Newspaper columnist and editor Frank Devine dies, aged 77
Veteran newspaper columnist and editor Frank Devine has died.
He was 77 years old.
On Friday he was described as the "laughing cavalier of Australian journalism", by friend and former NSW opposition leader Peter Coleman on the website of The Australian newspaper, where Mr Devine was a former columnist and editor.
He had also been editor of the Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Post, a senior editor at the American edition of Reader's Digest and editor-in-chief of the Australian Reader's Digest.
He worked as a foreign correspondent in New York, London and Tokyo.
"His laughter, often noisy, was always infectious," Mr Coleman said.
"He was a sports fanatic (he had a bookcase full of dog-eared Wisdens), a film buff (his favourite film was The Godfather), and a stylish writer with a love for words."
Mr Devine was born in Blenheim, New Zealand on December 17, 1931.
He began his career as a journalist at the age of 17 on the New Zealand publication The Marlborough Express.
In 1953 he started work at The West Australian, where he met his wife Jacqueline. They married in 1959.
Mr Devine is survived by his wife and his three daughters Miranda, Alexandra and Rosalind. - In all my years of reading newspapers columns, Frank was my favorite writer. I used to buy the Australian on Saturday just to read his lift-out column on language. He was witty, lively, precise and cultured. He was even handed and an advocate, a rare thing these days. I will not miss him, so much as celebrate his life. I am sure it is a substantial loss for his family, as he seemed a passionate, loving man. Thank you Frank. - ed.
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'Prepare for Aussie deaths in Afghanistan'
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=== Comments ===
Quote of the year
Andrew Bolt
Columnist Burt Prelutsky:
On a more serious note, I sincerely hope that when the President goes in for his annual check-up, the doctors at Bethesda will do a brain scan. Surely something must be terribly wrong with a man who seems to be far more concerned with a Jew building a house in Israel than with Muslims building a nuclear bomb in Iran.
===
Bolt observes that every time Rudd is unthinkingly supported by journalists he gets more popular.
===
A sinister hatred kept alive when we turn a blind eye
Frank Devine
IT is improbable that I could bring myself to stay for long, if at all, in the same room with somebody who had described Jews as "real motherf--king bastards." Apart from this piece of abuse, Maqsood Alsham, an asylum seeker from Bangladesh, has described the Gaza invasion by Israel as a worse atrocity than the Holocaust.
Yet three universities - Sydney, Macquarie and the Sydney University of Technology - continued their support of a conference organised by Maqsood to debate whether Israel should be tried by the International Court of Justice for the invasion.
In an early defence, Maqsood ingenuously whinged: "Is it anything wrong to have a private conversation? This is not my public view."
But to hold and express such views privately or publicy is to put oneself beyond the pale.
The English Catholic schismatic "bishop" Richard Williamson has done that with his dogmatic assertions that "only 200,000 to 300,000 Jews" died under Nazi persecution and none in gas chambers.
Only 200,000 or 300,000 men, women and children murdered for the crime of being Jews! How trivial a transgression!
Williamson reiterated this view on Swedish TV just prior to Pope Benedict's lifting last week the excommunication orders imposed on Williamson and three other "bishops" of the breakaway Society of Pius IX, founded by the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in rebellion against some of the conclusions of Vatican Council II.
Not being skilled at reading the minds of popes, I'm inclined to accept the official explanation that Benedict, having responsibility for preserving church unity, seeks to draw the Society of Pius IX back into the Catholic communion. The Pope's personality also makes it plausible that he cancelled the excommunication order, imposed on the four bishops by Paul VI in 1988, out of compassion for the individuals.
But Williamson! Great fools have achieved episcopal rank before, and you don't have to search widely to suspect their contemporary presence.
===
Breeding fighters and haters
Andrew Bolt
How cute. Palestinian kindergarteners do a traditional dance around Israeli bodies.
Add another generation to this particular war.
