Not Tony Abbott

Tony Abbott is not widely trusted, except by Liberals and press gallery journalists. Given the extent and frequency of promises broken it's a mistake for him to frame all his messages around trust and keeping promises. People are looking for an alternative to Tony Abbott but, as wasn't the case with Rudd or Gillard, there isn't one.

Joe Hockey isn't an alternative to Abbott. He is the lynchpin of this government. He needs to get across both the ideas that a) the economy really is in crisis and b) he's the Treasurer to address said crisis with such tools as are available to the Treasurer. Any credit for consistency and good government that will become due to this government will accrue to Hockey, not Abbott. If he fails at either or both, both men and their government will go down. Even if he succeeds it may put him in a position where he takes on Abbott and shunts him out, but that won't happen soon if at all.

Malcolm Turnbull isn't an alternative to Abbott. The Liberals know how to play him and he hasn't learnt any new tricks.

In the republic debate in the late '90s, Howard and Abbott backed Turnbull into a republican model that was unpopular, limited in scope, and focused on changing as little as possible about the way our political architecture works. Turnbull could have worked with those who supported a republic but not the model that was excreted from the convention - many in number but relatively powerless - but he chose to pooh-pooh them all. With a broader base he might have won one or two states in the 1999 referendum and maintained momentum for an eventual republic which would now be realised.

As Opposition Leader in 2008 Turnbull was unpopular, limited in scope, and focused on changing as little as possible about the way the Liberal Party worked. He was played for a fool by Eric Abetz over Godwin Grech, and Howard legatees like Nick Minchin nibbled away from the sidelines at any attempt to move the Liberal Party on from the reasons why it lost in 2007, even given the gift of Howard being removed from Parliament. Turnbull could have worked with those who supported anyone but Abbott (especially the Victorians; Turnbull would have won more seats in that state than Abbott has or can) - they were many in number but relatively powerless - but he pooh-poohed the idea that Abbott would beat him. He could have been the beneficiary of the Rudd meltdown and Gillard's fumbles. Even though he lost by a single vote in 2009, he may as well have lost by fifty.

As Communications Minister today, Murdoch and Abbott have backed Turnbull into a telecommunications model that is unpopular, limited in scope (both in terms of Labor's NBN and those operating in other countries), and focused on changing as little as possible about the way our media and ICT architectures work. Turnbull could reach out to those who are interested in ICT as a facilitator of growth - many in number but relatively powerless - but again, he chose to pooh-pooh them all.

There's a pattern here. Malcolm Turnbull is not about greatness and the leadership to get us to a bright new future. Those of us who thought he might have been were wrong about that, too. He can't build and maintain fractious coalitions, more a marquee man than a big tent guy. He tosses babies out with bathwater. His one tangible political legacy, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, should be coming into its own now with the drought but it is as one with Nineveh and Tyre. Turnbull will puddle along in Communications and may well take on another portfolio, but like Kevin Andrews or David Johnston his past is more substantial than his future.

A government is not obliged to be fractious and divided.

Paul Fletcher is Turnbull's parliamentary secretary. When Fletcher talks about the private sector, not the federal government, determining the future economic benefits Australia can draw from digital technologies, he isn't interested in hearing from some apps developer who lives with his parents. By 'the private sector', Fletcher means Telstra, Optus, and Foxtel. They will determine what we shall have and what we shall not have in line with their pre-existing plans.

Several countries around the world have determined specific goals for their digital sector.

In 2011, Brazil set its sights on raising its ranking from seventh to fifth world's largest economy by 2022 largely on the back of its exploitation of digital technologies enabled by fibre broadband ... South Korea and Sweden are constantly hailed for their digital vision

That's nice.

Countries that don't want to change their global position leave it to the private sector. The US is the biggest economy in the world, it leaves its ICT infrastructure to the private sector (it does have a significant military capacity, whose innovations - including the internet itself - occasionally spill over into the private sector). Countries that want to improve their economic position require government intervention: Brazil, South Korea, and Sweden are examples of this, as are China and India. Australia's economic position relative to other countries is one of stagnation or decline in most metrics, so by default the Abbott government has committed us to a low-growth future that it does not fully understand. The government is deaf to rallying cries like this; companies that don't exist yet have no clout.

Google Australia managing director Mailie Carnegie told Fairfax Media in October, the company wanted the change the tune of the public discussion ... "I look at the energy around the NBN. At the moment it's focused around cost. I'd love to talk about the benefits and how we can change the rhetoric, from cost to disruption," she said at the time.

Neither Fletcher, nor Turnbull, nor anyone in this government will have any truck with this communist notion of 'disruption', thank you very much. Australia being 'open for business' means that unions and asylum seekers are up for disruption, not large and somnolent businesses. There was never any indication that any other outcome would apply.

