Out with the bathwater

The fact that Barnaby Joyce had impregnated a former staffer and NewsCorp journalist was widely known before the New England byelection on 2 December last year. It has been ridiculous, and a bit sad, watching traditional media justify itself in relation to this story.

Fucking inconvenient

Let's remind ourselves of the political situation in late 2017.

The government needs a stable majority in the 150-member House of Representatives. It had 76 members, meaning that with the Speaker above the fray the Coalition fielded 75 members against 74 Labor and others outside the Coalition.

Barnaby Joyce, as Member for New England, was a NZ citizen by descent. John Alexander, Member for Bennelong, was a UK citizen by descent. Both renounced their non-Australian citizenships and were endorsed for the byelections. Each man, we now know, had left their wives and were living with another woman beyond the family home. Both men represented, and had sought to represent again, conservative electorates with above-average rates of married couples raising children.

Had either or both lost the byelections held last December, the Turnbull government would have been forced into minority status, propped up on a contingent basis by some of the MHRs outside both the Coalition and Labor. Almost every media outlet represented in the press gallery had editorialised before the 2016 election to return the Turnbull government. They still believe in Peter FitzSimons' Fantasy Malcolm. The press gallery hated having to cover a multivariate parliament in 2010-13; they tailored their reporting to minimise the possibility that the Turnbull government would lose its majority (oh yes they did). Labor candidates in Bennelong and New England did not make their opponents' marital woes an issue, and journalists didn't either.

J'accuse: political journalists deliberately held off reporting, or even confirming, stories about Joyce's infidelity in order to maximise his chances of winning, and by extension ensure the continuation of the Turnbull government.

Delayed gratification

Yesterday's sheepish effort from Sharri Markson (no I won't link to it) was too little, too late, but the press gallery has finally given itself permission to start talking about the issue. Almost immediately, traditional media was forced by reader outrage to defend its decision to avoid the Joyce story. This is not a proud moment in Australian journalism. It is not a harbinger of a bright future, nor even one that might keep things much as they are for that beleaguered industry.

Before we go through the traditional media's sorry-not-sorry piece, there are three precedents (in terms of pollies' actions and how the media responded to them) that are relevant here. Senior members of the press gallery, and the ninnies who now occupy the ranks of editors/news directors of traditional media organs, were directly involved in these incidents:

Gareth Evans and Cheryl Kernot

Evans was Attorney General and Foreign Minister in the Hawke-Keating Labor governments, and a senior Labor frontbencher once his party went into opposition. Cheryl Kernot was a Senator and leader of the Australian Democrats. Both were married to other people when they began a sexual relationship, which (as with Joyce-Campion today) was widely known but not reported.

Laurie Oakes decided that the hypocrisy of Evans championing family values and Kernot failing to mention the affair was enough to put the story into the public domain. Then as now, the press gallery talked about the convention of private lives being private while slavering over the story. There was no social media back then.

Ross Cameron

In 2004 Ross Cameron was an up-and-coming junior minister in the Howard government, a vocal proponent of heterosexual marriage and other traditional values. While his wife was pregnant in Sydney, Cameron began a sexual relationship with a woman in Canberra. The woman shared a flat with a press gallery journalist.

Traditional media covered Cameron's infidelity in the lead-up to the 2004 election. Cameron lost his seat (at that election, Barnaby Joyce was first elected to the Senate). Then as now, the press gallery talked about the convention of private lives being private while slavering over the story. There was no social media back then.

Julia Gillard

Julia Gillard had never married but had a male partner. There were no allegations of infidelity but plenty of media speculation about her private life nonetheless; "private lives are private" be damned, and there was social media but the press gallery were only starting to become afraid of it.

I will not be lectured about media ethics by that journalist

Fairfax ran a piece by Jacqueline Maley lecturing us about the media ethics around this story (*snort!*) and NewsCorp did the same from Caroline Overington (oh come off it). There's been enough accusations about hypocrisy over this matter, so fuck it, I am just not going to do Caroline bloody Overington lecturing anyone about anything. The Maley piece is bad enough, and she has form for being a terrible journalist, but for now let it serve as the chew toy for journalistic ethics in covering political sex scandals.

Why didn’t Fairfax Media publish the story? Why would we protect Barnaby Joyce?

The reasons were less conspiratorial than they were journalistic: we couldn’t stand it up.

Oh no, they were conspiratorial all right: the press gallery believes people shouldn't judge politicians on the basis of their private lives, and have been horrified to see political careers end at the hands of voters who take a different view (see Kernot, Cameron above).

As to stand-up journalism, this can be very selective. Let's look at some of the other stories on politics Maley's colleagues have seen fit to publish:

• This article speculating about the US Ambassador to Australia is terribly weak. First, Admiral Harris' name has been floated earlier, and the appointment has neither been officially confirmed nor denied, so it isn't really news. Any compelling force it may have is negated with tenuous links like "Fairfax Media has been told [by whom?] ...", "Mr Turnbull is also expected ...", "It is widely expected ...", "Fairfax Media understands ...", and "[Turnbull] is expected also to discuss the economy and trade with Mr Trump [no shit, really?]". How did this slip through Fairfax's iron ethical grip?
• The idea that Anthony Albanese might challenge Bill Shorten for leadership of the ALP is one of the longest-running non-stories in Australian politics. It is no closer today than it was three years ago or at any other point since Shorten became leader, but it helps dispel the fantasy that Fairfax never runs speculative political stories.

The entire oeuvre of James Massola and half that of Kate McClymont would have to be binned if Fairfax seriously applied the put-up-or-shut-up standard Maley is trumpeting here. Apparently, as with their counterparts in North Korea, the Canberra press gallery can only report what has been formally announced.

Within our newsroom, there was debate over what resources, if any, should be devoted to confirm the rumours.

In a newsroom that is hollowed out by cost-cutting, every reporter who is assigned to cover a love child expose, is a reporter who cannot write about national energy policy (which affects far more of our readers), or about the latest factional dispute in the Labor Party, or about the citizenship crisis.

Energy policy is better covered by dedicated and knowledgeable writers (who often spend little time lounging about the newsroom) rather than gallery hacks splicing a press release to a Google search. The Labor Party aren't in government, and if you can't tie a factional spat to a policy outcome (and you can't), then forget that. Perhaps framing Joyce's family issues with the journalistic cliche of the "love child expose" is the problem here?

At the same time, we knew it would probably be broken, sooner or later, by the News Corp tabloids.

