REVEALED: Mayne Muckraker's Manufactured Mendacity

In his woefully dull website bracksed.com, and an email sent at 3.10AM in between moon-howling, political candidate Stephen Mayne tries once again to get up a story that his chum Mikey Bachelard put in the Australian and elderly dandruffed gossip columnist Lawrence Money ran in The Age last year that the OC had been a contributor to Crikey as the notorious Delia Delegate.

And this is the "skewering" we were promised early in the week. What a let-down!

Wasn't true then, still isn't true. And he reckons I told him this over lunch! Yeah, right. If you believe that you'd also believe that at the same lunch he told me he has a peculiar fondness for plush toys. I agreed not to judge him.

Sure, we had lunch together, for reasons I'll explain below but he is simply lying about me as a half-assed payback for speaking truth to his power-grab. He's lying just as he's lied about People Power to the authorities, to the public and to its membership.

Nor for that matter was I "Reg the Representative", "Harry the Hack" or anyone else of the colourfully named and probably Mayne invented multiple personalities that appeared in Crikey back then. Certainly there is some material currently supplied to the OC by a wonderful source about a particular subject that has led me to think they might have been Delia but I haven't asked them about it and won't be doing so.

In dealing with fanciful allegations it's hard to prove a negative normally but in this case it's really very easy.

IS STEVIE A JOURNALIST OR LIAR? OR BOTH?
Poor old Stevie Mayne is one of those dweeby pious private school boys who while never really fitting in maintained a certain detached sense of superiority to the rest of us. A Malcolm Fraser for the modern age perhaps.

Mayne says he is a journalist and therefore he would obviously never disclose his real source or sources but presumably in his weird world of "journalist ethics" he can certainly invent a story about who a source was to fight for his political survival. It's certainly novel and not something the OC would do but he's a desperate lad, embittered by the fact that his People Power party is in deep crisis.

It still hasn't been registered. It faces serious claims of impropriety in their internal corporate governance and has already lost its leader Jack Reilly.

Mayne thinks it cute to falsely smear someone as being a source of his (associating with him clearly is odious) while conveniently remaining in compliance with clause 3 of the "Media Alliance Code of Ethics" which mandates union members like Stevie respect all confidential sources or in other words keep them secret.

Journalists like Michael Harvey and Gerard McManus of the Herald Sun have even defied court orders and risked going to jail to protect their sources. That's how important it is to the profession of which the OC is part. If you're seen as giving up sources, you're finished. And as low as Mayne has sunk, as the Captain of the Conflict of Interests Cricket Club First XI it is hard to imagine him actually trashing his reputation that way because I doubt he's going to turn politics into a full-time gig anytime soon.

He as good as admits he's bullsh*tting with this backhander:

I've spoken to senior ALP figures who don't believe Landeryou has the talent or insight to produce what Delia pumped onto Crikey.

This is what we call an each-way bet so if his real source outs themselves (please do if you're reading this that would really stick it up Stevie) he can say "oh I never really believed it." That's what I mean about the detached superiority bit. He must always be seen to be right, even if it requires tying himself up in rhetorical and logical knots.

Leaving that aside, we are left with the comic (and utterly unexplained) idea that I was ever a fan of the drunken toad NUW boss Greg Sword or a promoter of the bizarre defamatory conspiracy theories that Crikey ran about ALP factional politics.

YAWNING
My assumption is that Mayne invented the vast majority of it in conjunction with an NUW type who has a creative bent and a sick sense of humour. I won't out them though as no doubt they could invoke the Nuremburg defence of "only obeying orders."

Mayne's allegation that I claimed authorship of such muck "over lunch" is preposterous. And a bit sad given that we were hoping for the "skewering" he had so excitedly promised. I was hoping for some doctored photographs of me in an agricultural setting at least! He'll have to do better to keep us from nodding off.

THE LUNCH
I've had one lunch with Stephen Mayne. I sought him out to discuss Crikey's coverage of my personal sagas which at one stage included references to me as an SOB, a reference to my late mother that I thought even he would think was beyond the pale. I had also hoped that the long-time enemy of my enemy (Sol Lew) could be my friend with my then looming battles with Lew the Looter. I also decided to stir up Lew's mate Simon Crean by sitting next to Mayne at the ALP State Conference (Crean had a deep hatred of Mayne, as does Lew) and explaining to the Camberwell boy who was who in the Labor zoo. He looked more than a little lost and even visibily flinched at the sight of the CFMEU's Martin Kingham (understandably).

