Solidarity has its limits

As a useful expedient I could turn to Twitter to bask in her wit and wisdom as it tumbles from mind to manicured nail, albeit expressed in expurgated 280 keystroke form but alas, Badham dispatched me to Coventry some years ago.

Long story short, I callously mocked Badham for headlining some ghastly Guardian event where she promised to unlock the secrets of column writing to a paying audience. Presumably those in attendance would be enlightened to within an inch of their lives and leave toting the dreaded Participation Award.

I ventured on Twitter that ponying up to attend may not be an especially prudent use of the punters’ hard-earned, caveat emptor and all that, and was sent to Twitter detention for my trouble.

Why does any of this matter? Well, on Tuesday evening in Brisbane, Labor leader Bill Shorten strode purposefully to the stage at the ACTU Congress dinner and delivered a speech Badham regarded as akin to the Sermon on the Mount.

Only after the event did we learn that Shorten’s speech was one of the ‘My first hundred days in office’ type. A little presumptuous, you might think. Sure, Labor has led in 36 successive Newspolls but those same polls show Shorten about as popular as something I just stepped in. Still, Shorten is the alternative PM and as such any undertaking he makes in a speech of this kind is absolutely in the public interest.

But the public was kept in the dark. If Shorten did have a dream we were not to know about it because the media was forbidden to enter. Journalists, including Ewin Hannan from this august journal, were denied entry at the door. No shorthand, no scribbles, no service.

This left Ms Badham as the sole journalist — and I apply the term with the broadest of brushes — to live-tweet the oratorial magnificence.

That she is a Labor shill is not especially important. After all bias, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. All columnists engage in polemic and sophistry. We are not paid to be right, we are paid to be certain and Ms Badham was certain that Bill Shorten’s speech was one for the ages.

Her social media gushes were all the contemporaneous reporting the public had to go on, presuming she has not already blocked them on Twitter for the crime of poking a bit of fun at her expense.

But Van Badham is not just a Labor abettor. She is a Vice President of the MEAA’s Victorian branch. The MEAA is the union responsible for journalists and other assorted weirdos who dwell somewhere on the media spectrum.

Certainly, it was not Badham’s call to ban journalists from what should have been a public function. It was said the secretary for the ACTU, Sally McManus, wanted delegates to ‘relax.’ However, the media ban extended to some of the sessions at the Congress. Presumably delegates needed a little more time to put their feet up.

Working journalists were not just prohibited from working, the entire industry, including thousands of journos represented by the MEAA specifically and the ACTU generally were virtually told to get stuffed. Freelance journos who were stopped at the door, were left to contemplate their losses in time and travel expenditure.

For what it’s worth, the MEAA has registered a complaint with the ACTU. It will almost certainly come to nothing. I suspect even Shorten would be annoyed by the censoriousness, having made a significant speech that exists now only on the flat surface of a screen on his own website.

Of the media ban, Van Badham, who is supposed to be representing journalists, said and did precisely nothing. She merrily tweeted through the evening and into the following day on sundry topics and unrelated matters. She must have known the people she was charged to represent had been royally shafted.

Solidarity, like hours in the day, has its limits.