One-week wonder

We noticed a familiar name pop up on the Woman’s Day website a few weeks ago.

One Elizabeth Baxter filed an exclusive interview with The Block duo Mitch Edwards and Mark McKie on September 7 all about the ‘shocking rumpus room reveals’.

Now, our first thought was, ‘How shocking can a rumpus room be?’ But the real story is the journalist who wrote it.

‘Elizabeth Baxter’ may not ring a bell – but Lizzie Baxter sure does.

That’s right: Woman’s Day’s new hire was Nova radio presenter Tim Blackwell’s much younger girlfriend – the one who made a lot of noise on Father’s Day when she called him ‘daddy’ and joked that she was ‘young enough to be [his] daughter’.

Baxter had quietly moved from a production role at Nova to handle the digital side of things for Are Media, the magazine publisher behind titles like Woman’s Day and New Idea. But she hasn’t filed a single dispatch since her chat with Mitch and Mark. So, what gives?

Well, an insider tells us she resigned from Are Media for ‘personal reasons’ after a week or so in the job. We don’t know what those ‘personal reasons’ were, but the timing suggests she bolted after her tone-deaf Father’s Day post made headlines.

Apparently, the newsroom was left in the lurch by her unexpected departure.

She needn’t have been embarrassed. While some staff were vaguely aware Baxter was ‘Daily Mail famous’, no one really cared about her relationship with Blackwell.

Staff churn in media is nothing new – but quitting after one week has to be a record.

Big shoes to fill

Channel Nine’s ‘Mr Everywhere’ Clint Stanaway has handed in his notice, leaving the network with a seat to fill on Weekend Today. But who will replace him?

‘The most natural choice is Tim Davies,’ says a Nine insider. The affable weather presenter for the Today show is popular with viewers – the only downside is he lives in Brisbane, so it’s unclear if he’ll be up for the commute.

Nine’s Europe correspondent Edward Godfrey is another option. They like him upstairs but he’s considered a pretty serious journo, so it remains to be seen if he’ll be comfortable with the goofier aspects of brekky TV…

Charles Croucher is on the shortlist too.

He has flirted with breakfast before as a fill-in for Karl Stefanovic and ‘has the newsreader twinkle in his eye’, says our source. Still, we’re told Croucher already has his dream job as political editor in Canberra and isn’t looking for a change.

The wild card is Chris Kohler.

The son of respected ABC money man Alan Kohler made a name for himself as a serious financial journalist before pivoting into silly but informative TikTok videos that brought him into the orbit of Gen Z – an audience that TV bosses are desperately trying to court.

‘He lives in Melbourne and Weekend Today is filmed in Sydney. So, as with Tim, it’s a question of whether he’s keen enough to do the commute every weekend.’

Tiff throws in the towel

Inside Mail is saddened to learn former Fox Sports freelancer Tiffany Salmond has given up looking for work as a rugby league broadcaster.

The Kiwi had earned a cult following as a sideline reporter for New Zealand Warriors games, but later said she was cut loose without proper explanation.

She believes she was a victim of the sports media boys’ club and that she was pushed aside because broadcasters don’t want to employ women who are ‘too sexy’.

For their part, Fox Sports said there simply wasn’t a role for her.

After the work dried up at Fox Sports, Salmond’s very public job hunt saw her relocate from New Zealand to Sydney, where she has been spotted around the Bondi Beach area.

Eventually, she laid out her grievances with the industry – and her theories for why no one would hire her – in an interview with sports columnist Danny Weidler on July 27.

The SMH article soon became the most talked-about story in rugby league – but clearly didn’t help with the job search.

Last Saturday, during the Warriors vs Panthers game, Salmond told her Instagram followers: ‘That chapter of my life is closed.

‘With full clarity and self-respect, I won’t return to the sidelines. But your love, support and loyalty means everything to me.’

She later shared a tearful selfie, alongside the text: ‘Me trying to be strong…. then my DMs got flooded with “we miss you” and now I’m crying again.’

Chief political troll

Pyjama-wearing political pundit-turned-lobbyist for The Australia Institute Amy Remeikis has once again decided to go low when she should have gone high.

She watched a political assassination and did a victory lap.

In a New Daily piece – which the left-wing website rightly pulled almost as quickly as it published it – Remeikis wrote that Charlie Kirk was ‘killed in the America he wanted’ and that he was ‘continuing his harmful grift… up until his final breath’.

Stay classy, Amy!

A man is shot dead on a university stage and her reflex is tone-deaf triumphalism. That isn’t analysis – it’s gloating.