UPDATE
Reader Lee wonders if this wall will be damned as Israel’s was:
Saudi Arabia has signed a deal with a major European defence contractor to build a hi-tech security system including a fence around the whole of its 9,000 kilometre border… Its two main concerns are its neighbours Iraq and Yemen, and the instability and lawlessness of these two countries have raised fears in Saudi Arabia that their problems will overflow the border.
===
Rudd needs soft sand to spin
Andrew Bolt
John Howard isn’t impresed by Kevin Rudd’s strategy of flirting with Rove but avoiding programs such as Insiders, on which I believe he’s appeared just once since the election:
In stark contrast to Howard, whose medium of choice was talkback radio, Rudd has made a specialty of forums such as FM radio and Rove…
“The reason I didn’t do that kind of media is that I didn’t think I would be very good at it,” Howard told The Australian. “But I also thought the prime minister oughtn’t to do too much of that stuff. I took the view that my responsibility was to go on serious programs. Although I did do talkback radio, I didn’t avoid the serious interviews.
“I had frequent press conferences and I would often go until they were getting agitated and wanted to file.”
While there is certainly nothing wrong with a prime minister discussing his use of a hair-dryer with Rove McManus - or engaging him in exchanges via Twitter - that was not the universal judgment on Howard’s talkback appearances with Neil Mitchell in Melbourne and Alan Jones in Sydney. In an essay in Stifling Dissent, a 2007 collection edited by Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison, Helen Ester argued that the Howard strategy of daily talkback appearances had “diminished other democratic institutions, including the parliament itself”.
Based on interviews with a dozen senior Canberra journalists, Ester said: “Their perspectives show that the last decade has seen an increased focus on strategies to block and control access to information flows from the gaze and analysis of the critical expertise of journalists in the parliamentary round.” ...
Similar criticisms have not been directed at Rudd, despite his blanket ban on appearing with Jones.
Actually, that last bit is not quite true. Some journalists, anonymously, are indeed now complaining - but very quietly, fearfully and without the venom:
But the TV networks - and we spoke to all five - believe it’s getting harder than ever for them to do their job. Some typical comments:
It’s getting worse than with Howard… They are worse than the previous government… It’s disgraceful…
UPDATE
Barack Obama’s press corp, however, is starting to bridle at their own leader’s spin, not least the by-arrangement vetting of questions.
UPDATE 2
The White House corps was right to be sceptical about Obama’s management of even a town hall meeting. A “random” question from the audience turned out to come from a volunteer from an Obama campaign outfit. Not that Obama knew that, he said.
===
How the (compact fluorescent) light died
Andrew Bolt
Dan Bishton discovers it’s not so Easy Being Green, after all, as another green scheme bites the dust:
For two years I worked for Easy Being Green, a Sydney-based carbon trading firm that operated under the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme. As a team leader there, I spruiked, cajoled and charmed members of the public into taking home free boxes of energy-saving CFL globes ...
“100 per cent free,” I’d say — “All you have to do is sign this form.”
The form was a nomination form, which stated that the hapless coal-fired electricity consumer could have the bulbs for free, if they promised to use them — as long as Easy Being Green could keep the saved energy. Or to put it more accurately, claim a certificate representing a tonne of saved carbon, which could be sold on one of the world’s oldest carbon markets, the NSW Greenhouse Gas Abatement Scheme…
Ex-Greenpeace Chairman Paul Gilding led the company with galvanising speeches about harnessing market forces… Many of the initial employees were ex-Greenpeace members…
Life was grand at first… The price for a tonne of carbon was at its peak of $25, and the nomination forms were rolling in at an incredible pace… Trade of demand-side certificates (carbon credits) mushroomed to almost 9 million throughout 2006, many times the previous year’s total…
The scheme’s administrator was IPART, the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal… (In 2006) IPART received the results from a Newspoll survey conducted on giveaway installation rates. Newspoll’s survey found that only four of every 10 bulbs found their way into light sockets — half the rate that the booming giveaway companies had been claiming credit for. Half-way through August, IPART made a shock announcement that slashed the installation discount factor accordingly to 0.4, halving the value of NGACs generated by giveaway programs....