Before the New England byelection Joyce's daughters had toured Tamworth with a loudhailer, warning that if he could breach trust with his family then none of his political promises could be trusted either. Independent Australia put out not one but two articles to this effect. So did True Crime News Weekly. There is a long tradition in the Australian media of "respectable papers" waiting for "the yellow press" to break an unsavoury story, and then appear to pick it up reluctantly: any of these events would have given traditional media the impetus to run the story, on 3 December if not earlier.

The ABC is doing this hold-your-nose-and-report-the-story thing tonight too, and it's risible. Joyce would normally retreat to the conservative redoubt of Sky, but nobody watches that crap outside of what bushies call the SCAM triangle (Sydney, Canberra And Melbourne). Leigh Sales has, like Joyce, undergone a recent marriage breakdown, which may explain why she has gone so easy on him and is treating him like the victim here.

You'll always have an excuse not to do your job. And when it comes to political journalism, you can count on Jacqueline Maley to not do it well at all.

Maley exceeds herself by lapsing into what-if:

If it had been published in full, could the story have changed the crucial byelection result in New England?

During the campaign it was reported the Deputy Prime Minister had broken up with his wife and was living with his sister. Rumours about an extra-marital affair and a pregnant “mistress” (terrible word!) were widely known throughout the electorate. His long-time nemesis, former New England MP Tony Windsor, frequently tweeted about it. At one point Joyce was hounded by a man who harangued him about his family situation in a pub.

None of it affected his popularity. Joyce won the byelection with a huge swing to him of 7.21 per cent.

For starters, the candidates at the byelection were different to those at the general election. Here's what would have happened if traditional media brought their imprimatur to this story:

• Candidates who might not have stood against Joyce may well have done so, affecting the result;
• The local gossips might have borne less of the burden for the story, and so too those stout defenders of the Deputy Prime Minister ("what a terrible thing to say! I know Barnaby and his family! That would never happen!") might have looked a lot less silly. The authority of trusted media helps clarify matters both for those who want to believe the news, and those who don't.
• The idea that journalists at major outlets call it as they see it without fear or favour would be reinforced, and not diminished as it has been. When Jacqueline Maley calls on you to subscribe to Fairfax and to help with the campaign against proposed laws that might send journalists to prison, she might've been able to point to a recent example where fearless reporting outed a family-values hypocrite and a crap Agriculture minister, rather than misrepresenting a political liability as the nation's choice.

If you're going to trash your reputation for fearlessness in gathering and disseminating information, be it on your head. This is why it's silly to stake your reputation covering for Joyce: five years from now he'll be gone from politics, will you be gone from journalism by then?

Joyce, a Jesuit-educated Catholic, has long proclaimed the sanctity of traditional marriage. He has often spoken of his conservative “family” values.

During the debate on same-sex marriage Joyce advocated against it, saying he believed marriage was a heterosexual institution that had “stood the test of time” and was “a special relationship between a man and a woman, predominantly for the purpose of bringing children into the world”. He then abstained from the same-sex marriage vote, perhaps because he realised how untenable and hypocritical his position was.

Joyce is a leader, not just a regular MP, so his character is part of his political brand. Voters are now free to judge him on it.

Voters are always free to judge him on it. Always. On 2 December you should have provided voters with the information they would need to make such a judgment, and you chose not to do so, diminishing your value as a provider of information.

Joyce's decision on the same-sex marriage vote is less important than the decisions cast by people who sincerely believed the Deputy Prime Minister, and who believed that his words were quoted in the appropriate context by Fairfax outlets. They weren't, and it doesn't matter whether or not Joyce's office and/or the Fairfax newsrooms were festooned with knowing smirks as his words were quoted without that vital context: that he could not imagine any same-sex couple might fulfil the rights and obligations of marriage at least as well as he had (this is where the blithe "love child expose" bullshit falls down).

Then there is the human factor of the story. Who can look at the photo of Vikki Campion, surprised by a photographer outside her Canberra home, heavily pregnant and wearing gym gear, and not feel a little icky about it?

It is such a huge invasion of her privacy, not to mention the privacy of the unborn child, at a time when a woman is at her most vulnerable (and prone to emotional distress).

Can I direct you to your highly ethical coverage of Lindy Chamberlain, or Stormy Daniels, and ask you to shut the hell up about icky.

Here's icky for ya: Vikki Campion is a former NewsCorp employee. That invasion of privacy, the slut-shaming and all the rest of it, was done by people whom Campion personally knows and worked with. You'd think there would be some "honour among thieves" among Caroline Overington and the Murdoch people, but clearly not. Jacqueline Maley's newsroom is full of former and prospective NewsCorp employees: there but for the grace of God and Rupert Murdoch go we all.

Some readers will remember the huge scrutiny and nasty sexual innuendo Julia Gillard copped over her personal life and suspect a double standard is at play.

No suspicion: the contrary case simply cannot be made. Contrast with the treatment of the current Prime Minister of New Zealand, and start preparing lists of press gallery journalists who need to be replaced as soon as possible.

The scandal is unlikely to be a career-ender for Joyce.

Only people who don't understand politics would say this. Anyone who's seen politicians come and go knows that Joyce has more past than future. His Cabinet picks showed the overreach of a man on his way out. We know not the date or the time (unless the press gallery are holding out on us again), but only a fool would be shocked at the prospect of a new father suddenly wanting to spend more time with his little one - particularly if the youngest Joyce proves to be a boy. Watch as the very same photographer snaps pictures of Barnaby being a doting dad!

Finally, there are Joyce’s four daughters and wife to consider.

You should have considered them when Joyce trotted them out for staged pictures that made it look like he could manage a long-distance family life on top of everything else. You could have used some journo skills to show that he was a sham and a joke at that, too. We'd be better informed, and you'd be the respected news outlet that nobody in the newsroom dares admit you no longer are.

The families of politicians are generally considered off-limits for good reason: they didn’t sign up for public scrutiny ...

Driving down the main street denouncing one's father, the Deputy Prime Minister, deserved some scrutiny; Fairfax diminished itself as a reliable news outlet by failing to provide even that.

Imagine the impact on Australian politics of a Deputy Prime Minister felled by the feisty women of his broken household, who weren't going to put up with his shit any more. Some allies you are, Jacqueline Maley and Caroline Overington and all the rest of you arse-covering swine. Barnaby fucked up, and so did all those newsroom heroes: you haven't exactly made a strong case for more resources and loyal readers, have you?

Yesterday's social media today

So she was considering, in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

I'm grateful to Katharine Murphy for drawing this to my attention, I suppose; but it is rather more your standard press gallery output and less an exemplar of what it might be, which is what I had hoped and suspect she might have hoped, too. Let's not dismiss it out of hand. Bear with me as I pop the bonnet and take it apart, then consider what sort of reporting an event like this might give rise to, from journalists and media companies that knew what they were about and had some conception of customer value.

