Radio Australia Today Editorial
Archive for November, 2009
A Radio Australia veteran still going strong
30 November 2009
In this era when people stick at their jobs for five years or less, Hidayat Djajamihardja’s career has been extraordinary.
Hidayat hasd been working with Radio Australia for 43 years. He started working for us in Jakarta in 1966. He tells of how in those days he had to clear his copy with an Indonesian Government censor, and that was the just the start of his hurdles. Today when we file copy, we do it over the internet or on the phone, but back then he had to either send it using morse code if it was just copy or, if it included a piece of audio, he would go to the airport and try to get one of the out-going passengers to take it to Singapore for the next stage in the transmission.
Wow. I remember as a young reporter being frustrated by the lack of public phones in western Sydney. I thought I had difficulties, but obviously Hidayat Djajamihardja would have luxuriated in what I thought at the time were real problems.
As we approach Radio Australia’s 70th birthday, all of us here reflect on the work of people like Hidayat. He was there when Indonesian President Sukarno was overthrown, working at that time with Philip Koch, the journalist that was the basis of the character that Mel Gibson played in the film The Year of Living Dangerously. That book and film is notable for the young local journalist Billy Kwan (played by Linda Hunt in the film). Some say that Billy was based on Hidayat, a claim that he embarrassedly plays down, claiming instead that Billy was a composite of several Indonesian journalists.
Hidayat is a man who has been not at all jaded by his 43 years in the office. He is obviously thrilled to be telling stories on a day-to-day basis, and he gives out the feeling that every day is like his first at Radio Australia.
It’s a pleasure to be working with the man. And I’m glad he stayed working with RA long enough for me, a relative newcomer, to meet and work with him. Hidayat represents what Radio Australia is all about: enthusiasm, connection, smarts and integrity. Being hilarious and having a rich baritone doesn’t hurt either.
- Phil Kafcaloudes
November 27, 2009. The day the Liberals Implode
27 November 2009
I have written that being in Opposition in Australia is a nightmare. You have no power and even less to do.
Party unity is a rarity and leadership plotting is a pastime.
After he avoided a leadership challenge on Wednesday the Opposition leader here in Australia, Malcolm Turnbull had every right to think that his leadership was safe for a week at least.
Try twenty-four hours. For that was how long it took for his opponents in the party to start defecting from him. And when Liberals defect they do it very loudly. There they are all over the media this morning, almost gleefully telling the world why, regretfully, they can’t support the leader, even though they lost a party room vote to oust him.
All this is may be unedifying to casual onlookers, but there is a very serious side to it too.
That serious side is global warming. The future of Australia’s Emissions Trading Scheme rests on Malcolm Turnbull’s survival as leader.
The government is putting pressure on Turnbull too. It has specified that it wants the emissions laws to be passed by 3.45 today.
It probably won’t happen then, and if it does happen, few politicians will celebrate. Secretly the government would probably being in mixed emotions. A failure to pass the bill will give it the legal and moral right to call an early election, and that’s an election that even Malcolm Turnbull acknowledged this morning would decimate his party. The government would mostly likely become dominant in the parliament and the Opposition destroyed.
Stay tuned. The next three days will be the most extraordinary in the Australian parliament ever since the sacking of the Whitlam government in 1975.
- Phil Kafcaloudes
Nigel Brennan. The nightmare’s over
26 November 2009
This is extraordinary. Fifteen months ago Australian freelance journalist Nigel Brennan was kidnapped in Somalia along with his Canadian companion, journalist Amanda Lindhout.
In the social and political mire that is Somalia, anything could’ve happened to them. The only thing that kept them alive was the possibility of a ransom being paid for their release.
Obviously governments do not pay ransoms to anyone, terrorists, kidnappers or extortionists, because to pay such a ransom would guarantee further such kidnappings.
One of the kidnappers claims that a ransom was paid in this case, and suggestions this morning are that Lindhout’s family may have been the ones who came up with the money. If either the Australian or Canadian governments helped top up the ransom they won’t say. Nor are they likely to ever admit it, for the reason I have already given.
