White coal

English food person Jamie Oliver believes that because his country is taxing sugar added into processed foods, Australia should as well. He put out a statement on his Facebook page, and Fairfax superjourno Latika Bourke thought she was doing some journalism by copying it and doing a quick Google search on sugar. Some people regard this as Excellent Journalism That Must Be Preserved but I disagree.

There was the expected backlash from big processed food producers, inevitably to be copied here but with added surprise even from journos with Google access; but that isn't the reason why a sugar tax won't work in Australia.

First of all - Australia is one of the last countries in the developed world that doesn't have a bill of rights, same-sex marriage, or a tax on carbon emissions. What makes anyone think we are ready for a sugar tax? The Treasurer is actively looking for ways to cut taxes rather than raise them, even with a supposedly massive and unsustainable debt.

Second, and more importantly, the reason why we won't have a sugar tax in Australia is because of the sugar seats.

Most famers vote Coalition and get taken for granted. Sugar farmers tend to be different, voting for parties that best represent their interests at a given election (i.e., swinging voters), as Tony Windsor would have all farmers do. Sugar cane is grown not in lush, rich soils, but on marginal lands where margins are thin and a break in government policy can mean the difference between surviving or going under. This has seen major parties offer subsidies and other largesse - sweeteners, if you will - to sugar farmers.

Australia has a significant domestic market for sugar, which arguably has peaked. Australian companies producing sugar (such as CSR, founded as the Colonial Sugar Refinery) have exited the market, beset by low and unpredictable profits and high transport costs. Sugar processors that were set up as farmers' co-operatives, like Tully Sugar or the early distillers of Bundaberg Rum, have sold out to foreign-owned conglomerates. There is a large and growing market in Asia for sugar; except for a heavily-subsidised sugar cane industry in the south-eastern US, most sugar-producing countries are developing countries that undercut Australian producers on price.

The free market is bracing for the sugar farmer. The (increasing) threat of cyclones hits them first and hardest in their communities, and they are among the last producers to recover when the debris is cleared away. Combined with wildly fluctuating profit margins, sugar farmers can find it difficult to get insurance or other support for long-term production - which is where the politicians come in.

Here is a map of where sugar is grown and processed in Australia. The federal electorates covering that area are:

• Page (NSW)
• Richmond (NSW)
• Fairfax (Q)
• Wide Bay (Q)
• Hinkler (Q)
• Capricornia (Q)
• Dawson (Q)
• Leichhardt (Q)

Flynn and Kennedy (Q) would be included were it not for their significant beef and mining hinterlands, which dilute the impact of the sugar-farming vote. You have to draw the line somewhere.

Those electorates have as much in common/are as diverse as the much-vaunted seats of western Sydney.

In that list of electorates above, all bar one (Richmond) was won by the Coalition in 2013. People with short political memories may be tempted to simply regard the rest as Coalition heartland, but all of those seats* had been held by the Labor Political Party when it was in government and it would be crazy not to have some overarching strategy for winning them back.

The Leader of the Nationals Political Party, who is also Minister for Agriculture, almost certainly has feelings for and on the sugar industry too. George Christensen, who holds a sugar seat, has been courting the dormant One Nation vote with his culture-war efforts; he would sooner have people pay zakat than a sugar tax. Any concerted effort for a sugar tax by an unlikely and unsustainable alliance of health policy wonks and small-government fetishists simply has no chance against major political parties backed by processed food industry donors/lobbyists. Besides, the small government fetishists have sold themselves out to the gigantic bludge that is their Northern Australia Dreaming.

This effect is felt at state level too. In 1998 Queenslanders sent 11 One Nation MPs to their state parliament: half were from sugar seats.

Media organisations other than the ABC are cutting back their coverage of regional areas. The 2016 election will see regional electorates play a more decisive role than any election since 1961. This is further proof that major media organisations are run and staffed by idiots. When you have to do your own political background on the events of the day, you realise just how grievously political journalism has failed, and how impertinent is the demand that those who have faile be maintained in the manner to which they've become accustomed.

The very idea that government might levy a tax on the sugar industry is frankly unbelievable. A reduction in their subsidies would have the same fiscal effect as a tax, but that won't happen either.


* Allowing for boundary changes etc over time

One Tony Abbott

There is only one Tony Abbott, but the press gallery report him through the lens of an imaginary, wise and capable leader. The fact that so many journalists limit themselves to the same story at any one time is what's wrong with both politics and with journalism, not some sort of vindication of either.

Take this piece by Michael Gordon. Despite Gordon's experience and seniority it is no better/worse than other pieces of its type (which doesn't say much for notions of experience and seniority in political journalism):

Tony Abbott has reverted to the tactics that proved so devastatingly effective in opposition in a bid to achieve ascendancy over Bill Shorten, wedge Labor on national security, consolidate his own recovery and increase his flexibility on election timing.

By reducing the complex issue of citizenship to a slogan, shattering any prospect of bipartisanship on security and brazenly misrepresenting the position of the country's foremost expert in terrorism law, the Prime Minister is out to maximise short and medium-term political advantage.

Having declared that "Daesh is coming, if it can, for every person and for every government with a simple message: submit or die", Abbott's emphatic message now is that Australians are safer from terrorism under the Coalition. This is an extraordinary and irresponsible claim.

Abbott never moved on from the behaviour that so enthralled journalists. This is why he's such an abysmal Prime Minister.

The press gallery were willing to take him at his word, while the rest of the country wasn't. Australians have always been Tony Abbott sceptics. Whenever people were asked who they would prefer to lead the Liberal Party, Tony Abbott or a brown snake, Abbott couldn't win a trick. Since he became leader of the Liberal Party major media broadcasters have insisted, like people trapped in a bad relationship, that they knew the real Tony and we didn't. He Can Change. He's Looking Prime Ministerial. He'll Grow Into The Job. This Time. This Time. Good Government Starts Today, Or Maybe Next Thursday, Definitely After The Budget. No Really This Time It Will Be Different, Please Believe Me.

They made excuses for him that they didn't make for Latham, or Downer, or any other party leader manifestly unfit to become Prime Minister.

To return to Gordon, Abbott is not being "extraordinary" when he executes the responsibilities of office in his typically irresponsible way. Every week, if not every day, Tony Abbott does things that fall short of the press gallery ideal that they call "Tony 2.0", "Prime Ministerial", or whatever. Rather than abandon this pretence and report on Abbott as he is and has always been, they hold him to a fantasy ideal and act all surprised when he falls short.

Now somebody has taken Peter Hartcher to lunch and convinced him that the environment is a real thing in politics, something that goes beyond the weak tea and small beer that is the major parties' positions. It's so risible I won't even link to it, because the SMH campaign on the environment works from the same assumptions as all bad political reporting:

• the incompetent boofhead we see trashing government services, and with that our very confidence in government itself, is somehow not the real Tony Abbott and something of a surprise to seasoned observers;
• the real Tony Abbott is a sensitive and well-rounded fellow who feels people's pain, and is very receptive to issues like same-sex marriage and renewable energy; so
• with the right form of words, offered respectfully, we just might get him to tone down his opposition to something against which he fundamentally defines himself.

This bullshit has to stop. I am singling out Fairfax but every organisation with any mouth-breathing muppets in the Canberra press gallery is guilty of the same malicious negligence. Stop believing in "Tony 2.0". The whole reason Abbott is Prime Minister at all is not because conservatives pushed for a conservative government - conservatives are entitled to make their case - but because of smirking dipsticks like Hartcher and Gordon who insisted they knew Abbott better than the rest of us. They falsely asserted against all the evidence - against everything that journalism is supposed to stand for - that he wouldn't be so bad.

Start seeing Abbott for what he is and report accordingly. Misinformation kills democracy, and it kills media organisations that peddle it.

That Hartcher piece

Wow. Just wow. All the press gallery and Labor staffers were united in their belief that this piece by Peter Hartcher was Very Important Journalism, which must of course be wrong. Well, it mostly is, but mainly because of Hartcher overreach. When he gets it right, though, he gets it right - but not nearly enough to warrant all the hoo-ha, or even a net positive regard for Hartcher.

The most important sentence in Australian political journalism for a decade

One paragraph, buried way down the article, revealed more than Hartcher knew or dared admit. In it lies buried much of what's wrong with our politics, mediated through traditional broadcast media, with an insular political class that monitors those it governs, but keeps its distance; that doesn't understand what a country needs, and fights a losing battle over its bipolar tendencies to populist binge followed by neoliberal purge. In it lies everything that's wrong with the press gallery: those who see it and fail to understand must not report for "work" on Monday. The second sentence in this paragraph:

The Labor opposition has struck a position of bipartisan accord with Abbott on national security. For this reason, the Parliament is no longer a functioning check on the government in this realm.

The press gallery - and Hartcher is one of the worst offenders - reports on politics from the premise that whatever Labor and the Liberal/Nationals/LNPQ/CLP/OMG/WTF Coalition agree upon is Sensible Bipartisan Reform. They believe - yes, even the best will lapse from time to time, or their editors do on their behalf - that whatever Laborandthecoalition don't agree on (or what others disagree with the joint ticket on) must be pointless bickering at best, destructive nonsense at worst.

