The credibility gap

There is a myth in the press gallery that Tony Abbott had a deep and abiding concern about Indigenous people. There was never any evidence of it, but it has become the stuff of unshakeable press gallery myth.

Another myth in the press gallery is that Malcolm Turnbull might be more moderate and accommodating than Abbott.

It's worth examining this to work out how these myths form, what effects they have, and how impervious they are to proof and reason - which goes to the question of what the press gallery is for, and what its members mean when they insist that they respect their audience.

Abbott and Indigenous people

Unlike Whitlam, and even Fraser, Abbott had a long record as a minister in areas affecting Indigenous people directly (Employment, then Health), where evidence of commitment to Indigenous people and issues might have been evident. Not much to see there, and a genuine surprise that none of the experienced press gallery journalists went looking for it.

Tony Abbott doesn't have a deep and abiding concern about Indigenous people. Actual Indigenous people never rated Abbott they way they did for politicians who actually listened to them and came through for them, like Gough Whitlam or Malcolm Fraser or Fred Chaney. They did not vote Coalition in greater numbers when Abbott was leader than they had when Howard was leader, and apart from Pearson there are no spontaneous outpourings of thanks or support from Indigenous people, as there might have been for someone who made a real difference or who really gave a damn and did his best.

He might have a deep and abiding concern about Noel Pearson, but that isn't quite the same thing as a commitment to Indigenous issues and people.

If The Australian had decided, say, Marcia Langton or Gary Johns rather than Pearson as the tribune of all things Indigenous, perhaps Abbott would have hung out with them instead. Pearson can churn out variations of the same article about how white elites ensure Aboriginal kids get an inferior education, and The Australian will give it a run every time; but they can neither dismiss nor laud something like his oration at Whitlam's funeral (e.g. "The Whitlam government is the textbook case of reform trumping management"). This should leave them with no option but subtle and nuanced analysis, delivered gently and respectfully; but they lack the ability to do that, and so, therefore, did Abbott. He could dismiss and he could laud, but Indigenous affairs require more and better and reward even ardent advocates with heartbreak: Abbott was nowhere to be found.

Nobody has had more of an effect on the education of Indigenous people in far northern Queensland than Noel Pearson: no education bureaucrat, no Minister, no Premier or PM. People in that area should be among the best-educated in the country: if any group of Indigenous people were to come close to non-Indigenous education levels, that's where you'd look. Sadly, statistics are hard to find, and the normally forthright culture warriors of The Australian equivocate on the issue. Tony Abbott has himself had a fine education (St Ignatius' Riverview, Universities of Sydney and Oxford), and not much of it devoted to considering Indigenous issues.

Luke Pearson outlined Abbott's record in what was to be his final days as Prime Minister, and it rewards a read. Notions like Sydney being "nothing but bush" before 1788 or the litany of what Luke Pearson calls "oddly patronising" comments (what a press gallery journalist might call "gaffes" or "Tony being Tony") reveal a mind that is simply not engaged with these issues and these people. His dismantling of Abbott's three-point slogan on Indigenous issues is masterful, the sort of thing press gallery journalists and established media outlets are meant to do.

On what basis, then, do press gallery journalists insist Abbott's interest in Indigenous issues was strong and genuine? Well, before he won government, he took a bunch of press gallery journalists (none of whom had much background in complicated Indigenous policy) deep into the bush and professed his concern for Indigenous issues. Yep, that's it. They actually took him at his word, and continue doing so.

When he didn't spend his first week as PM in an Aboriginal community, they should have been suspicious rather than tossing it onto the pile of broken promises. When he eventually spent a week near an Indigenous community not really engaging with them, engaging in vacuous picfacs and puny announceables, proper journalists would have felt insulted, and started to dig for stories.

Long after he had trashed his word and his reputation, press gallery journalists kept insisting that Abbott was a clever and sensitive man. In policy area after policy area people pointed to the desolation that comes from refusal to engage in informed and considered thinking, and eventually journalists stopped with the magical thinking about Rhodes Scholars and started seeing Abbott as a wrecker, a man who used his intellect to bamboozle and mislead rather than elucidate and lead.

In Indigenous affairs, however, they still cleave to the old fiction that Abbott really was serious, that some work of noble note might yet be done, hoping that nobody will call them on it. Luke Pearson was far too polite about it, and they have ignored him: tell me again how being polite to press gallery journalists gets your message across, go on.

As journalism seeps into history, such as in the rushed and lightweight confections of Aaron Patrick, we see Abbott's deep interest in Indigenous affairs asserted but not evidenced, let alone examined.

Turnbull and Indigenous people

Like most Australians, Malcolm Turnbull had little contact with Indigenous people. There are relatively few in his electorate, he didn't encounter many at Sydney Grammar or in Kerry Packer's office, nor at Ozemail or Goldman Sachs. On what basis, then, did a supposedly experienced press gallery journalist like Michael Gordon seem to believe Turnbull would take to Indigenous issues like a duck to water?

There was more than one gap on display when the nation's MPs gathered to hear the Prime Minister deliver his annual Closing the Gap report on Indigenous disadvantage.

As you might expect, Gordon nowhere considers his own role in this, nor that of his equally obtuse press gallery colleagues.

Look at the targets for Closing the Gap. All of them are complex issues that resist easy political measures like press releases or three-word slogans. All of them require skills in working with diverse, often rebarbative people, and getting them to focus on a common cause over more immediate priorities and prejudices. Turnbull is doing badly on Closing the Gap not only because Abbott left him with nothing to build upon, but because working with diverse and often rebarbative people is not a core Turnbull skill. Never has been. He might learn on the job, or he might not; but Gordon, amongst others, looks like a patsy for giving him the benefit of the doubt.

There was the gap between Malcolm Turnbull and a section of his backbench, who chose not to take their seats in the House of Representatives to hear their leader's first substantive speech on Indigenous affairs.

"Where is everybody?" one Liberal MP asked another, as Turnbull rose to his feet to become the first Prime Minister to begin an address to the Parliament in the language of the traditional owners of the land on which it is built.

There is a convention that when the PM addresses the chamber, his troops are there in force to demonstrate solidarity. It went by the board on Wednesday morning.

There is also a convention that when a subject of national importance that goes to questions of national identity or national security is broached by the nation's leaders, all MPs take their seats. That, too, was waived on the Coalition side.

Whenever a journalist lapses into the passive voice, they are up to no good. Why was it waived, Michael, by whom and for what purpose? As ever, some journalism from the press gallery would be nice. It would beat the hell out of cliches and puzzlement at the all-too-familiar.

Look at other occasions where that convention has been breached - and by whom. The Liberal MPs who disrespected Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations in February 2008, Sophie Mirabella and Peter Dutton, have since proven themselves so misanthropic that it was probably for the best they were not there.

Was it lack of interest in the issue? Or lack of respect for the leader? Either way, it was conduct unbecoming.

It was to be expected. Your experience should tell us what is to be expected and why, not airless nonsense about keeping up appearances.

Then there was the gap between Turnbull and the man he replaced, Tony Abbott, whose passion for this area of policy was sadly not matched by achievement during his two years in office.

What gap? What passion? What nonsense, Michael Gordon. You want to see something that isn't there.

Abbott was there to hear Turnbull's speech, but there was no room in the Prime Minister's remarks to acknowledge the efforts of his predecessor. That was an unfortunate oversight.

There was nothing to be said, so he said nothing. For a man often accused of being verbose this must have been a relief. What did you expect him to say: "a good government had lost its way", perhaps.

Then there was the gap between the government and the opposition, with Bill Shorten backing a referendum on recognition next year, arguing the case for a new target to reduce Indigenous incarceration and asserting: "You cannot cut your way to closing the gap."

Here, the differences were ones of emphasis, not direction, with Turnbull expressing strong support for recognition, outlining action to tackle rising imprisonment rates and determined not to "sugar-coat the enormity of the job that remains".

So there's a gap between government and opposition, but it's only rhetorical? Luke Pearson said that the proposed targets on justice in Closing the Gap were important, that Labor is proposing while the government is not necessarily disposing; and Michael Gordon of The Age regards this as just a difference of emphasis?

Next year is significant because it will be 50 years since the referendum to recognise Indigenous people in the census. That referendum passed with 90% in favour. Where has all that public goodwill gone? What makes an experienced press gallery journalist think Turnbull and/or Shorten can arouse, or even tap into, that level of support?

