Ross Coulthart

And those people are now being proven true.

I have got an enormous amount of respect for Shari Markson from the Australian Sky News.

Shari did a series of stories for The Australian, which essentially revealed the appalling situation where it was very likely that the COVID vaccine, sorry, the COVID virus came from

the government laboratory in China, in Wuhan.

And there was an enormous attempt by people on the ABC, notably the Media Watch program under Paul Barry, to try and shout down Shari.

And eventually what happened was she was proven right by a U.S.

intelligence investigation and by a congressional investigation.

And the thing that really shocks me about this is there is a tendency in the media, I've noticed, for people to go, oh, wow, an expert said this, therefore it must be right.

I mean, for example...

The way, for example, a lot of the News Limited papers, the Australian particularly, have been pushing on the appalling behavior of members of the opposition at the time, who are now in the government, who essentially tried to suggest that there was some kind of a cover-up involving Brittany Higgins.

Yes, we should accept from the civil decision that was made by Justice Michael Lee that Brittany Higgins was tragically raped in a minister's office, but the appalling allegation that produced the reputation of a minister and her policy advisor that was pushed by the then opposition, now members of the Labor Ministry, to suggest that there was some kind of dark cover-up, and it was used as a kind of a slur to try and attack the then coalition government,

under Morrison.

It was a very effective slur, and I suspect it played a huge part in the downfall of that party in that election.

And frankly, I don't think the media should be knowingly involved in that kind of hatchet job.

And I think the media on occasion in Australia has lost its objectivity and allowed itself to be manipulated.

As we're seeing with this ridiculous expenses scandal at the moment, who gives a flying fuck if a minister spends a few dollars, a few thousand dollars on flying members of their family to a sports match?

Are we really so petty in Australia that we think that people who are paid a fair pittance as politicians, as ministers of the crown, shouldn't be able to have their families with them when they're doing their work as ministers?

I frankly can't get worked up about whatever it is that the media most of the time get worked up about in Australia.

We are obsessed with minutiae.

Meanwhile, we're not talking about things that are happening right under our noses, such as, for example, the militarisation of the top end of Australia.