Crikey

In the Weekend Australian, super-sleuth Janet Albrechtsen breathlessly claimed to have blown IR expert John Buchanan’s academic cover:

Judged by his own words, in his Politics in the Pub address after the 2004 election, the academic looks anything but neutral on politics in general and industrial relations in particular. His speech on the future of the union movement to his leftist audience is overtly political and passionately militant.

Ms Pot, meet Mr Kettle – he edits your opinion page.

That is, the latest issue of Quadrant contains an essay from Tom Switzer, the Australian’s Opinion Editor, offering a strategic assessment of the Right’s progress in the culture wars. The article doesn’t offer the observations of a journalist so much as the musings of a combatant, sprinkled with cheery asides to his far-right companeros.

“Frank [Devine] has fought the good fights,” Switzer says, “and helped dramatically improve the public culture in this country. More power to you, Frank.”

Switzer reminisces about happy days with John Bolton in the American Enterprise Institute and complains that, when he started work at the Australian Financial Review, his unionised workmates shunned him for toadying up his editor.

Most of all, though, he celebrates “how public culture has changed during the past decade—and mainly for the better.”

[D]uring the Keating era, only a few well-known conservatives or free-marketeers such as Paddy McGuinness, Frank Devine, Alan Wood and John Stone existed in the national media.

Today, by contrast, the ranks of the Right have swelled to include Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, Gerard Henderson, Greg Sheridan, Miranda Devine, Janet Albrechtsen, Imre Salusinszky, Sandra Lee, Michael Baume, Dennis Shanahan, Terry McCrann, Michael Duffy, John Roskam, Tim Blair, Christopher Pearson, Paul Gray, Neil Mitchell, and Paul Sheehan.

Like John Buchanan, Tom Switzer’s entitled to his views. But if Buchanan’s figures become suspect because he addressed Politics in the Pub, what does Switzer’s affiliation with the Quad Ranters mean for the Oz’s Opinion Page?

To help out, we’ve written tomorrow’s Albrechtsen column for her. It begins like this:

Judged by his own words, in his address to a Quadrant dinner, Tom Switzer looks anything but neutral on politics in general and industrial relations in particular. His speech on the future of the union movement to his rightist audience is overtly political and passionately militant.

Government Gazette, indeed.