All manner of dumb, nasty policy has been foisted on the Australian public by Laborandthecoalition: a budget in structural deficit, mandatory detention of boat-borne asylum-seekers, a contradictory and half-baked foreign policy, no policy on renewable energy or climate change to speak of, lip-service to health, education, science, and social programs while actually cutting them (more on that later); I could go on, and I have. All of those bad policies have been praised by the press gallery for being bipartisan. That praise only spurs more bad bipartisan policy, which will escape scrutiny because bipartisanship, and the press gallery become drawn into the protection racket that is the political class.

Any and all criticism of those bipartisan positions has been written off as irrelevant, because bipartisanship is its own reward and trumps all others. Peter Hartcher is one of the worst offenders but they all do it. Bipartisanship is an idea above its station.

When bipartisanship shuts down debate, there is some scope for the broadcast media represented in the press gallery to open up the debate that parliament isn't having. To do that, they'd need some understanding of the issues at hand and the stakeholders in the community who can articulate why the bipartisan position isn't the only and best one, which is how it appears to Capital Hill insiders.

Hartcher is yet to demonstrate any difference in the way things appear to Capital Hill insiders and the way such decisions affect those who are governed. This is why the rest of his article, bar the sentence referred to above, fails and fails utterly.

Wannabe Woodward

Bob Woodward is a US journalist most famous for his work uncovering the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s. More recently he wrote a series of books on the decisions by the Bush Administration to go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq, in which he used verbatim quotes from leading figures at crucial moments. Woodward had access to those people but he didn't have access to those meetings; he could not have taken those quotes directly but those who uttered them all come off as wise, learned, experienced, and wanting what's best for the their country and the world.

A review of Hartcher's recent columns show him to be a Woodward wannabe. Joe Hockey, Julie Bishop, Barnaby Joyce, and Malcolm Turnbull have all been tongue-bathed in recent Hartcher columns, where he uses direct quotes from meetings he did not attend that flatter those who flatter him in return. Hartcher is aiming for some sort of eminence in his profession, rather than a serious examination of how we are governed by this government.

unAustralian

Peter Dutton's proposals to strip people of their citizenship are the result of too little scrutiny of bad decisions that arise from bipartisanship.

Under the last Coalition government, Australian citizens Vivien Solon and Cornelia Rau were effectively stripped of their entitlements under Australian citizenship. Robert Jovicic, born in Serbia but who emigrated to Australia as a child and who held dual citizenship, was deported to a country he had not lived in for four decades after committing crimes here. Mohammed Haneef, a foreign citizen working in Australia, had his visa cancelled because of a ministerial decision about his terrorism activity. Dutton's proposal should not be seen as some sort of ambush, but an example of the classic conservative principle of perpetuating that which has gone before. Consider Dutton's predecessors as a Liberal immigration minister:

• Phillip Ruddock is an elder statesman among Liberals, whose demotion by Abbott earlier this year anguished many in the party but who has recently been restored to a supporting role in anti-terrorism measures;
• Amanda Vanstone is a Fairfax columnist. OK, so maybe she wasn't commissioned directly by Hartcher, but it's hard to imagine he hasn't at least acquiesced to such a position;
• Kevin Andrews not only sits at the Cabinet table but was quoted favourably by Hartcher in his piece.

Hartcher's framing is all wrong, and he is horribly compromised in trying to misrepresent Dutton's position.

Quote unquote

Turnbull asked Abbott directly if the Daily Telegraph had been briefed on the proposal for the next morning's paper, which would have meant the cabinet meeting had been pre-empted by the Prime Minister's press office. The Telegraph is a favoured Abbott outlet for signalling his moves in advance.

It had not, replied Abbott.

Yet the next morning the Telegraph carried a report saying that the proposal would be "included in the bill" that had been approved by the cabinet the night before. Oops.

OK, so Abbott is a liar. This isn't even news, let alone the big give-him-a-Walkley-already scoop that the journosphere thinks it is.

What this does is prove a point that has been obvious throughout Abbott's career, not least in his infamous interview with Kerry O'Brien where he basically asserted his right to make shit up on the fly and nobody in the broadcast media called him on it. This was a significant moment in Australian political and journalistic history; Abbott should have been politically dead, but he is Prime Minister today because Peter Hartcher, those who report to him, and their counterparts in other organisations, went along with the idea that Abbott had to be taken at his word - whatever that word was.

The kind of insider access Hartcher and the rest of the press gallery aspires to is negated by the assumption that a direct quote has some sort of journalistic value, that there might be a connection (rather than the odd coincidence) between what is said and what is done.

The result of the 2013 election was based upon the assumption - reinforced by the coverage by Hartcher, his underlings, and their peers - that Abbott's word was worth more than that of Julia Gillard or Kevin Rudd.

Journalists place a lot of value in a direct quote. Abbott has devalued it considerably. Yet they go on, jamming stories full of direct quotes, often from people who don't have names (admittedly Hartcher's piece is refreshing for having a named person by each quote, which his reporting and those of his underlings have lacked in recent times).

It is in the nature of politicians to give self-serving quotes that reflect well upon them. Journalists need not feel obliged simply to transcribe these without further analysis.

On re-reading the above quote, why not have Abbott snarl: "And I suppose you're going to leak this to Hartcher at the SMH, are you Malcolm?". It would have been out of character for Hartcher to have published it, though. Anyway, Abbott isn't that fast on his feet, and his rejoinders tend to be both nasty and prepared in advance.

False balance

Rights are hard won and should not be lightly discarded. And, overall, the Abbott government is an active agent in the furthering of rights in Australia in at least three areas.

The rights of the disabled. The Abbott government is working to bring to fruition the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The rights of women and children in the home. Abbott has pledged to work to reduce domestic violence, even if he is criticised for doing too little.

The rights of Indigenous Australians. He has called a meeting with Aboriginal leaders for July to try to set a process and timetable for achieving recognition of Indigenous Australians in the constitution.

This is Hartcher's attempt to avoid being frozen out by a government that insists, against all evidence, that it must hold office without being criticised for the decisions it makes.

The NDIS has been cut down in budget and scope to suit a government of limited capability. Let's hope that it helps Australians like Solon and Rau, and Greg Anderson, and millions of others similarly afflicted - and their carers. It has a precarious existence under this government, whose announcements are received with nervous surprise rather than the warm gratitude they would hope for.

Hartcher's other two examples are just bullshit. Funding has been cut for women and children facing domestic violence, and for Indigenous people (not to mention those who fall into both categories). The government is not entitled to be taken at its word, which is a key assumption of the very notions of human rights. The insider access counts against the insider who ignores this credibility gap, and who therefore falls into the gap along with those in the community afflicted by more than their pride or 'balance'.

Hartcher sits atop a reporting structure designed to feed him the information necessary to avoid such a strain to his credibility. His lunge for insiderdom undermined the credibility he had sought to put beyond doubt.

Don't take his word for it

Bizarrely, Hartcher rounds off his column by reference to what he considers a higher authority, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker. Pretty much everybody who has been a second-year Arts student over any of the past thirty years has an opinion on Pinker, but Hartcher is happy to quote him too verbatim and uncritically.

The only risk now is that it falls prey to petty political vanity ... Rather than a mean game of using rights to divide, whether the rights of citizenship or the rights to equal treatment of gay people before the law, Australia's leadership has a chance to use rights to unite.

An Australia united in advancing fairness and human rights is not only the right thing to do. It's also a profound repudiation of the barbarians who call themselves Islamic State. That truly would be an extraordinary proposition.

Hartcher dumps us back in the moral swamp of bipartisanship. Had Shorten endorsed Dutton's proposal, Hartcher would have no story and would likely have piled on the criticism of Turnbull and other "dissenters".

Whether or not others share Hartcher's political-class delusions is neither here nor there. We have a government that stands athwart history, screaming "stop!", across almost every portfolio. That is the nature of our government and Hartcher, as with the rest of the press gallery, is wrong to represent it in any other way. With regard to same-sex marriage Abbott is foxing, like Howard did with the convention on the republic. Hartcher is a fool to take the current prime minister at his word, to assume he is capable of anything beyond political vanity at its most petty.

This triumph of hope over experience, sacrificing reportage of what is happening to a desire to think well of the government, is where all political reporting fails. Peter Hartcher, a puffed-up man holding a senior position in Australian political reporting, fails where he wanted to succeed and fails all the more for that.

Mark Kenny still believes

Once again, we have a journalist who admits to have been played for a fool by the spinners of the Abbott government. Once again, this journalist is implying this is a recent development, when he has been played for years.

Today's bunny is Mark Kenny.

Trade unions were long believed by Liberals to be a declining force in Australian society, and that any attempt to hasten their decline might rouse them from their sickbeds. This is the lesson they learned from the union movement's extraordinarily successful Your Rights At Work campaign in 2007. Liberals who had opposed WorkChoices feared that very outcome, while those who didn't redoubled their determination to actively disempower the unions rather than tiptoe around them.