You don’t have to like Kirk’s politics to grasp the baseline taboo: don’t sneer through a eulogy. Plenty of people on the Left who opposed his agenda still managed to condemn the killing without the wink.

Remeikis, however, just couldn’t help herself. Because Kirk argued for a hard-edged America, he somehow authored his own murder?

If your instinct when blood is on the floor is to craft a gotcha line about a man’s ‘final breath’, you’re not speaking truth to power, you’re just getting down in the mud.

By all means, interrogate his record and test his claims – you can even do so while the body is still warm if you absolutely can’t help yourself. But don’t confuse cruelty for clarity by going further than that.

Remeikis is billed as the ‘Chief Political Analyst’ at The Australia Institute, but they’ve used the wrong ‘a’ word in her title – and we don’t mean a***hole. She’s more activist than analyst.

Remeikis is at least right about one thing. In an interview with a university newspaper, Honi Soit (what a surprise), she described herself as an ‘unholy mess of a journalist’. At least she has her investment property to fall back on…

Remember her Father’s Day sign-off on The Project about ‘non-crap dads’? Another classy effort. Even the show’s hosts looked stunned. Her impulse is always the same: reach for the putdown first, let the thought arrive later… or not at all.

KIIS of death?

Here’s a bit of radio gossip we heard right before deadline.

In the last month, ARN has registered the domain name kiis1023.com.au – all but confirming rumours Adelaide station Mix 102.3 is finally being rebranded as KIIS.

Could it simply be a case of aligning the KIIS brands? Perhaps. But our money is on Mix getting a makeover before ARN rolls out The Kyle and Jackie O Show nationally.

Currently, Mix 102.3’s breakfast show is Hayley and Max in the Morning, which only launched in January. They placed third in the FM ratings in the most recent survey.

Will it be good enough to save them?

Corporate boundaries

BuzzFeed Australia has farewelled writer and social producer Mark Mariano, who confirmed his redundancy after just 11 months with the digital publisher.

In a LinkedIn post, Mariano described the move as ‘amicable’ and ‘long overdue’ (after 11 months?!) but admitted he was ‘heartbroken’ by the decision.

He wasn’t the only redundancy at Val Morgan Digital, which holds licences for a number of websites including LADbible, GameSpot, BuzzFeed and Popsugar. The other was a writer for lifestyle website The Latch, Sangeeta Kocharekar.

Mariano’s departure adds to the slow drip of exits from BuzzFeed’s Australian arm, which has faced ongoing structural changes since its editorial wind-down in 2023.

In announcing his exit, Mariano said he had learned from BuzzFeed ‘corporate boundaries and standards I would have never received anywhere else’ – an unusual takeaway for someone shown the door within a year.

Did they get free pizza on Fridays?

Another Tele exit

Another promising young reporter has walked out the doors of the Daily Telegraph, with Elizabeth Pike departing the state politics beat to join The Australian’s federal bureau in Canberra.

Pike, who joined News Corp as a cadet in July 2023, quickly rose through the ranks – from St George Shire Standard to the Tele’ state rounds – and was widely seen as one to watch.

‘Ben English was a big fan,’ says a source.

She was handed the plum assignment of interviewing Premier Chris Minns at the Bush Summit in Wagga Wagga, and regularly fronted the Tele’s video platform DTTV.

Just last week, she was named a finalist for Young Journalist of the Year in News Corp’s in-house awards. But she won’t be at the Tele to see if she wins.

Her move follows the recent exits of national political editor Clare Armstrong and federal political reporters Lachlan Leeming and Angira Bharadwaj.

R U OK? after we fired U

ANZ’s slick new CEO Nuno Matos spent last Monday evening rubbing shoulders with the most powerful people in the country at the Business Council of Australia’s annual dinner.

The event – essentially the Met Gala for corporate Australia – heard from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who was given a standing ovation.

The Labor leader lavished praise on the gathered business leaders for being the ‘drivers of economic growth, creators of jobs and leaders in innovation’.

If Matos winced, no one noticed.

Just hours later, early Tuesday morning, the former HSBC high-flier announced that 3,500 jobs and 1,000 contractors at ANZ would be axed over the next year.

It has understandably caused panic stations at the bank’s Melbourne headquarters.

But those facing the chopping block in the coming weeks and months should fear not – because help is at hand!

The beleaguered bank is now hiring a workplace mental health and wellbeing specialist for its Docklands office.

The advert, which went live three days after the jobs cull announcement, outlines a series of responsibilities.

