NOT RUDDY RIGHT

Nobody really believes Kevin Rudd and his  ‘one of the boys’ blokey poses when he’s says ‘Hi. I’m Kev. I’m from Queensland. Fair suck of the sauce bottle.’ So maybe nobody’s surprised that he’s just had a holiday at billionaire Kerry Stokes’s luxury mansion on the beach at Broome. You should be. What’s the Australian Prime Minister doing accepting such largesse from a major player in the Australian media when such important media issues are before the government?

Kerry Stokes is a major shareholder in the Seven Network, the controlling shareholder in West Australian Newspapers, a major shareholder in Foxtel. He’s just started a $50 million broadband rollout in Perth when the Government is trying to screw Telstra with it’s own national broadband system.

The Government is currently considering the ‘anti-siphoning’ laws which will affect free-to-air networks and Foxtel. There’s also the issue of Internet  censorshop and other media issues.  Stokes is now also a player in rival Consolidated Media (a Foxtel shareholder) and has made no secret of his  Foxtel expansion plans if the Government’s  pressures on Telstra forces it to off-load its Foxtel holdings.

This is not the time, if ever there is a time, for a Prime Minister, to be accepting freebies from a media mogul.  Imagine if John Howard had spent a week on the Arctic P, Kerry Packer’s floating palace, when cross-media ownership was being debated.  There would have been an uproar.  And rightly so.

Bob Hawke as PM seemed to get away with it as a great mate of, and receiver of favours from, that old crook Sir Peter Abeles. And the former ACTU president had no qualms in engaging in a bout of union-busting when he used Air Force planes to help break the pilot’s strike when Abeles owned Ansett.

A spokesman for the PM has defended Rudd’s stay as a Stokes guest. He said: ‘Mr. Rudd has acted appropriately at all times’.  And he said the visit had never been a secret.

That’s not the point. And he has not ‘acted appropriately’. I wonder if he has declared it on the pecuniary interests register?

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009