The Queensland Nationals MP George Christensen has threatened to vote against Coalition superannuation changes, immediately threatening one of the Turnbull government’s key policies two days after his ministry was formed.

Christensen took to his Facebook page to state categorically: “I hate it when government fiddles with super” and described it as “Labor-style policy”.

“It’s not the government’s money, it’s YOUR money,” Christensen writes. “We in government need to remember that. If the government’s superannuation policy does not change, I will be crossing the floor and voting against these measures.”

OK, I read Christensen's Facebook page in the original, and it says a lot about him as a politician. Basically, George has stamped his foot and delivered an ultimatum, which was probably meant to sound like strong and principled leadership. Canberra deal-makers hate ultimatums and the drama queens who deliver them. Coalition MPs returned by the barest of margins will not thank one of his party's whips for rocking an overloaded boat in this fashion.

That said, there are four issues here.

First, superannuation. It's important, and the details have ramifications that go far beyond Canberra, far beyond this term of Parliament, and we really should pay attention to the details. Any details about what this carry-on might mean, Katharine?

The Coalition policy places a $500,000 lifetime cap on after-tax superannuation contributions backdated to 2007, increases the concessional tax rate on asset earnings from 0% to 15% for people aged 56-65 in the “transition to retirement” and taxes accounts over $1.6m at 15%.

Pretty thin, that. What's really needed here is some context as to what that means. This is not a new debate, and by now specialist writers should have opinions about what might happen if the relevant regulations are changed, versus what might happen if the government's policies are enacted. But for two years a decade ago, every government since 1980 has had to bargain its policies through a Senate it did not control (and in 2010-13, a House with a majority of non-government members too); it is probably more useful to talk about the likelihood of some sort of compromise being enacted, and what that may or may not mean.

Christensen has concocted a sob-story whereby I as a taxpayer will have to subsidise (that is, with MY money) a couple sitting on more than $3m of super. It isn't as convincing as either of them might hope. Just because a politician says he is the defender of the people's money it doesn't mean that he can be taken at his word. Just because a journalist has a quote it doesn't mean they have a story.

Has superannuation policy really reached a state of perfection that is worth bringing down a government to preserve? Is this or any other policy at the mercy of his emotions ("I hate it")? If you couch Christensen's antics position in terms of policy, and leave others to do the horserace crap, you potentially bring an angle that informs debate within Canberra and beyond. You also run the very grave risk of establishing a value proposition for media consumers that is described by Ezra Klein in, uh, this piece.

You could make a case that here's a generalist journo trying to make a fist of a complex issue, but that might have been good enough way back when a quick summary was good enough for the likes of you. These days, there are plenty of superannuation wonks. Some of them can write and not all are hopelessly conflicted. Those people have more credibility than workaday hacks trying to be all things to everyone, and the only traditional media outlets with a future will be those who can tap into real expertise when required.

Second, there's the issue of the budget. Superannuation is taxed lightly in comparison to other reservoirs of money, and any government committed to balancing the budget had to revisit this issue. It makes no sense to complain long and loud about BUDGET BLACK HOLE EMERGENCY DEFICIT SHOCK (as Christensen did) and then complain about specific action to that end (as Christensen did).

Again, this is part of the policy context in which this government operates, and which therefore Murphy, Chan and their press gallery colleagues must also operate, and report on. Nowhere in that piece is there anything about that. No questions to Christensen about the relatively light tax treatment of super over many years - including when Labor was in government - and no questions about what he suggests might be taxed instead.

Third, Christensen isn't a conservative in any real sense. Before the last election he was endorsing far-right groups who would shun Muslims, who were ambivalent at best about anti-Muslim violence. Real conservatives have nothing to do with that garbage, as Ted Cruz demonstrated. Hanson didn't run a candidate against Christensen at the last election: she didn't need to. Now Christensen and Hanson are as one on superannuation too:

... senator-elect Pauline Hanson has indicated she believes superannuation should be “left alone” ...

... and Christensen's Facebook page is full of endorsements of whatever she might say about anything. Why doesn't he stop pretending he's a legitimate member of the Coalition and piss off to the PHONies? Is he playing a longer game like Bernardi, waiting to drop off the Coalition once he has sucked it dry?

The novelist Evelyn Waugh once wrote of one of his contemporaries: "To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee". There's a certain element of that in knowing George Christensen, and many others no better than him, holds your retirement income and mine and the fate of the government in his hands. Murphy's fascination is understandable, but misplaced. There less drama than you might imagine in a man who talks big but tends not to follow through.

Lastly, there's the angle that Murphy takes on all this - the same angle every other press gallery herd animal took - on the horserace. The barely returned Turnbull government and the potential disruption to its agenda, etc. I suspect this is the bit that's meant to take my interest.

Um, probably. It's just beside the point. Politicians make deals and break them and carry on - mostly over nothing of enduring significance - all the time. Despite press gallery lore, that's not really where the most interesting story is. The herd are all over that horserace stuff. The story is in what those deals are over, and how the outcomes affect us in ways we may or may not expect.

Christensen isn't going to turn government over to Bill Shorten, not over superannuation or anything else. He's seen how conservatives treat Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott, or the Job of Sippy Downs, Peter Slipper; neither Christensen nor anyone in this government wants that sort of calumny for the rest of his days and yea unto the seventh generation. The idea that conservatives cross the floor without penalty is palpably false. It's a historical artefact that was binned by John Howard. If your twenty years of observing politics up close has taught you anything, that's one of the lessons you should have learned.

If it were no big deal that conservative MPs cross the floor, why even write a story about it?

Cory Bernardi has been threatening to leave the Liberal Party for a decade. Like most people (and many dogs, and even some bits of furniture), Bernardi is much smarter than Christensen. If the SA Liberals punted Bernardi he has a much more solid political base to survive and almost certainly get re-elected to form an enduring presence in Australian politics - but still he waits, and waits, and knows any time he wants to stir the pot the entire press gallery as one will run around with their hair on fire. If the LNPQ punted Christensen he'd be finished, flat out making it onto Mackay Council.

Christensen has his Facebook page: if Murphy Chan thinks the best use of her traditional media platform is to make more from a gobbet of social media than it can possibly bear, then she is selling that platform short. She's not alone in this belief, and strangely many journalists take comfort from following this trend: whether it's an overpaid presenter on live TV cutting to a smartphone, or radio personalities taking to podcasts to complain about Twitter, nothing diminishes traditional media faster than the impression that they are nothing but relays for where the action really is, on social media. If the traditional media becomes yesterday's social media today, it's finished.