This brings us to the man who should be more not-Abbott than anyone else: Bill Shorten.

Do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man.

- Iain Duncan Smith, UK Conservative Opposition Leader 2001-03

Nobody wants to hear from a party that has just been defeated. Even though Rudd and Gillard have since departed Parliament, there were good reasons why the previous government was re-elected. Shorten was right not to come out too hard too early.

A successful opposition needs a few points of difference and With education funding (including childcare) and environmental issues (fracturing the water table for the sake of gas, dumping the Barrier Reef), are plenty in themselves. Simple statements of principle - that education is important, in itself and economically, and likewise for the environment - could sharply limit this government and help voters work out what post-Rudd/Gillard Labor stand for.

This government wants to act on behalf of stratified education and of those who casually pollute as a by-product of other gains, but it wants to be seen to act on behalf of all Australians. An opposition that is about maximising educational opportunity, and which points out there are more jobs with a burgeoning reef (e.g. in tourism) than there are in a depleted one (e.g. in mining), leaves the government exposed as facilitators of those who would constrict the country for their own purposes.

Communications is another potential issue: the government's "reviews" and "consultations" will leave it too long to develop a strong and coherent policy; Labor will be able to offer more and better than whatever we might get from Abbott | Turnbull | Fletcher | Partners (limited liability). This is a good start.

Shorten has given Abbott enough rope. He is in a strong position to say: I've had enough of this government, and make some declarative statements that ring true with people, and which help define him and what a potential Labor government might offer.

As to unions: targeting dodgy unions and unionists should help them, and Shorten by extention, more than it hurts them/him. It's just what Coalition governments do. What they tend not to realise is that it relies upon unemployment going lower than it is and staying that way. You can't get stuck into unions when unemployment is high or rising, unless you have carefully made the case that they (rather than global economic conditions) are directly responsible for it. If the economy turns down and unemployment rises, there will almost certainly be high-profile corporate failures that will make union malfeasance look small-scale. That's why I disagree with this paywalled article by Laura Tingle: the idea that Abbott looks purposeful while talking workplace relations is not that significant, a matter of parliamentary theatre rather than wider analysis.

Workchoices failed because it had plenty of detractors and few die-in-a-ditch supporters. The Heydon Royal Commission will come under pressure to be wrapped up early if it turns on employers as the Costigan Royal Commission did. Labor has 120 years of dealing with unions. Shorten should be able to draw on that.

As it stands, Shorten has made few such declarative statements. He's surrounded by sand, and the few lines drawn in it have genrally been put there by others. This might have been designed to bipartisanly protect both Burke and Hunt, but it looks like the government has bent Labor to its will and blunts its criticism of Hunt. If he won't come out swinging in favour of the national disability scheme or education or the Great Barrier Reef, and if he won't be goaded over having been a union official, will he stand up for anything?

Greg Jericho pointed out that this government was elected despite popular support for Labor policies. If Shorten can establish that Labor is able to fulfill those policies it is a long way toward returning to government - especially as it becomes clear that Coalition promises of bipartisan support for school funding, disability care, and telecommunications were never real, and that those who were taken in by the 'Seinfeld politics' idea were mugs. As Hawke and Keating did with Whitlam, it is possible to retrieve legacy issues from a government that has been emphatically dispatched.

Shorten is only the third federal leader in ALP history to have spent more of his parliamentary career in government rather than opposition: the other two were H V Evatt and Kim Beazley. Evatt was a champion of human rights but couldn't carry that through to a coherent narrative of government. Faced with multifaceted challenges to national security and human rights in 2001, Beazley couldn't establish a coherent narrative for government. Shorten might be able to establish a coherent narrative for government, or he might not. His union background is much benefit to him as it was for Frank Tudor or Simon Crean, if not more so.

Now is the time for Shorten to start drawing lines in the sand, to start defining himself that he might govern others. Rudd and Gillard have gone. This government has stuffed up and isn't great at explaining itself, or explaining away its shortcomings. Soon it will go to ground to put together the Budget. Shorten should fill that vacuum so that his criticisms of the Budget have a framework, or he will end up like Iain Duncan Smith - in office but not in power.

Tony Abbott is in power, and without meaningful opposition he is cementing himself there. Last September I thought it was better to perpetuate the fiasco rather than submit to this darkening ecliptic, but others voted differently and, well, here it is.

A lesser future

I’m on the record as saying that Tony Abbott will never become Prime Minister, which is not a widely-held opinion. In recent weeks, however, we’ve seen a number of developments that cast doubt on Abbott’s ability to lead the Coalition to victory over the government. The Coalition really is offering a lesser future in terms of rail, roads, and telecommunications infrastructure, and these are the sorts of developments that affect polls.