The fact that the current Opposition Leader makes much of his record as a union organiser adds to Liberal motivations to discredit trade unionism as it is practiced.

A serious policy response to trade union maladministration would be to beef up union registration requirements under Fair Work Australia, so that trade unions were regulated in a consistent way, with regular reports and audits and prosecutorial powers, similar to the way companies are regulated by ASIC and its attendant legislation.

The Heydon Royal Commission into trade union governance was always a political fit-up, designed to create daily headlines for easily-led and impressionable hacks like Mark Kenny.
Its true motivations were revealed on its inception by the Attorney General, George Brandis. Brandis' abuse of parliamentary lurks to attend social functions and build a bookcase required distraction; Kenny and the press gallery were happy to oblige him in that regard.

A cynic might say the 12 month extension of the royal commission into unions is politically convenient for the Abbott government because it will shift its report and release date to within sight of the 2016 election.

A cynic might; Kenny works in Parliament House, so I'll defer to him on what cynics do.

Ascribing base and snide motives to the Abbott government doesn't make you a cynic. It means you've been paying attention. Kenny is in the difficult position where he wants you to believe he's been paying attention (i.e., trust me I'm a journalist) but wants to avoid being labelled a 'cynic' for calling this government for what it is. Canberra can be a lonely place as it is, and this government is happy to turn off the taps to those they regard as less than fully with their program.

Mark Kenny did not get where he is by being labelled a cynic (or even being a cynic is the classical sense of questioning authority and matching/ contrasting words with deeds). He got where he is by doggedly insisting, day after day, that Julia Gillard did something wrong with Bruce Wilson's AWU money all those years ago, and that he was the scoophound who'd find it. He found nothing, and was disappointed that the Royal Commision didn't either:

Former prime minister Julia Gillard's hours in the witness box discussing her pre-parliamentary work as a union solicitor promised so much but in the end delivered dull TV. There was no smoking gun, no gotcha moment.

Nobody had any right to assume, after years of digging, that any such moment or artefact would arrive. It is the Lasseter's Reef of 21st century politics. Nobody should know this more than Mark Kenny. The man has been had, fooled, gulled, played for a mug. He has attempted to palm this off to the rest of us - but nobody seems to have been taken in but him and his silly colleagues.

It doesn't occur to Kenny (or Brandis) that moving the reporting date closer to the 2016 election only means that it will reinforce the two three big drawbacks of this government - that it is mean, petty, and vacuous - at a time when it will want to play down or negate that impression.

Leaving aside that [Brandis' explanation of his reasons for extending the Royal Commission] is hardly a muscular refutation of a serious charge - to wit, using scarce taxpayer funds to manipulate an issue and wedge one's political opponents - is it even true?

It is only now, more than a year after it has taken office, for Mark Kenny to start holding the Abbott government to account for its words/actions deficit.

Even so, he's pretty gentle: nothing like the all-pervasive savagery arising from Gillard's carbon-pricing statement, nor allowing for the standard political practice where previous positions require adjustment to new developments. As analysis goes it's pretty poor, but typical of Kenny.

Perhaps these objectives [discrediting Gillard and Shorten] will be progressed in the final report - or the interim one even.

Kenny has to be the last journalist outside NewsCorp to give this government the benefit of the doubt. Even the dullest hacks are starting to tire of the idea that it's all Labor's fault, an evasion that hasn't worked since the budget was excreted in May.

In the meantime, the process rolls on with taxpayers footing the likely $61 million bill.

That almost sounds like outrage. Could we be building up to a swingeing denunciation in the final par?

Sadly, no.

That will be money well spent, however, if it comprehensively addresses and resolves a culture of corruption and intimidation within the nation's unions ...

This is the wheedling of the chronic gambler, convinced that the next race, the next card, the next roll of the dice will be the big winner. C'mon, spinner! Time to cut your losses and go.

The biggest story of this royal commission is that Kathy Jackson, once called a "whistleblower" by Fairfax and the Liberals, could well be the biggest looter and villain of them all. Kenny forgot to mention that, despite having been very close to the Thomson saga.

His colleague Kate McClymont won a Walkley in 2012 by quoting Jackson without giving her claims due diligence. With that, and after the cadet-level error of mixing up Chris Browns, it's fair to say that McClymont is in decline and not the epitome of investigative journalism that the profession's boosters like to claim. If the NRL can strip the Melbourne Storm of two premierships retrospectively, then surely the Walkley Foundation can quietly ask McClymont to return their gong if the award is to mean anything going forward.

Like all press gallery journalists, Mark Kenny has been played for a mug by the Abbott team for half a decade. This is what's diminishing political journalism in this country. Given that Kenny lacks both the sense to realise his predicament and the backbone to get out of it, it's time to widen the scope and realise that his editors have no idea what sells, and that Kenny will go on being wrong until his employer dies under him.

Don't blame Amanda Vanstone

Amanda Vanstone tried to defend Joe Hockey in his attempts to implement the policies of the Audit Commission, of which Vanstone was part. She only demonstrated her own intellectual poverty and that of the politico-media environment which sustained her career.

Sometimes the banal aspects of life are just too much to ignore.

What a great opening! Dear reader, this column will be banal: aren't you glad you buy the paper?

When the gods conspire to load them up into a short time frame and throw them at you, it can seem overwhelming. I feel that way now about so much of our media coverage of politics.

The first two sentences could apply to anyone, anywhere. Stop someone in a supermarket or waiting for an elevator and they would probably say something like that to make polite conversation.

As to the last sentence - why now? Did this not happen regularly during her time in politics, or even before that?

There can't be a crisis next week, my schedule is already full.
- Henry Kissinger

The next four paragraphs of her article were a pathetic attempt to say that, well, a Liberal smoked a cigar but then a Labor person smoked a cigar too. This is the sort of childish tu quoque that denigrates politics and democracy as a whole, and then people like Amanda Vanstone then write articles saying what a pity it is that politicians are held in such low esteem.

Here's the significance of the cigar: it denotes a man who is out of touch with most others, and who does not care. For a retiree, the symbolism is less significant than for someone in a position to know better. Hockey has brought down a budget that shows him (and the government that approved it) to be out of touch with ordinary people, and who maintain entitlements for those who are already wealthy and powerful. Vanstone has tried Dr Freud's line that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" and it just makes her look like she doesn't get it.

If you think I am kidding myself, consider a reversal of the stereotyping on others. How about users of illegal drugs as an example. If someone were to stereotype them all as useless losers who sponge off society on welfare, break into our homes and steal from us, there would be an outcry. You see, apparently it is OK to engage in stereotyping of a senior conservative politician, but not of others.

I still think she's kidding herself. On one hand, we have a guy who has 20 years' experience dealing with the media, and who employs people who deal with the media on his behalf. On the other we have people so deluded they think drugs and other criminal activities are what their life is all about - people who can't defend themselves from themselves, let alone others.

Mind you, the actions of drug addicts is only illegal because of the way our laws are drafted.

If Vanstone has a point I can't tell what it is, and she can't either.

There’s a free kick on offer, and plenty of the lazy journalists take it. Hollow infotainment tries to get away with looking like sensible media comment. Stereotyping and ridicule pass as substitutes for informed debate. It adds nothing to the substantive political discourse.

Valid points in some general sense, but it doesn't fit the situation here. Keep in mind Vanstone has been both victim and beneficiary of such laziness. Hockey did not get where is with media engaged in constant Socratic dialogue; nobody does, not even the media themselves.

Another example is the media reaction to Joe’s recent comment to the effect that people with lower incomes don’t drive as far and thus would not be affected as much by a small increase in the fuel excise. In many cases, in an absolute sense, that would be true, although there would of course be exceptions. It would be equally true to say that, in some cases, lower-income earners would be affected more in a relative sense. Yet again, amid all the information we could be looking at, one remark is brought to the surface and has a spotlight trained on it.

In the discussion on this from so many journalists we see little about the overall merit or otherwise of raising the excise on fuel. Do we want fuel to get relatively cheaper and cheaper so the so-called rich, who in absolute terms may well consume more petrol, get a bigger benefit? Even that is not the question.

Clearly, if you want a serious discussion of issues, you're wasting your time dealing with the press gallery. Vanstone is not the first to make this complaint, and it's not even the first time she has made it. Over the last half-century at least, the political parties that govern us have come to rely more and more upon the press gallery to maintain their relationship with voters. By using a demonstrably inadequate means of connecting with people they compromise their position. Either find a way of going around the press gallery, or stop bellyaching, and no there is no third option.

The real issue we face is: Can we keep going as as we are? Can we keep spending at current rates and have a sustainable economy? Do we just hope things will pick up, or do we start to put our house in order? If we don’t want to collect more money one way, how would we like to collect it?

There are several questions there. I'd add questions of spending versus investment, too, among others, but then I've not seen a lot of evidence that Amanda Vanstone is open to engagement with new ideas, or that a newspaper column is the forum for such a debate. Like most major party politicians, Vanstone's idea of a debate is to talk past an idea rather than engage with it or modify behaviour in any way.

Much of the difficulties Joe faces are a consequence of the Senate with which he has to deal.

