Bernie's Missing Link

Thursday, 13 February 2003

Bernard Slattery is mickle irritated over Annabel Crabbe's House on the Hill column in yesterday's Age. Thanks to that technological marvel, the Google Advanced Search facility, I'm able to present the full text of the item that has got Bernard's goat.

What's he got under that robe?

Lefties who lost their breakfast over the appointment of Dyson Heydon to the High Court vacancy left by Mary Gaudron can prepare to lose it again.

The gossip at yesterday's High Court blast to welcome Justice Heydon was that he is planning to take on right-wing commentator Janet Albrechtsen as his associate next year.

Albrechtsen, a lawyer and opinion-haver who has been published extensively in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian Financial Review and lately in The Australian, was at the ceremony yesterday and would admit only that "negotiations" were under way.

But she'd certainly have a cool reception in some corners of the High Court tea-room.

"Is the High Court inviting terrorists to Australia?" Albrechtsen wrote in December last year, in a piece that further accused Chief Justice Murray Gleeson, Justice Michael Kirby and Justice Mary Gaudron of having "trouble differentiating terrorists from refugees".

Presciently, she urged the Government on November 6 last year not to appoint another "hero-judge" such as Lionel Murphy or Michael Kirby.

(One would assume the rider "so Dyson Heydon gets the gig so I can have a job" was not even implicitly attached.)

Anyway, if the job comes through, it will cause havoc among the anti-Albrechtsen forces, not least Labor's Mark Latham, who has unleashed Project Vocabulary upon the unfortunate columnist, using privilege to savage her variously as a "filthy hypocrite" and a "skanky ho' who will die in a ditch to defend the Liberal Party".

It's going to be a sad day for me if Janet does become a hero-associate to a High Court judge: where am I going to find a hero-columnist who is remotely her equal?