Fishy business
It’s always nice to see our daily newspapers, those marvellous bastions of free speech, celebrating the moments when the people have their say.
So it was good of the Sydney Morning Herald’s diary column on Friday to run a four column image of a campaigner at the ALP conference. He was, apparently, “a centurion protester pleading with the ALP to enter the 21st centruy and accept gay marriage”.
Or alternatively, as Joe Hildebrand put it in the Daily Telegraph the next day saluting the SMH’s “thematic narrative”: “The young chap was in fact a model called Jason who was dressed as neptune, the Roman God of the sea and was there to lobby for the conservation of marine life.” The clue, Hildebrand reports, came from the fact that young Jason was standing next to a woman dressed as a mermaid. Dr Mumbo looks forward to reading the SMH’s correction.
