Bolt makes me question my ancestry

9:36 PM | Labels: Journalism

At a party a couple weeks ago, a friend asked me if Andrew Bolt had ever bothered to have a go at me. I replied that other than suggesting I should be sacked he hadn’t taken any notice of me – and to be honest, why would he?

But then yesterday oh joy of joys, Bolt did decide to target me. You see while watching Insiders, I let forth a series of tweets suggesting that the show had become a joke as it pandered to Bolt’s bias. Bolt as is his want, rushed home and wrote a blog about all the ruckus he created on Twitter (yes I know). In his blog he singled me and my tweets out for particular attention. Oh what an honour. If only my grandparents were still alive to witness it.

I say this because Bolt for some reason decided to not only single me out, but also my parents and grandparents:

Now firstly, what does my ancestry have to do with my criticism of Insiders? It doesn’t have anything to do with it of course, but Bolt just put it in there because he knows his readers hate public servants (lazy lay-about, sucking off the public tit, good for nothings that they are) and so being the last of three generations of Canberra public servants just about puts me in the pantheon of lazy, lay-about, sucking off the public tit, good for nothings.

You can see how this label is received by his readers, by the comment left on my blog by someone who came from his blog (got about 530 hits via his blog, so cheers for that Andrew):

Anonymous said...

Your blog is a simple minded reflection of a third generation public servant... And your chicken shit disclaimer about it being your viewpoint and yours only is a joke - I would fire your arse as soon as possible if you were in the private sector reporting to me. Oh, but you would never survive there anyway. That's where us regular taxpayers work to meet our forced obligations to pay tax to keep useless sacks of meat like you employed on projects that offer little value to society...

How charming.

But here’s the thing, while I can understand Bolt wanting to label me as a public servant, and also a third generation one, and also a third generation Canberran one (laziest of the lot they are!) there’s just one slight problem:

It is not true.

You see the statement that I am a third-generation Canberra public servant is an untruth, a falsehood, a fiction, a furphy. In short, a lie.

Now I know Bolt is pretty big on people’s ancestry, but I was at a loss as to why he was making up this lie about me. The post that he linked to to prove his statement doesn't even mention that I live in Canberra, let alone where my parents live or did for work.

You see, I have only lived in Canberra for 5 years. Before that (as I have written) I lived in Cairns for 11 years, but I actually grew up (as I have also written) in South Australia. My father also grew up in South Australia, as did his father, and his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father, and his father’s… well you get the point.

Secondly, neither my father nor my mother were public servants. My mother held all manner of jobs (the list is long and impressive and starts with nurse and ends with canteen operator), but my father (as I have written) was a primary school teacher. Now admittedly he worked in the the South Australian public system, but like all teachers he considered himself a teacher and not a public servant – and oddly the Tax Office also considered him that because he, unlike me, put “teacher” on his tax form, whereas I write “public servant”.

Now maybe Bolt, like some right wing types in the US, has decided to start having a go at teachers, and wants the fact my Dad was a teacher to be seen in a negative light? But I doubt it. Or perhaps Bolt was referring to the two years in 1967 and 1968 when my father was in the army fighting in the Vietnam War as part of national service (I have written about that as well, and I assume Bolt did his research on my family history before making the statement in his piece). Soldiers in the army are technically public servants so perhaps Bolt was wishing to sneer about the fact my Dad fought for this country? But again, I think not.

Where his assertion really breaks down (not that it isn’t already in tiny pieces) is when we get to my grandparents. My grandfathers on both my father’s and my mother’s sides were farmers. My Dad’s father owned a fruit block in the Riverland (that’s in South Australia) and my Mum’s father owned a wheat farm just out of Loxton (also in South Australia). Both men, as you can well expect given they were farmers, were not exactly friends of the left side of politics. I have no doubt they viewed Whitlam as a communist, and the thought of them voting for Labor ever would have been about as unlikely an occurrence as could ever happen.

So given it is all wrong why the hell did Bolt make this up?

I had no idea, especially as I searched my blog for evidence of me incorrectly writing my Dad and grandfather had lived in Canberra also worked as public servants (because you know I make those kind of factual errors all the time…).

The answer came from a reader of my blog, Tim Gay, who sent me a message on Twitter:

Did Bolt confuse my comment about being 3rd gen Canb on your post with you? If so, dumber than I thought

And that was it. In my post on Paul Kelly and gay marriage, Tim left a comment. This is what it looked like:

timbog74 said...

Democracy is only allowed if you agree with Paul Kelly and the Liberal Party? Got it. I suppose as a tertiary educated, 3rd generation Canberra public servant, my values are so wildly out of step with the rest of Australia that I don't really deserve to have my elected representatives make laws on my behalf. Good to know.

I don’t know about you, but to me it seems pretty obvious that the comment was written by Tim and not me (the whole “timbog74 said….” kind of gives it away).

So that leave us with two conclusions.

1. Bolt read my blog post, saw Tim’s comment and decided to lie to his readers and attribute Tim’s comments about his life to me

2. Bolt read my blog post, saw Tim’s comments and was unable to grasp that they were not written by me.

I assume Bolt is not a liar, in which case it just means that he is someone whose reading comprehension skills are, shall we say, somewhat lacking in robustness.

In a post last October in The Punch on criticism targeted at journalists, Bolt said:

“The worst abuse doesn’t hurt as much as a polite letter pointing out I’ve made a factual howler. But of the abuse, what most gives me the pip is that many of my worst critics clearly haven’t read a word I’ve actually written.”

Well, I hope Bolt considers this a polite blog post, because he clearly hasn’t read a word I’ve actually written.