A joy to watch? Pauline Hanson gets a warm welcome in some parts of the media | Weekly Beast

Pauline Hanson may have been vague on policy detail, costings and sources but according to a bunch of News Corp Australia commentators she gave a “tour de force performance” at the National Press Club on Wednesday.

The One Nation leader was hailed as “a politician ready to rule” by news.com.au and “a joy to watch” by the Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt.

Jai Bednall, news.com.au’s “head of growth”, said it was “clear we have a new unofficial opposition leader” who “looks and sounds sharp”.

“Some Aussies of all ages might struggle to trust a party that is having to expand so rapidly with the nation’s finances, let alone geopolitics,” Bendall wrote.

“But One Nation doesn’t have to be perfect in these areas either. They just need enough people to believe that it surely can’t get much worse than those currently running the country.”

The Australian’s associate editor Jenna Clarke, hailed Hanson as a Thatcher from Queensland.

“Critics and commentators were expecting a lecture from a Karen, instead she put on a show akin to late British PM Margaret Thatcher, if Marg ever spent any time in a Townsville pub,” Clarke wrote.

“Hanson is sharp in every sense, from her political antenna to her rhetoric.”

Grogs told to jog on

Some of the questions at Hanson’s press club appearance raised more than a few eyebrows. There was no more stringent critic than Greg Jericho, the Australia Institute’s chief economist and a regular Guardian Australia columnist.

Jericho was among those who thought questions from the Age and Sydney Morning Herald correspondent James Massola and the Canberra Times’ Dana Daniel were underwhelming.

Massola: “A simple question for you, reflecting on your speech, your comments about migration and multiculturalism, and what have you, is Australia in danger of being swamped by Muslim migration?

Hanson: “Not if I’ve got anything to do with it.”

Daniel: “Canberra cops a lot of criticism from conservatives. You spent a lot of time here in your career. How do you rate our nation’s capital?”

Hanson: “Well, I try to keep out of it as much as I possibly can.”

Jericho reacted to the broadcast with a post at 2pm on BlueSky which said: “This gallery has had a decade of watching Trump and 30 yrs of Hanson and they walked in the press club like it was first day on the job”.

As a Walkley award-winning journalist, Jericho has been a member of the press gallery since 2015.

But an hour after he posted the sharp criticism of his gallery colleagues, the committee president, Jane Norman, emailed to say he no longer qualified to hold the pass.

“We’re doing another audit of Press Gallery passes and yours has been identified as one that no longer fits the criteria,” said Norman, the ABC’s national affairs correspondent.

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“Given your primary job is now as the chief economist at the Australia Institute, can you please arrange for a lobbyist pass for the building?”

Jericho told Weekly Beast he had joined the institute in February 2022. On sitting days, he said, almost all his time was devoted to journalism.

Norman told Beast: “It hasn’t been cancelled. I asked Greg to arrange a lobbyist pass because he’s the chief economist at the Aus Institute which is in breach of the Press Gallery rules.”

Jericho said his pass was being cancelled: “If you’re kicking me out, fine, but don’t tell me you’re not while you show me the door!”

An English editor in France

We’ve established that the Daily Telegraph editor, Ben English, loves to post videos from his car or his desk and talk up his paper’s stories. But this week he changed tack and posted what looked very much like an ad for Qantas’s new Airbus A350-1000ULR on the Tele’s Instagram page.

“Hello, everyone, from Toulouse in France,” English said, with the plane behind him. The “longest haul flights ever for humanity” had just been announced by the airline’s chief executive, Vanessa Hudson. The nonstop service from Sydney to London was first announced in 2017 and was due to come into service in 2022, but has been repeatedly delayed. The flights are now set to start in October 2027.

“They’re specially designed as incredible innovations to enable people to minimise the impact of being on a flight for 20 hours, including wellness centres, special diet, special temperature control, a whole range of things,” English gushed. There was no indication on the post that he had travelled courtesy of Qantas.

The aviation writer Robyn Ironside, who is also on the junket to France, disclosed the arrangement in her stories for the Australian and the Tele: “The writer is a guest of Airbus and Qantas in Toulouse.”

We tried to ask English if he had paid for his own ticket to the media event but received an out-of-office auto-reply from his email. The Daily Telegraph has been contacted for comment.

New line of work

Matthew Hooton may be the “most experienced, exciting and intellectually engaged political and business commentator” in New Zealand, according one of the country’s biggest publishing companies, but he is not a journalist. That hasn’t stopped Stuff Group from appointing the former National party strategist as editor-in-chief of the Post and the Sunday Star-Times.

In the Post’s report on the controversial appointment it noted: “There’s one thing missing from his list of credentials: journalism. Hooton has never trained as or been a journalist, yet he’s now the new editor-in-chief of The Post.”

The Stuff Group owner and publisher, Sinead Boucher, explained that she had chosen the lobbyist for his understanding of power.

“Few people understand power in New Zealand as well as Matthew does,” she said in the press announcement. “He has lived and breathed political strategy and spin for most of his career, and he knows institutional self-interest better than most.”

Elsewhere in the media it was described as a “bombshell” and a “WTF moment”.

Hooton, who was writing a column for the New Zealand Herald before he landed the gig, said he was a fast learner who would “delegate things pretty readily”.

“The Post is not one person, The Post is not one generation of people, The Post is its whole history,” Hooton said. “You’ve got pre-existing institutional frameworks that ensure the highest standards of ethics, and the highest standard of balance and rigor.”

The head of journalism at Massey University, Associate Prof James Hollings, told Radio New Zealand that Hooton’s appointment was “one on the shock factor”.

“It could be quite a sea change for journalism and political journalism in New Zealand.”

Cup overflows

SBS’s broadcast of the World Cup has already reached 9.76 million Australians and SBS says it is “delighted this global sporting event has been embraced by Australian audiences and media”.

The enthusiasm is so high for World Cup content, Weekly Beast understands, the exclusive Australian rights holder has raised concerns with a number of media organisations over their use of footage, some of which comes close to a breach of rights.

Before the tournament began, SBS warned media organisations that any use of its footage or other copyright material from the World Cup would be considered a breach of its copyright, unless it was under fair dealing.

We noticed both the Courier-Mail and the Daily Telegraph were running an eight-second gif of Lionel Messi’s long-range goal for Argentina against Algeria on their homepages this week.

According to SBS rules, the use of animated gifs or looped MP4s is not ordinarily permitted by rights owners under fair dealing for major comparable sporting events.

An SBS spokesperson would not be drawn on which media organisations the broadcaster had contacted.

“Non-rightsholders may only use FIFA World Cup 2026™ content in accordance with the requirements of fair dealing under the Copyright Act 1986, including for the genuine purpose of news reporting, criticism or review,” a spokesperson said. “In particular, any use must attribute SBS as the source/rightsholder of the content.”

News Corp Australia was approached for comment.

Zero insight

A familiar yellow Clive Palmer ad for the United Australia party has never looked so out of place as it did this week in the Advertiser.

The anti-immigration ad, for Senator Ralph Babet, ran along the bottom of the page featuring stories about and photographs of Nestory Irankunda’s joyful family and Adelaide Socceroos fans celebrating his World Cup performance against Turkey.

Just below a sea of smiling faces in Adelaide, including Irankunda’s mother, Dafroza Siyajali, was the jarring headline “Zero immigration”.