Brennan and Lindhout have an extraordinary tale to tell. Ten months ago they tried to escape their captors, and you can understand why they would. After five months in captivity, a cruel death looked more likely every day. They were recaptured though, and Lindhout tells of being beaten and tortured. The two were chained together, and remained chained together for the remaning ten months of their captivity.
I wrote in the headline for this blog that the nightmare was now over.
Of course it’s not over. Brennan and Lindhout will have years of suffering from their ordeal, and their lives will never be the same as it was sixteen months ago. I just hope that they get all the counselling and support that they deserve and need.
- Phil Kafcaloudes
Malcolm Turnbull faces a reckoning
26 November 2009
Malcolm Turnbull is the Opposition leader here in Australia, and he’s rapidly finding out that being in Opposition is akin to being a gardener in the Sahara. There is really not that much for his members to do. There are parliamentary committees of course, and meeting constituents, but there’s no power involved. No governing, no voting power, and as former minister Tony Abbott once told me, no real interest in you by the media.
This makes for a vacuum, and nowhere for all that adrenaline to go.
It’s no wonder that former ministers get ropey mid-term.
Which is where we are right now, and Malcolm Turnbull is the man who has to deal with this pent-up fruistration from among his flock. The vote over Australia’s Emissions Trading Scheme brought a lot of emotion out last night, with some members calling for Turnbull’s head for having what they considered the audacity to claim that the Opposition supported the government bill.
The truth is that the Opposition does support the bill. he got, through hook and crook, majority support for it. It was bare support, but still support.
He will survive this fight, although some commentators say that the survival is sure to be short-lived.
I disagree. Malcolm Turnbull is one of the strngest politicians we have seen in a long time. He was forged on the twin anvils of the law courts and business. He has known tough opponents before and as often as not, won through. Every successful leader has had at least one Waterloo. yesterday’s bludgeoning fight to get the ETS through was his. he could’ve caved to the dissenters in his party, but he didn’t. He didn’t want to go down in history as the man who stopped Australia doing anything about global warming. he had gone to the government wanting changes, and got a lot of them. The government met him more than halfway, and he saw the result as something worth fighting for.
In saying that I think Malcolm Turnbull will survive, I’m not saying that he won’t lose his job as Opposition leader before the next election, but I do predict that he will regain it at some stage, probably when his party has an election victory in its grasp, which may be four or eight years away. If he stays in parliament, he will do well.
But he’s a wealthy man with a CV that’s full of achievements. If he wanted toi walk away, he wouldn’t end up sitting on a pavement somewhere with a tin cup. if he had wanted to leave politics, he had plenty of chances to do it already, when things were really down.
The fact that he’s stayed shows that there’s more to him.
- Phil Kafcaloudes
The Mike Rann Sex Scandal continues.
24 November 2009
Now I don’t particularly care whether or not the South Australian premier had sex with a barmaid.
I care about as much as he might about who I choose to have sex with.
As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, a former barmaid has alleged that the premier had sex with her on several occasions in his premier’s office in parliament house.
After her paid TV interview went to air, the premier issued a statement to say that there were gross inaccuracies in the woman’s story, and that he was saddened that their ‘friendship’ had come to this.
If the premier had left it there, perhaps the story would’ve petered out.
But he obviously felt that he had to take it further. He’s launched legal action against the TV station that ran the story, and against a magazine that is going to publish a story with the woman.
This development is enough for this story to be guaranteed legs for years to come. Every time the story comes up for a procedural hearing in court, the media will trot out the story, the allegations and the history of the disagreement, and by the time it goes to final hearing, the matter will have been years old.
That’s bad enough for Mike Rann and his family, but Mike Rann also had to go one critical one step further and tell the media that he did not have sex with that woman.
What he’s done is to put the story on front of almost every newspaper, and given the woman an opportunity to respond to his denial. Undoubtedly the premier will now respond to her demand that he undergo a lie detector test.
Political sagacity would suggest that he not fall for this. But then again, political sagacity would’ve suggested that the premier not make the comments that he made yesterday. He should’ve just left the story as it was. Make no denials, don’t protest too much. Leave the woman with no oxygen. After all the woman has not alleged any illegality by the premier, and only, at worst, some moral dubiousness.
Pandora has been let out. Prepare for a unedifying breaking loose of hell.
- Phil Kafcaloudes
