Swan's assault on free speech

Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan. Source: HWT Image Library

WAYNE Swan. World champion treasurer and twit.

Over the years you accumulate a list of stories or commentaries that in the cold light of subsequent day you would prefer not to have written.

You also accumulate a second list of stories and commentaries that you regret NOT having written.

Some on this second list were written, or written better, by others. Then there are the ones that just slipped by, unwritten, as the moment passed.

One of the latter that I have continually regretted not writing is an observation on Julia Gillard's instruction to journalists to "just don't write crap." Serendipitously, her deputy Swan has now given a new sense of relevance to that previously unwritten observation.

Gillard's instruction came in response to a 'Dorothy Dixer' from Seven Network's Canberra correspondent Mark Riley: to paraphrase, please tell us how to report on, as he ingeniously - others might say, inanely - put it, climate change opposers? Presumably, some of those "climate change opposers" will now be out in the streets "opposing" the floods in NSW and Victoria. I look forward to Riley reporting on them.

Riley's question could have spawned a whole series of commentaries on the fawning failures of the Canberra Press Gallery.

Its collective failure to even report on, far less scrutinise, substantive policy. Of which so-called climate change aka global warming is the all-time but by no means only standout.

But when the Gallery turns to rolling up supine 'Dorothy Dixers,' as Riley did last July, we have truly moved into the realm of the nauseating surreal.

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Swan's assault on free speech