As a venerable publication just shy of its190th birthday The Spectator has to eschew hyperbole (don’t use the Julia Gillard pronunciation, please). However, I have in front of me what is potentially the single most assinine assertion from their ABC ever.

It’s up with every banality ever utter on Q&A, every ill-expressed idiocy that tumbled out on The Drum, the sheer batty blind bias of every Wendy Harmer program ever since she became unemployable on commercial radio.

It’s from a comment piece — something the ABC shouldn’t be offering, by the way, as it’s outside the remit of the spirit of its Charter and puts it directly in competition with commercial media (unfair competition, as the Corporation is financed to the tune of over $1 billion each and every year from yours and my pockets) — and has to do with the sheer and utter horror of ABC types that Israel Falou, as a Christian, might be entitled to free speech.

It says:

His comments are … of concern in so far as they disseminate prejudice by a person in a position of moral authority… Folau has failed to appreciate the special responsibilities he carries.

“A person of moral authority”? As John Elliott used to say, pigs arse!

With all due respect, Israel Folau is a sportsman, a footballer, a meathead twenty-something in a game where blows to the head that would reduce average people to drooling incontinents are considered part of the fun.

“A person of moral authority”? How do you trump such idiocy?

The writer’s identity, at least, might give us some clues to why she’s prepared to place such imbecilities on the public record:

Professor Katharine Gelber researches freedom of speech, human rights and public discourse at the University of Queensland’s School of Political Science and International Studies.

No doubt she’s strongly opposed to all three — unless they strictly conform to her point of view.

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