Recent articles on Abbott's refusal to fund urban rail projects have been telling:

• In Perth, Premier Barnett had been clever in branding Federal-State infrastructure initiatives as his alone, only to find that Abbott won't fund them and Gillard is unimpressed with his grandstanding. The possibility that they might not go ahead has brought him and his back to earth with a wet crunching sound;
• In south-eastern Queensland, the disappointment in this is palpable;
• In Sydney, we deep-sixed a government that used PR to paper over serious deficiencies in the rail network. The current government retains its credibility on the basis that it is doing something constructive about it. Much will be forgiven - dodgy casino work, national parks teeming with armed randoms - until some silly accountant decides to trim the rail upgrade budget;
• In Melbourne there is a proposal to build a tunnel under the city, or not build it, and oh aren't Richmond doing well this year?

Playing silly-buggers over rail projects means that road projects won't have the desired effect in improving traffic flow. It means that the disruption that happens with big construction projects will be resented even more than usual, and that the grandstanding involved with ribbon-cutting will also be resented.

Politically, it's pointless for the Coalition to promise this. It might have been true in the 1970s that Labor voters used public transport and Liberals private, but the uptake of public transport in recent years of expensive petrol and traffic snarls simply does not correlate to rusted-on federal voting intentions. It looks like they are natives to Planet Canberra and have no idea what life is like in the suburbs.

When the Japanese bombed northern Australia during World War II, it was often difficult for those co-ordinating the war effort to contact affected sites to work out what happened, what the damage was, what assistance was required. Visiting US officials were appalled and impressed upon Australian politicians the need for a national telephone network. In both Labor and the Coalition, some understood the importance of a national telephone network delivered through copper wires, and others didn't. It was started under the Chifley government and completed under Menzies, it is a bipartisan achievement. When Telstra was sold the national telephone network was sold with it, and the Gillard government bought it for NBN at a cost of $11b.

The first major failing of the Coalition's broadband plan is that it assumes copper will provide a sustainable solution, and overestimates the degree to which it can provide current services, never mind upgrading to 25 megabits per second. It's part of the Coalition's theme of insisting The Old Ways Are Best, but this tactic simply doesn't work when dealing with technology.

Turnbull's rapid blinking at the launch could have been a function of bright studio lights, but he is accustomed to the media glare and more comfortable in it than his leader. Some say rapid blinking can be an indication of mendacity, but I'm not going there. At one point Turnbull frowned and turned to look at Abbott as though he thought his leader had said something quite mad. With his stern face and Abbott's sticky-out ears, they reminded me of the Sesame Street characters Ernie and Bert.

I get that Turnbull has to demonstrate being a team player, and that people who rail at him for not seeing the technical inadequacies of his plan don't understand why he can't break from the team-imposed ashes-and-sackcloth routine at this point. By the end of September he will almost certainly be leader once again, and I should be more pleased at that prospect than I am: Turnbull cavils before Murdoch as much as Abbott does, and that is a real worry.

The key measurements of a broadband network are how much data can be downloaded - and uploaded, thanks BigBob - and how quickly. The NBN promises much in changing the way health and education is delivered, changing the way that people work in those sectors - and changing the way people work outside those sectors, too (including transport policy, but here we run the risk of blowing the tiny minds of Coalition policy-makers). None of that was present in that announcement.

The vision of the Coalition's policy was limited to delivery of high-speed, high-definition video - but compression technologies make that less important. The sorts of high-definition images required in medicine, and the need to have those delivered in real time, would have been a better example. This would have provided a tangible vision for rural Australians, as access to health (and education) is one of the key reasons for the depletion of country towns, about which the Nationals in particular profess to care.

This leads us to the second major failing of that plan, which is that a speed on 25 megabits per second - a faster download speed than most people have in 2013 - is Good Enough For The Likes Of You. Given that their policy in 2010 cost $6b and that this one costs $29.5b (yeah right), they have no right to complain about cost blowouts under Labor.

Cost blowouts on a project is largely a function of competent project management within clearly defined scope. Despite the yearnings of some of the nuttier Libs competent project managers are not on strike until Tony Abbott moves into the Lodge, and the Opposition frontbench contains no more program management or scope-setting skill than is present in the Gillard government.

It was unutterably stupid of the Libs to schedule their policy launch at Fox Studios, to speak of the possibilities of broadband in line with News Ltd product offerings - and to hand out Daily Telegraph articles in lieu of press releases. This will make it difficult for the Libs to refute accusations that their policy is designed to avert the threat that the NBN poses to Foxtel and other Murdoch outlets, and that their interests and those of the nation are subsumed to those of News Ltd. Journalists from broadcast media other than News Ltd were meant to be, and probably were, slack-jawed with wonder at the Foxtel broadband - but no government will ever build the sort of connectivity that the world's largest media organisation has built for itself.

