Greg Jericho has lost his Federal Parliament press gallery pass, and the clock is doing most of the talking. The Australia Institute chief economist and Guardian Australia columnist posted to Bluesky at 1:56pm on Wednesday 17 June, going after his own colleagues over the questions they put to Pauline Hanson at the National Press Club. By 3:03pm, 67 minutes later, the gallery committee president had emailed to tell him his pass no longer qualified.
That sequence, first reported by Amanda Meade in Guardian Australia's Weekly Beast, is the version travelling fastest. What it skips is who Jericho is, and what else happened in that room.
What Jericho posted and how fast the pass went
Jericho's post read:
“This gallery has had a decade of watching Trump and 30 yrs of Hanson and they walked in the press club like it was first day on the job.”
He singled out questions from the Age and Sydney Morning Herald's James Massola and the Canberra Times' Dana Daniel.
At 3:03pm, gallery committee president Jane Norman, the ABC's national affairs correspondent, emailed to say an audit had flagged his pass and it no longer fit the criteria. She asked him to arrange a lobbyist pass instead, on the basis that his primary job is now chief economist at the Australia Institute. Norman told the Guardian the pass had not been cancelled. Jericho's answer was that you don't tell someone you aren't kicking them out while you show them the door. He's held the pass since 2015 and won a Walkley in 2016.
Who Greg Jericho actually is
The left rushed to cast this as an attack on press freedom, a brave journalist punished for speaking out. That story falls apart the moment you ask who Jericho actually is. He is no neutral observer of Pauline Hanson. He is the chief economist at the Australia Institute, a progressive think tank, and has written for Guardian Australia since 2013. The Guardian's own account called him the most stringent critic of the questions Hanson faced that day. The man complaining the gallery went easy on Hanson is one of her fiercest critics, who wanted her grilled harder, not softer. This is the same gallery One News watched lob a childish jet question at Hanson in Perth a week earlier.
Jericho also doesn’t hide where he stands. The bio on his long-running @GrogsGamut account — which he held from 2009 before leaving for Bluesky — reads:
“Trans women are women. Transphobic bigots are bigots. Israel is committing genocide.”
That is a campaigner with declared positions on the day’s sharpest fault lines, not a neutral chronicler of them.
On Israel in Jericho's bio, that one-line verdict skips both context and facts. The Jewish people have been conquered, expelled and slaughtered for more than 3,000 years, from the fall of the ancient kingdoms through centuries of pogroms. The worst came within living memory: the Holocaust murdered six million Jews, the genocide that drove the rebirth of the modern state in 1948. In the decades since, more than 25,000 Israeli soldiers and security personnel have been killed defending it, alongside over 5,000 civilians lost to terrorism. The latest eruption came on 7 October 2023, when Hamas killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel and dragged 251 hostages back to Gaza, among them babies, children and elderly Holocaust survivors. From the next day Hezbollah shelled the north, emptying more than 60,000 Israelis from their homes for over a year, and Iran fired directly on Israel twice in 2024. The one genuine genocide in this history was committed against the Jewish people, not by them. "Genocide" is a verdict, not a description, and it is not one One News shares.
On the trans statement, One News sits on the other side of his line. Our position is plain: sex is biological, and a man does not become a woman by declaring it. There is an Australian legal thread here too. In 2013 the Gillard government amended the Sex Discrimination Act to make “gender identity” a protected attribute — the change that, a decade on, sat behind the Federal Court’s ruling in Tickle v Giggle, which found women-only app founder Sall Grover had unlawfully discriminated by removing a transgender woman from her platform. Whether that advanced women’s rights or hollowed out sex-based protections is precisely the debate Jericho dismisses as bigotry.
The hard question that did get asked, and the reporter Hanson banned for it
The idea that the whole gallery rolled over also has to deal with Sarah Martin. The Guardian Australia senior correspondent used the same appearance to ask whether Hanson had any role in the appointment of her daughter, Lee Hanson, to a taxpayer funded advisor job. The Canberra Times reported the role pays about $150,000 and sits with One Nation's New South Wales senator Sean Bell, while Lee Hanson has been based in Tasmania.
Hanson didn't take it quietly. She opened with “Honestly, you never give up,” called Martin “a trashy journalist,” and accused her of an obsession with tearing down One Nation and Gina Rinehart. She told Martin she'd be banned from her future answers and interviews.
Hanson then answered the question. She said she had no role in the appointment, that her daughter got the job on merit after 8 years at the University of Tasmania and a stint as a department head, and she compared the interstate setup to Liberal senator Simon Birmingham keeping a senior adviser based in Tasmania.
What the gallery did next
The Federal Parliament press gallery committee condemned Hanson's threat to ban reporters. The journalists' union, the MEAA, called the attack on Martin bitter, personal and unprofessional. That same committee, chaired by Norman, is the body that moved Jericho off his journalist pass 67 minutes after he criticised it.
Martin and Jericho were not the only flashpoints in the room. Activist group GetUp unfurled a protest banner during the address, a stunt that saw the National Press Club later reject David Sharaz's membership, and Hanson also rebuked an SBS reporter on her way out.
Where that leaves the week
Hanson used her speech to argue she'd spent years being silenced. You don't have to agree with her to notice how the week played out. A Hanson critic lost his press pass inside the hour. A reporter who put a hard question to Hanson was called trashy and told she's banned. And the gallery that condemned one ban is the same one that quietly reclassified a pass out from under a critic. The Guardian and the ABC told part of that. The rest of it was sitting in the same room. It is the same media weather One News tracked when news.com.au ran its Hanson outsourcing ‘exclusive’ days earlier.
