was a torrid affair — especially as it didn’t actually discuss any of the content of the report.

The impromptu press conference gave reporters half an hour to get to Kirribilli House to ask questions about a report that none of them had had the chance to read. So how satisfying it was that Anne Connolly, a long-time ABC aged care reporter — and thus very much across the detail of the submissions — was there to punch a hole in the whole shoddy edifice:

Connolly: This report was delivered last Friday. You gave us half an hour to attend a press conference. You tabled the report when we were here. How can we ask questions to know what’s relevant in the report without knowing what’s in it?

Morrison: There will be plenty of opportunities to ask questions. But we’re before you now. This isn’t the only day to ask questions. I’m telling you that we’re releasing the report …

Connolly: That’s a tactic, isn’t it, prime minister.

Morrison: No. With respect, today is not about the media. Today is about releasing the royal commission report. There are eight volumes, and I would encourage you to digest all of them. And on occasion after occasion after occasion, I have no doubt you will quiz me on it. Today is the day for us telling Australia that it is released …

Connolly: This is a major social reform and you’ve stopped us from actually looking at the report. Is that because you’ve [got] two commissioners who disagree on the reforms and the way forward?

Morrison: No. I don’t understand the question.

Morrison appeared visibly shaken by Connolly’s barrage of questions (that’s what reporters are paid to do, PM).

Pantomime Given everything that’s going on, what a time for Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young to schedule a chummy appearance on long-time senior Liberal and current chaser of military industrial complex cash Christopher Pyne’s podcast.

PC gone mad (again) Once again we are forced to ask: what is the Australian Press Council actually for? Consider the following cartoon which appeared in The Australian in June last year:

It depicts a masked Black man, his eyes contorted by rage, kneeling on the neck of the Statue of Liberty in a grotesque inversion of what actually happened to George Floyd while buildings burn to their frames behind him.

According to the Press Council, the cartoon (by veteran cartoonist John Spooner who, for whatever reason, the adjudication declines to name) was “sufficiently in the public interest” given that “violence was perpetrated by African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities against their own communities”.