The IPART announcement killed light bulb giveaways… Easy Being Green became insolvent and went into third-party administration in October 2007.
Carbon trading will give us countless more such stories, I’m afraid, only this time involving a lot more money transferred from you to them.
===
Doing to ourselves what warming won’t
Andrew Bolt
The most bizarre example so far of how fear of global warming causes more damage than global warming itself:
MILLIONS of dollars worth of luxury waterfront homes at Byron Bay will be demolished in the name of climate change following a council decision to enshrine “planned retreat” in law.
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Global warming shrinks sheep
Andrew Bolt
Top this:
Sheep living on a remote island off the coast of Scotland have been shrinking for 20 years. Now it seems shorter winters caused by climate change are responsible.
Amazingly enough, global warming is blamed even though it’s cooled over the past eight of those 20 years:
===
Manne on fire
Andrew Bolt
Robert Manne blames post-modernism for many of the deaths in the Black Saturday fires:
Drawing on the evidence given so far at the royal commission hearings in Melbourne, Manne explains how the response to the fires was gravely undermined by a culture of institutional timidity and bureaucracy.
”Far too few inside the firefighting bureaucracies were willing on February 7 to break the rules, to disobey authority or to act spontaneously at a time of crisis,” he writes.
He concludes that this timidity contributed to a deadly failure to deliver warnings to people in the path of the fires. But Manne goes further, suggesting that there was a moral vacuum at the heart of the way the firefighting bureaucracies responded.
“Conformity to rules was the enemy of judgment, commonsense and moral responsibility,” he writes.
“The answer to the question of why we weren’t warned ... requires not only the forensic capacity of a royal commission but also a sociologist with the capacity to illuminate the strange character of our postmodern world.”
Post-modernism? I’m not so sure. I’d see it more as a indictment of a common characteristic of any bureaucracy - the elevation of process over judgment. The trouble is that this is not always a failing, given that good judgment is a rarer quality than it should be, and process helps to conquer panic.
So while Manne strikes me as too scathing of the CFA, some of his examples are indeed compelling:
He highlights testimony to the commission about how Jason Lawrence, the CFA chief at Kangaroo Ground, ignored repeated pleas from his staff to issue an awareness message to the fire-threatened regions of Wandong, Wallan, Kinglake, Strathewen and St Andrews in the early to mid-afternoon of Black Saturday.
According to evidence given to the commission Lawrence refused to approve a warning on bureaucratic grounds, saying it was “not appropriate” because a CFA incident control centre at Kilmore had technical responsibility for issuing the warnings in that area.
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Creating children with no past
Andrew Bolt
THE most medically monstrous thing about Michael Jackson was not his bleached and carved face.
That hurt no one but himself, after all.
No, uglier still was a thoroughly modern medical procedure he had performed—a modish bit of biological engineering of the kind that’s hailed as a life-giving marvel of our time.
Its perverse results now make it bizarre that so many people could both cry for Jackson, yet then gladly switch on one of the country’s biggest TV shows and cry all over again.
That show is, of course, Find My Family, a Channel 7 smash that usually features adopted children trying to find the parents who gave them away.
===
Save our right to fewer rights
Andrew Bolt
YOU’D think we already had more rights than is right, especially when one man’s right means someone else must pay.
Julian Knight is only the latest to prove the point.
Here’s a crowing, unrepentant and cowardly killer of seven people who’s so plagued our courts with trumped-up, look-at-me claims that he was finally declared a “vexatious litigant”.
Foolish me thought that meant he’d never get to waste court time again, but there he was last week, in the Practice Court this time, claiming his “right” to have a computer in his cell.
That even Knight, a man who just shot strangers in a street, can trumpet so noisily about “rights” to even a computer shows how carefully we’ve coached even bottom-feeders to demand more than they are due—and demand it from you, not themselves.
And that our courts still let Knight through their doors shows that even the worst and least deserving of us still has elbow room at that trough.
Yet the Rudd Government is now considering whether to give us even more “rights”—maybe even a bill or charter of human rights—and has had a National Human Rights Consultation Committee tramping the country to see what would best suit.
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