In this week’s column, the Adelaide media man’s misdirected missives; disgraced Pastor Frank Houston’s local connections; and “the club sandwich of wrongness”.

Misdirected

FIVEaa brekky presenter David “Penbo” Penberthy reportedly gets a mention in former Sunrise producer Adam Boland’s “tell all” book about his time in television.

The anecdote is about a skirmish that occurred when Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph ran a front-page story on plans by then Opposition leader Rudd and Sunrise for a “false” Anzac Day dawn service.

We haven’t yet got our hands on the book, but The Australian reports that Rudd “went ballistic” at then editor Neil Breen over the story he claimed was untrue.

The stoush went on for days until the Telegraph boys got hold of an email trail confirming the story was correct.

“Breen took the emails confirming the story to his colleague, The Daily Telegraph editor David Penberthy while Breen met Rudd, who had been forced to admit he was wrong, for a coffee at Sydney’s Intercontinental Hotel.

“As Rudd and Breen were talking, David Penberthy was on the roof of News Limited’s Sydney headquarters, reading the email chain while having a cigarette,’’ Boland writes.

“As soon as he was done, he sent Breen a text: ‘Hey mate, we are smashing (Rudd) on the front page tomorrow.’

“Penberthy sent that text to Rudd by mistake. Immediately realising what he’d done, he sent him another text addressed to journalist Kelvin Bissett, in the hope of creating the impression that both were meant for Kelvin and not Kevin.”

Awkward.

Funnily enough, Penbo also sent a message to InDaily accidentally last year, when we broke the story that Julia Gillard had bought a house in Adelaide (a story planned for the Tiser front page that weekend).

Penbo was editing the Sunday Mail at the time. And the email was more pithy than the text he sent to Rudd.

“F***ken J****s,” it read.

Fallen

There has been horrible evidence provided to the Royal Commission into institutional sex abuse this week about the late Pentecostal pastor Frank Houston and his sexual assault of a boy.

The New Zealand-born, Sydney-based Houston, who died in 2004, had strong connections in Adelaide.

Way back in 1982, he was the special guest preacher at the opening of Adelaide’s first “megachurch” – then known as the Paradise Assemblies of God.

Houston, then one of the leading figures in the pentecostal Assemblies of God denomination, had been something of a mentor to Paradise leader Andrew Evans, whose flock had grown so strongly in the late 1970s and early ’80s, that they were able to fund the building of the more than 2000-seat auditorium on Crowle Road.

Until yesterday, Evans’ brother Fred – a fellow pastor a Paradise but now retired – had some interesting footage of Houston on his YouTube page, preaching at Paradise.

The footage has been taken down, but it was vintage Houston, setting (now) ironically high standards of moral behaviour (including not touching alcohol) and expressing confidence in the imminent “second coming” of Jesus.

Andrew Evans went on to be a founder of the Family First Party and sit in the Legislative Council. He, too, is retired.

Evans’ son Ashley now runs Paradise, which has been renamed as “Influencers Church”.

If you’re interested in a comprehensive history of the Pentecostal movement in Australia, including Houston and his role in helping Evans grow his church, this thesis offers very detailed information.

And you criticised the Frome Street bikeway …

While Adelaide continues to wring its hands about a few hundred metres of separated bike paths, Londoners are going ballistic about what has been described as the silliest piece of cycling infrastructure ever proposed.

It is a doozy: a 13 kilometre central bike path that would “float” on the River Thames, and which would cost more than $1 billion (Australian) to construct.

In fact, it would be so expensive to build that cyclists would have to pay a toll to use it – although how many would do so is in question given the risk of seasickness.

It’s only a proposal at this stage, but one commentator has summed it up as follows: “The proposal isn’t just wrong. It’s a whole club sandwich of wrongness, made up of many delectable layers of stupid.”

Closer to home, Bicycle SA is searching for Adelaide’s truly awful bike infrastructure. They’re asking for cyclists to Tweet pictures of said terrible infrastructure, with a view to publishing a compendium of craptastic at the end of this month (use the hashtag – #bikedoff).

The Outsider appears in InDaily every Friday, digging into places where we’re not welcome, and probing Adelaide’s obsessions.