Have you ever noticed just how utterly bourgie the left are? Despite their claiming to champion the proles, it’s glaringly obvious that the ranks of the left are solidly middle-class. From the posh private-school-blazers at School Climate Strikes to the XR protesters shouting in decidedly posh accents at working-class commuters, scratch a leftist and you’ll find a privately-educated twat from the “better” suburbs.
It’s ever been thus, of course: even Orwell (himself an old Eton boy) took aim at all that dreary tribe of high-minded’ women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come nocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat. He might well have been peering through a crystal ball at the middle-class nosey-nannas glueing themselves to the road in South Australia this week.
It’s also hard not to notice just how bien-pensant bourgeois are the issues that the left obsess themselves with. When the UN globally polled 7 million people about their most pressing concerns, climate change barely squeaked into the bottom of the lift. Education, healthcare, work, food: these are the things that trouble real people. Only the useless leaners of the middle-class, white-collar set have the luxury of fretting about whether it will be half a degree warmer in a hundred years.
But perhaps the most bourgeois issue of all is the so-called “gender pay gap”. Notice that it’s not factory girls or checkout chicks shrieking in the lady-pages, but mummy-bloggers, CEOs, politicians and journalists? In other words, the very people who get paid far too much for doing far too little already, having tanties because their male peers turn up to the office and work longer hours – and get paid commensurately.
Except, as it turns out: not always.
Former Today host Lisa Wilkinson, who has positioned herself as the poster girl for pay parity, now faces a tough battle to control her tightly scripted public narrative amid claims that she commanded double the salary of her on-air breakfast show co-host Karl Stefanovic from at least 2007 to 2011.
It seems that Wilkinson has about as firm a grasp on historical fact as her husband.
That revelation, published by news.com.au’s political editor Samantha Maiden on Tuesday, appears to have taken the wind out of one of the central themes of Wilkinson’s autobiography — that is, that the TV host felt cheated and humiliated when she discovered in late 2015 that the tables had turned, and Stefanovic was by then earning more than twice what she was pocketing.
Cue the harbourside-mansion Karen demanding to speak to the manager.
It’s not the only porky in Wilkinson’s autohagiography.
Other recollections in her book also have been challenged by the emergence of a video of the pair’s final appearance together on air. Wilkinson writes in her book that she was especially upset by Stefanovic’s treatment of her on her last day at Nine in October 2017 when she claims he treated her with “uncaring disregard’’ and barely spoke to her when the cameras weren’t rolling […] Wilkinson claims that Stefanovic failed to mention her wedding celebrations – at which she also suggests he was a no-show – and her honeymoon in their 5.15am live news cross, before the Today show started at 5.30am.
The Australian
Hell hath no fury like a Bridezilla scorned. Except that leaked video shows that Wilkinson’s memory is playing funny tricks again.
Not only does Wilkinson erroneously name others participating in the broadcast, but the video clearly shows Stefanovic chit-chatting with Wilkinson before asking, “How was your honeymoon?”
Just to show that there’s no catfight without Ms Punch, none other than the patron saint of Silly Girls Who Get Drunk and Make Poor Choices threw in her two-bits.
All this ladies’ open-mic clown show needs to be complete is an appearance from the repellent Megan Rapinoe, demanding to be paid more money for being a worse player than a 15-year-old boy.
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