CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has finally cracked the shits today, as he faces backlash for not legislating a blanket ban on gambling advertisements.
“I’m not going to let our media infrastructure collapse. I can’t. You all the saw the crazy shit your uncles were reading on social media during the pandemic. That will be the only news source Australians have if I turn off the life support of the gambling dollar”
“We need a media industry in this country. It’s crucial. Even if our newspapers are run by a bunch right-wing clowns who have been outshone by A.I conspiracists on TikTok… At least they report the fucking weather”
As every Australian knows, our beloved past time of having a punt at the pub, or on the trackside, has transformed into a sinister and toxic online predator in recent years.
The cold-blooded online bookmakers that snuck into our life during the GFC have created a world where working Australians cannot help but hand the card details directly into an app on their phone and bet money they don’t have on an incessant stream of algorithmic odds while holding their phone down the side of their bed at 2 in the morning with the screen brightness turned down to zero so as to not wake their pregnant wives who are none the wiser to the fact that they are a couple race days away from losing the family home.
But as Albanese has pointed out today, it’s not just the punters stuck in this mess. The Australian media and the government are also wedged.
If you didn’t watch last night’s ABC Four Corner’s expose into the death rattle of Channel Seven, you might not know that Australian media has been run into the ground by delusional executives who think it’s okay to pay juniour reporters $60k a year to spend their lives attending the scenes of horrific car accidents and DV murders.
It seems the old men who think it is perfectly fine for aspiring journalists and producers to work 14 hour days for a salary that is easily outperformed by a job in a fast food kitchen, with absolutely no job security or career pathways, also seem to think that it was perfectly fine to keep ploughing ahead with a business model that is completely based on the manipulated free-to-air ratings paper surveys.
While the audiences switched to social media and streaming, the ancient 1990s high-rollers at Ten, Nine, Foxtel and Seven burying their heads into the sand – praying that it was all a fad.
Albanese says if he turns off sportsbetting, these companies will disappear, along with the majority of Australian journalists.
“Do you know how fucked they’d be?” said Albo today.
“They’d be beyond fucked. They’d collapse entirely. They didn’t innovate. Abbott gave Murdoch a $880m tax abatement in 2015 and everyone thought they’d be fine. They won’t be. And now its my fucking problem”
“I don’t want toxic online algorithms to dictate our gambling patterns, but I also don’t want them to take over our news”
“…Turns out letting out-of-touch boomers run media companies during a tech boom has created a toxic reliance on gambling ads during live sport broadcasts. Which is the only shit people watch on TV anymore”
“Of course you could all just watch the ABC, but these deadshits at the commercial networks have made a point of also destroying the public broadcaster’s reputation on their way out the door”
