Letters & Editorial

Karl Stefanovic has always been a clown. That is the point of breakfast television. He can turn up for work drunk after a night at the Logies and the only difference is that he laughs a little harder at his own jokes.

The first thing to say about Pauline Hanson is how unimpressive she is as a speaker. To watch her address to the National Press Club was to watch a bigoted archaeopteryx flail through an hour-and-a-half of talking points.

For a brief moment, little more than half a minute, Tanya Plibersek articulates what is wrong with One Nation. She captures the obstruction and the hypocrisy. She circles the emptiness. Barnaby Joyce blinks slowly as he watches, swallowing like a bullfrog in a quilted vest.

This is about how a former minister treats a young woman who once worked for her, who was raped in her office, who she called a lying cow in front of her colleagues, whose legal documents she leaked to a newspaper, whom she bankrupted and whom she now accuses of profiting from her own abuse.