Look at that picture of Abbott leaving the House as Shorten spoke. The bearded guy watching him leave is Senator Nigel Scullion, the Indigenous Affairs minister who owns the failures set out in the Closing the Gap report, and who's had more experience in Indigenous issues than Abbott, Turnbull, Shorten, and most of the rest of Parliament put together. Do you think Tony Abbott will ever get over himself (a necessary precondition to reaching out to people who aren't plentiful in his electorate either)?

Do you think Gordon (or anyone else in the supposedly diverse and competitive press gallery) noticed Scullion, or is calling for his job over his failings in executing his portfolio? Again, no - but still he plods along:

Turnbull's speech was replete with good intentions, empathy, optimism and commitments to engage with those who have devoted their lives to finding answers and improving the circumstances of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Just like Tony Abbott, and Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd before him.

Ten years after the closing the gap project was conceived, the voice of country's peak Indigenous body is ignored; a landmark report on empowering communities is awaiting a considered response, 12 months after it was delivered to government; racism persists and the recognition campaign desperately needs an injection of momentum.

Turnbull made an impressive start ...

Did he? Why the jaded response to his three predecessors and measures that could have been addressed over recent months, if he was genuinely "impressive"? Is empty rhetoric "impressive" now?

Why does the recognition campaign need momentum (which can't really be "injected")? Doesn't it need to be scrapped? Is it a Good Thing that needs Bipartisan Support (like, say, tax minimisation or refugee detention, or any one of a number of bad policies), or is it the waste of time many commentators see it as?

I hunt around the web for different perspectives: traditional media like The Age only hold up experienced journalists like Michael Gordon, claiming they can lead us through big complex political issues like that - but once again, all they do is rehash assumptions that simply fall apart once you examine them.

... but, when it comes to righting history's wrongs, he will be judged by the gap between his words and his actions, his intentions and what he actually delivers.

But press gallery journalists will only quote his words, and not weigh them against any actions. It's hard to tell what Turnbull's intentions are on Indigenous issues, and if he leaves office without having achieved anything in that area do you think it will bother him? Do you think anything he pulls together will be half as productive as a copper-wire NBN? It doesn't bother do-nothing Nige, it doesn't bother the press gallery.

The press gallery can't investigate government on these issues, and they can't explain why either Abbott or Turnbull deserve the benefit of the doubt they (and not actual Indigenous people) seem so willing to give them. Why am I listening to these people? Why must I accept the unexamined assumption that their experience is worth more than the pinch of conditioned air I prize it at? Michael Gordon and the press gallery disgrace themselves when they do business-as-usual reports on political and policy failures like this. You have to go beyond the press gallery to find the best reporting on policy and politics.

Once again, the whole point of the press gallery could not be less clear. Your guess is as good as theirs. Decades of experience in not doing investigative journalism counts for much less than those people might hope.

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.

Sooky one day, snarly the next

I got the horse right here
The name is Paul Revere
And here's a guy that says if the weather's clear
Can do, can do, this guy says the horse can do
If he says the horse can do, can do, can do

Frank Loesser Fugue for Tinhorns (from Guys and Dolls)

Former State MP for Cairns Gavin King has written a biography of his former Premier, Campbell Newman. I haven't read the book but I have read excerpts of it in the broadcast media, and their responses seem every bit as interesting as the ins and outs of Queensland politics.

King demonstrated a strong talent for embarrassing himself to get publicity, as though media attention was more important in itself than as a conduit through to the community he represented. He tried and failed to make complex issues like assaults on the body or movements of the body bend to both his will and the limitations of his understanding. He was probably astute to publish his book through the conservative Connor Court, ensuring no pernickety publisher would fact-check it too critically.

Media reports quote King's/Newman's complaint that the defeat of the LNP state government after a single term renders reform impossible. Journalists shirk the whole idea of 'reform' and what it might mean, accepting the word as a gobbet of content rather than an idea in need of unpacking: it is left to people like sociologist Mark Bahnisch to explore questions like reform of what, to what ends and in whose interests, etc.

Their main focus seems to have been on what Newman thought of the media, as though this was the most important and newsworthy aspect of the Newman government. Apparently he thought they were a "pack of bastards", shallow and what have you. This is what gets them going. The trouble is, it doesn't really go anywhere.

Confident that I'm not a bastard

The ABC's state political reporter Chris O'Brien leapt into print with a headline that promised so much. He spends half the article recapping the situation, before this:

After his last all-in media conference in late January, Mr Newman told colleagues "... that's the last time I'll ever have to talk to that pack of bastards."

The initial reaction by some of us bastards has been to dismiss the criticism as sour grapes.

That's an understandable response. It's natural for anyone - journalist, jockey or jeweller - to defend themselves when they're admonished in print, and the book is steeped in Mr Newman's deep disappointment at the fact and manner of his defeat.

Understandable perhaps, but the right response?

Where journalists are different is in their analysis. Information is useless without analysis and context, and journalists add value when they supply both information and analysis. Anyone can stick a microphone in front of somebody and transcribe it: that's a job that can be replaced by computer hardware and software, and one day soon will be.

O'Brien should have been big enough to analyse the criticism for areas where Newman had a point, to concede them with as much good grace as he (O'Brien) is capable of, and to show how he might do better. Instead, he commits to tossing out baby and bathwater with equal force.

Jewellers and jockeys, lawyers and doctors and politicians, face real career limitations in the event of proven malfeasance in their jobs. Journalists do not. Journalists can, and do, dismiss any and all criticism as whinging, going directly into defensive mode without any real clue what they are defending or why, other than their feelings and those of their colleagues. It is flatly untrue that everybody is as incapable of self-examination as O'Brien admits himself to be.

But largely [Newman] avoids admitting any actual mistakes of policy or action.

Well Chris, you were the ABC's state politics reporter during that time: any suggestions about what they might have been? No? That makes you as bad as him, surely.

However, does that mean that his "sour grapes" - and reporters' umbrage - is all we take from the book and its reception?

"Can Do - Campbell Newman and the Challenge of Reform" is more than 300 pages long. It includes lengthy sections, in the words of the author and in passages written by the subject himself, that offer up suggestions and opinions for improving the way politics is done and covered.

What are they, Chris? You're an experienced journalist - draw those ideas out, examine the arguments for and against - no? If your article had a point, that would have been it.

What if Newman and King make some good points, but they're overlooked because Mr Newman is regarded by opponents as bitter and twisted and because he stops short of a full mea culpa?

What are the "good points", and how can you tell? What if an ad hominem attack on Newman and/or King just doesn't cut it? Note this - "is regarded by opponents" - the passive voice and anonymous quote, the marks of journalistic failure.

I don't think there's any harm in debating the book's premise that the coverage of politics in Australia today leaves something to be desired.

As a political reporter I defend what I and my colleagues do, but I have some sympathy for the opinion that there should be more in-depth reporting of government and politics. I happen to think there's plenty, on radio programs and news websites and ABC television current affairs (the last of which Mr Newman acknowledges.)

But I don't dismiss out of hand the view that there isn't enough and that it could be better. It's worth discussing.

But you do dismiss it out of hand, Chris. Here we are near the end of your article and you claim there's "plenty" of in-depth reporting, which presumably gives press gallery journalists some sort of excuse to be trite and banal. See the two paragraphs following the above quote, O'Brien's anecdote about Wayne Bennett at the NRL Grand Final: "... may come across ... labelled by some critics ...". Gutless shirking of perfectly fair criticism of reporters.

Similarly, Mr Newman's bleak view of media - even if genuinely held - cannot be separated from his disastrous electoral outcome.

Really? Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Jeff Kennett and Neville Wran are three examples of politicians with similar views about press gallery journalists and journalism; all had more substantial achievements than Newman, including getting re-elected.

Secondly, can his criticism of media be treated dispassionately by media? Yes, perhaps - but not easily.

As one of the pack of bastards who was at that last news conference, even if I am fairly confident that I'm not a bastard, and even if Mr Newman was thinking about some other bastards and not me, I am at least subconsciously inclined to reject his analysis of my craft.

O'Brien should have answered his rhetorical question in the negative. When criticised he gets his dander up and can't tell whether criticism is legitimate. That second paragraph quoted above is embarrassing, his confidence based on nothing but ego. Maybe he's right to assert his subconscious over any capacity for sensible analysis; it's just a pity.

The journos' syllogism

So perhaps journalists should stay out of the argument about journalists.

