Hinch Says

A dangerously delusional message on Twitter last night took me back to a sordid issue I was talking about at this time yesterday and maybe gave me an insight into how some of our judges think too.

I heard the latest news today about Hoddle Street killer Julian Knight and yet another attempt to clog up the courts at taxpayers’ expense.

Be interesting to know how many people tuned in to Channel Ten this week for the bikie wars story Brothers in Arms -- or the bikie gang doco that preceded it.

This is going to make me sound so old and so out-of touch. I heard a story on the news today which took me back to my own school days when we were banned from taking a newfangled gadget to school called an electronic calculator. I don’t think we ever had an abacus. We had to use an old-fashioend thing called a brain.

Remind me again of what a senior judge was saying the other day…. It’s not the courts that are out of touch… it’s the media. Police reporters and people like me. We give the courts a bad name. How dare you criticize judges? We’re the experts.

I won’t call it a tug of love because it is not. It is a tug of war. And, as usual, when marriages crumble and children are involved a lot of people get hurt. Lines get blurred. Lies get told. Emotions get very raw. And the pain gets very real.

I know I am remiss in not covering this story yesterday but to be honest the first reports coming through sounded like fiction. Or, in journalistic parlance, sounded like a beat-up.

Question. How can a man, a predator, an absolute sleazebag, who is on the Sexual Offenders Register for life, be umpiring Under-18s football for the VAFA?

OK. I’m setting a scenario and want to know your answer and I hope you’ll be honest. Have you ever got into an argument and got so angry you have called somebody a name you regret. Got so heated, so het up, in a domestic dispute, a lover’s spat, or an argument in a pub, or in a card game, or playing football, when you really unloaded and called somebody a bleepity bleep.

Last Thursday, I did my 3AW Drive program, an outside broadcast from Forest Hill Chase for Harris Scarfe, because they donated $10,000 to the research department at the Austin Hospital’s Liver Transplant Unit.

Today, I managed to listen to all of a doctor’s diatribe against homosexuals in general and gay marriage in particular, without throwing anything at the radio, but it was the last comment though that really go to me.

There’s a Page One story in the Herald Sun today under the headline Bikies for Hire. Cops uncover Hell’s Angels link to corporate giant. The corporate giant is Visy. The billion-dollar domain of the late Richard Pratt and family. It’s a legitimate story about bikies being used as standover men, debt collectors and as ‘problem solvers’.

Yesterday on my 3AW program I said I thought President Obama was brave for announcing in an election year that he supported gay marriage. That prompted an angry email from an American listener who argued that it wasn’t ‘gutsy’. That Obama had merely ‘flip-flopped’ for his political benefit with a re-election campaign underway.

An incident involving two well-known Melbourne journalists has raised a number of questions about what is news, who is news, when should something be reported and why has this story not surfaced in the newspapers?

A rare experience for me today. I did an OB --an Outside Broadcast – for 3AW from inside a shopping centre. From the new Harris Scarfe store at Forest Hill Chase in Melbourne. It was their big official opening and I was pleased to be part of the celebrations.

I want to talk about a delicate issue that individually is a mystery but on a larger scale is a subject that parents and schools have to confront.

One way to look at last night’s Budget, to try to get a feel for it, is to check out the names being given to it. Treasurer Wayne Swan and a desperate vote-buying Julia Gillard would like this one: The Robin Hood Budget. In an instant you’ve got a picture of your government fighting for the battlers by taking from the rich and giving it to the poor.

There was an explosive rumour that ran riot on Twitter today. It named a senior Government politician. It made salacious accusations against him. Just what the Government needs in the midst of the Slipper-Thomson squalor.

There’s disturbing news out of Sydney. A decision by a District Court judge that I believe smacks at the very core of our justice system. Undermines any idea of all people being treated equally under law.

I was in the perfect place yesterday to analyse the latest [official] detailing of Craig Thomson’s obscene use of around half a million dollars of hospital workers’ money on hookers, high life entertaining and spousal travel.

Only yesterday afternoon I was telling a high-ranking Police officer off-air how much I respected the work they do. Some things bring you crashing down in a hurry don’t they.

To really explain the obscenity and the seriousness of the scandal surrounding one of Australia’ s most notorious unions I want to go back to a personal story I have told before. To me, it sums up the cynical exploitation of some of Australia’s lowest paid workers. Those ‘working families’ that Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan are always on about.

It was almost two years ago now that Julia Gillard in the final desperate throes of the 2010 Federal election made the now infamous promise that has haunted the legitimacy of her prime ministership ever since.Tony Abbott has reminded us of it almost daily. I’m told his office secretary even has it as her ring tone.

As you may have heard on the news a critically injured man was dumped at Melbourne’s Western Hospital in Sunshine last night after being shot in the groin.

Remember after the failed Rudd challenge against Prime Minister Gillard in February. She won it handsomely. Rudd was politically buried. The PM had that badly needed ‘ clear air’. She called the troops to a barbecue at The Lodge and even brought along a special guest for a pep talk. The Silver Bodgie himself. Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

I want to talk about a guy named Lou d’Alpuget. Known to older journos around Australia as a yachting reporter and known to people in political circles as the father of Blanche d’ Alpuget journo/biographer and now wife of former Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

If I listened to Jeff Kennett I would not be raising this subject with you. I well remember when the head of Beyondblue got the backing of the Brumby Government and went it court to get a temporary and then permanent injunction against 60 Minutes. The result was the program was banned from carrying a story about teenage suicides in the Geelong area.

To really understand the insulting tactics and the’ a line has been crossed’ nonsense that came out of the Prime Minister’s mouth yesterday, I have to go back about 40 years to when, as a foreign correspondent, I was criss-crossing the United States aboard Gough Whitlam’s plane.

With the Slipper-Thomson-Gillard schmozzle in Canberra -- and the latest Galaxy Poll showing again there’d be a rout at the Federal Election --you’d think Tony Abbott only had to sit back, try to be a small target, and wait for the keys to The Lodge to, this time, fall into his lap.

You know, for a while there, I thought that Bill Shorten was foreman material. Maybe even one day could take the boss’ job. But not after yesterday’s behaviour over Slippery Pete when he was being interviewed on SKY News by David Speers. What a stupid, vacuous, forelock-tugging performance.