This government is less precarious than the one of 2010-13, which Murphy and most of the press gallery reported from up close. The idea that the government might collapse at any minute got very damn boring after months and years where plenty else was happening. It crowded out reporting of actual policy developments every bit as significant as the superannuation reforms under discussion here, developments that could make useful stories today or tomorrow given the right writers. Clearly, the lessons of the abysmal reporting from that time have not been learned.

A focus on policy removes perceptions of journalistic bias: can a policy opposed by the Labor party really be a "Labor-style policy" (even if a politician declares it so)? Leaving policy out of your coverage puts it at the mercy of a bunch of personalities that are far less compelling than beleaguered media outlets might hope.

As a political correspondent, Murphy Chan should know Christensen isn't much of a superannuation wonk, and isn't much of a politician either; she would serve her readers better by saying so and pointing out why. In terms of this event and where the news value is, the fate of the nation's retirement incomes far outweighs the outbursts of another mediocre Jack-in-office. Journalistic inertia in only being able to cover complex stories in tiresome ways that obscure their lasting significance is to be pitied (to be fair, Murphy's this piece was one of the better examples of a doomed genre). We still need more and better information on how we are governed than the press gallery can provide.

Update 27/7: It was remiss of me to overlook the fact this article, while referred to me by Katharine Murphy, was in fact written by Gabrielle Chan. The necessary changes have been made above.

My original point stands about the research: reading a Facebook page and taking a gibbering dupe at the words fed to him is not a vindication of journalism but a failure of it. The paragraph on superannuation should have been the core of this story, not a side-effect; we will be enjoying/suffering the results of this for years, and it is only fair for journalists observing from up close to tell us what's going on.

A NewsCorp veteran, Chan tends to give politicians the benefit of the doubt and believes she has done journalism by quoting them directly and taking them at their word. Her journalism from beyond Canberra is far better than that from within; she should do more of the former and let it inform any political reporting she may turn her hand to. Murphy was wrong to consider this piece anything more than your standard all-sizzle-no-sausage journalism content.

Brough enough

As we head into the end times for Mal Brough, let's consider how his career represents several things wider than him: machismo, keeping Aborigines "in their place", opportunity costs, and the price of loyalty. Oh, and of course, piss-poor standards of political journalism.

Act I: Taking the crease

Before first entering parliament for the electorate of Longman (now held by Wyatt Roy) in 1996, Brough had been an army officer. The press gallery singled him out for Big Things. When Tony Abbott was promoted to Cabinet in 2001, Brough replaced him as Minister for Employment Services.

Malcolm Farr made a telling anecdote [link broken] about Brough at a cricket match. Because Farr is an old-school journalist in the mendacious world of political reporting, he did not use that anecdote to look into what Brough did and how he did it, questioning his statements and fitness for office generally; instead, the coverage of him (by Farr and others in the press gallery) is pretty much all direct quotes and giving Brough the benefit of the doubt.

Act II: Hubris

In 2004 Brough became Minister for Revenue and Assistant Treasurer to Peter Costello, where he was responsible for hacking into the tax base at the very time the mining boom was taking off. Part of the reason why Wayne Swan, Joe Hockey, and now Scott Morrison, have been unable to do much about the revenue side of the budget is because of Brough's hard work back then. It's notable that those tax breaks did not lead to the private sector picking up the slack in terms of infrastructure; Australian history suggests that where government fails to take the lead, no infrastructure magically appears. Interesting experiment, though.

In 2006 Brough entered Cabinet as Minister for Families and Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. This might sound like he was doing squishy welfare stuff; not a bit of it. Brough came up with the idea of using a report into sexual abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities, Little Children are Sacred, as a pretext to send the Army in to occupy those communities and stamp out anti-social behaviour. He ignored the report and there is no evidence it made much of a difference one way or another, but it made a big splash - this may explain why Labor kept it after 2007. Frances Jones shows how Brough encouraged the Tiwi Islands Land Council to adopt schemes that created no jobs and degraded the environment: a lose-lose situation for people who were doing it tough already.

Despite the demonstrated lack of any link between the Northern Territory Emergency Response and any sort of success metric, the press gallery remained convinced that Brough was an action man and a Liberal star on the rise. He was Hotspur to Tony Abbott's Prince Hal. Consider this table of Sheer Damn Manliness:

Criterion	Abbott	Brough
Relationship to the Queen	Talked a lot of talk about the Queen	Held the Queen’s commission
Occupation before entering politics	Student (well into 30s), journalist	Army officer, sales
Economic credentials under Howard govt	Peter Costello disdained his understanding of economics	Minister for Revenue, helped diminish tax base
Military deployment proposals	To Ukraine, protect plane debris	To Northern Territory, protect Aboriginal children
Military deployment proposals supported by Labor	No	Yes
Re-elected in 2007	Yes	No
Complained publicly about decline in income after having been Cabinet minister	Yes	Yes
Disdained major political development	Climate change	Merger of Liberal and National Parties in Qld
Supported Brough for LNP preselection in Fisher for 2013	Yes	Yes
Supported Brough for Abbott ministry 2013	No	Yes
Supported Abbott as Liberal leader February 2015	Yes	No
Supported Abbott as Liberal leader September 2015	Yes	No

Act III: Nemesis

If Mal Brough had held Longman in 2007 then he, not Tony Abbott, would have been the favoured candidate for leader when Turnbull stumbled in 2009. Brough would have negated Rudd's Queensland appeal and been a bit more presentable than the often uncouth and puerile Abbott. The press gallery would have loved that action-man crap and Labor would hardly have been in a position to criticise his failures in Indigenous policy, having perpetuated them.

But, he didn't. If ever a minister was going to come out of the Howard government and fall into a series of cushy boards and advisory roles, according to the political-class fantasy, he was it. Brough faffed around and ended up as the last Queensland State President of the Liberal Party. He was against the merger with the Queensland Nationals that formed the LNP: he lacked the clout to stop it altogether and the wit to turn it to his advantage. He looked truculent, like a lamb trying to back out of a sheep-dip at the last minute, rather than a political operator contributing to something bigger than himself. It meant he couldn't secure a seat for 2010, which may have seen him back in Cabinet in 2013; more faffing around, this time outside the LNP power structure.

George Brandis also showed his true colours at this time, putting up a token resistance before succumbing. As Attorney-General his role has been to talk about John Stuart Mill, but then assert that civil liberties must be sacrificed to Daesh and that you can exercise a right to bigotry. If your idea of political activism and progress is to offer a token resistance before succumbing, Brandis is your model for involvement in major-party politics.

