“If you want to be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Mm, it seems that Amanda Vanstone has been out of the country. She says so in her column. So her column on Zaky Mallah may be considered a little less topical this week.

Still, she has been out of the country, as she tells us, and she hasn’t had time to read all the commentary. Still, she has a point of view and she has every right to put it even if she is a little late. And what’s her point of view?

Well, that’s where I find it interesting, because she writes:

“…my initial reaction was that it was a set-up, designed to put Coalition MP Steve Ciobo on the spot.”

So, Zaky Mallah was there to put Ciobo “on the spot”. Clearly then, he’s not the sort of person we want on Q & A. What a shocking “error of judgement” by the ABC. Putting a member of the government on the spot… No wonder, Ciobo said that he’d be happy to be a member of a government that deported him…

However, that wasn’t the only poor decision according to Ms Vanstone. She continues:

“Everyone is entitled to their view, but I am struggling to see why Antony Hegarty, with an admittedly beautiful voice but no apparent expertise in other areas, was given air space on the Q&A panel that one might have expected would be accorded to experts. His pronouncements as to who is delusional may humour some, but they hardly rate as substantive public debate. “

Was this another “error of judgement”? Should the ABC launch an investigation into this one too?

The rest of Vanstone’s article was devoted to talking about the terrible “thought police” who were demonstrating their hypocrisy by complaining about Abbott standing in front of the “Ditch the Witch” signs. Somehow the ABC was guilty of a major mistake by not knowing about Mallah’s tweets and that nobody who criticised Tony for not noticing an enormous banner behind him should dare defend the ABC for not reading every single one of Mallah’s pronouncements on Twitter.

I guess that one can infer from this that Vanstone sees Abbott’s decision to speak at that rally a gross error of judgement too.

But the thing that intrigues me most is that she found no time to comment in her article on the matters raised by “Four Corners” last week, regarding her decision as Immigration Minister with regard to a certain colourful figure. Surely – as it was reported that Fairfax were seeking a comment from her last week – someone could have pointed her to the story, and suggested that it would be worthwhile for her to make some comment on the story in her column.

And to explain her position on whether Malllah being allowed to ask a question on Q & A was such a terrible error of judgement when compared to granting a visa to a senior Calabrian Mafia figure.

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