(I would have said "many" rather than "much"; in any case multiple things can't be "a consequence". This, from an expensively-educated person whose entire professional life has been about communication, in a newspaper that is supposedly authoritative on such matters. Anyway.)

Joe Hockey has been dealing with the Senate for two decades. During this period it has faced seven half-Senate elections and numerous turnovers on account of resignation etc. He is not the first Treasurer do deal with a difficult Senate. It's part of the job.

We elected some people who in their wildest dreams never expected to get elected. We didn’t expect it either. They had no coherent set of principles that would guide their decision making. These senators seem very much focused on simple political posturing and bargaining.

Amanda Vanstone was Education Minister in the Howard government. She once hired Chris Pyne on her staff. Today, Chris Pyne is Education Minister and trying similar 'reforms' to universities that Vanstone tried and failed to get through. What principles are at work there?

Amanda Vanstone was Immigration Minister in the Howard government. What principles guided her decisions? Keep quiet, do as you're told, don't rock the boat and we'll give you an embassy.

What are Joe Hockey's principles? I've known him for as long as Vanstone has, and unlike her I confess freely that I do not know.

Now Joe has to deal with [Senators] in order to get some common sense. Making sense of that isn’t easy.

Nobody said it would be. Malcolm Fraser said it wouldn't be, back when Joe was in short pants. I've found that if you want to get some common sense, you have to bring some: could that be the issue with the budget?

What do the independents and Palmer United Party members want for the long term in Australia? Do they think we should future-proof the economy against another global financial crisis, or not?

What does it mean to "future-proof the economy"? It used to mean protectionism and keeping out non-whites. I think it's a nonsense to say that the economy can be future-proofed, and a lie to say that the way this government is going about it is the only/best way to do it. Maybe we could've had some journalist ask the before the last election.

Just how did Clive Palmer achieve such prominence? He’s a rich man, but so what. There have been and still are rich people in Parliament. That alone is no claim to fame.

Every time a wealthy man has entered Parliament, they have attracted media attention. Every time. Never once has Mr Moneybags rolled into Parliament and rolled out without troubling the scorers. I can feel a straw man coming on ...

First, his party always had a prospect, even likelihood, of holding the balance of power in the Senate. That alone makes you of interest. Some in the media actively built his profile.

Imagine a dark and stormy night, with a black-clad old woman hunched over the horoscope of baby Clive. Her bony fingers reach into his cot and she feels the bumps on his skull. "This boy is destined to hold the balance of power in the Senate!", she cackles.

Nope, doesn't work for me either. Why, pray tell, was it so likely? Did you wager a yellow note on such an outcome Amanda? How did some LNP Queensland tiff lead to this scenario, or predicament? Perhaps it is a Queensland thing, given that in recent years Queenslanders such as Andrew Bartlett, Cheryl Kernot, Mal Colston, and Vince Gair have held the balance of power in the Senate.

I have no idea why a cruel electorate would taunt Joe so, and fail to elect as many Coalition Senators as possible.

Second, sadly there was precious little scrutiny of what he stood for.

Oh, that's rich. Joe Hockey and the rest of this government coasted into office on the back of this "precious little scrutiny". He is now under a great deal of scrutiny, as is Palmer, but one is handling it with more equanimity than the other.

Being a potential thorn in Tony Abbott’s side made him the darling of good portions of the media.

Julia Gillard was a thorn in Abbott's side and large portions of the media of varying quality treated her very badly. Nobody becomes a 'media darling' by criticising Abbott. Even his successor as Leader of the Opposition doesn't qualify for such a title. The idea that the media is out to get Tony Abbott reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the media that constitutes the press gallery. They've observed him up close for many years and they don't get him at all.

Third, Clive is a master at manipulating the media, at getting the spotlight – and like moths to the flame, they fly.

The same can be said for Tony Abbott, and it's a shame it can't be said for Hockey. They said lots of nice things about him when dull policy wonk Wayne Swan (another Queenslander! Was he a likely prospect too?) held the job he holds now. You'd think Hockey would have learned media manipulation skills after all this time.

All of this contributes to coverage of the froth and bubble of politics, not the substance of policy.

Of course, in the great conversation of life that is politics there is room for discussion about people, their personalities, attitudes and quirks. How we say things can matter as much as what we say; it can unintentionally cause offence and it can affect what people think about us and our ideas. That’s no doubt why Joe has apologised for any offence caused. We just need to remember that these things are about the game of politics but they are not the main game, not the substance of government.

It was the substance of government that is making life hard for poor people. It was the substance of government that doesn't know or care enough to find out about how they live, or leave them alone, or perhaps even help them a little bit.

One does not apologise for offence caused; one apologises for one's actions, and let the apology go the way of the action itself. There has been no change to that substance, which is more offensive than a thousand word-games of this type (see previous post). Or not apologise, as the case may be.

The Hockey budget seeks to put Australia’s house back in order. It seeks to do that in a measured way over quite a few years. Sure there are, as there always will be, some tough decisions. Personally, I am in favour of future-proofing us from the next GFC, and very much in favour of stopping the selfish "spend now, make our kids pay" policies.

It seems to have made the house more disorderly, not less so, even without having been passed. Hockey seems to want the same tenure that Swan had, but unlike Swan not promising a surplus at the end of it, nor making any innovation on the revenue side. Amanda Vanstone was a Cabinet Minister in the Howard government and she sure as hell did nothing to protect Australia from the global financial crisis of 2008 (the one Hockey denied we had).

I still don't know what it means to future-proof anything, let alone a national economy, and it would appear Hockey is making our kids pay with fewer opportunities in what should be a brighter future for our country.

Some will pillory Joe over his cigars or something he said. I think we should offer him some praise for recognising that we need to clean up Labor’s mess.

These are not the only two choices. He overstated "Labor's mess" and is doing too little to address it, and other important aspects of our future. At the first sign of the scrutiny he should have faced in last year's budget - if not earlier - he has resorted to self-pity and a mutually embarrassing intervention from Aunty Mandy.

Vanstone is understandably upset that someone she's known and liked for many years is being pilloried. She is wrong to expect better from the media, wrong to expect policy debate when she can't even ask the right questions, and wrong to assume that whatever the government is doing must be right. The idea that she's succeeded at anything when muddying the waters over the cigar imagery is just sad. Politics is changing around her in ways she doesn't understand, and all she offers is her befuddlement - which is what she offered when in office. Why Fairfax are strapping themselves to both her irrelevance and the things she rails at is unclear.

The future of financial advice

Maurice Newman is supposedly Chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Committee. When he aired his opinions on climate change, which ran the full gamut from the half-baked to the half-witted, people marvelled that such an ignorant man should be so trusted an advisor to the country's government.

Since then, you would have expected Newman to have been very busy. Keep in mind that the first term of any government is when its legacy will be most firmly set in place. Yet, Newman had no role in the stunted compromise over Sydney's second airport at Badgery's Creek. When business confidence crashed and the Business Council of Australia joined in trashing the budget, Newman was not having gentle chats with the chaps in Collins Street and Martin Place to persuade them of its merits. Future eructations from Newman should be cast in the dim light of this inaction.

Newman was a stockbroker. You cannot buy or sell shares and other financial products unless you go through a stockbroker: it's a legally-protected retailing job. Sometimes they offer financial advice, but mostly they don't need to - whether clients make money or lose it, the stockbroker does well either way. The private-sector nature of the job, and the fact that you can make out like a bandit without anything like hard work, attracts libertarians and leads them to overlook the essential regulatory underpinnings. Even the most dogmatic libertarian will die in a ditch for "brokerage fees" that add no productive value and cost Australians billions of dollars each year, and will blanch at the very idea of shares traded directly from seller to buyer like Bitcoins or organic vegetables.

Let us leave aside Newman's embarrassing foray into climate science (or even the business opportunities arising from it: no solar panel installer ever bought him lunch), and his ineffectual chairmanship of the ABC. If Newman was going to bring his business and political clout to bear on anything, surely it would be on the amendments and regulations over those who give financial advice to people and sell them financial products, or even the system that generates such products: sadly, no.

Decisions on how financial products are to be sold, and on whom the regulatory burden should fall, have been the subject of considerable debate. The most cogent debates seem to be found here rather than on Hansard, and if there's anywhere less enlightening than parliamentary debate on this issue it must be in the traditional media.

Traditional media outlets used to have a number of journalists who specialised in business matters, who seemed to subsist on sandwiches from corporate AGMs and who could get to the nub of complex issues quickly and engagingly. They tended to be the first ones out the door once traditional media began downsizing, and have not been replaced. Explaining the FoFA debates has been left to Australia's worst journalists, the press gallery, who can only ever explain developments as 'argy-bargy'.

Most traditional media outlets have more than one employee in the press gallery. Nobody in the press gallery follows any one issue for an extended period, as they all move as a herd being equally unenlightening on any issue. This is one of the better press gallery articles on the subject, but it is still presented as win/loss for the government and a series of unqualified quotes rather than what this might mean for consumers long after financial advice regulation is 'off the agenda'.