That line is whimpering defeatism.

When it comes to criticism, journalists have a syllogism that goes as follows:

1. No criticism of any journalist by any non-journalist is ever legitimate.
2. Only journalists can truly know what it's like to be a journalist, so only they are in a position to criticise - if any criticism is warranted.
3. No journalist ever criticises another journalist, because that would be mean and disloyal - and any criticism of journalists can only ever be mean.
4. Go back to step 1 until you a) are sick of it, and b) realise they will and can never, ever change. Any and all criticism of journalists is never about the journalists, only about you; Q. E. fucking D.

There's no helping some people. O'Brien (and most journalists, let's be frank) want an impoverished, two-part world: journalists over there, doing the same old same-old without thinking, day in and day out, while over here those of us who want more and better from journalism can chat amongst ourselves, and never the twain shall meet.

It may be naively purist to say, but reporters reporting on criticism of reporters makes them part of the story.

"May be"? How could you tell?

Aren't we well past the point where we can pretend journalists are "not part of the story", as transparent as a window pane? I won't sustain anyone in that fantasy.

We need to be able to explain our actions as reporters and rebut ...

Why not a bit of forethought and humility? Nobody wants to hear your whiny defensiveness. We all have to think about what we do and how we do it, and do things differently when common practice no longer yields expected results.

But it's difficult to remain disinterested in that particular to and fro.

While being Premier of Queensland is a piece of cake? Really? Get over yourself and admit your analytical skills are non-existent, O'Brien. That old saying about politicians needing to be replaced like nappies need changing applies to press gallery journalists too.

Lessons in leadership

Madonna King is not a press gallery journalist but has written extensively about politics. While O'Brien wrestled with issues that are too hard for him to understand, MK (initials to distinguish her from Gavin, from the singer, and the Christian icon) is convinced a simple ad-hominem slapping will suffice to deflect - no, defeat - criticism.

It is a feature of most bad journalism that you have to scroll down a third or even half-way down an article to get to the point. Many can be forgiven for giving up altogether. MK's rugby league analogy was laboured but this bit was jarring:

... on Sunday night when the Cowboys stole the premiership from the favoured Broncos.

The Cowboys played within the rules and won the Grand Final on the field, within the rules of the game. They did not cheat on the field or engage in skullduggery off it. The Broncos were not the reigning premiers, nothing was "stolen" from them. If you can't get that right, what else in this article is bullshit?

Why else would [Newman] think - after the biggest defeat in history - that he is in the position to lecture us on everything from reform to the role of the media?

Despite the LNP loss, he still can't see that he was the reason for it. Now it's the pack of bastards in the media, or those on his team that didn't really pull their weight, or even voters, who didn't understand what he was doing was in their best interests.

Eight months after voters sent him packing, the poll loss is still everyone else's fault, except his own.

The man is entitled to his opinions. An opinion does not become a "lecture" just because you don't want to hear it. He has some experience with reform, and with the media, and so his opinions might have some weight - or they might not, but the umbrage at the very fact of expressing them is silly. Newman might not be self-reflective, but as we saw with O'Brien above (and with Newman's brother-from-another-mother Tony Abbott) he's hardly alone in that.

His book, can do, is bare in self-analysis but it offers a thorough (although one-sided) account of his government's actions. All the attention, so far, has been on his criticisms - a focus the former premier will no doubt highlight as proving his point about the paucity of modern political debate.

Newman may have participated in its writing, but it would be "his" book if he had written it. MK lets Gavin King off the hook - maybe this is another example of the journos' syllogism, maybe Madonna and Gavin are related, who cares? When MK talks about "all the attention", she really means all that journalists want to write about - as though what journalists want to write about is the same thing as what people want and like and need to read.

But what comes through the most is Newman's unwavering belief in himself.

Is Newman the first politician who believed in himself? No. Is self-belief a feature of non-political lives, such as those of (say) journalists? Yes. Is this a silly criticism?

It's certainly passive-aggressive. Someone who wants to disagree with you, but who lacks the information, the debating skill and the sheer wit necessary to make a case and hold to it, will say something like "you're very sure of yourself, aren't you?" in an attempt to throw you off. This is what MK is doing here: like O'Brien, she can't tell whether Gavin King and Newman have legitimate criticisms of the media. She can only tell that there are criticisms, and that considering them and responding to them would be harder work than she is prepared to do.

Lessons in history

His inability to play as part of a team is highlighted more and more, evidenced by the fact that he didn't even consult his wife Lisa about running for the top job until a month after he had sought the advice of others. By her account, he just mentioned it casually as he walked out the door on the day his candidacy was to be revealed.

It was demonstrated long before then. Before becoming Premier, Newman had been Lord Mayor of Brisbane. In that role his autocratic tendencies were obvious to the point where even the media noticed. When he became Premier, smarter people in Queensland were awake to what he was like. Journalists, desperate to maintain whatever is to be gained by insider status, wrote slavering articles and allowed him to slap their faces over and over for years.

Now that Newman's career is over even the most supine journalist doesn't have to cop that any more. When they go after Newman, they do so because he's now outside the whole fed-chooks system that press gallery journalists don't question, and which stunts their ability to tell us how we are governed.

And of everything that has come out in the past two weeks, that is the point I struggle to understand most - particularly given the keenness with which [Newman] later embraced [his wife's] campaigning skills.

Why are we even speculating about his marriage, anyway? Why did Lisa Newman switch to such a full embrace of the life of a politician's partner? What if she holds the media in similar esteem to her husband? What about Gavin King's wife? You see where this gets us: nowhere, particularly in terms of media criticism. But hey, MK has had her say - or lectured us - and that's the main thing.

Campbell Newman can say what he likes, but he led his party to an historic and unexpected defeat, and lost his own seat ...

... and ner-nerny-ner-ner, tu quoque you loser! No mention of Newman's media criticisms and any evaluation of same, no mention of anything he might have achieved among the wreckage of his government, but a resentment that the man both has an opinion and dares to express it.

Had Newman offered Madonna King a series of exclusive interviews, as Joe Hockey did for her biography of him, that might have been different.

So to put himself up, now, as ... someone even the party might turn to in the future is breath-taking in its arrogance.

Really? He said his career was over, but ... oh I see, MK just made that up.

There is a question to be had about how the media were so keen to embrace Queensland's change of government in 2012 (or at least not get caught defending a government on its way out), so happy to put up with the crap Newman flung at them for three whole years, and now happy to pile on him now that he's having his say.

Maybe they're just not as perceptive as we need journalists to be.

You could be really smug

Censorship (n.)

1. Any regime or context in which the content of what is publicly expressed, exhibited, published, broadcast, or otherwise distributed is regulated or in which the circulation of information is controlled. The official grounds for such control at a national level are variously political (e.g. national security), moral (e.g. likelihood of causing offence or moral harm, especially in relation to issues of obscenity), social (e.g. whether violent content might have harmful effects on behaviour), or religious (e.g. blasphemy, heresy). Some rulings may be merely to avoid embarrassment (especially for governments).

2. A regulatory system for vetting, editing, and prohibiting particular forms of public expression, presided over by a censor: an official given a mandate by a governmental, legislative, or commercial body to review specific kinds of material according to pre-defined criteria. Criteria relating to public attitudes — notably on issues of ‘taste and decency’ — can quickly become out-of-step.

3. The practice and process of suppression or any particular instance of this. This may involve the partial or total suppression of any text or the entire output of an individual or organization on a limited or permanent basis.

4. Self-censorship is self-regulation by an individual author or publisher, or by ‘the industry’. Media industries frequently remind their members that if they do not regulate themselves they will be regulated by the state. Self-censorship on the individual level includes the internal regulation of what one decides to express publicly, often attributable to conformism.

5. In Freudian psychoanalytical theory, the suppression of unconscious desires that is reflected in the oblique symbolism of dreams: see displacement.

- The Oxford Dictionary of Media and Communication

Again, I have no idea how "awful" or "woefully-titled" can do is (or whether it is), so I have no choice but to take Gay Alcorn's word for it. What I don't have to take is her misinterpretation of what censorship is:

I will defend Newman against, of all places, the Avid Reader bookshop, the premier independent bookshop in my hometown of Brisbane. Avid Reader is routinely named the best bookstore in the city, with a “ridiculously comprehensive” selection.