By 2012 Brough had come around to the idea that politics was his only real career option, and that he had no choice to suck up to people who were once his peers and juniors. Brough was a minister when Peter Dutton was first elected; when Brough went into Cabinet Dutton had taken over his junior portfolio. Dutton had been re-elected in 2007 and was cruising to a Cabinet role without doing anything. As Peter Slipper committed political suicide by all but switching to Labor, Brough could have played the statesman and let the LNP bring Fisher to him - but instead, he got his hands dirty. That sexist menu for his fundraiser in 2012 (no I won't link to it) is a perfect example of officers' mess wit.

As with Kathy Jackson, Independent Australia were onto Brough from the outset. The press gallery resisted the allure of sleaze and illegality because Brough was part of the Restoration narrative. This is why there's no point dipping into broadcast-media summaries, and why ABC reporters look silly when they write off questioning of Brough as 'Labor mischief': the Ashby thing ain't their mischief. IA put out numerous articles and a book on the matter while the broadcast media can offer only potted half-embarrassed recaps.

Act IV: You can't step in the same river twice

When the Abbott government took office in 2013 there were a few changes to the Shadow Ministry becoming Ministers, but basically the Abbott government was all about restoring the Howard government as though nothing had happened between then and 2007. Two Howard-era Cabinet ministers elected in 2013 did not get a portfolio - Philip Ruddock and Mal Brough - and Ruddock had declared he didn't want a portfolio. Brough sucked it up and got on with backbenching, and the press gallery stopped gushing over how great it was to have the old gang back together. Brough didn't have the twinkly-eyed gravitas of veterans like Philip Ruddock or Warren Entsch, and wasn't a fresh face either.

The LNP merger Brough had so opposed was designed to make it easier for the Coalition to win State government in Queensland. Brough had foreseen that it would be a disaster, and the performance of the Newman government 2012-15 proved him right. In politics you can be a drunk, a thief, a sex maniac and/or a terror to work for, and people will cover for you; but get proven right when everyone else is wrong, and that warm inner glow won't save you. The January 2015 Queensland state election proved everything turned out to be just as bad as Mal Brough said it would be.

The first chance he got, in February 2015, he voted against his brother-from-another-mother Abbott. In September he voted against him again. The lack of press gallery coverage about Ashby (mainly protecting favoured source Christopher Pyne) must have lulled Prime Minister Turnbull into thinking Brough was cleared of the matter concerning Slipper's diary and other questionable behaviour. It was always a sad joke to put him in charge of electoral probity, and now it seems like the Prime Minister will have to find someone else.

The longer Brough stays as Special Minister of State, the less likely it is there will be an early election. A quick replacement would have been a clear sign the government was up to something. He is also Minister for Defence Materiel at a time when big procurement projects are up for grabs.

If Turnbull hadn't appointed Brough to the ministry, Brough would have joined the Abbott-Abetz sooks' club, and/or gone bonkers like Senator Macdonald.

Abbott allowed himself a chuckle as Labor finally started questioning him over Ashby-Slipper, at a time when even the press gallery would give them coverage for doing so. Abbott allowed himself a chuckle, as he does when others come under the scrutiny he has always escaped: a could-have-been Liberal leader mocked by a has-been.

The Australian Federal Police had all but dropped their investigation into the events surrounding the Speaker's diary until recently. I note, without making any allegation, that the minister responsible for the AFP is George Brandis. If this investigation damages the political careers of two of Brandis' ministerial colleagues (Brough and Pyne) while leaving his untouched, it could be a masterstroke worthy of House of Cards. If not, it could be the greatest own-goal in Australian politics since the Costigan Royal Commission.

Governments can lose a minister or two without affecting their ability to be re-elected. Turnbull knows this, as does any student of Australian politics. Predicting the demise of Brough or even Pyne will finish Turnbull is to over-egg the situation. Mind you, Mal Brough's whole political career has been empty hype on the part of the press gallery. Now that it is over, it is clear how insubstantial it was.

Commercial media, Pauline Hanson, and radical Islam

In the 1990s Laurie Oakes claimed that the "national broadcaster" was not the ABC but the commercial media outlet he worked for, Channel 9. Since then, commercial television and radio have declined in Australia. Oakes wouldn't make that claim now, or he'd be ridiculed if he did. People have other options for spending their time than watching TV or listening to the radio:

• Well-educated people spend less time on commercial TV/radio than less well-educated people.
• Younger people spend less time on commercial TV/radio than older people, who had grown up in an era where there were fewer alternatives.
• People from non-English-speaking backgrounds spend less time on commercial TV/radio than people from English-speaking backgrounds.

The people now running commercial TV/radio find it more rewarding to hang onto the audiences they have rather than take the risk on a broader, more representative audience that may never embrace those media so ardently as its ageing, Anglo-Celtic, politically inflexible existing audience.

If Muslim Australians were big consumers of Australian commercial TV/radio there would be more Muslim Australians appearing on commercial TV/radio, and running it. Populist presenters making ignorant and hurtful comments about them would be disciplined, and talkback callers offering such content would rarely be put to air.

New migrants tend to work hard and try to fit in, and don't need to be harangued about working hard and fitting in. Rhetoric about 'fitting in' rings hollow from people who regard being both Muslim and Australian as a contradiction in terms, or an exercise in malicious deception. The small numbers of new migrants who don't fit in, who lash out at people and property of a society they don't feel part of, confirm commercial media in their biases.

Those now running commercial TV/radio remember when larger numbers of Australians paid attention to them, back in the 1990s, and one of the personalities who got people to tune in was Pauline Hanson. The assumptions of politics at the time suggested that being disendorsed by the Liberals when they held a strong majority in the House of Representatives should have rendered her irrelevant. Instead, she got millions of dollars worth of free publicity from commercial TV/radio. Political parties have small armies of people raising money in order to buy the sort of exposure Hanson got - and gets - gratis.

In 1998 Hanson's party won a million votes. She lost election after election, she went to prison, and in some cases she paid dearly for free publicity. No longer holding public office, she shunned publicity. Eventually she accepted interview requests from those who promised her an easy time. Pauline Pantsdown's satire of her was as gentle as Billy Birmingham's affectionate, unthreatening impersonations of Richie Benaud. As Jason Wilson points out, her exclusionary immigration attitudes had become mainstream, bipartisan policy (and the broadcast media loves bipartisan policy).

Compare the trajectory of her career to other politicians from the late 1990s: Cheryl Kernot, or Peter Reith, or even David Ettridge. Note how Hanson has survived while Clive Palmer, a smarter operator with more money and votes than Hanson could ever muster, has faded. Many voters in the next federal election will have no clear memory of her as an elected official. Those who have negative memories of her may be outweighed by those who look on her more kindly.

