Fairfax’s daily Abbott-hate: sniggering at him for what was done before his time | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog
MP John Alexander tells Parliament how Fairfax stitched him up:
MP John Alexander tells Parliament how Fairfax stitched him up:
In July last year I was invited to travel to Perth to deliver the keynote speech at a Curtin University forum relating to sporting-club development. During my short stay in Perth I had the opportunity to visit the club at Royal Kings Park and also to meet with the CEO of Perth Airport to discuss our shared issue of aircraft noise, another electorate matter.
While on the west coast I accepted an invitation from my committee colleague, the member for Forrest, to visit her region to meet with business leaders to discuss my work as chair of the coalition’s Sustainable Cities Taskforce. This work was born from the No. 1 issue facing Bennelong residents—a lack of urban planning, leading to our streets becoming the funnel for one of the fastest-growing regions in the country....
Yet it was an unrelated feature of the Forrest electorate that garnered a journalist’s interest in this trip more than a year later: the Margaret River community’s successful wine-production industry.
In order to ensure the public perception matched the integrity with which I approached the trip, I scheduled meetings over three days and was keen to ensure that all activities during that period related only to work matters. Whilst in the region, I also took three days of personal time, solely at my own expense. As a result of the success of my earlier meetings, more work related meetings took place on my personal days. I made no claim for that.
Early last month I was contacted by a Fairfax journalist wishing to have details about this trip. The questions were answered with a clear conscience, but preferring to avoid a story the information was given off the record, as background only.
The journalist in question affirmed his understanding of the status of this information, by reply email. Shortly after sending this email, the journalist transmitted a barrage of tweets that repeatedly quoted from the off-the-record information I had provided…
Interestingly, the final tweets from the Fairfax journalist read: ‘Mr Alexander’s trips fit within entitlements.’ So no story. Ten days later he printed a story that demeaned the good work that was being done into a farcical claim—that I had visited Margaret River to study traffic congestion. This absolute lack of accuracy in reporting directly undermines the important relationship between constituents and their elected representatives. These actions are performed in an overt attempt to injure us, to damage our reputations.