The Liberals' fawning to News Ltd reinforces the message in this phoneshot of Abbott, Murdoch and Rinehart, taken at the recent IPA dinner:

When I was a Young Liberal, I paid fealty to senior members of the organisation and parliamentary party in a similar manner to that. At a function full of essentially conservative people, someone should have given up their seat so that Abbott could take his seat at a table with Murdoch and Rinehart like an equal. Whatever office this man might hold, he will never exercise real power. It's every bit as bad a look as Calwell and Whitlam in 1963. Another Liberal weapon from 2010 is blunted: that image trumps any Liberal who rabbits on about Gillard and 'faceless' union leaders.

People who work in ICT regard it as maximising human potential; all that's good and bad about what humans do can potentially be made faster, cheaper, better by ICT. People who go into journalism and stay there tend not to see that. Almost all broadcast media journalists report on ICT issues from two contradictory perspectives:

• ICT is overwhelming, e.g. BIG BROTHER READS YOUR BRAINWAVES! A FACEBOOK POST ON A DRUNKEN NIGHT OUT MIGHT STOP YOU GETTING A JOB YEARS FROM NOW! HI-TECH CHILD PORN RINGS! The square-eyed inactivity that was once sheeted home to television, etc.
• ICT is irrelevant: boys' toys, phone apps built by teenagers that solve insignificant problems, gadgets that cause great excitement among certain people but who can't clearly explain why they feel that way, etc.

That disinterest about ICT should not be confused with journalistic distance and balance, however. The internet has diminished once-mighty organisations that employed thousands more journalists than they do today. The internet took their jerbs! To propose faster internet is to ask journalists to look upon the tides and rips that have drowned the careers of their colleagues and see a tsunami that will finish them off. Journalists who can cover a closed factory with a colder eye than a dead fish will wail and keen at a rumour of cutbacks at a media outlet where they've never worked.

Most of the Coalition's criticism of the NBN, with cost-benefit analyses and what have you, mainly involves failure to understand the possibilities of high-speed broadband, and what might flow from these. To give one example, policy-lightweight journalist Mark Simkin was ill-informed, and passed on that ill-information to ABC TV viewers, by claiming the NBN is a "rolled gold solution" (i.e., more than is required). Simkin usually dismisses policy detail with "the devil is in the detail", but by using the Coalition's frames to describe its own policy against that of the government Simkin shows that he lacks the ability to explain what is going on in politics, especially in actual what-it-means-to-you policy, and that his years of experience isn't helping him or us to that end.

Simkin is at his best when politics is at its most puerile. If you want a comparison of broadband policies go here, but if you want to know who farted during Question Time then Simkin is the go-to man. Whatever he puts out is no more than you deserve, ABC viewer. His employer, and organisations like it, employs journalists like him because, well, they have always employed people like him. This is not a sustainable business model, regardless of what broadband model we end up with.

Most of those whose job it is to provide information in a highly controlled way can't see a future for themselves in an age of uncontrolled information. Journalists who don't understand ICT issues but who are rattled by the disruption caused by broadband to their industry do, and can only, produce lousy reporting. The best analysis of the Coalition's broadband plan and the launch is not in the broadcast media; it is here, on a website that didn't exist a couple of months ago, or at Delimiter. On this issue, yet again, press-gallery "context" counts for fuck-all.

The cuts to urban rail projects and the cut-down broadband projects cast doubt over whether even the amounts cited in the policy will be spent. It shows people that no matter how hard you work, no matter whether you pay for private health insurance and private education for your kids, the Liberals really are offering less to the country's future than the incumbents, that will give us less to show for the prosperity coming from Asia at this point in history. Its role in creating that impression is why the Coalition broadband policy will cost it votes, not because Australia's notoriously hard-to-organise geeks have become some huge and strategic voting bloc.

Why not cut all government services? Why not restrict the age pension to those who make it past 100? Why not cut back the ADF until it would be flat out going nine rounds against Fiji? Imagine the tax cuts. Any fool can balance a limited budget, but governing Australia is another question altogether.

For three years now, Abbott and Joe Hockey and other Liberals have raised alarms about government spending and the state of the economy generally, and within that context have advocated cuts to spending. Kevin Rudd showed in 2007 that an opposition can win if it merely matches the government in areas that aren't central to their main message, as did Howard in 1996. Offering less is a real risk for oppositions, as Howard learnt in 1987.

The essential failure of John Howard is that his political instincts overrode his abstemious, low-risk rhetoric of the 1980s, warning against government bloat and centralisation, and welfare dependence. Strangely, he retained that reputation even after he led Australia's biggest-taxing, biggest-spending, highly centralised government which shovelled welfare at anyone who could whine at the right pitch. That failure must be resolved, not replicated, before by the Liberals get back into office.