These include ensuring ’employee wellbeing’ and ‘providing specialist advice, targeted interventions and upskilling on managing psychosocial risks’.

Whoever is brave enough to apply will no doubt find themselves very busy.

Taylor’s requiem

The biggest story of the past week was the shooting of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk at a college campus in Utah. American conservatives have been quick to blame the Left at large for the assassination and are vowing ‘revenge’. This won’t end well…

While Kirk wasn’t exactly a household name in Australia, his death inspired wall-to-wall coverage and an endless stream of tributes on social media Down Under.

We won’t recap what you’ve already read. However, a few stories stood out to us…

Firstly, there was the spiked article by reluctant landlord and ex-Guardianista Amy Remeikis for The New Daily that somehow made the assassination all about her.

Then there was a piece on the News Corp-owned Realestate.com.au that managed to find a housing angle on the shooting.

‘Charlie Kirk’s fortune and real estate wealth revealed’ was the headline. The story included the Turning Point USA founder’s estimated net worth (AU$18 million) as well as photos of the six-bedroom Arizona home he sold ‘months before his passing’.

Realestate.com.au nuked the story – which was more bizarre than it was offensive – but a version with a different headline remains on News.com.au.

But the prize for strangest Kirk take? That goes to former Spotlight producer Taylor Auerbach – the Bruce Lehrmann trial latecomer who torched Seven after it allegedly bankrolled the serial litigant’s bender in a bid to land an exclusive interview.

Auerbach – who is now a paralegal for his lawyer Rebekah Giles and something of a crooner on Instagram – posted a video of himself singing You’ll Never Walk Alone intercut with clips of Kirk and his wife Erika.

He doesn’t quite hit every note, but earns full marks for passion. It’s weird, it’s earnest, and it’s oddly compelling. Watch it for yourself.

Opposition under the weather

The Opposition may soon shuffle the deck chairs aboard the Liberal Party’s HMS Titanic, with Sussan Ley under growing pressure.

Andrew Hastie is set to quit the frontbench in protest at the Coalition supporting a net zero emissions target and Inside Mail can confirm he won’t be the only right winger in Ley’s shadow cabinet to do so.

We’ve spoken to at least two other frontbenchers who plan to do the same.

It’s 2009 all over again, when Mathias Cormann, Mitch Fifield and Brett Mason all quit Malcolm Turnbull’s frontbench over his decision to support Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme.

Turnbull survived the first vote to oust him as leader but not the second.

History often repeats itself, but the similarities are particularly stark here, with climate change threatening to oust an Opposition leader.

A decade and a half later and the Liberals still can’t find common ground on how to approach this issue. Even if Ley does go, replaced by a more conservative alternative, it’s hard to imagine moderate Liberals who favour supporting the net zero target sitting on their hands and accepting the shift.

Opposition represents the wilderness years in politics. With all the infighting going on – this issue is just one of many brawls underway – the Coalition looks set to be stuck there for some time to come.

The art of the deal?

Australia’s much-touted Mutual Defence Treaty with Papua New Guinea has all the grandeur of a Hollywood trailer and about as much substance, too.

Albo jetted into Port Moresby (again) promising history (again), but came home with nothing more than a communique (again). It’s essentially a press release dressed up as a big policy win.

The text is now agreed, sure, but PNG’s Cabinet blinked right at the finish line, essentially leaving Albo with nothing, or nothing much anyway.

Critics there are worried about the failed state’s sovereignty. In the world of geopolitics, timing is everything, and delays invite China to whisper sweet nothings in PNG’s ear as a precursor to potentially becoming a military outpost one day.

The PM has trumpeted a pact he couldn’t close the deal on, and the risk is that China encroaches ever further into the Pacific domain. But perhaps Albo won’t worry about that, now that he’s becoming besties with Xi.

Hard pill to swallow

Here’s your morality play for the week: the Queensland LNP Government wants to ban pill testing, including at music festivals, by shoehorning the change into an unrelated health bill.

Health experts are rolling their eyes (politely, of course). They say pill testing saves lives and provides important harm reduction more generally.

In contrast, the government says no illicit substance is safe and only a zero-tolerance approach is acceptable. Meanwhile, an independent evaluation by the University of Queensland on this issue has now been completed, but the government has kept it under wraps. Readers won’t be surprised to know why…

This looks like a classic case of public health policy being sacrificed on the altar of the culture wars. The LNP made an election promise without all the facts and now doesn’t want to break it, no matter what the medical evidence says.

The likely consequences? More overdoses. More dead teenagers.