The only interviews on Australian commercial TV/radio with Hanson in recent years have been puff-pieces. Many of her opinions echo lines run by talkback radio, and they have her on to run those lines and reinforce them to a receptive audience. She stayed in the limelight through Dancing With The Stars, an odd definition of stardom. Age had softened some of her rhetoric. A tough interview would arouse sympathy and "controversy" that would go on and on, and work to her benefit. The idea that she is a menace to the unity of Australian society, a belief expressed often in the late '90s, has become harder to maintain.

When there are racist outbursts on content that commercial TV/radio really cares about, such as sport or entertainment, they are slow to act. They are quick to play up a "controversy" that is never resolved, but it isn't in their interest to shut down what they consider a genuine expression from their audience.

Samantha Armytage spent her career in Australian commercial TV, and occupies one of its plum roles as co-host of Sunrise. When she made a "racist gaffe", the resulting conflict arose from a powerful institution being held to standards that it does not set. See also, the treatment of Adam Goodes being Aboriginal in a public place. Commercial broadcast media is run to certain formulas that make racist assumptions and don't challenge them; this helps embed them among those who are watching/listening, and repels those who aren't.

If you can accept that Daesh and al Qaeda aren't representative of Islam, then you can accept that Pauline Hanson's resurgence on Australian commercial television is not a genuine expression of Australia today. She represents a recurrence of some national infection, nasty and untreatable, public but embarrassing.

Scott Atran points out a clear disadvantage for those who would harness the power of commercial TV/radio to promote trust and goodwill:

We have “counter-narratives”, unappealing and unsuccessful. Mostly negative, they rely on mass messaging at youth rather than intimate dialogue. As one former Isis imam told us: “The young who came to us were not to be lectured at like witless children; they are for the most part understanding and compassionate, but misguided.” Again, there is discernible method in the Isis approach.

Eager to recruit, the group may spend hundreds of hours trying to enlist a single individual, to learn how their personal problems and grievances fit into a universal theme of persecution against all Muslims.

Current counter-radicalisation approaches lack the mainly positive, empowering appeal and sweep of Isis’s story of the world; and the personalised and intimate approach to individuals across the world.

So much for harnessing the power of mass-media to counter the Daesh narrative, as we might discourage people from smoking.

It was always a laudable goal to have commercial television reach out to a broader audience, beyond Anglo-Celtic Australia, to include Muslims and other relatively recent migrants. Indeed, there were sound business reasons for them doing so. Now our society needs cohesion and dialogue to maintain safety and security, and it would be nice if the commercial broadcasters could get on board as a community service. It’s too late for that now.

If Hanson and those who run commercial TV/radio could choose to define us/them for who’s with “us” and who’s against, they'd choose the one that resonated with their audience: demonising Muslims and other new arrivals, who were never part of their audience anyway.

There will be politicians who align their interests with those of commercial media. If you thought the Murdoch papers were a bit supportive of the Coalition in 2013, then this country’s commercial media are going to treat Tony Abbott like the king in exile in 2016 (similar to the way they treated Rudd under the Gillard government). He has spent his life aligning with the interests of commercial media. Not only Hanson, but other minor parties who want to crack down on immigration and civil liberties will get much more earned media free airtime than, say, the Greens or other established non-government political entities. Nick Xenophon will have to flirt with anti-Muslims, or walk on his hands down Rundle Mall, to get the free coverage that got him this far.

In their mutually weakened state they'll help one another before they'll help those who ignore them. And what could be more Aussie (pause) than friends helping friends when they're struggling (cut to shot of Australian flag rippling in the breeze, then to shot of a southern-cross tattoo on a comely white female buttock, then to an ad).

A royal commission into the mandatory detention of asylum-seekers

The system of mandatory detention of asylum-seekers began in 1992, when Paul Keating was PM and Labor Left inner-city Melbourne MP Gerry Hand was Immigration Minister. Since then, Labor has been in power for 10 years and the Coalition for 13. Both parties have been implicated in human rights abuses involved with mandatory detention, and with the rorts that have seen foreign governments and multinational companies paid billions of Australian taxpayer dollars to treat people badly and mess with their heads.

These people are kidding themselves. Labor has committed itself to continuing mandatory detention until the next election, and afterwards if it wins. It cannot back down, or even change that policy significantly:

• The Shadow Minister for Immigration, Richard Marles, is a factional ally of the current Opposition Leader. While he might go through the motions of challenging headline-grabbing events like deaths, riots, or cost blowouts, he is not going to challenge the fundamentals of the policy.
• The Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Tanya Plibersek, has said repeatedly that we should work more closely with countries in our region to build a system where asylum-seekers don't have to take their chances on the Arafura Sea, and are treated humanely within Southeast Asian countries and their asylum applications are processed and, um, whatever happens to refugees at a time where they number in the tens of millions worldwide happens. I had expected Plibersek to travel a lot throughout the region, talking with political leaders at or below the ministerial level, but apart from a content-free trip to Kiribati she hasn't done nearly enough.
• The Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, is adopting a strategy of differing substantially with the government on a few key issues - and this is not one of them. At Labor's federal conference earlier this year, he twisted arms and worked the system enough that the entire party reaffirmed its historic commitment to mandatory detention. If Labor were to change policy direction before the election it might need a new leader.
• Chris Bowen and Tony Burke are both former Ministers for Immigration. Both are likely to be senior members of the next Labor government. Any measures Labor may direct at Peter Dutton, Scott Morrison, or Philip Ruddock would rebound on them, too.
• State politicians Eddie Obeid and Bernard Finnigan had very little to do with mandatory detention, but they show Labor can't get out of its own way let alone reform vast national policy.

You used to be able to vote for moderate liberals to curb the excesses of a Coalition government. Philip Ruddock helped kill that. Mandatory detention is bipartisan.

Tony Abbott tried to wedge Shorten by making mandatory detention worse than the conditions from which asylum-seekers fled. Abbott is gone from the Prime Ministership but Dutton remains the relevant minister. Shorten and Marles and Plibersek kept their jobs, too. Mandatory detention isn't a wedge when it's a platform.

Labor and the Coalition are locked in to mandatory detention. They're not just "committed", or "sending a signal" that has gone to every corner of the world for more than two decades, a signal received and played back to us by the United Nations. The outsource providers of those centres can and do charge what they like, knowing the Australian government has no choice but to pay. This also applies to the governments hosting them: they breach formally-defined human rights and basic human decencies minute by minute, knowing that the Australian government dares not define standards without tacitly accepting that it breaches them, and that breaching those standards is bad.