Its owner, Fiona Stager, is a former head of the Australian Booksellers Association and a leading cultural figure in Brisbane [you there, stop that sniggering] ... Avid Reader is refusing to stock Newman’s authorised biography, written by former Queensland MP Gavin King. Stager told ABC radio that Newman’s decision soon after winning office to scrap the premier’s literary awards was a key reason.

“We saw that as an attack on the writing, editing, book-publishing, book-selling community in Queensland. It seemed ironic that the first thing he did after losing was to turn around [and] be involved in the publication of a book,” she said.

Stager says the store has “always reflected the views and feelings of its community” and that many of its customers were devastated by Newman’s public service job cuts.

Love it when a journalist has a point, and gets to it.

Nowhere in that article, nor anywhere else I could find, is there any indication that Stager is campaigning to have the book banned. She is not threatening Newman or King with violence, as Salman Rushdie was - not by Stager - over The Satanic Verses. Stager certainly doesn't have the power to censor it, even in her capacity as "a leading cultural figure in Brisbane" (stop it!).

When I rang Avid Reader and asked them to set aside a copy of can do for me, the jackboot of the state came down hard upon my neck and here I am in a remote gulag, for who knows how long? the staff helpfully referred me to another shop nearby which stocks the book.

If Stager had expressed her misgivings about Newman, as I dare say she had even before this book came out, wouldn't she have been a hypocrite for pocketing that all sweet sweet cash which is undoubtedly pouring into the coffers of her competitors? What about if said competitors sold out of stock, and Connor Court could not replenish in time - would they be censoring Newman too? The absurdity of this argument is demonstrated whenever anyone dares to talk back to Andrew Bolt: he goes on his national TV show, his nationally-syndicated newspaper column, his blog and his mates' radio shows, grizzling loud and long that he is being "censored".

Alcorn is a journalist who grew up in Queensland when it was governed by Bjelke-Petersen. Short of someone like Peter Greste, or immigrants who fled repressive regimes, few people in this country should be more aware of what "censorship" really means - and how absent it is here.

Fundamental to my now-quaint notion of progressive politics is tolerance, debate, and the critical importance of free speech, even of speech I intensely disagree with.

It's a pity that Alcorn couldn't engage the book itself, and the issues it raises; and how easy it apparently was for a few tweeps to bump her off such fundamental convictions as she might have, or even her understanding of words. The issues apparently raised in the book are live issues in politics today: law and order, the assets of the state and how they are to be used, how we choose and discard our leaders. If Alcorn doesn't deign to engage the ideas raised by King and Newman then she can hardly blame Stager for doing likewise. Alcorn claims Stager has a responsibility to public debate that she herself has shirked.

Conclusions

... Now this is no bum steer
It's from a handicapper that's real sincere
Can do, can do, this guy says the horse can do.
If he says the horse can do - can do - can do ...

Here again we have seen the limits of 'horse-race' journalism, where the shortcomings of the favourite somehow become apparent after he has slipped back in the field - never before.

For Newman's political career, there is no "can do". There is only "has done" or "didn't", it is too late for "can yet do", "could/ should/ would have".

The whole idea of fourth-estate journalism, of all the privileges enjoyed by press gallery journalists like O'Brien, big-in-Brisbane journos like Madonna King, and ex-editors like Alcorn, is that they will tell us how we are governed and how we might be governed. They won't, they can't - instead, they flock to essentially the same meta-debate about the media and how nobody is allowed to question it. Anyone who does can cop an ad-hominem attack, in place of the fair and well-informed debate they all claim to champion but none can actually conduct.

So Campbell Newman has criticisms of the media. So does anyone with any experience of them. Some of these probably are the illegitimate gripes of someone who shirked the responsibilities of both democratic scrutiny, and to engage the public on issues that go beyond technocratic matters of expenditure and regulation. Some of them might be more than fair: there may even be some really important lessons that journalists, and those who employ them, would be foolish to ignore. O'Brien, Madonna King and Alcorn are well placed to examine these, but they haven't and can't. Instead, they have hurled babies and bathwater with equal force.

Newman's pathetic attempts to limit public debate have been thwarted. Nobody said that public debate can only happen at Avid Reader, or in different broadcast-media outlets that can only ever seem to run much the same story from the same angle and never revisit it. Now we need information about how we are governed (which includes information about how we have been governed, and what our options are on how we might be governed). Are journalists - experienced journalists, with years of experience observing politicians and politics up close - in a position to do this?

They're in a position to do this, but they don't. Newman, and Tony Abbott, are just two recent examples of politicians described by political journalists as soaring and swooping like eagles, who turned out on closer inspection to be turkeys caught in updrafts of broadcast-media hot air. Campbell Newman has every right to lecture journalists on how they should do their jobs, because almost none of the practitioners have much of an idea - they get reflexively defensive without any real clue what it is they are defending. While it's certainly true that Newman's criticisms are unfair, it's indisputable that journalists can't tell which criticisms are fair and which aren't. They have no basis but their own feels to do so, and that leads them only to note the mote in Newman's eye while overlooking the beams in their own.

Even Queenslanders need to be well governed. They - we - need more and better information than self-obsessed, obtuse journalists can provide. Journalists who can't get over themselves aren't just flawed humans, they are social, economic, and democratic bottlenecks. They should accept criticism (not in general but specifically) and engage with it. They should accept that people will and should go around them to get the information they/we need, the information to which we are (go on, say it) entitled.

Playing Canberra games

I just am not going to get caught up in Canberra gossip, I'm not going to play Canberra games.

- Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott (!), Monday

Tony Abbott had spent the better part of the last quarter-century doing little else but Canberra gossip and Canberra games. Even to the end, no press gallery stenographer called him on it, or had the humanity to laugh. He had his second-last photo op as Prime Minister in a traffic management centre in Adelaide, one of those strange places to which hidden-camera video goes to facilitate transactions the "controllers" can't possibly know - how emblematic of his Prime Ministership, a yen for control without any interest in understanding.

Thy rod and thy staff

Here was a man who had ascended to high office by ingratiating himself with the powerful. The powerful had to cover for him or look as though their judgment was off. When they departed the scene, when Abbott ascended to a ne plus ultra role he couldn't cope. There was always someone to keep Abbott in check - the Jesuits at Riverview, Kerry Packer, John Howard - until there was only Peta Credlin.

You can't tell the Abbott story without talking about Credlin. He was right to outsource the administration and the discipline for which he had no patience, wrong to rely on her so completely. She didn't have any special insights into the Australian people that real Prime Ministers only begin to glimpse toward the end of their careers, careers in which they have put themselves on the line and in people's faces more than any backroom operator ever dares. She wasn't a scapegoat or a martyr. Those who romanticise the Abbott government and her role in it have to admit she wasn't up to propping up and covering for such an inadequate man. Margie Abbott wasn't, and even John Howard couldn't keep up the fiction - once again, preserving his record of dumping on every Liberal leader but himself.

Credlin's successes were separable from his, while her failures were inseparably theirs. Mind you, she is the most substantial answer to the questions: what's the difference between Abbott and Mark Latham? Why was the latter so repulsive while the former was inevitable?

Abbott retreats to Forestville with Margie-and-the-girls. Credlin goes back to her husband, who is probably not up to the job of managing the re-election of the Turnbull Government.

Off the record

Those who thought Abbott was a capable fellow, or might become one, were mistaken. Same with those who thought he was a good guy, pleasant and amiable and intelligent when in safe, off-the-record company - they wanted to believe, and they were mistaken too. Samantha Maiden actually said Monday night on Lateline that "Tony Abbott isn't a wrecker" - one of those astonishing falsehoods that is so diametrically opposed to the truth it mocks the sheer futility of accurate reporting.

Tony Abbott is a wrecker, he's always been a wrecker; to deny that he's a wrecker is to fail even the most basic understanding of the man and his place in our politics. His assurance that he won't wreck or snipe or undermine has zero value. Abbott was and is a wrecker in the same way that the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge are palpably located in Sydney, and that to assert that they are somehow located in Geraldton would not be just a difference of opinion but flatly wrong. You can't even talk about this government without talking about basic truths and denials thereof.

Those who reported on that government thought we were being 'partisan' when we objected to the blatant falsehoods, not only for their falsity but their blatantness. Take, for example, this blog's official bunny: he was sent to report on something that actually happened (that Abbott sulked for almost a full day, and was ungracious when he did speak), and which has happened repeatedly. He then pretends that this reality is somehow out of character:

Even at its most benign, it was a parting non-decision, characteristic of his government's mostly hollow presentation as little more than a non-Labor government.