Abbott is trying to get people to vote Liberal in the name of economic responsibility, while also retaining the belief that any spending cuts won't really affect them. This is a bit like selling lots of low-fat snack food rather than convincing people to buy fewer/no snack foods. It's a tricky balancing act, and others might think that Abbott can pull it off. The cuts to infrastructure (and the therefore suspect commitments on roads and to broadband that isn't broad enough) compounds all that no, no, no to create the negative impressions that stay with people and will only attract further evidence going forward: the Coalition is offering a lesser, scattershot version of the future compared to the incumbents.

Politically-savvy people study polling very carefully, and act on the basis of what they find in that data. For them, polling is a leading indicator. Yet for those who provide the data, polls are a lagging indicator of impressions formed up to the time they were asked. The idea that the Coalition are offering less and worse, not more and better, for Australia's future is taking root and polling will react accordingly. The most highly-respected poll, Newspoll, fluctuates erratically. The first paragraph of this story is, and will come to be seen, as risible as these statements. I struggle to take seriously those who are convinced that polls taken in April or earlier will reflect the result of the election to be held in September.

Even so, I've had my doubts. As a Young Liberal I was shattered when the Coalition lost the elections of 1987, 1990 and 1993. Am I kidding myself again when I say the Gillard government will be re-elected? Do I have some form of mental illness?

At the right time my Pandora feed threw out its version of this song: "Rudie can't fail", the commentator singer insists repeatedly, but if you listen to the song more closely, the Jamaican rude boys have failed already: drinking beer at breakfast and harassing morning commuters, those guys might think they're on their way but they are going nowhere. In the same way, the Coalition's policies and actions are leading them away from government office, at the very time when the broadcast media and other poll-jockeys agree they are inevitable. Look at the Coalition in Question Time and wonder whether their monkey-house antics are any more appropriate than harassment by rude-boys on a London bus. Joe Strummer (a man long and lamentedly dead, who never saw a Newspoll) is a more perceptive commentator on contemporary Australian politics than Mark Simkin, but who isn't?

Strange rituals and bad jokes

I remember reading this shower of piffle from the ABC's Head of Policy and Staff Development and dreading the prospect of appalling and inadequate coverage of the next election. Reading Greg Jericho's The Rise of the Fifth Estate gave me the ability to validate and articulate that dread. After viewing the US election from afar you have to wonder whether the ground is starting to shift under Mr Sunderland's feet:

Alan Sunderland discusses how the ABC will provide both comprehensive coverage of the next federal election campaign and engaging coverage of policy issues.

Alan Sunderland discusses nothing. He makes announcements and engages in no discussion with the well meant and considered comments that follow his edict. His declarations toward the end that he's open to discussion bear little credibility:

There are few things we can really be sure of as the next Federal Election approaches.

We certainly don’t know when it will be. Officially, a full term would see an election sometime between August and November next year, but given the volatile state of politics at the moment, no one is relaxing.

We can’t even say with certainty who will lead the Government into the campaign, as Labor’s consistently low ratings in the polls mean that leadership speculation just won’t go away.

But there is one thing we do know with a fair degree of certainty. By and large, the voters are hoping for an election campaign with more policy focus and more substance than we’ve seen in the past.

All this doubt basically means that Alan and the gang are going to cleave all the more closely to traditional journalism: verbatim reportage of what was said and avoidance of what it might mean. Any hope in the fifth paragraph is pretty much in vain, because Sunderland is going to frame reporting on government as some sort of high-wire act rather than the certainty of what comes from all that legislation that is being passed by this parliament. That's how it is; policy and substance is second-order business at best.

And that, more than anything else, is what we are turning our attention to at ABC News.

Sounds like a call to action, doesn't it? That feeling lasts until the very next paragraph:

Of course, complaints about election campaigns being policy-free zones and the media covering them as if they were horse races are nothing new ...

He then describes his own experience of getting caught up in the hurly-burly of campaigns, where journalists allow themselves to be caught up in the hype and starved of information while fooling themselves that they were at the very heart of the action, people who confused motion with progress and who thought that they did the media favours by staging their own stunts.

The US election campaign of 2008 saw blogs and Twitter accounts erupt with rebuttals of assertions by candidates; some were splenetic outbursts while others were coolly backed by stats and anecdotes. This time the process of fact-checking has become every bit as professional as the speeches and ads they critique. Ari Melber is wrong when he says "We are all fact-checkers now"; it's reserved for those with the facts to hand an the wit to know which information addresses (or rebuts) which assertion, as he concedes toward the end of his article. As you'd expect from a mainstream journalist, Melber's regards the new development as "aggressive", without disclosing (or realising?) that not only politicians but the mainstream media have most to fear from any such aggression.

The great newspapers of Britain mostly started as coffee-shop pamphlets. What elevated them from diversions to Journals Of Record and Important Organs Of Democracy, etc., is their reputation for fact-checking and reliability. To lose that reputation is to reduce mainstream media outlets back to the level of coffee-shop pamphlets, or their modern equivalents in social media.