The traditional media has noted the 'argy-bargy' between Cormann and Palmer over the bill before the Senate. The traditional media has noted the report from David Murray on the regulation of the financial system, including his comments on financial advisor fees and other matters that might cast more light than heat over the FoFA debate. The traditional media has not, however, twigged to the idea that Murray's findings are not apparently shaping the way financial advice is to be regulated into the future. It shows no sign of considering that such a dislocation (along with doubts about the passage of the budget, and the fiscal strategy of the government as a whole) might indicate a lack of joined-up policy planning on the part of the government.

This isn't to advocate for (or against) Murray's findings, nor indeed for the legislation of the previous government which this one is seeking to overturn. It is to question why you'd have an inquiry into regulations that was so utterly disconnected from your regulatory agenda.

Tabloid television shows hire convicted thieves to break into houses and cars to run stories about domestic security. Organisations with large IT systems hire white-hat hackers to probe for electronic security vulnerabilities. Similarly, traditional media should hire some old scammers from Qintex, Westpoint or Storm Financial and present them with the amendments from Cormann and Palmer, and then say to them: looking at these proposed regulations, if you were out to rip off people with more money than sense today, which of these proposals makes it easier for you?

The person chairing the finance system inquiry should have been Don Nguyen, identifying his least favourite options, doing it as a community service obligation rather than for whatever Murray was paid.

Maurice Newman was of no practical assistance in the process of regulating the financial advice industry, one he knows intimately. He might have smoothed things over with Clive Palmer, businessman to businessman, but no. Clearly, being Chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Committee is a position of no practical political or policy effect, like being Miss Australia or Minister for Health.

The failure of the government in both a policy and a parliamentary sense, and the failure of the traditional media to explain what's going on at any level, leaves consumers exposed and ill-equipped to engage with the debate.

It is standard practice for a government in trouble to create a diversion, and without Newman to do it the task has fallen to Kevin Donnelly.

When the budget was in trouble, Donnelly floated introducing teaching Latin to schools. There is no budget for it, no real advocacy, just a bit of anecdotage that achieved the desired result of attracting press gallery attention away from the train-crash of fiscal policy. The move was designed to appeal to the conservative base, but it didn't work because the budget jangled the hip-pocket nerve too hard.

Before the last election, in what was probably the closest they came to actual policy development, the Coalition proposed an increase in educational exchange between countries in the Asia-Pacific. The idea of increased learning of Asian languages by Australian students is one of those ideas that enjoys great support but fails for lack of a champion. Kevin Rudd proposed it as a Queensland public servant a quarter-century ago, and was still wittering fruitlessly about it after losing the last election. Kevin Donnelly hasn't engaged with the idea at all, but he may yet do so in a future look-over-there moment.

Donnelly's latest maneuver is to talk about corporal punishment. It may appeal to the conservative base, but the threat posed to retirement savings may again displace the effectiveness of culture-war gambits such as these. Journalists should be awake to deliberate feints and distractions like this, but not so for the easily impressed Matthew 'Mark' Knott:

Kevin Donnelly, co-chair of the national curriculum review and a widely published commentator on educational issues ...

Donnelly is not widely but narrowly published, in the Murdoch press; and if you look at the placement of his columns on the page you can see his editors know he is not one of those contributors who attracts readers.

Dr Donnelly continued: "I grew up in Broadmeadows, a housing commission estate in Melbourne, and we had a Scottish phys-ed teacher.

"Whenever there were any discipline problems he would actually take the boy behind the shed and say, 'We can either talk about this or you can throw the first punch'.

"That teacher would probably lose his job now but it was very effective. He only had to do it once and the kids were pretty well behaved for the rest of the year."

Australians are one of the most obese people in the world, an indictment on the effectiveness of phys-ed teachers of whatever background. It is the mark of a mediocre teacher whose ambition and capability extends no further than sullen compliance.

What surprised me about going behind the school sheds was that they did not run into any smokers - Donnelly was hired by tobacco companies to present smoking to school students as a valid lifestyle choice, making a mockery of his other witterings against moral relativism.

The Minister for Education, Chris Pyne, believes he is helping his colleagues by having Donnelly run interference. No journalist will link Donnelly to Pyne in this fashion. No journalist will look at Pyne cutting school funding, and Donnelly cluttering the curriculum with irrelevances, and wonder whether any education minister has so failed his brief as Pyne failed his.

Pyne was responsible for the idea that Peter Costello might challenge for the Liberal leadership, a non-story that sustained the careers of many press gallery veterans. Pyne has been good to the press gallery, and they to him, but whether either is any good at their allotted roles is a question that no longer admits positive possibilities.

In all of his forays into investigative journalism (why meet Deep Throat in an underground carpark at midnight when you can get your scoopy EXCLUSIVEs by transcribing 2UE?), Knott never considered the possibility that he might be in hot pursuit of a non-story, that he might be nothing more than a willing dupe while real actual stories went begging elsewhere, or even that being a dupe is a bad thing. Neither did those who allocate his time and efforts. Note Donnelly's gutless equivocations in Knott's piece, note that Knott does not and cannot call him on them, note the fact that Donnelly's and Wilshire's report is due in a few weeks; and wonder whether it will be worth a pinch of crap, even as a distraction from some emerging crisis for this stumblebum government. A crisis that real journalists should be onto right now.

With the exception of Laura Tingle, none of the Fairfax contingent in the press gallery are worth their own weight in dog food. Their ability to tell you anything meaningful about how we are governed (including the regulation of financial advice services) is non-existent.

We have a government and a media that can't describe how our financial advice system is regulated, and can't suggest how it might be regulated better. We have a media that can't even describe either the status quo or the proposals (and I include social media here - like a 21st century Dionysius I search for the blog that can enlighten in clear strong prose what is actually going on).

Financial advice has a future - until the next catastrophic failure. Maybe then a journalist will then have the temerity to ask Cormann or Palmer about their role in such a failure, whereupon they will simply say "I reject that". The journalist will simply quote them and move on, wondering why people regard traditional media as even less relevant than politicians.

Good news for the confused

It's good news week
Someone's found a way to give
The rotting dead a will to live
Go on and never die

- Hedgehoppers Anonymous Good news week

You fools! You ingrates, you Fairfax readers! After all Mark Kenny and Michael Gordon have done for you, you go and claim that the science of Tony Abbott somehow isn't settled.

Mark Kenny has long been on a mission to make you think well of Tony Abbott. Long after it was clear that there was no story with Julia Gillard, her former partner and his AWU slush funds, Mark Kenny was flog-flog-flogging it. He got his official title, chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, only because of his inexplicable failure to land a Walkley. Kenny helped pioneer the syllogism that eventually spread around the press gallery like a dose of the squirts:

• Julia Gillard makes announcements;
• We in the press gallery want to establish that Julia Gillard's announcements have no credibility;
• Tony Abbott basically gainsays what Julia Gillard says;
• If Julia Gillard says anything, it is only as a foil for Tony Abbott; therefore
• When Tony Abbott says something, he isn't just another politician - boy, you can take it to the bank.

All that led the Liberals to eat their own dog food to this extent:

When you are dealing with people who have trust issues, the very last thing you should do is overreach like that with a statement that you know - and that everybody but the press gallery knows - can only ever be bullshit.

This also explains why Mark Textor's gobbet (no I won't link to it) about trust and slowing down the media cycle is such utter crap. Tony Abbott is not the dependable sort of guy to restore trust, either in word or deed, and in pretending otherwise Textor et al were setting him and the nation up to fail. Governments always react to developments whether they like it or not, an obvious truth that cannot be accommodated in Textor's silly Fueherprinzip. For example, whoever is responsible for the media strategy surrounding MH370, and its effect in losing all trace of the actual aircraft, can be fairly regarded as a) having followed the Textor playbook unswervingly, and b) an idiot who has gotten in the way of big and important issues of global significance.

Once Abbott, and those around him, started believing their own press to that extent, there was no way they would or could ever go about the necessary business of getting over themselves. There was no way that the press gallery, having invested so much in their success, could simply engage the political clutch and revert to voice-from-nowhere political neutrality. The press gallery and Abbott were, and are, in it together.

This is why Kenny got all giddy with this - I mean, I ask you. If a journalist in North Korea or Egypt came out with something so cloying, so treacly, you could assume they'd been tortured or their family had been threatened. Kenny just does what he does because he's a suck. He does it in the hope that he'll get little drops in the lead-up to the Budget, looking less like some fearless source of truth than some yapping lap-dog.

In that position, you stake everything on the object of your obsequiousness going from triumph to triumph. This is what Peter Hartcher got right for a couple of years after 2006 with Rudd. Not so Kenny, firmly in the basket of a hot-air balloon which has already begun its descent. Look at the path of Kenny's columns immediately after he had laid what was left of his soul so bare:

• ... could be just months away ...
• ... Tony Abbott has praised communist China's economic achievement ...
• Prime Minister Tony Abbott has pleaded ...
• Tony Abbott slumps in polls despite best week yet

As Bushfire Bill says, any more successes like that and they are done for.

