The Punch is supposed to be News Ltd's answer to ABC’s The Drum, and similar sites such as Crikey and its spin off Pure Poison. Coming from a News Ltd funded operation, “Julia and Tony learning the art of limited overs politics” is presented surprisingly without much in the way of spin – especially in the context of it being published a mere eight hours after the somewhat dismissive “Bob Brown is feeling lucky”.
Paul Colgan approaches his subject, the second people’s forum of the election campaign, in an informative but folksy way. Colgan almost immediately admits that the cricket analogy that he is using is tenuous at best – and it was already wholly lost on me, regardless. I’m not “down home” enough for this sort of talk but undoubtedly a lot of The Punch’s readers would understand.
This recount of the forum is remarkably balanced, with Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard both coming across as flawed individuals receiving mixed reactions from their shared audience. Colgan is critical of the responses of both of them, but seems to pay particular attention to the perceived ridiculousness of Abbott’s answers in regards to peak oil and the Global Financial Crisis. It is definitely not something that I would reasonably have expected to ever read on The Punch, and certainly not on something run by News Ltd.
Colgan’s article was apparently composed in haste with a minimum of editing applied: several sentences are missing key words, meaning that the reader has to deal with a couple of stumbling blocks. Still, despite its flaws, Colgan has produced one of the more readable items on The Punch website. Damning with faint praise, perhaps, but true nonetheless.
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