Regardless of intent, it conveyed an absence of grace which not only reflected poorly on Team-Abbott, but seemed at odds with Abbott's own more honourable style.

Abbott's departure should have been marked by the dignity of a swift exit, not a sullen vacuum.

He went out the way he went on. To the very end, press gallery journalists made Abbott out to be a better politician, a better man, than he ever was or could have been. When historians start to fossick through the wreckage of this government, Mark Kenny will still be trying to recover the sunk costs of his credibility by insisting his insider notions really are worth something, something more than what is obviously true.

It's amazing how those savvy insiders only found out after it was all over: if not this, etc. Paul Sheehan reckoned he knew two weeks ago and declined to let us in on it, which goes to his credentials as a journalist.

The Abbott government was a fake government, and the press gallery covered up for it until the loss of credibility began to bite them too. They never had any basis for their blithe assumption that Abbott would or could make a transition from wrecker to statesman, and it did them no good to re-state that he never made the transition. A dog might chase a car and even displace the driver, but it is never going to become a capable driver; everyone of the contrary opinion was kidding themselves. Decades of political judgment, before Abbott became Prime Minister and now since, count for nothing.

Not since Alfred Deakin have we had a Prime Minister so steeped in media training from early adulthood that he could only imagine politics through headlines and bylines. Abbott was Murdoch's Manchurian Candidate, which is why the old bastard had to come from New York to reverse-midwife him out of office. Abbott had entered politics as Hewson's press secretary, running his own agenda ahead of his boss and party even then. He replaced Reith as Howard's favoured leaker. Through this the press gallery grew to love him, and why their grief at his departure is genuine if not well-founded.

The real reason why his swipes at the media in his sooky, churlish farewell address are so unfair are not because any and all criticism of the media is unfair, but because he lived by the media cycle and assumed he was too clever to perish by it. Abbott's claim that he could calm the media was always Canute-like in its hubris. No conservative, nobody with any media experience, has any excuse for believing that or even playing along.

The press gallery couldn't believe their man would turn on them as he did - but by then his only alternative was to turn on himself, and nobody expected him to do that. If Tony Abbott was no good at media, what was he good at? What was he good for?

Permanent interests

The loyalties which centre upon [the leader] are enormous. If he trips, he must be sustained. If he make mistakes, they must be covered. If he sleeps, he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good, he must be pole-axed.

- Winston Churchill

Liberals stagger and stumble under the demands of office, and look to a leader to make their lives easier. When Abbott didn't, and couldn't make their lives easier, when they spent more time covering for his missteps and misstatements, they got rid of him. They leaked to ensure they weren't entombed with him, like the entourage of a Pharaoh. They spent six hours meeting over same-sex marriage - not war, nor economic reform, nor Indigenous recognition - but because they were sure Abbott was wrong while lacking the ability to come up with and enact the right answer.

Howard, Fraser, and Menzies made their lives easier - they chafed and grumbled, but they accepted imperfect leadership over the hyper-engagement required in its absence. The Liberal Party got rid of Gorton, Snedden, Peacock (twice), Downer, Nelson, and 2009-model Turnbull for the same reason they got rid of Abbott; the leader supports the led, not the other way around. The Liberal Party is not a commune. They want leadership and they will pay for it in blood if that is its price.

The Liberal Party has failed as an organisation for electing and maintaining such an inadequate leader. It is one of only two political parties that leads governments, and its leaders must be Prime Ministerial timbre. The Liberal Party's three longest-serving leaders are three of the four longest-serving Prime Ministers. Abbott is their fourth-longest serving leader but has one of the shorter Prime Ministerial tenures. Claiming that Abbott was brilliant at media is like Labor claims that Evatt was a brilliant at law - all very well, but never sufficient for leading a government.

Having come to office with so little public goodwill, it was incumbent on Abbott to reach out, to flesh out the bare bones of the campaign offering, to take people into his confidence. Just because the sheep in the press gallery accepted "on-water matters" and other obfuscations, it didn't mean we all did. Abbott's "slowing down the media cycle" ensured we always remained suspicious about him, and denied the Liberals the honeymoon they had expected.

Washed up on the northern beaches

The 1960s TV series Skippy was filmed in Kuring-gai National Park, on Sydney's northern beaches. The area is notoriously parochial. Communities there have actually campaigned against better roads and public transport because they do not want to make it easier for interlopers. Yet, their two representatives in the House of Representatives, Abbott and Bronwyn Bishop, are from the upper North Shore - Killara may as well be Timbuktu for those on the insular peninsula.

Bishop has her branches sewn up. Insofar as she can conceive of her political extinguishment at all, she will probably be succeeded by her chief of staff Damien Jones, Kerry's husband. Abbott is likely to be succeeded by someone more like Mike Baird (Baird's state electorate lies within Abbott's) rather than a rock-ribbed conservative like himself.

To quote from Abbott's farewell speech:

In my maiden speech here in this Parliament, I quoted from the first Christian service ever preached here in Australia. The reverend Richard Johnson took as his text: "What shall I render unto the Lord for all his blessings to me?"

At this, my final statement as Prime Minister, I say: I have rendered all and I am proud of my service.

This is all very well if you see God as your personal service-provider. In his columns for The Sydney Morning Herald, Peter FitzSimons mocks award recipients in sports or showbusiness for thanking God for looking out for them while apparently neglecting so many and so much else. Here too Abbott's limited idea of his own piety must not be seen as compensating for, but instead compounding, his other shortcomings.

Conservatives demand that their opponents make a dignified exit but feel under no compunction to do so themselves. Peacock and Hewson departed after crashing while Howard and Downer did not. On Monday night, after all was lost, Kevin Andrews made a bid for the deputy leadership against Bishop that might have seemed laughably futile. Andrews' pluck/ doggedness, and that of Bishop, stands in stark contrast to the moderates-in-name-only who've made their peace with bad, right-wing policy for the tinkling bells and clattering cymbals of office.

Those who went along with Abbott in order to get along, like Joe Hockey, now look foolish for having done so. They should have known better, which goes to questions of judgment that apologias like this tend to avoid. As Treasurer Hockey meant well and was diligent, just as John Kerin or Les Bury were.

A coup?

What a lot of silly reporting has invoked this loaded word.

If Roman Quadvlieg or Angus Campbell were seizing the keys and passwords of government and suspending the Constitution, if leading figures in Abbott's government were dead or in prison, that would be a coup. What happened on Monday night was not a coup.

I still remember when John Howard conceded defeat at the Wentworth Hotel in 2007. He'd conceded defeat before; he plodded through his speech, in his way, with more good grace for Rudd than Abbott could muster for Turnbull - while the eyes of Jeanette Howard darted around the room, as though she feared they were going to rise up and strangle the Howard family, as though she felt they deserved no less.

I have been, and I remain, a Turnbull sceptic.

When all is said and done

There were a number of people who contacted me via social media to tell me that I should be posting - I'd just prioritised other things over the past few weeks. It's really touching, thank you all.

Because the press gallery coverage of the Abbott government from beginning to end has been such terrible shit, even the summaries by one of the better members of the gallery is barely competent.

Abbott had been looking ragged and I felt reluctant to fully cheer his defeat and subsequent silence. But no - he's just a sook and a churl, others will have to look out for him, and man the medicine cabinet in a way he never would or could.

For all the long-winded blather of this blog:

• this is the best summary of Tony Abbott. It was written before just after he became PM and stands as a better obituary than all those catalogues of flags, onion-eating etc.
• this is the best summary of Abbott's final speech, and what Abbott was about as a reactionary.
• this is worth reading on what comes next.

Losing it 1: The spearhead

Traditionally, an issue has popped up in the media, squadrons of journalists rush out with pre-prepared cliches to smother any public interest, and the issue dies and is replaced by another one. They may be weighty issues, they may not; but you can be sure that the media will churn through them.

In recent years, editors and news directors have lost control of this media churn. The decline in consumption of traditional broadcast media means there's a strong correlation between social media users and the remaining readers/ listeners/ viewers of the broadcasters. The smarter people in the broadcast media realise this, while the less smart ones - disproportionately found in the press gallery, and "media management" roles in the political class - persist with the view that social media are somewhere between annoyances and competitors. They can't dismiss us out of hand (the old saws about cats or breakfast pics have had their day) but they dare not admit we keep them up at night.