Politically Homeless pioneered the disdain for Australian polling data that has since been emulated elsewhere, and this remains regardless of which ways the polls pitch and yaw. Opinion rendered as 'hard data' by pollsters really is an example of what Orwell called "an appearance of solidity to pure wind". US polling data enables a level of granular examination that can be relied upon by people like Nate Silver, but Australian polling does not. Kenny does his best befuddled Shanahan at the poll data before him:

The degree of voter disenchantment suggests the government has again squandered the goodwill which had ebbed in the lead-up to Christmas, but was thought, now, to have been recovered.

There is no such thing as a double or repeat squander. The very idea suggests either fraud, or mistaken counting in the first place (note the passive voice - who, exactly, thought it had been recovered?).

... the government has paid for a month in which its central economic policies such as repealing the carbon and mining taxes and crafting a fiscally responsible budget were allowed to be swamped by self-inflicted political controversies.

No, this government has shown that it really has no agenda other than repealing two taxes that only really affect a few very big and wealthy companies. Once they lose that focus, they are lost pretty easily: Brandis' shout-out to bigots, Six-buck Dutton, the safe pair of hands that had been too grasping, etc. The repeal of those taxes is this government's sine qua non, its Godot, without which there isn't much going on at all. And again, the passive - "were allowed to be swamped" - to describe such an active, swaggering government.

In Western Australia, where the Greens succeeded less than a fortnight ago in having their sitting senator re-elected following a well-fought campaign ...

Having failed to sneer the Greens out of existence, he tries to worm his way in with a party that will clearly be a political force for as long as Mark Kenny will have a job in the press gallery.

Labor's dominance on the two-party-preferred basis is being driven by the Greens' support and by a noticeable shift in voting intention between the cities and the non-capital city votes.

That really is the key sentence in this sorry drizzle of a column.

First, there are realignments going on between Labor and the Greens, conflicts and allegiances far more profound than anything seen on the left in the 1950s. Second, the idea that this government stands or falls in regional Australia - not in western Sydney - could enable a sharper focus on why this government reacts as it does, thus improving the way politics is reported.

Or not:

"It has been an important week for our country," [Abbott] said in his weekly Facebook message.

Given that we can read Abbott's Facebook messages as and when we choose, what is the point of Kenny and his supporting edifices of Fairfax and the press gallery in merely relaying social media content?

"My hope is that in the years ahead Australians will see first-hand the benefits of closer, freer trade with Asia – through more jobs, more affordable goods and services and even closer bonds with our north Asian friends and neighbours."

That's what they all say. Really. There is no news value in such banality.

Keating and Howard relied more and more on staged foreign-policy events when they were on the way out. Rudd, a former diplomat, staked everything on the Copenhagen conference and was shirtfronted by the Chinese: the people we thought he understood better than anyone. When Gillard negotiated tradeability between the currencies of China and Australia, it was too late. Now Abbott, having failed in his first foreign policy forays, has gone straight to vacuous posturing with no intervening period of achievement.

Note that Abbott mentions not a word about immigration, even though South Korea and China are important sources of migrants to Australia. Not a word about cultural exchange, or that "new Colombo Plan" stuff. Note also that the press gallery don't follow it up, not wishing to embarrass Abbott.

Why embarrass the Prime Minister when you can embarrass yourself? This is the approach taken by Michael Gordon, who has never recovered from his unrequited man-love for Keating, and who should simply shut up until he can work out what's going on:

Call it counter-intuitive. Tony Abbott enjoys the finest week of his prime ministership and goes backwards, Bill Shorten goes on leave and goes forward, and disenchanted Coalition voters park their votes with the Greens.

And that's just for starters. For all the talk of primary producers benefiting from freer trade, the big drop in Coalition support has occurred outside the cities, in regional Australia ...

So regional Australia is outside the cities now?

Then there's the fact that Labor, after recording a record low vote in the West Australian Senate re-election and being under pressure on multiple fronts, finds itself in an election-winning position in two-party terms if an election was imminent, which it is not.

What, exactly, is the "fact" that Gordon promised? Is it the truism that Senate votes can be different to "election-winning" (House of Representatives) votes? That negation at the end is Lewis Carroll stuff, except it is Gordon who can't both hold onto his prejudices and work out what's going on.

For all the seeming contradictions in the latest Fairfax/Nielsen Poll, two points are clear.

The first is that the Abbott government remains deeply unpopular, having surrendered much of the support that delivered the emphatic victory at the last election.

No double-squander here. Like Kenny, Gordon was one of the few people who believed Abbott when he made the claims in that picture above. Gordon, Kenny and the press gallery then presented the 2013 election as though both major parties were offering the samey-same outcomes, but that Abbott had more credibility. They were wrong on both counts - and these are the guys who see Abbott up close on a regular basis. If they're wrong about that, about what might they be right?

The second is that there are plenty vying for the attention of voters whose inclination more than two years out from an election is to disengage, with no consistent pattern in thinking emerging other than the fact that neither side has a clear ascendancy.

Voters aren't disengaged from education, or jobs, or health. Voters are disengaged with the fatuous way that these issues are (mis)reported. Michael Gordon and Mark Kenny are, in part, responsible for that disengagement; it represents professional failure on their part.

There is "no consistent pattern in thinking emerging" from the press gallery; this is unlikely to change so long as moribund outfits like Fairfax resist turnover in both personnel and in the way they report politics and government.

Photo opportunities with world leaders rarely translate to higher approval ratings for national leaders ...

This is another one of those predictions that would have been more powerful before or during the event rather than afterwards.

... it is likely to take time for the electorate to process the value of Abbott's whirlwind Asian tour and the free trade agreements, either signed or in prospect.

Because the facile media coverage was so manifestly inadequate.

It is also possible that voters have delivered an adverse judgment on the bigotry debate, a debate we did not have to have, and on the decision to bring back the titles of a bygone era.

What 'debate'? To call it that, you have to assume that Andrew Bolt's readership constitutes a political constituency, which it doesn't. This was the mistake Howard made in 1998 and it almost cost him government. Abbott is much less deft than Howard; for a start, Howard could see that Brandis was a liability, whereas Abbott indulges him again and again (travel rorts, the bookcase, Tim Wilson, and now the soon-to-be-iconic s18 of the Racial Discrimination Act. What next?).

Nervousness about tightening eligibility for the pension ... help explain the drop-off in Coalition support among older voters.

It isn't just that, it's cutting off other options that is doing for Abbott. It's one thing to shut down the car industry if there is some efflorescence elsewhere, but there isn't. Abbott is all about slashing, not pruning. Older people want education for younger generations, and healthcare; I cut out the reference to PPL because it made Gordon look silly.

By this point Gordon is not in a position to make any declamatory statements at all, not even inane ones like these:

Not that there is comfort for Labor ... For both sides the budget looms as a crucial test.

Consistent with the rest of the piece, I was half expecting Gordon to flatly contradict those statements and then resign, but sadly it was not so. Instead, he puts the boot into Bill Shorten - but in doing that Gordon just reinforces his own confusion:

... almost one in five voters are not sure whether to approve or disapprove of the performance of Labor leader Bill Shorten, who is on bereavement leave after the death of his mother.

Do you think the press gallery has given voters the information they need to make such a judgment, Michael? Having explained why Shorten isn't making speeches or twisting arms in Labor backrooms, Gordon then says:

Shorten is right to say the party must change, but is yet to articulate how and when.

Why isn't he articulating that, Michael? Oh.

Mark Kenny and Michael Gordon are not a couple of blow-ins. They are senior members of the federal parliamentary press gallery. It is equally undeniable that they have no idea what is going on with our political system. Business journalists who didn't understand the stock market, sports journalists who don't understand individual matches or the wider competitions in which they are played, have no future. Yet, Fairfax have kept these numpties for too long in a press gallery construct that doesn't work for anyone. The reason why Karen Middleton can't find anyone to celebrate or support the press gallery is because, even at its best, it is bullshit.

When we become disengaged with their addled and fatuous commentary, apparently it is we and not they who have the problem. Yep, the political predicament we're in shows that we just don't appreciate all the hard work that Michael Gordon, Mark Kenny and the gang have put in.

For crying out loud

The editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald today embodies everything that's wrong with the Abbott campaign, as well as every reason why it seems to be working. It suffers from a logical fallacy called 'begging the question', where it accepts the premises of an Abbott government and then flaps about trying to justify such a beast, using those same assumptions.

Australia is crying out for a stable government that can be trusted to deliver what it promises. The Herald believes only the Coalition can achieve that within the limited mandate Tony Abbott will carry into office should he prevail on Saturday.

There's two begged questions right there.

No party platform in Australia's history has been fulfilled so comprehensively as the agreement signed between Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott with the Gillard government in 2010. Had the last election returned a simple majority of Labor MPs, it would have set aside key pledges and seen internal brawls. If Tony Abbott had become Prime Minister then, by contrast, his government would have set aside key pledges and seen internal brawls.

There is no such thing as a 'limited mandate'. You either win government or you don't. The first Howard government and the first Rudd government achieved relatively little of what they were elected to do. The second Howard government (1998-2001) and the first term of the Bush Administration in the US (2001-05) had what this editorialist would call a 'limited mandate', whatever that is, but they pretty much did what they liked.