So in context his claims are more than a little strange as I hardly know the bloke but I suppose it's not surprising given how desperate he is feeling over his "start-up" (six years old is a bit long in the tooth for that description) political party being skewered by the OC's fearless investigative journalism.

IS IT A BIG CONSPIRACY AGAINST HIM OR IS MAYNE JUST GOOD COPY?
He thinks it's all some Labor Right conspiracy against him. Even though he says I was Delia Delegate who was against the Labor Right. Confused yet? His ranting does raise the obvious question, why would the Labor Right give a toss about a party that will get 0.1% of the vote if they're lucky?

I'm interested for one reason. For all Stevie's faults, he is good copy. He does weird stuff.

He runs a party whose leader denies ever being its leader or even a member!

He runs a party where you join once and never have to renew again to retain membership!

He's a rich man who pretends to be a battler.

He cuts corners while being pious and holier than thou.

He is a politician AND a commentator.

He is in a feud with Eric Beecher over the whole election stunt which could see him sacked from Crikey at anytime. His wife Paula is very annoyed about the whole election thing reputedly.

How could I NOT write about such a person? He's a freak. And a fake. And a fraud. If I had to invent someone to write about for the state election I suspect it would be Stephen Mayne.

In an election that will be agonisingly stage managed by two slick party machines with the Greens rapidly catching up in their professionalism too, what else is a journalist to do but to seek out interesting news?

That's my job Stevie and while it's human nature to not like criticism, it seems incredibly hypocritical for someone who made his fortune from rough and tough journalism and internet defamation to seek to shut down someone else for having a go. In the supreme irony of ironies for someone who made a fortune selling a business that slags people off, Mayne is obsessed with shooting the messenger not looking within at what went wrong with People Power.

And in coming days it will become very obvious that my sources about People Power come from within People Power not from Treasury Place or Trades Hall or 104 Exhibition Street or ALP Head Office or Herald Sun supremo Peter Blunden or blogger legend Tim Blair or columnist Andrew Bolt or competing AGM maddie Jack Tilburn or the cast of thousands determined to make Mayne pay for his years of slagging them off.

Mayne's problem boils down to this ancient problem: he sees the splinters in the eyes of all others while ignoring the plank in his own. But as a political candidate he simply doesn't get to bully critics out of the way.

If he thinks a few invented claims and snide attacks are going to shut the OC down, he should perhaps realise that we've seen off much bigger and badder than Stevie Mayne.

FAWNING: THE THORNLEY BROWN-NOSE AWARD
Given that he's invented lunch-time confessions it's probably appropriate to disclose the truth which was that he actually told the OC that Evan Thornley was at one stage hoping to buy Crikey and had offered him a million for it but Mayne thought he was a "tyre-kicker" and "tosser" who probably just wanted to buy Crikey as an investment and leave Mayne with the responsibility of running the business, something he felt unable to continue with. Beecher while "dull as dog sh*t" at least wanted to run the business himself, relieving Mayne of a responsibility to which he felt unsuited. So naturally, with no business skills Mayne feels qualified to manage the state's finances possessing a "balance of power." That should work out well.

And of course Mayne is silent about Thornley's shameful anonoblogging as Rex Ringschott, which he all but admitted by transferring the blog to his own Labor First website before quietly giving the blogging away when no one was looking.

So I think the Mayne doctrine of web commentary restricts free speech to millionaires like himself and Evan Thornley, preferably cowering behind the shield of anonymity. Pauperised one-time spivs who disagree with Stevie must be "silenced" and "shut-down" etc. If they agree with Mayne and lavish praise upon his "latte left" revolt then their work is "important." Perhaps even the most significant whistle-blowing exercise ever.

And that's one other truth you won't hear much of these days from Stevie was that he was gushing in his praise of the OC saying what were doing was "so important" and giving advice about this and that aspect of producing the news. This was no doubt his view until our harsh light of truth shone upon him and his various crooked schemes. His chum at The Aged Lawrence Money once praised us as "witty and entertaining", once we'd held him to account for his vile work though we were "deranged" and "insane" and whatever else.

There's more to respond to and we'll put up more Mayne updates as they come to hand.

It's damn good to have a new version of Slandersyou back, albeit this time not with a cowardly anonymous opponent but one who is running for office. Some might think this is like shooting fish in a barrel and while eastern suburbs boys like Stephen often bring toothpicks to gunfights I think the exchange promises to be fun.

Knock yourself out Stevie, because if you don't the OC will do it for you.

Game on.