Both Melber and Greg Jericho warn, rightly, that facts aren't enough in themselves. For example, in the past week it is a fact that unemployment in the US has gone down:

• Is Mitt Romney right when he says that too few jobs were created in the past month, and that too many people have given up looking for work (and thus dropped off the lists of those officially unemployed, i.e. looking for work but not having a job)? Yes, he is.
• Is Barack Obama right when he says that more jobs are been created than lost under his Administration, in contrast to the Republican Administration that preceded his? Yes, he is.

What's needed is a deeper understanding, not only of the nature of unemployment statistics, but also of each man's record in using public policy to generate jobs and economic well-being generally. Mainstream media organs claim to have this in spades, but there is all too little evidence for it. This is the essence of notions like "experience" and "gravitas" that press gallery journalists (and their equivalents in the US and elsewhere), but which is more important to the journalists themselves rather than the media-consuming/ taxpaying/ voting public.

Regardless of all that, Sunderland does not promise to change a single thing about the ABC's coverage. The next election campaign will be run in pretty much the same way as the last one:

After all, when you’re about to choose the Government that will manage the country for the next three years, some proper consideration of their actual policies is not such a bad idea.

Yes! He gets it! This is the man to awaken the potential of Australian journalism and reorient it toward actual news and analysis! But then we get to the dead heart of Sunderland's article ...

Let me add a note of caution in all of this.

This is Alan's way of saying: let me ignore your concerns and kill your hopes stone dead.

The media does have a responsibility to cover the election campaign we are actually having, rather than the one we might wish we were having. And if, for the sake of argument, our political leaders are focussing on heat rather than light, moving from stage-managed event to stage-managed event with little or no time for detailed policy illumination, then it is reasonable to expect that would be reflected in the media’s coverage of the campaign.

A responsibility to whom?

When he talks about "the campaign", he means the succession of stunts set up and executed by major parties. These organisations have their own websites, Twitter accounts, YouTube channels and other means to get their message out in the best possible light. Sunderland holds up a mirror in which preening politicians may see themselves displayed and media strategists may judge their own efforts against their own nebulous criteria. He overestimates the extent to which this is important to viewers:

The public is entitled to know what is actually happening on the ground each day.

In election campaigns, voters' minds are "the ground", not the areas beneath the feet of politicians covered in TV camera cords. Strategists position politicians this way or that with the aim to create the impression that an issue is being addressed, but the more important question is whether or not the issue is actually being addressed. It is an issue that journos "on the ground", being whisked around and starved of information, have little role in addressing other than to run the day's talking points against wider information (and if there's a website available to all, and if the talking points can be had from the party's site, what value is there "on the ground"?).

And, of course, if ever it was relevant to focus on who is ahead in the race for popular support, the election campaign is the time to do it.

And what if it was never relevant to do so, Alan?

Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff nails the problem that Sunderland - and many other experienced journalists and editors - cannot bear and are not equipped to confront:

The crisis in the news business, involving, among other things, a massive decline in reading and viewing habits by the younger audience, is blamed on many things. Seldom, though, is it understood as the logical result of not giving its customers what they want. Or giving them what they don't want: banal and repetitive coverage of what Rasmussen calls the "strange rituals and bad jokes" that comprise modern campaigns ...

If Alan Sunderland wants to feed you "strange rituals and bad jokes" then that's what you'll get; or, as he puts it:

In many ways, an election campaign is something of a horse race, and it will always be covered like one.

So there. No discussion will be entered into, and you were a fool to think things might change.

As a consolation prize, Sunderland proposes to knock up a sandbox for social media users:

So our aim for the coming Federal Election campaign, whenever it is, is to tune into that emerging agenda, work with our audiences to identify the policy issues that matter to the community, and ensure they are front and centre in our coverage.

We believe we can combine the best and most comprehensive coverage of the campaign with rich and engaging coverage of the policy issues as well. Why shouldn’t ABC audiences get to have it all?

The key to this for ABC audiences will be an election website that brings together all of the rich, policy-based coverage we have always done during election campaigns, but makes it more accessible, more searchable and more comprehensive than ever before.

If Radio National provides a deep examination of the major challenges in health care, if Q&A has a program devoted to the big questions in education policy, if 7.30 has a debate between the Minister and the Shadow Minister on defence, the ABC’s election website will bring all that content together and make it available throughout the campaign.

For example, if you have a particular interest in environmental policy, the ABC’s election campaign website will give you all of the background on the policies of the major parties, a range of program material examining the issues in depth, and an easy way to track what is being said about environmental issues during the campaign.

If this had been available in 2010, it would have been awesome. Such is the speed of development of information and technology that it is not even adequate for 2013.