The Sydney Morning Herald predates our federal political system and the parties that seek election to it. The editorialist, speaking in his masthead's name, trashes its history by such gullibility and ignorance.

Abbott does not so much deserve the chance to do what Labor could not do in the past six years. Nor has he earned the right to govern with a clear, articulated vision, as the Herald has sought from him during the campaign.

Tony Abbott has been leader of the Liberal Party for more than three years. For very little of that time has it been seriously attempting to pin Abbott down about what he might do in government. Negligently, its coverage has mainly taken two forms: first, gushing at his effective media strategy of saying nothing of substance, and secondly quoting his words verbatim as though no further verification might be required. Again, the Herald has no excuse for indulging any politician to that extent.

During the campaign, the Herald has accepted Abbott's shortcomings rather than challenged them in the exertion of the power of the Prime Ministership. Its political editor even asserted that we cannot handle the truth, reinforcing him and the editorialist - as well as Abbott - in their belief that facile reporting is all we deserve, and all that ought be expected of them. Their chairman has over many years demonstrated his commitment to this sort of feeble, reader-repelling content too.

The feeble plea at the end of that last quote that the Herald has done all that could be expected of it is only true if you underestimate what journalism is, and how little thorough journalism there is in federal politics, particularly coming from the Herald.

But the party he leads is untainted by scandal and infighting, and therefore has the best chance to unite a tired and despondent electorate.

That is sheer bullshit. The opposite of that is true.

Scandals surrounding Mal Brough, Christopher Pyne, and even potentially Joe Hockey arising from Justice Rares' judgment on a sexual harassment case are yet to be played out. Arthur Sinodinos' links to the Obeid family are yet to be clarified, let alone explained. There has been plenty of Liberal infighting, but the Herald has chosen to ignore it and treat outbursts as isolated incidents: only today, the confusion about whether or not our internet will be slowed further by a filter imposed upon us bodes ill for calm and measured government. The fact that the Herald has chosen to cover those matters in a cursory fashion does not mean that the assertion of its editorialist can be sustained.

Labor will not be able to do this until it is stripped of corrupt rules that have rewarded those who value power more than the public interest.

The Coalition is not exactly short of "those who value power more than the public interest". Putting out facile statements while asserting that they are detailed, costed policy is the work of those who really do value power more than the public interest. Its internal matters are a matter for its members, and for those who feel loyal to the party by voting for it. It's a mistake to assume that the Liberal Party that brought forth Jaymes Diaz, Fiona Scott and Matthias Cormann can be regarded as "unblemished" or free of "those who value power more than the public interest".

Abbott needs to be true to his word. As he says, "No surprises, no excuses … No more, no less."

And if he's not? Seriously, what sort of idiot takes Abbott at his word?

The Coalition has put to the people some aspirations of which the Herald approves if applied fairly: value for taxpayers' money, greater workplace flexibility and ending the age of entitlement. It has aped good Labor policies and banked sensible savings.

If applied fairly.

Is it fair, or even sensible, to assume that such measures might be 'applied fairly' by such people? If it is, to whom is the 'fairness' to be directed? The Herald has catalogued political promises made and broken for over one hundred and eighty years. Why Tony Abbott of all people is the shining, sea-green incorruptible exception to such a history is both inexplicable and amazing.

Notably, Abbott has also signalled policies the Herald considers unfair and a threat to national progress: slower broadband, his paid parental leave scheme, turn back the boats, and education inequity. And we will, as many Coalition figures privately do, continue to rail against these populist and frivolous indulgences.

So that's the purpose of the Herald: to rail, like a blogger. I guess all those 'Coalition figures', unnamed but railing, put the lie to the idea that infighting is unknown in Coalition ranks.

A Coalition government will be entitled to pursue any elements of its agenda that have been detailed to the public.

A Coalition government will feel entitled to pursue any elements of any agenda it bloody well feels like pursuing. And the Herald will do little more than praise such a beast for its political shrewdness, apart from the odd bit of railing maybe.

Then voters can judge Abbott on delivery in three years or, should he prove unable to manage a democratic parliament, much sooner.

See, this is where I'm confused. The incumbent government succeeded in managing a democratic parliament and yet it is considered unfit to continue governing (which of our parliaments might be considered non-democratic?). What if Abbott is removed by his own party (without, of course, any infighting at all; a phenomenon unknown in the history of conservative politics)?

Abbott will be free to conduct his commission of audit on government spending and implement recommendations within his pledge of no cuts to education, health or frontline services.

What if he has his audit and cuts those services anyway? Will the editorialist faint from sheer surprise?

Imagine Tony Abbott breaking a pledge. Journalists may pride themselves on lacking such imagination, transcribing what is said to pad out word-count rather than examine how we are and would be governed.

He should conduct the promised reviews into workplace relations, industry assistance, regulation, legislation, competition law and tax.

He should have done those already.

The whole idea of election policies is not to provide checklists for journalists (or even party activists, within one party or within its opponents) to tick off. The idea of election policies is to show the extent of your thinking over the past three years - who you've spoken to, who has impressed you, and what sources you use for your anecdotes, data and ad content. The quality of that thinking informs what is done in government far more than what may or may not appear on a fucking brochure, for crying out loud. Politically homeless knows this, and The Sydney Morning Herald doesn't. Ponder that, ye perishing few who still believe the future of Australian media is strong.

Why hasn't the Coalition been having those debates from Opposition? Surely the Best Opposition Leader Ever would, like Whitlam, prosecute his case with whatever meagre resources are available to oppositions so that his capacity for government appears all the more formidable. And here we find ourselves at the very event horizon of the black hole at the heart of not only this Herald editorial, but the very idea of an Abbott government:

That will help him develop the sort of detailed policy reform agenda he has failed to flesh out in the past three years for fear of a political backlash. Australia needs to debate new ideas and better ways to ensure the economy is flexible enough to survive the end of the resources boom.

One person's "backlash" is another person's "debate", I suppose. The Coalition can't pursue ideas from any forum other than from government. They can and do even disconnect the very idea of debate from what is actually done, rubbishing painstaking research and expertise with the sheer force of executive decision-making. It's surprising, and more than a little sad, that the Herald can't see that and doesn't think it's a problem.

It seriously shares the Coalition's belief that you put them in government first, and then hold them to account to, um, what little extent they discussed it beforehand. 'Limited mandate' my arse, you stupid bloody people.

But the Herald will scrutinise a first-term Abbott government with the same independent eye that has exposed Labor graft and attacked Coalition policies.

i.e. none at all.

Too often Abbott has asked voters to buy his plan sight unseen; to believe his numbers even though they have emerged at the eleventh hour.

Given the complicity of the journalists in all this, at the Herald and elsewhere, Abbott cannot be blamed for trying it on. Voters are the ultimate decision-makers here. The quality of the information they receive, from the Herald and others presenting the low farce of campaigning as though it was all that politics is about, is inadequate. The Herald should not escape culpability for the poor quality of information about politics that is leading to a deeply inadequate choice at an election where not only adequate, but capable government is called for.

Then there is a surprise reduction in foreign aid and water buybacks as well as an extra efficiency demand on the public service.

Which bog-ignorant political ninny is in any way surprised by Coalition proposals to cut foreign aid, or impose an imaginary 'efficiency dividend' and punish public servants for failing to nail it down? Here the sheer inadequacy of the contemporary Herald is in full view, its perfectly justified lack of confidence in its own self, its history and its future. Those of us who disdain people surprised by easily foreseeable events have a point, don't we.

Abbott's mandate will be weakened as a result of this opacity.

No more than Howard's was with his light-bright-and-trite campaign in 1996.

Abbott has hidden much and, as such, much must be taken on trust, just as Gillard Labor had to be taken on trust at the 2010 election.

Bullshit. NBN, DisabilityCare, education funding, tobacco packaging - hiding in plain sight the whole time.

Labor then was a party that had corrupted the NSW government and allowed faceless men to unseat an elected prime minister.

If you had the resources of The Sydney Morning Herald at your disposal, you'd know that the corrupt Askin government in NSW played little role in the Coalition losing the 1972 and 1974 elections, and was little impediment to the re-election of an unelected Prime Minister the following year. It's funny how things turn out, isn't it.

After that election produced a hung parliament, the Herald recommended Abbott be prime minister because "stability is more likely".

Rarely does a slow-media outlet own up to getting it so wrong. Gillard provided more stability than the Herald gave her credit. Abbott would have gone to a double dissolution election, and it's a real pity that the Herald's political reporting resources fail to point this out. And as for this:

But Gillard retained power by, it emerged later, breaking her promise of ''no carbon tax under a government I lead'' in a deal with the Greens. Labor betrayed the voters.

That's a Coalition talking-point rather than a historical fact, as an examination of the Herald's own archives will attest.

While the Gillard government achieved important national reforms in trying circumstances and kept the economy strong, it squibbed tax reform, skewed taxes, overspent on optimistic revenue forecasts and did nothing to remedy Labor's fatal flaws.

The Howard government did little of the former and much of the latter, and Abbott promises less and worse on all fronts.