Consider those costs in light of current debates about taxes, deficits, and cutting benefits.

Press gallery journalists can't tell whether a policy is good or bad, right or wrong - they can only tell what's controversial. At different times when Labor was in government, under both Rudd and Gillard, they flinched before full support for mandatory detention. The press gallery belted them hard and unanimously for deviating from bipartisanship.

Nobody in the media, nobody in the major political parties, examined asylum-seeker policy from basic principles. The media shut down rather than facilitated public debate, because it values bipartisanship over debates it cannot control. All major-party MPs got a free pass from the press gallery when they wept in Parliament over the boat that hit the rocks on Christmas Island, and they all kept their free pass when they voted to tighten the screws still further.

There's been a bit of discussion on this blog about what is or isn't an informative interview, or a hard-hitting one. It seems that every interview involving Peter Dutton is hard-hitting, regardless of who interviews him or how. He could have the softest interview ever and he would still come off looking like a goose. There is no point "popcorn-scrabblingly" hoping for a tough interview on Dutton, because:

• there have been plenty and they make no difference, in terms of policy outcomes and conditions in the camps; and
• they make Dutton look resolute and tough, with a touch of martyrdom, which feeds his rightwing support base; and
• a Labor government would be no better. At all.

So much for partisanship being the only basis for criticising political coverage (and for brushing off any/ all criticism as though it were).

Intrepid journalists who actually get over to Nauru and Manus Island put the entire press-release-chewing gallery to shame. Their descriptions of what we do to those people is more important than all the journo-fetishising of bipartisanship. The broadcast media are culpable for reinforcing mandatory detention and deserve no credit when the policy changes, as it must. The public debate to develop better policy will have to exclude the major organs of the broadcast media. They can trail along behind the debate in bewilderment, as they do on most issues, or they can step up once they have stood down the long-serving "Canberra insiders" who have clogged their pages/airwaves with bad judgment calls for too long.

A royal commission (or whatever replaces this mechanism under a republic) into Australia's mandatory detention system will be necessary. It will not be pretty, and all the worse for justice denied and injustice compounded. It would only take place when a future Labor/Coalition government is over a barrel and has no choice but to agree to a measure that could damage them and their major opponents. It might be forced on them by Greens or independents; it will have far-reaching effects on this country's established politics.

Sexual abuse against children within those detention centres should be referred to the existing Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Decisions about how those camps operate are made in Australia, with the Australian government as their client. The idea that they are under the effective jurisdiction of foreign states fails under actual examination of how the camps work.

No religious entities have stepped up. The scriptures of the major monotheistic religions in Australia are full of instructions to be generous to unfortunate strangers who turn up at your door. The performance of religious organisations against the scriptural standards they set themselves is patchy at best.

The belief that the current system can't continue cannot usefully flow through to faith and prayer: religious organisations and their leaders are more strongly committed to covering up and avoiding than resolution through exposure.

It can't be resolved through high-quality journalism because Australian political journalism is mostly useless fetishises bipartisanship over all other considerations. The odd telling story will be uncoupled from policy change through set-piece interviews that fool both journalists and politicians into thinking they have done their jobs.

The Navy resisted government instructions to be as harsh as possible, so the government militarised the Australian Federal Police and Customs.

This can't be resolved politically because both major alternatives are stuck in the same policy. Neither has sufficient standing with the community to start a conversation about how things might be different/better. There are alternatives to the major parties but nationally they are piecemeal, community-based and fragmented.

It can't be resolved legally for much the same reason; an injunction here or a judgment there won't invalidate the whole mandatory detention system, and even small wins will almost certainly be reversed by rushed legislation.

Royal commissions aren't as impeccable as they might have been, but they are all we have as tools both to expose systematic malfeasance over decades, and to avoid both the silly press gallery and you-scratch-my-back bipartisanship that will ensure injustices and inefficiencies continue. They only arise under specific political circumstances though, so you have to hope and be alert to things political journalists can't understand, let alone explain.

You can only do what you can with what you have. Some will tell you that what you have is all you'll get, but they're wrong about that too.

Ecco journo

Australian political journalism is abysmal. Very Serious Journalists tell us that deeply inadequate politicians really do have the answers for our country, Light Bright and Trite ones insist that they're not so bad against all the evidence, and then they all unite to describe the inevitable demise not as an indictment on their experience and judgment, but as fickleness and ingratitude on our part.

Curb your enthusiasm

I could pile on to the criticism of Annabel Crabb, which of course can never be anything more than pathological hatred of Australia, and everything and everyone else really, because what sort of monster goes around criticising Annabel Crabb? Or sits at a computer, criticising Annabel Crabb?

In May we learned Crabb has ascended to a high clear place where she is absolved of any and all criticism, like Remedios from One Hundred Years of Solitude. Now she has gone one better than your highfalutin' think-mag, she is down with the cool kids at Buzzfeed to show just how you brush off online whinging. If they call you a Nazi, they must have already lost the argument, right? So yeah, anyone who's ever criticised Crabb is a Nazi, or something:

“I think I’ve been called ‘Nazi’ more in the last 48 hours than ever before, it’s been bracing,” Crabb said, referring to the outpouring of tweets accusing her of “humanising” treasurer (and former immigration minister) Scott Morrison.

“I get all sorts of helpful feedback all the time,” she joked.

Like most journalists, Crabb is more than happy to accept unqualified praise. What she won't do, owing to the shallowness of the ideas she brings to any examination of politics, is engage with any ideas people may have. While she undoubtedly cops what could only be called mindless abuse, I doubt very much it is the only feedback she gets. In fact, it isn't. There are some real ideas in here that Crabb should have engaged with, and didn't. There is no sign of her actually engaging with different ideas about how she might go about what she does, or whether there's any difference between what she seeks to do and what actually happens.

But she was unapologetic.

Has she ever been apologetic, really? About what is she supposed to apologise? Crabb misrepresents McQuire and sets up a straw man made from newspapers to knock down:

“I think we owe an obligation to the great central tenets of democracy to try and engage as many people as possible. I don’t think with the rather snobbish view that you can’t be interested in politics until you’ve consumed The Financial Review and The Sydney Morning Herald and every daily newspaper,” she said.

She's unapologetic about a criticism nobody is making? She thinks democracy is not something that comes from people themselves, but is some sort of outreach program from the powers-that-be? You can see why she's going onto a site that won't question her too closely.

It’s all about broadening the appeal of politics to more people.

No, it's about telling us the politicians we have are the best we can possibly expect.

“I like to think that if you publish and broadcast different kinds of content about politics, and give people different access points to politics than you’re working to include a greater proportion of the population.”