Adam Goodes' Indigenous dance celebration at scoring a goal didn't seem so strange to those of us from northeastern Australia, as Preston Towers observes in his masterful account of the controversy. Rugby league player Greg Inglis does a goanna move after he scores tries, which is just Inglis being Inglis; it is not worthy of booing even by fans of teams Inglis pays against, or by those who (for whatever reason) don't like him.

It's true that New Zealand's rugby union team, the All Blacks, do a Maori war dance (haka) before every match, facing their opponents at close range, sometimes including a genuinely menacing throat-slitting move. It's also true that the Australian team, the Wallabies, did a half-hearted Aboriginal-derived response, but that they haven't done it for decades. Because this guy doesn't realise that he isn't quite as Proud Of Our Aussie Heritage as he might imagine.

It also makes this whole debate beside the point. Rugby fans are no more/less Australian than AFL fans, no more/less uncouth or passionate, and no more/less across issues of structural racism.

Goodes is not, as one cranky fan pointed out, the first Aboriginal AFL player; he's not the first prominent Aborigine who uses his public profile to help young people. What makes him different to those who came before, like Nicky Winmar or Graham "Polly" Farmer, is that prominent Aborigines these days can mix it in public debates. Prominent Aborigines like Goodes, Rachael Perkins, Larissa Behrendt, Noel Pearson, or Marcia Langton are central to public debates involving indigenous people unlike previous generations of leaders like Harold Blair, or Bennelong.

The idea that Goodes ought not express pride in his heritage, or that he's being aggressive in doing so, is rubbish. Ron Barassi has spoken of his Italian heritage, including the harassment his father suffered during World War II when Australia was at war with Italy. Dermott Brereton's hardscrabble upbringing is not unlike the disadvantage suffered by many Indigenous people. He has spoken of his Irish heritage and the threats he received as a result.

Did Brereton really never offer any support to the terrorist organisation IRA? Has Goodes ever supported terrorism, openly or otherwise? Brereton's criticism of Goodes is curious. He looks like an old stager who doesn't get it. Mind you, that puts him firmly in line with the gutless all-about-the-money AFL Commission.

When he was called an "ape" showed a deft touch in raising the issue, then defusing the anger that arose from it. He insisted the child be protected from the ravages of tabloid (broadcast, "professional") media, and kept the focus on structural, endemic racism. Accepting his Australian of the Year accolade last year he did much the same thing: raised harsh truths squarely, and then called on everyone to face them together.

I wish we had a Prime Minister who could do that.

The man who has not handled Goodes' comments at all well was racial discrimination offender Andrew Bolt:

People who loathe Bolt will show that image for the rest of his life, and probably beyond it. Bolt has to keep up his persona of the disappointed conservative. Even after his conviction he was "disappointed" and, like Goodes yesterday, took time away from his job. Bolt finds accusations of racism directed at him to be "chilling", as the young people say.

Appearing calm and measured is essential to keeping onside well-meaning conservatives who don't pay close attention to media controversies, but who want a respectable champion of their values in the media when they do dip into it.

If Bolt blows his cool he loses those people. The idea that he's a hate-filled, seething bigot will turn advertisers away, and NewsCorp will drop him. James Packer, a major shareholder of the TV network that broadcasts Bolt, has already shirtfronted him. If there is a "war" over "race hate" between Goodes and Bolt, then Bolt has already lost it.

Spittle-flecked partisans aside, pragmatic and experienced media professionals like Jo Hall expected this to blow over:

I agree with Carol Duncan and Paul Daley: we do need a discussion, one that doesn't end with recriminations and moving-on-to-the-next-story but to somewhere productive, the "brave and fine" conversation we've always been promised but could never quite manage by ourselves.

The AFL had only planned to have one Indigenous Round but has effectively been forced to have a second this past weekend - without Goodes present, and with the possibility that he might retire rather than continue as a lightning-rod for the country's worst instincts. The AFL Commission has not done the leading when it comes to this issue, it has been led. But this goes beyond one sport, which bears more responsibility for the nation than it can reasonably bear.

Again, I wish we had a Prime Minister capable of leading such a discussion. The press gallery promised us that Abbott was both sincere and capable when it came to Indigenous policy issues, and they acted all surprised when neither turned out to be true.

Abbott has gone to ground, which he usually does when the going gets tough. He could have leavened his clearly difficult experience with Bronwyn Bishop by stepping up with even some noble words on this issue - that would have been enough for the mugs in the press gallery. He's not going to talk about on-piste matters. He might not understand AFL or race relations, but he's in that job because he knows how to fool the broadcast media. If he absents himself from the media, the thinking goes, the broadcast media will run out of new angles and the story will die. All that's happened for him and his office is he's been left behind. The broadcast media promised us he was "Prime Ministerial", when he was never anything of the sort.

The broadcast media have now been abandoned at the very point where social media is running rings around them, and they need to borrow Authority from external sources. They're just there to be used and abused by this government, a realisation everyone has come to except them.

They still believe that an endemic issue will just churn through and Good Old Tony will come through for them once more. He'll play them, and they think they play him too, bless them. When they do start focusing on another issue, they might find less public engagement than traditional broadcasters are enjoying now. They become less adept at picking the right issue for their One Daily Story, and their Access Privileges count for less and less with a smaller, more engaged audience.

The worst thing journalists can be is not biased, or even shallow, but obtuse. On Indigenous issues generally, and on Goodes in particular, the media sure have been obtuse. This can't end well for traditional access-oriented broadcast journalism.

Debates and outcomes

And we'll paint by numbers 'til something sticks
And I don't mind doing it for the kids
(So come on) jump on board
Take a ride (yeah)
(You'll be doin' it all right)
Jump on board feel the high
'Cause the kids are alright

- Kylie Minogue and Robbie Williams Kids

Not far from where I live is a bend on the Parramatta River called Kissing Point. You might think it's called that because the outlook shimmers prettily in the moonlight, because it's secluded without being remote, and is therefore a perfect place for young lovers to go for a pash without being interrupted. It is, but that isn't why Kissing Point is so called.

The kissing-point is a nautical term for the furthest point up a river that an ocean-going ship can go. Ships that are big enough to withstand the big waves of the open ocean can go varying distances from the open sea up a particular river. On mighty rivers like the Yangzi or the Amazon, ships can travel hundreds of kilometres before hitting the kissing-point. On the Parramatta River, the kissing-point is less than thirty kilometres from the river's mouth at the Heads of Sydney Harbour.

Debates over Australia's head of state and our flag are a bit like nautical processions up the river. They start off with great pomp and splendour, cheered on by the city's great and good from their glass-fronted balconies; then they start having to weave and dodge around smaller craft as the Harbour narrows into a river, before foundering at - or turning back ahead of - the kissing-point.

What is the kissing-point in our national debates about symbolism? The nation grudgingly accepts the political class and places public resources at their mercy, but baulks at handing over its symbols to them.

This is what Peter FitzSimons and Tim Mayfield miss in their attempts to revive old debates and anticipate old objections.

First step: the way that article is set out, you could be forgiven for thinking Mayfield is just another Guardian Australia journalist. He isn't: he's the Director of the Australian Republican Movement, which isn't disclosed in that article as I write this.

Second: FitzSimons was appointed to his role, not elected from a wide range of candidates in a vigorous campaign among the people. A supposedly democratic movement that calls for popular input but seeks to manage the outcome? Sounds like one of the major political parties, whose social base is small and getting smaller.

Peter FitzSimons is arguably Australia’s king of Twitter ...

So is anyone, really, given that medium's democratic nature.

You'll note, as I have, that FitzSimons uses social media to shout out to political-class mates like Joe Hockey and Christopher Pyne. How is he going to break it to them that he is out to rock their world? Easy: he isn't. Neither the head of state nor the flag will undergo any change of which they do not approve. Indeed, any such change would be in their gift, their plaything if you will:

FitzSimons said he favoured keeping the current system where the prime minister chose the governor general, but that the choice should not require the assent of Buckingham Palace.

There are good arguments for and against that position, but they aren't being made here.

Days after the Speaker of the House of Representatives has presented herself as proof, yet again, that the Age of Entitlement is not over, it is the wrong time to assert that a new high office should be created and handed over to the political class. This is not to say that political-class appointees are absent from the Governor-Generalcy - they aren't, but appointees are required to distance themselves from the political class in a way that isn't obvious with a presidency.