All the while, Rudd remained a destabilising force; a reminder of betrayal - and an even bigger one when he retook the leadership just over two months ago.

Really? I thought the instability in the Gillard government was all her fault, not Rudd's. The Political Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald said that Rudd was "a happy little vegemite" on the backbench and that the instability was simply due to 'umble Labor loyalists concerned about the polls. The Chief Political Correspondent of The Sydney Morning Herald said that the Gillard government's problems were caused by one of her former lovers decades before. Now, all of a sudden, this instability is Rudd's fault? Imagine my surprise.

Rudd Mark II has presented some laudable policy reforms on boat people and emissions trading.

Really? I thought they were cop-outs myself.

Which part of asylum-seeker policy is in any way 'laudable'?

He talks of Labor's big ideas so Australia can rise beyond our station. But reformers must take the people with them - and reformers must be trusted to deliver.

The amount of trust placed in Abbott is unbelievable, and unsustainable.

Rudd has struggled to outline how Labor would strengthen the economy, beyond relying on its worthy record during the global financial crisis. Faced with shrinking budget revenues, Labor did well to outline a plan for a return to surplus, yet lost the moral high ground over Coalition costings.

There is no Coalition high ground on budget costings. The government has provided evidence of sound economic management that the Herald, at the cost of its own credibility, has chosen to ignore. Be that on its own head, not Abbott's or Hockey's.

It wasn't until his official launch that Rudd pushed Labor values based on a fair go for all.

All parties, at every election, base their pitch upon a fair go for all. Even Abbott did that. Again, if you had access to the archives of The Sydney Morning Herald you'd see that it's true, but hey.

The Herald believes Australian democracy needs Labor to modernise and prove it respects the privilege of power. It cannot be supported for abusing that privilege.

There is nothing, nothing 'modern' about the Liberal Party - still less about any of the other parties in the Coalition. It has not proven that it respects the privilege of power. Tony Abbott certainly has not proven that, Jaymes Diaz and Malcolm Turnbull and Peta Credlin and Christopher Pyne haven't, and neither has any other member of his team. This too is sheer bullshit, useless to support the Herald in making such a case.

Voters should not reward Labor before redemption ...

The Coalition is unredeemed from 2007. It does not know why it lost that election and will govern as though the past six years were an interregnum rather than a legitimate government. Again, the Herald is in breach of the What's Sauce For The Goose Is Sauce For The Gander Act in its partisan defence of its position.

... nor reward those who owe their influence to factions and betrayals of trust that have marked the past six years.

Abbott became leader of his party because of a betrayal of trust. His ascent is inexplicable unless you examine factional manoeuvring within the Liberal Party. Another silly and ignorant assertion that undermines not only the case they are making, but the very idea of the Herald as repository and provider of political information.

Labor under Kevin Rudd in 2013 is not offering a stable, trustworthy government on which Australians can depend. The Coalition under Tony Abbott deserves the opportunity to return trust to politics.

Matthew 7:3-5, motherfuckers.

First, The Sydney Morning Herald decided to support the Coalition and then it decided to build a case upon all of its readers accepting that assumption. You'll note in the above that it is possible to point out the logical flaw in the Herald's reasoning without resorting to Labor (or Green or Liberal) talking points. Nonetheless, those who defend this worthless piece will claim that any and all criticism can only be partisan.

That failure of perception, real (in this editorial) and reasonably anticipated (in the defence by whoever the editor is this week), underscores why those who trust in the future of The Sydney Morning Herald, and who blame only others for its demise, are kidding themselves and avoiding the real ailments of a withered organ they mistake as vital.


---
It almost goes without saying that I'm beyond pissed off at this elaborate practical joke unfolding around me.

... Yeah, my blood's so mad feels like coagulatin'
I'm sitting here just contemplatin'
I can't twist the truth, it knows no regulation
Handful of senators don't pass legislation
And marches alone can't bring integration
When human respect is disintegratin'
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin'

And you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
How you don't believe
We're on the eve of destruction ...

- P F Sloan Eve of destruction

All week I've been dreading the very prospect of an Abbott government, but last night I saw someone who dreads it more: Joe Hockey, sweat-beaded and gasping like a landed fish, having laboured so hard for so long and all for so little.

Hockey's much-awaited economic statement was worse than Richard Nixon in 1960 because Nixon hadn't crammed it all in the last minute, with an easy and lazy cut to foreign aid. So much for all those costed policies, ready to go last year or the year before.

All week, one in every eight to ten Australians are yet to make up their minds about who to vote for, making a mockery of 50-50 or 52-48 or whatever. There is a veneer of complacency in the assurances that Abbott will become Prime Minister no matter what, and underneath it is a shrillness that underlines a failure of persuasion; a government that has supposedly failed so comprehensively should be made of less stern stuff. It should not be so hard to knock over as it is clearly proving to be.

The experiments for our future in telecommunications, education, and disability care may well be abandoned. The dimmer journalists and Liberal shills will claim those as failures, not as spoils but as trash. Another series of experiments is being set up and may well be given a chance that those big-ticket items are yet to have. These experiments were gingerly begun under Howard, ideas to which he dared not give full rein if they endangered his tenure of Kirribilli House.

The enfeebled union movement could have been finished off by workplace legislation deft enough to outflank them; hell, they may have willingly embraced such legislation, as strategic geniuses like Martin Ferguson and Doug 'mind mah tea' Cameron had under Keating and Kelty. Instead, the union movement was emboldened by the inept WorkChoices. An Abbott government workplace relations policy (both the do-nothing one from two months ago that was abandoned, and the frenzied but gutless hints of Abetz and Alexander) assumes most people have secure salaried jobs. Let's have it, then, and see how we go. That 2m jobs thing is starting to look sick already, especially when you consider than one hour's paid work a week is a 'job' in Coalition terms.

There are few proven facts in economics, but one is that if you tax high-income earners highly then they move to low-tax countries. Something similar happens with researchers: when you cut research funds, and refuse to do anything clever with tax breaks for research, researchers leave or dumb down their output. The cuts to NICTA and to ARC grants, and coming to the CSIRO and NHMRC, show that the potential for economic growth and welfare through innovation is being squandered. I don't mind people trying and failing - hell, the fact that the Australian media hasn't shut up shop can be traced to the same attitude - but people who won't try at all are contemptible. We face a government that would hold us back, and yet want credit for having a go; fuck that, and them.

Those cuts to innovation from the Beechworth bandit Sophie Mirabella look like her final act of spite in public life (unless, perhaps, she bites someone outside a booth on Saturday). My generation of researchers, people whose careers were just getting going when Howard was elected, have achieved less than they might have because his government came too late to realising the value of publicly-funded research. Hockey promised to preserve research funding but was clearly overruled, assuming he opposed it at all. Along with the basket-case economies of Europe, we'll be proving-grounds for what happens when you bugger research; and that worst of all, those you hope might be grateful for eviscerating the boffins never are.

If you think sound economic management (or even effective politics) involves traipsing around the country acting like the Job Fairy, sprinkling ten jobs here loading boxes onto trucks or whatever, then you won't miss innovative jobs and the potential they offer until it's too late. Whether it's building infrastructure, or providing aged care to baby boomers who won't put up with the conditions that today's mustn't-grumble generation of seniors cops with good grace, the future workers of this country are almost certainly immigrants. They want to join us here and, even if you can set aside the cruelty to them, what 'cries out' to me is the lack of imagination involved in putting them to work.

There are only two choices with the 2m jobs thing: either they will come through, in which case the electorate won't thank them; or they won't, and all that "we'll keep our promises" stuff will be seen for hollow bullshit. The editorialist of The Sydney Morning Herald cannot imagine Abbott and bullshit to be anything but inimical to one another, which may explain why the demise of one may well also see the demise of the other.

One of the most cogent Coalition criticisms of the NBN was that most data travels over wireless, and that this is likely to increase. This doesn't explain the army of dumb boxes coming to our streets, where future posts and other dis-content will be coming at you via copper wire. Have you noticed that Coalition policy does not address actual problems that face this country? I have, because I'm not a press gallery journalist or a slow-media editorialist.

I've seen governments come and go, this ain't my first rodeo. I still think more babies than bathwater will be tossed out with the incumbents, and pity those who believe that the Coalition's own bathwater can be confused with the elixir this country needs.

I still think polls (as published in the newspaper) are bullshit. I'm sure there are some great polls, in the same way that there are nutritious hamburgers, but the diet of newspaper polls that temporarily sustains the slow media and some of the dimmer bloggers is no good for anyone. Not even the most ardent stats nerd can defend their use as determining the outcome to the extent we have seen at this election. It's monstrously disrespectful to say that the ballot is over before it's started, like the elections in North Korea or Turkmenistan are.

This blog will continue into the Abbott government, and beyond it: fuck it, every other bastard is breaking their pre-election promises. If The Sydney Morning Herald can assert that they are 'Independent' of anything other than sensible business and editorial practise, or that The Australian might be the heart of anything, this blog reserves the right to tinker with its subheading as may be required from time to time - and the rest of you can get used to it with as much good grace as you are capable.