Katie Hopkins used her Instagram account to "joke" about flouting quarantine rules. (Image: Instagram)

Hopkins skipkins jumpkins What a difference a weekend makes — the time between people idly wondering what shameless far-right grifter Katie Hopkins was doing in a hotel in Sydney while so many people’s friends and relatives were well into their second year of being stranded overseas, to the cancellation of Hopkins’ visa, was a little over 48 hours.

It followed the customary script of Hopkins employment these days — a network chasing ratings via her performative bile, swiftly finds the Hopkins of it all is a bit more than they can handle. In this case it wasn’t her fondness for spewing the rhetoric of conquering war criminals, but her yawn-inducingly predictable anti-lockdown stance and attendant shock tactics.

Since, we have gold-standard buck-passing from those responsible for bringing her to the country. Channel 7, whose googling of Hopkins apparently didn’t get as far that time she told a meeting led by a high-profile Holocaust denier she was “on [their] team”, were shocked, just shocked, to find out she would flout COVID-19 restrictions. Then Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews, in announcing that Hopkins’ visa had indeed been cancelled, argued that her application to be let in had been supported by “a state government”. Which slightly ignores that Australia’s immigration minister has unparalleled personal discretion over who gets let into the country via the “Character Test” — something that has been used to keep Chelsea Manning out of the country, but not, say, Lauren Southern.

Further evidence, if any were needed, that Australian media is happy to act as a sewage inlet for the cheapest far-right hucksters, long after they’ve outstayed their welcome in every other market.

Seven Curses But of course, why should we expect that anything in Hopkins’ past would have turned Channel 7 off? In the last three years alone we’ve seen:

  • Seven sued for racial discrimination over a 2018 Sunrise panel whereby a commentator called for another Stolen Generation
  • A ruling from broadcasting regulator ACMA that a story attributing “crime surges” to “African gangs” breached accuracy guidelines
  • The running of a Facebook survey asking viewers if they thought “anti-white racism” was on the rise
  • An uncritical interview with Blair Cottrell, leader of the far-right group United Patriots Front as though he were a concerned citizen leading a neighbourhood watch
  • The gratuitous identifying of “three black players” missing penalties in the England football team’s Euro 2020 final loss
  • An ongoing love affair with One Nation.

Stenographer watch It must be lovely for our perpetually beleaguered PM to watch two arms of the biggest employer of journalists in the country fight to be the place his talking points first get published. So yesterday Sky News “revealed” the shocking news that, far from sitting on his hands, “Prime Minister Scott Morrison was a key driver in advising the NSW premier to go harder on restrictions to attempt to quash the virus in Australia’s biggest city”. This morning, perhaps seeing that his turf was under threat, The Australian‘s Simon Benson delivered the following analysis:

Scott Morrison is the target of a coordinated and unbridled political campaign directed by the state labor premiers and the federal opposition. And it’s working.

On the latest Newspoll numbers, the Morrison government would obviously lose an election. And probably lose it badly.

… The risk for Morrison was always going to be that people would eventually link the lack of access to vaccines to the mugging of their liberties. It’s pointless to argue whether this may be a misdirected anger. It is the reality that Morrison is now dealing with.

Morrison, in this reading, has not stumbled from one calamity to another throughout his leadership, betraying a pathological indifference to the truth and the responsibilities of his office — he’s simply the victim of brutal, sustained politicking.