It’s started!

As Jim Allan notes (at left), it is London-to-a-brick that the ABC will turn on Malcolm Turnbull. Useful as Mark Scott’s glee club has found him, warm and frequent as the invitations to appear have been, he remains a Liberal and must be treated accordingly now that the Abbott scourge has been done in. To be fair, though, the national broadcaster will probably wait a diplomatic spell before subjecting the new PM to the full measure of proxy disdain that can be deployed by, say, a well-stacked and artfully coached Q&A audience, an exercise in monocular “fact-checking” or the derailments of a corpus interruptus of comperes intent on punctuating the responses of less-favoured guests with the febrile passions of their activist interjections.

It will be a turning by gradual degrees until, by the run-up to the next election, he will be getting more of the same treatment meted out during his ill-starred turn as Opposition Leader. The coverage wasn’t pretty then and will be even less so in the months to come. Ah, well, we reap what we sow — or, in the former Communications Minister’s case, neglect to weed out.

At Fairfax, though, where adolescent enthusiasms shape the daily news list, restraint is another of those concepts the kiddies can’t quite grasp. Indeed, as Latika Bourke today demonstrates beneath the headline reproduced atop this post, the unmaking of Malcolm is already underway. The woman-hater label was a useful tag in bringing down Abbott. Why not use it against his successor who is, after all, a Liberal.

Much more of this and our new PM might want to re-think his suggestion of 2011 that, given the dire finances of the news business, tax-deductions aimed at keeping the “quality press” alive might be a splendid idea. As loyalties shift and are abandoned, so can the subjective definition of “quality” be overhauled.

Bourke’s first dot in the soon-to-emerge pointilist portrait of Malcolm the Misogynist can be read in full via the link below.

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