Here we get into a difference between what Crabb likes to think, and what democracy needs from political journalism.

Democracy needs reliable information about how we are being governed, and options for how we might otherwise be governed. That information can be presented in a densely earnest way, or in a breezily engaging way, or somewhere in between; but without that information it pretty much fails, regardless of the format. It's much like a meal: a fancy meal can be more or less nutritious, and so can one that's cheap and quick to prepare; but let's not pretend disdaining fancy cookin' makes you some sort of providore to the starving masses.

And in the end, getting a look into their personal lives of politicians actually makes you understand more about the decisions they make.

No, it doesn't.

Nothing about that episode with Morrison makes you understand why he took the decisions he took. In other interviews, Morrison spruiks his Christian faith but when asked to consider it in the context of his treatment of people in detention centres, he shrieks that faith is a private matter and he is not to be questioned on it. He touted on-water operations as core to his job - and then when he insisted that he did not comment on such matters, none of the fierce lions of the press gallery so much as demurred. Unless he wanted to, that is. He promised to get children out of detention centres by December 2013.

I'm still none the wiser about why Morrison took/didn't take those decisions; unless there's some pearl of wisdom curled up on the floor of the editing suite, neither is Crabb.

Crabb wasn't humanising Morrison, because she can't; the very verb is a nonsense. Crabb is no more human than Morrison. Humans do all sorts of things; they are human when they hug their children, human when they brutalise others. Morrison has spent his life appearing to be nice and reasonable, and then acting in ways that is neither of those things - all too human, hardly the first to do that. In a democracy we judge representatives by whether they serve us well or badly - not by how human they are. All politicians, all public servants, are human (or acting under command of humans, like police dogs).

If the Morrison episode was the first episode ever of the show, there may be some slack to cut Crabb in the hope things might get better. Sadly, this isn't the case:

• In the very first episode, Christopher Pyne avoided going one-to-one with Crabb (and does so again next week). The death-knell of the Abbott government was sounded by Pyne weeks after it was first elected, when he declared bipartisan commitment to Gonski education funding was a lie non-starter and the press gallery called him on his lie agreed that he'd be a witty dining companion.
• The first episode of the second series features the man who delivered the 2014 budget, without a trace of the document that came to define him. We see Hockey's eagerness to please, but it would have taken real insight to show that quality actually negated any principles that he might have brought from his upbringing into public life.
• The one after that is on Bronwyn Bishop, who greets Crabb in the way that a card shark greets a wealthy but frequently unlucky gambler. Crabb has a weird fascination with Bishop that has never yielded any insight into her at all. She never asks the question we'd all like to ask Bronwyn Bishop ("why don't you just fuck off and die?"), but instead indulges her in her delusion that obstinacy is the same thing as principle and strength of character; that partisanship and personal advantage are tangible and important while balancing national interests are to be disdained.
• At the end of Series 3, Crabb does Tony Abbott and he does her back, gibbering about the emptiest thing in recent Australian politics - his record, and what it might mean in government.
• The nearest thing the show has ever gone to any actual depth was with mental health, featuring Mary Jo Fisher and Andrew Robb. This government has continued the bipartisan approach toward mental health - talk about it, appear concerned, discourage any initiatives and limit funding.

Her show doesn't work even by her standards, and there are more than thirty episodes. But she don't need your stinkin' feedback - so long as Mark Scott is blowing sunshine at her, other people can make mistakes and learn from them. She's learned everything there is to know and will go on until she stops, and a well-informed democracy be damned.

If you're talking to me, your career must be in trouble

The Abbott government became politically constipated when it could not pass its agenda through the Senate. That government's leader in the Senate was Eric Abetz.

Eric Abetz achieved nothing as Employment Minister but an increase in unemployment. Abetz has spent what passes for his life sneering at moderates. Ian Macphee, the epitome of moderate liberalism who held the equivalent job in the Fraser government (who believed in centralised arbitration and conciliation long after Bob Hawke had given up on it), has a stronger record of achievement in that portfolio; so does Julia Gillard.

The late Michael Hodgman was designated "the Mouth from the South" because journalists thought he talked too much and achieved too little. Compared to Abetz, Hodgman was a Caesar.

This is quite the record of failure Abetz has earned for himself. Press gallery journalists are usually pretty good at latching onto winners, but on the day after the Melbourne Cup Latika Bourke did to Abetz what Annabel Crabb does to Bronwyn Bishop:

But Senator Abetz has told Tasmanian newspaper The Advocate that he would "of course" take a ministry should he ever be offered one but said he was in politics to "serve [and] not to succeed."

Nowhere in that piece is there any actual journalism from Bourke, not even her usual trick of sticking a recording device under a politician's nose and simply transmitting their remarks. She's re-heated journalism from elsewhere, under the mistaken impression that her readers are gagging for news about some loser from Hobart.

Now that politicians have their own websites and broadcasting capacities, it defeats the old media excuse that anything a politician says must be newsworthy. Bourke destroyed what little news value her story had with anonymous-quote work. Then came this:

The party's "right", as it is known[sic], has lacked a recognised leader ever since former senator and Finance Minister Nick Minchin announced his retirement in 2010 and has remained splintered ever since his departure in 2011.

And yet, in that enfeebled state, it still propelled Tony Abbott into the Prime Ministership and bent supposed moderates Christopher Pyne and Joe Hockey to its will. If I was a political journalist, that's what I'd be investigating rather than doing the expensive collage "Latika Bourke" (as she is known) is doing here.

Senator Abetz said Mr Abbott, whom he described as an "opinion and thought leader" should stay in Parliament because he would have an important role in guiding conservative allies in the party.

On what basis is Abbott an opinion and thought leader? On what basis is he anything but an example of what not to do? Bourke's journalism is as dead as Abbott or Abetz in their capacity for thought leadership.

Mr Abbott ... has been seeking the advice of friends and supporters about whether he should stay of go [sic]. The advice provided to Mr Abbott is understood to be mixed with some urging him to retire while others, like Senator Abetz, want him to continue serving.

Neither Abetz nor Abbott could command anything like the incomes they are on now elsewhere in the economy. There appears to be no thoughts on which they offer any leadership worth the name. These are not people who can be entrusted to run any organisation well or to have constructive opinions about it. Again, Bourke here proves one of the key rules of bad journalism: that the passive voice is a sign the journalist is up to no good.

It would be cruel to quote the final two dribbly pars of this piece. One speech from last month is not a hit circuit, and you can command nothing if you are a hostage to demand (or lack thereof).

Bourke reports to Peter Hartcher. Guys like him and Mark Scott think pieces like this are the sort of thing that's good enough for the likes of you in your quest to understand how we are governed.