South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill reportedly called Sky News host and Australian columnist Chris Kenny a “right-wing fuckwit” and honestly, where can we send the champagne.
The Australian reports that the comments occurred at a book launch for ‘Climate Wars‘, by Weatherill’s colleague and Labor MP Mark Butler.
It details the ongoing battle between Australian bodies pushing to move into renewable energies, and those trying to prevent it. At one point, it uses the example of Adele‘s power outage at her concert earlier this year, which right-wing politicians and commentators used to ‘prove’ South Australia’s push into renewables were doomed. (It almost immediately transpired that in fact an electrical chord had been unplugged by her rotating state.)
Weatherill was at the concert at the time, and so spoke about the incident at the book launch.
From The Australian:
During his speech, Mr Weatherill referenced a power outage at Adele’s Adelaide concert in March, mentioned in the book, which was caused by a roadie unplugging the wrong cord, but was interpreted by concert-goers at the time as the fault of the state’s patchy power supply.
Mr Weatherill described the angst he and several colleagues assembled in a corporate box had felt as the outage unfolded, and then their relief when the pop star confirmed the outage was unrelated to the state’s power supply
He was scathing of the “right-wing f..kwits” who he believed had sought to take advantage of the situation, in particular The Australian’s associate editor Chris Kenny, and a series of tweets he released in the wake of the outage.
In fact, it wasn’t just a series of tweets; Kenny did a full hit piece on the power outage and how local papers had covered it, despite Adele literally clarifying at the concert that it was thanks to a chord pulled out by her rotating stage.
Kenny is now having a lil tantz on Twitter, retweeting really bad jokes from accounts with 18 followers…
Did you hear the joke – What did South Australians use before candles? Electricity
— McDonald (@Novamarville) July 27, 2017
…and quotes from Margaret Thatcher.
Not a surprise. When you manage to achieve highest electricity prices in the world when you have abundant energy: you lash out at criticism. pic.twitter.com/Hr3GLP7d7S
— Mark Jardine (@markbjardine) July 27, 2017
The Australian reports that Weatherill is “being urged” to apologise, but tbqh with you, the only person urging anything might be Kenny himself.
glad to see jay weatherill join the thousands of other australians who also think chris kenny is a bit of a fuckwit
— dan (@dannolan) July 27, 2017
Photo: Sky News.