In 1999 people saw Malcolm Turnbull, with his blithe exterior barely concealing a control-freak modus operandi learned at the feet of Kerry Packer and Neville Wran, making it easy for his opponents to make a case against a politicians' republic. Turnbull said that very little would change under the model he proposed, while at the same time a great deal would change.

What Turnbull saw as a selling point was in fact the fatal flaw of his proposal, all the trivia and administrative adjustment of a symbolic change without any substantive effect. Government departments merge, demerge, and change their names and logos regularly, but these changes are not put to a public vote: if they were, they might suffer the same fate as the 1999 republic.

Turnbull got the message that if he wanted to go into politics, he couldn't just glide into the top job but had to join a party, win a seat, etc.

FitzSimons appears to be offering something similar to Turnbull: happy to court popular support but not happy to let outcomes elude his grasp. Perhaps this is why Mayfield's piece goes heavy on FitzSimons' yarn-spinning and up-the-guts rugby abilities (journalists hailed Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey, and Senator Glenn Lazarus for similar biff-and-barge qualities, which haven't necessarily translated well to public debate).

The idea that we might build a social movement big enough to change the environment in which the political class operates without them noticing or participating is rubbish, and most people realise this. Let's look to other public debates to see how a republic might fare.

Four months ago, the Treasurer promised us a genuine, sensible and mature debate on tax reform. He and the Prime Minister then set about ruling out taxes that weren't up for discussion, jumping all over the very spectre of a carbon tax for good measure. We have now arrived at a point where:

• the only tax open for discussion is the regressive GST, and
• against all evidence, ACOSS and the BCA still believe that broader tax reform is possible; and
• nope, that's it.

Hockey launched his debate at ACOSS in March, but four months later the same organisation has pretty much written him off. The BCA accepted Liberal assurances that they would implement their agenda so long as they kept quiet about it before the election, and had BCA President Tony Shepherd usher it in with his Commission of Audit - but this didn't work either. The BCA lacks even the remnants of a community-based organisation that the Liberal Party has, and can't convincingly run candidates for office like the union movement does through the ALP.

The press gallery dares not report that the BCA has lost confidence in the Liberal Party, a politically seismic event that would lead to more independent politicians and place public debate further beyond the BCA's capacity for influence.

Mayfield claims around 50% of voters support a republic in general terms. At least that amount support same-sex marriage, an issue stymied by the political class to the point where it brings on learned helplessness.

The idea that debates about national symbolism distract from bread-and-butter issues is palpably false where it is so clear that a focus on those issues yields such poor results.

FitzSimons still appears to be a director of Ausflag, which expands the scope of the change he seeks to effect to our national symbols. Conventional media management practice suggests that the scope of an issue for public debate should be narrowed rather than expanded; Turnbull was careful to separate the republic from the flag but FitzSimons has not.

Nothing will kill public affection for the current Blue Ensign flag faster than Tony Abbott's use of multiple flags as backdrops for security announcements, or galoots wearing them as capes.

FitzSimons does not appear to be a director of the other great symbolic issue of our time, recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders within the Constitution and removal of racially discriminatory passages within it. This issue - and the practicalities of what such recognition might mean - is part of Australia's national identity as much as the flag or the head of state. Again, broadening the scope of debate will appal message-control freaks; either the issue must be embraced by republicans and flag-changers, or abandoned as it was in 1999.

The one thing we need to hear from proponents of a republic - and by "we", I mean both supporters of a republic (in whatever form) as well as opponents of any form - is what they have learned from 1999. To reference one of FitzSimon's books: we need the Knight Commander Monash of Le Hamel, not the duffer in the gully at Gallipoli. FitzSimons appears to have learned nothing from 1999 while opening more fronts for debate than he can possibly handle. 1999 made second-rate operators like Sophie Mirabella and Tony Abbott look like tactical geniuses.

We have a press gallery, and a wider system of news/current affairs reporting in our broadcast media, that can only report on decisions that have been taken (and not even do that well). They are easily fobbed off when questioning politicians. Over the past ten years they have assured us of the suitability of politicians for high office who are manifestly not suited for responsible office at all. They have no ability to involve people in those decisions that are yet to be taken. The broadcast media is limited and exclusive. FitzSimons - an employee of a broadcast-media organisation - is starting from the wrong place to launch a far-reaching and inclusive movement.

Schoolchildren are taught to debate issues without any expectation that those debates will change the issues under debate. Political debates are like those school debates, taking time and resources but resolving nothing, giving the impression that real decisions are made elsewhere. When John Howard said that he was "happy to have the debate" on an issue, it meant his mind was made up and that he could engage in pointless banter until his opponents gave up.

Quite why FitzSimons is, as Mayfield insists, the man to inspire the Youth Of Today toward a republic is unclear. He may well wish to inspire his own children, but apart from that his youth appeal is not as obvious as he might insist (here is the segue to the quote at the top of this post, incase you missed it). After 1999 republicans seemed to agree that their cause should wait, like a watchful vulture on a dead tree, until Queen Elizabeth II has died; that commitment appears to have been abandoned, but again it is not clear why.

A far-reaching public debate - one that might change the way media and the political class operate - is both what the country needs, and the outcome least likely. Far easier for them to burn FitzSimons, to portray him as some unfocused nutter, and reduce him to an irrelevant caricature of his rugby and his yarns ("Did you hear the one about the winger in the lineout? ... I gotta million of 'em!").

The very idea that we might have a sensible and wide-ranging discussion on national symbolism is beyond wrong, it's absurd. Our public debate is so inadequate, and the proponents of change appear to have learned so little from earlier debacles. They arrogantly underestimate the amount of thought necessary to build a wide-ranging, inclusive movement of people with both goodwill and focus. Peter FitzSimons is not the person to lead his organisation, nor the nation, toward a new system of government that might be better than the one we have.

The clearest and best example of how to conduct a wide-ranging, complex, and mature debate that involves everyone - politicians and journalists, policy wonks and frontline workers and even victims - is the debate around domestic/family violence. Leaders of the debate, like Rosie Batty, are prominent without being grandstanding. They can handle themselves in media interviews without over-egging the "importance" of either broadcast or social media in themselves. They bring politicians with them while making it clear they may not take credit or use the issue to score points.

The broadcast media's traditional tools of hype, cliche, and bullshit have been applied sparingly to coverage of this debate. Mercifully, nobody asks whether Rosie Batty has "won the night" or "had a good week", is she "feuding" with other stakeholders, or who she is wearing. This debate, the media, and the nation - from the highest offices of state to the poorest individuals who've just been abused by members of their household - are better for this absence of media business-as-usual. They can so take serious issues seriously. They should do it more often.

Barrie Cassidy queers the pitch

Barrie Cassidy is one of the longest-serving members of the press gallery and the host of the ABC TV show Insiders. His analysis doesn't quite work because, like Michelle Grattan, he takes political developments as they happen without any real long-term perspective.

Take this. The first questions are: what is "Plibersek's gay marriage pitch"? At what will it fail?

No matter how fatigued and cynical seasoned political journalists become, they line up enthusiastically to hear debates in the Parliament set aside for a conscience vote.

Such debates are refreshingly honest and passionate, allowing members of Parliament on all sides to shed stringent party allegiances and follow their heartfelt convictions.

That the issue is not just restricted to religious beliefs make the debates even more compelling.

There are MPs who vote like this all the time. They're called independents. Cassidy regards them as freaks and ferals and wishes that the electoral system could be re-jigged to stop such people getting elected.

The reason why Cassidy starts the article like this is because he wants to make it clear that parliamentary debates should be conducted for the entertainment of journalists. He then goes on to explain why, and how much, Tanya Plibersek has let him down.

Now Labor's Deputy Leader, Tanya Plibersek, wants to bind MPs to a party position on gay marriage, rather than allow a free vote based on personal beliefs.

Plibersek has been accused of raising the issue only because her electorate has a high proportion of gay people, and the Greens, as a party committed, driven and united behind marriage equality, present as the only danger to her re-election.

Plibersek has represented the electorate of Sydney since 1998. I haven't been back through her record but it's fair to say she would not have won that seat, and kept doing so, had she not been deeply involved in issues affecting the LGBTIQ community.

If you understand politics enough to comment on her seat, you'd understand that and seek to convey it as part of your analysis. The idea that Plibersek woke up one morning to be confronted by marauding gay gangs wanting to get married is silly.

