Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has taken aim at Fairfax and the ABC this morning, accusing Fairfax of orchestrating “a huge move” to “bring the government down, and the ABC of helping them.
Speaking to the ABC’s AM program this morning, he said:
“I think regardless of what Tony Abbot does, Fairfax will say it’s bad,” he said, accusing journalists of overstepping their mark.
“They aren’t supposed to be political players, they’re supposed to be objective reporters of the news and I think many of them have morphed into frustrated politicians.”
Quick update at 9:20am to add this gem in: Peter Dutton actually told Sky News that there’s “a bit of a jihad” being conducted by Fairfax against the government.
Now, sidestepping the fact that Peter Dutton’s own office in hot water over not reading or, in fact, noticing anything wrong at all with a press release that said Melbourne was turning into 1939 Berlin for the weekend, he seems to have forgotten that it’s Tony Abbott’s own cabinet that continually leak damning details to both organisations.
In fact, his accusations come less than 24 hours after two of them told Fairfax that the PM was under pressure to dump Joe Hockey as Treasurer if the Canning by-election goes poorly, forcing Abbott to defend Hockey while, for the umpteenth time this year, wonder which of his Cabinet members is harnessing the power of media and the voters to affect change within his party.
The ABC themselves confirmed that Coalition sources have also “regularly vented complaints about the Government’s performance to the ABC.”
And – as they so kindly reminded y’all – his accusations have an eerily similar quality, namely, that during the Gillard government days, the then Communications Minister Stephen Conroy accused the Murdoch Media of trying to bring about “regime change”.
I MEAN:
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Picture: Daniel Munoz via Getty Images.
via ABC.
