A Lesson Mrs Pirate Never Absorbed

Recently, I recounted how, as a young journalist, I had been ordered to drive through a Category 4 cyclone to report for work by a boss I described as an addition to the Holy Trinity – God the Editor. Some Quadrant commenters suggested I could just have laughed down the phone and refused outright. But those were different times, Labor’s current controversial Closing the Loopholes Bill with its “right to disconnect” was as unimaginable as life on Mars. Simply put, with a mortgage and a pregnant young wife to care for, I would have been looking for a new career.

The God Editor was omnipotent, his commands to be obeyed at all costs, and I was but a mere junior reporter. But the Fourth Estate’s version of the Heavenly Trinity had some human frailties — a character flaw brought to mind  by the legal imbroglio surrounding the aborted Brittany Higgins/Bruce Lehrmann trial and subsequent defamation cases. Even as a cadet journalist I knew better than Lisa ‘Mrs Pirate’ Wilkinson…