Note the passive voice "has been accused" - by whom, with what motives? Why did it not occur to an experienced political journalist to ask those questions? Whenever journalists lapse into the passive voice they are up to no good.

Cassidy wrote a book called The Party Thieves in which he claimed that ambitious politicians had somehow 'stolen' each of the major parties from their membership bases. Let's apply his thesis to Plibersek: a long-serving member of a political party (and a major one, none of your minor-party riff-raff), Plibersek worked within party forums to get same-sex marriage adopted to her party's platform. It's notable that the issue did not cause powerful opponents to flounce out of the party, as the ALP split in the 1950s.

The Deputy Leader of the Labor Party is seeking to get the Labor caucus to vote according to the already settled Labor platform: this is not quite the bolt-from-the-blue Cassidy is trying to make it appear.

More than that, her motives have been linked with the leadership, especially because Bill Shorten went on the record last year in a speech to the Australian Christian Lobby, locking himself into a conscience vote.

Again with the passive voice. If Plibersek is the tactical doofus Cassidy makes her out to be, Shorten is safe.

Sounds like the start of a LABOR LEADERSHIP SHOCK beat-up. It's on the record that Cassidy doesn't take kindly to ambitious Labor deputies. He didn't take kindly to Gillard, Crean, or Keating, deputies who turned on their leaders. He revered Lionel Bowen and Brian Howe, who each no more wanted to become Prime Minister than fly to the moon. He was quite fond of Kim Beazley, who waited until the leadership was dropped in his lap. As for upstarts like Hawke, Latham or Rudd - hey, that's just politics.

However, beyond that, her frustration is understandable. Despite a succession of opinion polls showing majority support for the move, the issue has been allowed to drift for years. Plibersek obviously believes that locking in Labor's numbers will guarantee change.

Not necessarily. Labor is in opposition. If there was a vote in parliament on same-sex marriage it would not pass because Labor doesn't have the numbers.

So, what does Cassidy mean by 'change'? Labor's platform won't change. Plibersek might be seeking to make a statement about Labor's intent when in government. She might be seeking to progress an issue she's been working on for years.

In politics, it's possible to lose a vote in the short term but win eventually. Look at Tony Abbott's repeated no-confidence motions in the Gillard government (Cassidy has): Abbott lost every one of those votes. Did this make him a loser? Eventually, Abbott convinced the public to share his lack of confidence in the last Labor government.

It is possible that Plibersek is playing a long game with same-sex marriage - indeed, it's likely - but in his lunge for PLIBERSEK FAIL Cassidy cannot even examine the possibility.

What's the point of doing all that work to change the Labor platform if you can't enforce it? Should this issue be on Labor's platform at all? Cassidy should engage those issues, but can't.

But the party's national conference will resist the call for a host of sound reasons.

Undeniably the community wants change, but a conscience vote on both sides would be the best expression - and endorsement - of that attitude; an opinion freely expressed rather than one driven by party discipline.

Tanya Plibersek isn't deputy leader of 'both sides'. Like any practical politician she is doing what she can with what she has, and what she has is some influence within the ALP.

The tactics are wrong as well; and that was best underlined by openly gay Liberal Senator, Dean Smith, who supports gay marriage.

So a Liberal backbencher has greater tactical sense than the Deputy Leader of the ALP? Smith has more directly at stake with this issue than Plibersek, a straight married woman, but Plibersek has the record on this issue that he lacks. Cassidy is only quoting him because he needs some support in opposing Plibersek.

He recently said that "if the ALP was to adopt a binding vote ... then the issue of a conscience vote in the Liberal Party is dead".

He is right. Such a move by Labor would release the pressure on Tony Abbott to grant his side a conscience vote.

No it wouldn't, and no he's not.

First of all, same-sex marriage is dead within the Liberal Party so long as Tony Abbott is leading it. Smith, Cassidy, and everyone else with any political experience at all knows this.

Abbott and same-sex marriage is like John Howard and the republic - he's just not going to support it, and everyone who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves. He'll go around stomping out debate, saying that Liberals who support it aren't really Liberals at all - until community pressure builds and a vote must be held, whereupon he will frame the vote in such a way that it can't succeed. If same-sex marriage came to a vote while Abbott is Prime Minister he would put up a travesty: Smith and other prominent same-sex-marriage advocates would vote it down, proponents would be split, and Abbott would declare the issue as dead as the republic. People like Barrie Cassidy would praise his deft political skills.

Abbott's opposition to same-sex marriage isn't tactics, it's strategy. Cassidy should be able to tell the difference.

What pressure is there on Tony Abbott to hold a vote on same-sex marriage? Tony Abbott is under pressure over a number of issues, but same-sex marriage isn't one of them. How can you ease pressure that is barely felt?

Smith did not win a Senate seat for the WA Liberals by being a passionate advocate for gay marriage. They voted for him despite, not because of, his position on this issue. What he is trying to do here is not introduce same-sex marriage, but keep alive the idea of the Liberal Party as the natural party of government - the Liberal Party disposes in its own good time and not a minute sooner.

Progressives often criticise conservatives for being against any and all social change. Not only is this not fair, it's inaccurate: just as there are plenty of eminently conservative positions brought in by Labor governments, so too there are progressive positions that were brought in by Coalition governments. Conservatives almost never dismiss social reform out of hand: "now's not the right time" or "there are other priorities" deflect and bog down progressive momentum, whereas outright opposition can rile it up.

Smith would rather there were no same-sex marriage for the next fifty years rather than have the ALP or any member of it get some credit. That's how conservatives work. Barrie Cassidy has no excuse for not knowing that, and failing to convey it to his readers.

Neither would it be a good look for the Opposition to impose a binding vote, and then suffer the humiliation of MPs voting against it anyway, as some surely would.

Labor has established mechanisms for dealing with its members who vote against their party's platform, and Cassidy knows that - but more on that later.

And already merely raising the issue has shown how divisive it can be. The ALP's national conference is a singular opportunity for its leader, Bill Shorten, to take centre stage with a developed plan for the future built around economic management. The issue of Palestine threatens to distract from that. Loading up the agenda with an unnecessary brawl around gay marriage is a further impediment.

Labor has an established lead over the government in the polls, just as Kim Beazley did a decade-and-a-half ago. Shorten led it into that position by being risk-averse, by only opposing the government where it was proposing something unpopular. Say what you will about Plibersek and same-sex marriage, or recognition of Palestine - it isn't risk-averse. Cassidy should acknowledge that, but he can't because it goes against his narrative.

Why does Labor have to focus on economic management? The Coalition promised to be econocrats first and last but most of their energy has been dissipated in cultural stances like abolishing Medicare bulk-billing, or enforcing Anzac Correctness. Why can't Labor's future include same-sex marriage and a Palestinian state?

For most of its first 60 or 70 years, Labor insisted on tight discipline. New members had to take "the pledge", allowing for internal debate initially, but absolute adherence to the party platform in the end.

They wanted to resist factions going off on a frolic of their own, splitting the party into disparate groups.

But times have changed, and dramatically so.

Across the country, there is nothing like the support for the main parties that existed even 20 years ago. As voting patterns change, parties need to be more diverse. The broad church imperative grows, not diminishes.

That means, at times, foregoing discipline for flexibility; being more open to conscience votes, not less so.

But wouldn't that be embarrassing? Cassidy said it would be embarrassing if some Labor people voted one way and others another. Now he's saying there should be more of it. Why were Labor splitters of old "on a frolic of their own", while those who want to vote against today's platform are just being broad-church? When Plibersek opposes her leader on this issue, a matter of party platform, is she being broad-church or frolicsome?

Cassidy has not made the case that flexibility of the type he advocates is the answer, or even an answer, to declining support and participation in traditional politics. Maybe no such case can be made. Does political debate really end with the bemusement of journalists?

Barrie Cassidy is entitled to engage in political analysis, too; his employer pays him to do so. His analysis just isn't very good. He trashes his own experience, even the thesis of his Party Thieves, to make what looks like a self-defeating point. He flails a successful politician in pursuit of a long-term social reform goal whose popularity bears no relationship to the numbers of people directly affected. This year's Labor Conference is less significant than you might expect; it is certainly not that significant to a journalist who's seen plenty such conferences come and go.

Cassidy's political experience should be worth a lot more than he makes of it, and not just to himself. The Drum should do a better job of editing what is submitted to it. Cassidy can't even have a meaningful debate with a blank piece of paper - no wonder he can't handle political debates among other people.