Farewell, Joe Aston: The hits, the scalps and the misses

Joe Aston’s final Rear Window column ran in today’s Australian Financial Review, recounting his journey from his early days on the column when “unconstrained by self-awareness”, with the “Dunning-Kruger effect in full force”, he would attend “Sydney’s establishment canteens … and catalogue the power diners of the day” to its current incarnation, where he has had “most riotous fun exposing the rampant spin over substance in Australian business and politics, and demonstrating just how thin that veneer is”.

Say what you want about the guy — Gerry Harvey’s thoughts spring to mind — but Australian journalism is losing one of its most distinctive voices, an expert stylist whose put-downs landed with a satisfying thwack on the page. This got him and his employer in legal trouble from time to time, though less often than you might expect. And every now and then his work was just plain vile. Join us in looking back at some of Aston’s hits — and occasional misses.

The misses

Let’s get the uncharitable part of our round-up out of the way first (to paraphrase Voltaire, “It’s to the active gossip columnist we owe respect, to the departing one, only the truth…”).

Aston’s sign-off recalls:

… an evening when broadcasting doyen Kerry O’Brien called to confront me over an item I’d written about him, which was incorrect and which I hadn’t bothered to check. ‘You are the pits, sir!’ he exclaimed, before hanging up. And he was right.

But a few other names are conspicuous in their absence from his reminiscence. Venture capitalist Elaine Stead, for example.

With a typical flourish, Aston had called Stead a “stupid cretin” and accused her of acting like a “pyromaniac” with other people’s money across two pieces and a tweet in 2020. Stead sued for defamation and, after a surreal trial where Aston, among other things, was called upon to justify how many photos of his own feet populated his Instagram, was awarded $280,000. As if to further burnish Aston’s reputation as a writer who didn’t mind who he offended, the trial also revealed that Aston’s AFR colleague Aaron Patrick — whose own work had been given the Rear Window treatment — had contacted Stead to sympathetically note they “both been trolled by a certain AFR columnist”.

In 2014, the Fin had to pay $95,000 to News Corp CEO Kim Williams, who had sued over incorrect claims he stormed out of a meeting with Opera House trustees. And while it never landed him in court, we can’t let Aston off the hook for his grubby work on then-media reporter for The Australian Darren Davidson. When confronted by Media Watch in 2018, Aston “rejected [the] premise that my language was homophobic … In the examples you cite, I am not cruelly tormenting Lurch over his sexuality but for his unrelenting and unashamed bootlicking of News Corp management”. Still, the constant references to Davidson’s apparent love of having “his mouth full” and his preference for “debasement” paint their own picture.

Indeed, reading the expertly crafted invective below, it’s a surprise that Aston, particularly in Australia’s madly pro-litigant defamation system, didn’t land in court more often than he did.

The hits

When he was on, he was really on. Over the past 12 years, few in Australia’s mainstream could touch Aston’s ability to cut through spin and self-importance with a diamond-tipped turn of phrase. Here are a few of our favourites.

• On the “omnishambles” of disgraced Qantas CEO Alan Joyce‘s farewell tour: “His tone-deafness is medical grade. He almost got away with it. The getaway car was roaring into the sunset with half a billion dollars in the trunk — Vanessa Hudson’s scarf was blowing in the wind. And now he’s seeking moral elevation for doing the right thing!”
• Kevin Rudd: “The Nambour narcissist … Is it any wonder that someone who cannot even proselytise his own achievements with the accuracy expected of an HSC exam paper thought that rolling out metronomic announceables was the same as running a country? Kevin is no intellectual; he’s barely a sophomore with a serious face.”
• Earlier than most, Aston had concluded Scott Morrison was “the equal phoniest occupant of The Lodge — in a dead heat with Kevin Rudd — since Stanley Parkes first put quill to paper and designed the joint”.
• Former Rio Tinto boss Jean-Sebastien Jacques was called a “nauseating greenwasher”.
• Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Brendan Pearson was “quietly taken out the back for a hearty breakfast of shotgun muzzle”.
• On Andrew Forrest ignoring the chaos in the Fortescue to give a surreal presentation on “lethal humidity”: “It was part televangelist, part cult leader, part TED Talk parody … If Twiggy was standing outside the State Library in a Nepalese poncho with a megaphone, you’d cross the street to avoid him. Instead, he’s the proprietor of a $65 billion company with a massive chequebook, so everyone nods along in unison.”
• Bronwyn Bishop: “In her flourishing senility, the Beehive is finding a red under every bed”.
• Julie Bishop: “JBish, pioneer of fashion diplomacy, now beyond reproach, her popularity absolution for her vacuity.”
• Peter FitzSimons is a “moneyed North Shore bloviator” and “a stupid person’s idea of a smart person”. In another piece, Aston noted “FitzSimons intends to, upon his death, donate his brain to science. Why wait?”
• On BlackRock chairman Larry Fink: “Perhaps if Larry was disposed to living BlackRock’s creed, rather than declaiming it emptily from his throne of blood diamonds, his message might sustain the kind of progress it envisions. That, plus he wouldn’t come off as such a douche cannon.”
• On News Corp and Gerry Harvey: “The Murdochs’ entire Australian apparatus — from its tabloids’ anti-PC layabouts through to The Australian’s plodding business section — guzzles Gerry’s warm Coomboona bull sperm by the pailful so its publishers can shake down the rabid old fool for the very last $40 million print advertising account they’re ever going to see.”