KEVIN HUME Consultancy

'Hanson has turned (after her release on appeal from prison for electoral fraud) into a character of the reality TV age. In the early days of Hansonism, headline writers used to love the line "The Perils of Pauline", from an old silent movie serial. Now Pauline has been through real perils and many sympathisers have been sharing them with her.' 'She's still the face, but lacks solid body' by Michelle Grattan The Melbourne Age 9 November 2003.

'The secret to continued mainstream success in television is never to say anything that anyone will remember the next day' and '(The camera) The natives of Papua Niugini are right. It strips your soul. Thankfully, there is little requirement for soul in an industry where, as an American television executive once said, "We make programs for the people we fly over."' Andrew Denton TV presenter, comedian. The Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend 'The Getting of Wisdom' 9 August 2003.

I read five papers daily, and fifteen journals weekly. Having been in the same job for twenty one years, people know where to find me: I get hundreds of calls with tips. There is a constant stream of possibilities. To handle them, and to remain almost sane, I resort to opportunism.' 'How to Make a Science Show', Robyn Williams in A Promise of Miracles - Celebrating the Scientific Experience, Sydney, 1993.

I speak the vernacular, the language of my contemporaries. I don't try and make it too haughty and I never speak down to people. If you can paint a word picture, you can really drive the message home.' Paul Keating MHR speaking on SBS TV INSIGHT as reported in The Melbourne Age 3 May 1991.

'I'm not going to stand there palely loitering while I get my arse kicked' Then Prime Minister Paul Keating on the reasons why he had retreated from "all-in" media scrummages outside The Lodge, the Prime Ministerial Residence in Canberra, The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 November 1994.

'I'll tell you, there's nothing more lonely than sitting in front of a live TV camera', he says with a wry laugh. 'It's the loneliest place in the world... Frankly, I have hated fronting the media but I have exploited it to get my message across. At the end of the day I'm just a commodity to them (journalists) (But that's OK) I've used the media as much as they've used me.' ONA (Office of National Assessments) Intelligence Analyst and defecting Canberra 'whistleblower', Andrew Wilkie who left ONA when he went public in questioning the veracity of the Howard Government's case for war on Iraq, 11 March 2003 quoted in a profile 'Out on a limb' by Jane Cadzow, The Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend 16 August 2003

'Journalism is a highly competitive trade. But it is not as competitive as editors like to kid themselves or their readers that is. In fact, it is riddled with cartels. As a craft practiced by human beings, it exhibits all the failings adumbrated by Adam Smith. 'People of the same trade,' he wrote in the Wealth of Nations, 'seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.'' Former Chief Press Secretary to Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, Bernard Ingham in Kill the Messenger, London, 1991.

'To be a journalist was to be a kind of proletarian hero worthy of Hollywood star power…Once a cultural hero, he was glamorized in the movies by Clark Gable and she by Rosalind Russell. They were salt-of-the-earth, wise-cracking, sassy, but highly-principled types…Nobody (today) phones the paper expecting to find a hero anymore. It has been a long time since Americans thought of a journalist as a working-class guy teaching a spoiled rich dame how to dunk a doughnut.' Russell Baker in 'Goodbye to Newspapers?' in The New York Review of Books August 16th 2007