As with Coalition policies, the question must be asked of Sunderland: if you're truly ready for the next election, "whenever it is", why can't we see your wares now?

When journalists start using that information to change the question they ask, or even remove "political" journalists and replace them with subject-matter experts, only then would it be the change Sunderland hints at but could never deliver. One of the reasons why the Coalition's ICT policy at that election failed was because tech journalists, not press gallery hacks, took it apart and showed the politicians weren't across their own policy. This wasn't just the sort of gotcha moment that Sunderland and other senior journalists have built their careers upon, it provided real and valuable information to voters about those who would govern them.

I like to think that ABC News has always been about providing depth and analysis as well as covering the day’s events.

Translation: I'm not interested in any evidence that it was inadequate. We'll do what we like, and what we like is what we've always done.

But perhaps in the past, the problem was that if you missed a particular program on a particular issue, it was impossible to go back and find it again, or to locate all the relevant information you need in one location.

And if you find it, and it's full of pulled punches and begged questions and missed opportunities, what then? Is Sunderland fitting the problem to the answers he's already developed?

That’s where we are aiming for real improvement for the coming campaign.

More of the same, with public input sharply cauterised.

Now all we have to do is get Antony Green back ...

Green is one of the nation's pre-eminent psephologists, but every election-night telecast sees him wrestling with his own software as one of his assumptions ends up impeding our understanding of what is going on. This isn't a case of bagging Green, nor of offering uncritical praise; it means that Green's limitations as both a software programmer and an election forecaster cannot be relied upon as wholly as they have thus far, by the ABC and by viewers.

Wolff poses the sort of challenge for which Alan Sunderland, despite his protestations, is certainly not up:

So, what would happen if all general interest news outlets vastly downgraded their political coverage?

After all, politics, with its present niche focus, should certainly not warrant more coverage than, say, business. What would happen if the national media failed to show up for a political convention? What would happen if we stopped encouraging these squares and dweebs and wonks and Big Data idiot savants and hopelessly impersonal robo-types with our media attention?

In short order, we might start to see a new sort of politician who could speak to the rest of us.

The ABC is in no position to seek "a new sort of politician". This would require a new sort of journalist, which Alan Sunderland manifestly is not and cannot be relied upon to cultivate. Nor can Fairfax, News Ltd, nor any currently-operating commercial radio or TV network.

As a careerist, Sunderland probably thinks he's being clever by putting new technology to old uses. Hopefully between now and November he will throw out his plans (or they will be thrown out for him); and the ABC can lead the Australian media approach to covering the next election with a confidence Alan Sunderland cannot inspire, and cannot reasonably hold within himself.

(Thanks to Gordon Graham for the link)

When the bubble bursts

The dynamic nature of politics means that a policy vacuum rarely remains a vacuum for long (even so, this does not mean a policy can't be described as vacuous almost indefinitely). The whole Abbott-Credlin method of opposing every policy Labor puts up is starting to implode because people need to act on the basis of what's real. You can't sustain anyone or anything on the fantasy that a couple of media-management junkies seek to project, as though it were - or might one day become - real.

This is the problem that the Coalition face with the mining tax, as reported here and here. The legislation hasn't been passed, but recent examples with the carbon price and the US base that Howard lusted after for a decade show that the government can now be taken at its word when it says that it intends to push ahead with a particular policy. The MRRT not only promises big bickies but enables a shift away from income and business taxes, benefitting taxpayers and government alike.

When the opposition resources spokesman, Ian Macfarlane, said over the weekend the Coalition would consider supporting amendments to lift the threshold, he urged people not to get carried away. The Coalition, he said, would still abolish the tax if elected.

If the legislation was destined to pass, in the interim the Coalition may as well ameliorate its impacts.

However, a small but growing group in the Coalition is urging a rethink. One MP, who comes from a mining state and who was vehemently opposed to the tax when it was announced a year ago, told this column the group believes the threshold should be lifted to give smaller miners a break but the tax retained to ensure the bigger miners contribute.

Such a policy about-face would be a humiliation for Tony Abbott, who has vowed to fight the tax to his last political breath and, for this reason, it is unlikely he will flip.

Abbott backflips all the time, and the press gallery never call him on it. Abbott has to answer how he will raise the revenue other than through the MRRT, and the press gallery never (in the Peter Fray sense of the word 'never') call him on that either.

There is also the question of broadening the tax beyond iron ore and coal. Gold is enjoying super-profits and so are rare earths; why they should be excluded from this tax is unclear. It shouldn't care what stage the negotiations are at; at Christmas I shall be having ham, but this is not to say that I'm holding talks with the relevant pigs.

Anyway, back to the Coalition: they aren't having much luck with finding cost savings so additional sources of revenue that can't be shunted off-shore is a better bet than they would credit. The people calling for the broadening of the tax base to include long term super profits are not only right but are likely to prevail when the Coalition eventually makes it back to government.

