Professor David Flint has assumed yet another persona. Senior correspondent Barry Everingham comments.
The Indonesian migrant who has taken over the debate surrounding his adopted country’s Constitutional future has taken on another cause — or two or three, if it comes to that.
David Flint is now a fashionista; an apologist for Australia’s most egregious and racist shock jock, Alan Jones and to top that off he’s having us believe he knows something about the international best-selling, highly regarded magazine Vanity Fair!
If only he’d try to do something about the ingrained corruption which stifles his country of birth – or better still, go back to it – we’d be rid of him and he might not make such a blathering idiot of himself each times he taps his word processor with those ever so carefully manicured fingers. He might be surprised to know there’s a growing band of good Monarchists who to put it mildly “hate his guts” and want him out.
Thomas Flynn can tell him more about that.
In his latest incantation as a media commentator, Flint waxes ecstatic that his favourite right wing Liberal Party and seldom read rag The Spectator takes apart my colleague and fellow Republican Peter Fitzsimons for criticising Alan Jones – of more later – and actually sneers that he wears a Red Bandana!
This reference is of course right up Flint’s alley and in the bitchy and feline style which has become his signature, he goes ape over the bandana reference and even runs a picture of Peter to illustrate his nasty point.
The Spectator, according to Flint, opined and criticised Peter for daring to criticise the racist and misogynist Jones who Flint says is a successful broadcaster, which “Mr Fitzsimons is not”!
Now, The Spectator is edited by one of Australia’s most erudite and intelligent writers, Tom Switzer, with whom I had a happy professional relationship when he was opinion editor at of The Australian.
Alas, poor Tom has swung around to the extreme Right, along with Jones, Bolt et al. Switzer really should keep better company.
On the ABC’s Q&A this week he tut tutted when Alan Jones was criticised for his outrageous and totally uncalled for plea for the Prime Minister to be put in bag and thrown into the ocean.
Quoting that master of perceptive Australian journalism, Mungo McCallum’s description of John Howard being an “unflushable turd”, Tom indicated if Mungo could say that, well, it was open slather for Jones.
Sorry Tom, it ain’t as easy as that mate. Gillard is a woman and even a low life like Alan Jones has to bear that in mind while he’s whipping his redneck audience into a frenzy of hatred and invective.
Flint, too, needs to watch himself.
He blatantly lies that he (and ACM) have no political stance on anything — then shows his true colours.
Flint and The Spectator are outraged by Fitzsimons’ quotes about the real Prince Andrew from the top rated, hugely read international Vanity Fair, which Independent Australia used exclusively last week .
Whether Messrs Flint and Switzer like it or not, Vanity Fair doesn’t cop writs, the stories it uses are totally researched, checked and re-checked and the Queen’s second son it appears IS a real piece of work.
If he wasn’t a few heartbeats away from Yarralumla, it wouldn’t matter.
But while ever Australia suffers the burden of the current out-of-date Constitution, it’s befitting we continue to expose the behaviour of the foreign family we’re connected to.
