My first and most wonderful secretary worked, after me, for Gina Rinehart, and never had a harder word to say for her other than she was 'quite an unusual lady'. Wendy must have been raised by a mum, like mine, who'd say (but never lived up to it) that if you can't find something nice to say about somebody, don't say anything.
I'm afraid I'm not too good at it either, having learned how easily the tongue can humiliate or inflame.
Yet it would be a bloody good piece of advice for anyone wishing to weigh in (another witty AFR in-joke headline about Rinehart's latest obstacle to a seat on the Fairfax Board) to the discussion about Rinehart's contribution to Australian culture in terms of her perceived unattractiveness as a woman. 'Fat', therefore greedy and nasty and ill-controlled, and thus a target for ridicule based on how she looks and therefore of what worth she is.
On Q&A in May we were subjected to a thoroughly vile display of playground mobbing, the kind that ends with Piggy getting killed before the grownups break up the game of Lord of the Flies.
Rinehart wasn't there, but nobody defended her, and in her name any powerful woman. Tony Jones' half-rueful smile as virtually the whole panel got stuck into 'Gina' doesn't relieve him of responsibility for feeding her reputation down the razor-blade of public taste.
Presumably he thought it was funny to let Barry 'Dame Edna' (really, his despised Glen Iris mummy) Humphries opine that Rinehart should get herself a hairdresser. From beneath his floppy, improbably black hair. Which encouraged David Marr to call Rinehart 'greedy' and criticise her public warring with her children.
Sneers flowered on famous faces. Even John Hewson, who could have stood up for civility, instead went along with the pack with a pathetic remark that he could understand what Rinehart was trying to do but 'didn't excuse' because he 'didn't understand' how she was doing it.
Have we tried to understand? No, because she's 'ugly', according to a misogynist, a gay man, a former politician, and Miriam Margoyles, the fabulously British and famously lesbian actor who doesn't know 'Gina' (who does?) but doesn't like her.
It was a despicable 'debate' and did the