Media coverage of the embattled employment minister, Michaelia Cash, hasn’t been as bad as last week, but all things are relative. Earlier this week her department released a transcript of a “doorstop” interview – a huddle with reporters.
The Q&A had been redacted to remove questions and answers – including several on the raid on the Australian Workers’ Union – which the department said didn’t relate to the senator’s portfolio of jobs and innovation. Strange, because those questions are evidently official business. Leigh Sales, presenter of 7.30, said the questions had been “censored”.
Cash’s office quickly blamed an “overzealous staffer” in the department and not her office for tampering with the record.
A political reporter for Guardian Australia, Paul Karp, whose questions had been censored, asked the department what it was thinking.
A long bureaucratic answer followed about how the public service had to be non-political and portfolio-specific and “free from political bias and political influence”. But buried at the end was an admission it might have gone a bit too far: “The assessment may have erred on the more conservative application of these guidelines.”
Source:
theguardian
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