Hansard scrubs Reynolds’ Higgins slip, Taiwan talking points revealed, and NBC’s ‘both sides’ fail

Talkin’ Taiwan

Talking points released to Crikey under freedom of information revealed the tightrope the government needed to walk regarding this year’s election in Taiwan. “New talking points” on Taiwan circulated on January 11, two days before the poll, emphasised the island’s exercise of its “vibrant democracy” was a “matter for the people of Taiwan”. The reason for the “strong Australian media interest” that the documents note elsewhere is, of course, Beijing’s response.

So the talking points have to pay lip service to the rights of Taiwanese voters to decide their leadership while also acknowledging Australia’s “longstanding, bipartisan one-China policy”. While it’s deliberately vague on what this means for China’s claim on Taiwan, Australia does not actually recognise Taiwan as a country, and hasn’t since the early ’70s (something worth bearing in mind when recalling Scott Morrison’s News Corp-aided fulminations when he was PM on how soft a Labor government would be on China).

Certainly, Albanese tried to maintain that kind of diplomacy, telling Sky News on January 9: “It is important that everyone respect the outcome of democratic elections. That’s a matter for the
people of Taiwan and that is certainly the Australian government’s position will be to respect any outcome…”.

Of course it’s even trickier because Taiwan’s people keep voting in the pro-sovereignty Democratic Progressive Party, doing so again on January 13 with William Lai replacing incumbent Tsai Ing-wen, who had already served the two-term limit for Taiwanese presidents. Even before this had happened, China’s ambassador to Australia Xiao Qian was penning an op-ed in The Australian warning a “miscalculation” from Australia in its handling of the next Taiwanese government could result in the Australian people being “pushed over the edge of an abyss”.

The piece is shared in an email chain between the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (including PMC’s assistant secretary for the Pacific branch Bill Costello and acting deputy secretary of international and security Lynette Wood) alongside what reads in the circumstances like a studiedly neutral observation before insisting the “key lines” on the matter won’t change.

Accordingly, Albanese congratulated Lai on his win, but reiterated on ABC’s Radio National the following Monday “we’ll continue to work on what is an important relationship, consistent though with our long-standing and bipartisan one-China policy that we have”. It did not, at least initially, take the heat off.

Reynolds spears Higgins

Last week we were notified of a textbook Freudian slip from Western Australian Senator Linda Reynolds. While questioning Australian public sector commissioner Dr Gordon de Brouwer, Reynolds made a reference to the song “Oops!… I did it again”. Except she attributed it not to the singer Britney Spears, but (you guessed it) her former staffer Brittany Higgins.

The senator could be forgiven for having Higgins on the brain, given less than a week earlier her defamation proceedings against Higgins and Higgins’ fiancé David Sharaz had to be “postponed” after what Reynolds described as a “stressful and difficult day” put Higgins in hospital.

We said we’d keep an eye on the Hansard transcript to see if the record was altered to spare Reynolds, and wouldn’t you know it:

Are you Ronna go my way?

In recent days, US network NBC has given a truly textbook example of how not to learn the lessons that should have bludgeoned their way into every serious news outlet’s brain over the past 25 years or so. Namely, that a blind adherence to “both sides” of any debate will eventually land you in trouble and/or absurdity. We’ve seen this most catastrophically with climate change and COVID-19, but also with the white supremacy movement in the Trump era; many of the biggest news outlets in the US treated both sides of a debate as though they were good faith, useful contributors to a robust public debate. We, obviously, know the consequences.

So it’s quite something that NBC News was willing to shell out US$300,000 a year for ex-Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel. “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team,” NBC political editor Carrie Budoff Brown insisted.

A quick reminder of what that voice has got up to in the past: McDaniel was an early and leading proponent of the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election would be stolen from Trump, and continued to parrot the “big lie” that his election loss had been the result of voter fraud. She was also behind a motion that characterised the January 6 attacks on the US Capitol as “legitimate political discourse”. She eventually confessed to the United States House Select Committee on January 6 that, at the request of Trump and John Eastman, she helped organise “fake electors” to vote for Trump.

It went, well, how you’d expect it to go. Some of NBC’s highest-profile journos were publicly furious. And it’s not like this gave NBC a voice that will make a second Trump administration more agreeable to the network — their alliance has fallen apart, as every friendship with the former president eventually does.

To top everything off, having hired someone clearly unsuitable and allowed her to be publicly humiliated several times, the geniuses behind this debacle promptly hoiked McDaniel into the path of the nearest bus, announcing this morning (Tuesday evening in the US) that mere days after her hiring announcement, she was to be axed. McDaniel is reportedly already talking to lawyers about how to fight this. Let’s hope they’re better than the ones she and Trump relied on in late 2020.