The Courier-Mail is a very rightwing paper and it’s what you could call a “knocking” paper. It just relentlessly bashes everything and everybody. It appeals to the miserable middle classes, who spend their entire lives worried about being robbed, mostly by people at the margins: blacks, teens, foreigners. It’s not fond of the government (which is currently formed by the centre-right Labor party at both national and state level) and it spends a lot of its time inventing scandals to be outraged about.

Not that the politicians here aren’t corrupt, but the Mail insists on endlessly blathering about minor rorts that no one in their right mind would care about (much like the “expenses scandal” in the UK, which was just a way to express public rage at politicians). Yesterday’s front-page story, I shit you not, was about coppers using a police van to go to a drinks party, and running nude through a suburban street—presumably as some kind of weird pig ritual, I don’t know (at least it made a change from endless stories about rugby league). No one sane could read the Courier-Mail without going “don’t give a fuck about that” on every page…

The columnists are the worst of it though. The humourists are relentlessly unfunny and the wowsers moralise sternly while considering facts as bothersome, and as useful, as mosquitoes.

I say “former”, because the author was later sacked for his pains.