They are likely to prevail because there is no alternative. Abbott and the leadership group could kill the idea of the MRRT remaining in place under a Liberal government simply by coming up with some other funding model. From the Coalition, any chatter would stop because The Party Line had been decided, end of. To do that, however, would require some consideration on the Liberals' part as to where Australia is at right now, where we're going and the right option among the many that will help us get there. This policy development isn't happening, and announcements that it is underway should not be taken at face value. The Federal Coalition does not do policy any more. It does press releases instead.

So apparently Abbott is "playing down suggestions that some Coalition MPs would prefer the scheme be amended and retained" - well he would, wouldn't he. It might be enough for The Australian to take as given but it isn't enough for the rest of us. The Australian is a useful guide to what the current Coalition leadership is thinking but it is not a useful guide as to what is going on or what should happen.

Here's what John Howard would have done: he would recognise this backbench rumbling as a challenge to his leadership. He would have come out with a defiant statement that his position was clear and he wasn't going to deviate from it - then he would have taken soundings among his backbench. The weaker souls would have stopped their comments on Howard's announcement and assured him everything was fine. The stronger ones would speak to Howard politician to politician: you're giving me nothing to work with here. Do you really expect either of us to win any votes at all promising FA and plenty of it? Howard would see the sense of this (provided it wasn't leaked) and act accordingly, quietly, denying that he'd backed down but doing what needed to be done.

Abbott is too proud for that, and hasn't been through the wringer like Howard had (not that Abbott would or could survive half the adversity that Howard went through).

Another sign of the Coalition vacuum is the NBN. Yes, the Coalition policy is that they're against it and will repeal it, while at the same time Coalition MPs want their fair share, mocking that on which they feed. Your garden-variety hypocrisy and feeble charges thereof just don't cut it here. We all want better broadband, but there was no credible alternative to the NBN before the last election and there isn't one now.

MPs are doing their job when they call for a government service to be extended to their constituents. If there was an alternative broadband strategy, Coalition MPs could offer it as the alternative to citizens wanting that service. This puts Coalition MPs in an uncomfortable position but not an impossible one.

It is political suicide to expect politicians to choose between their constituents and their leadership. Constituents ensure that a politician keeps their job; leadership threatens politicians with loss or diminution of their job. Any Coalition MP/Senator knows Peta Credlin won't help them get another job. Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd and Brendan Nelson and every other party leader who ever got rolled, did so on the basis that their 'leadership' was imperilling the ability of the politicians they led to appeal effectively to their constituents.

This is particularly true with a populist leadership; if people want the NBN or MRRT, who is the leader to say we can't have it? On what basis, within what framework and what priorities - and offering what alternative - can the contrary claim be made?

Into the policy vacuum go a series of politicians who can't accept the vacuum is there as part of some wider aesthetic. They fill it with the status quo because people, inside Canberra and out, can relate to what's actually true and real and tangible. Despite what media management frauds professionals might think, reality is a great starting point from which to develop policy, and there should be more of it. If there's any conflict between what voters want and what feeds the leader's vanity, you can't expect retail politicians to vote for what feeds the leader's vanity.

The only way you can get clarity on policy is not for one person or another to hand out a songsheet and pleading with/shrieking at people to sing from it. The only way you can get clarity on policy is to have clear policies, that candidates can tailor to their audience.

True, only journalists really care about detailed policy and there is the Hewson thing. Hewson had to go into detail because he didn't have decades of frontline political experience to draw upon. That said, a detailed policy that is based on some sort of consistent bedrock of proven behaviour and principle resonates even with voters who don't pay much attention to politics. This is what happened for the Coalition once they got rid of Downer in 1995-96; they released a whole lot of policies that weren't particularly detailed but set out broad parameters. People saw them and thought: yep, sounds like what you'd expect from the Liberals. Howard knew he couldn't get away with what Abbott still thinks of as his only option: "trust me", with a wink and a grin.

Labor isn't improving because Gillard "seems more Prime Ministerial", as the press gallery would have it ("Waiter! Another jug of Old Prime Ministerial, put it on my tab!"). Labor is improving because they've stopped with the announceables and have something to show for them at long last. This isn't a game of competing vacuums any more; the party that made the most convincing break with the politics of 2010 wins in 2013. Right now Labor only look unbeatable because the Coalition are still playing 2010 politics, it's what they're best at. The Coalition aren't in the game (poll junkies please note: the polls will catch up to reflect this reality. Polls are what economists call 'lagging indicators': they are not useful at predicting behaviour two years out, only assessments of structural capability can do that).

There was a time when the Coalition policy vacuum acted as a bubble that saw the Coalition float above the government and bounce off solid realities and even the odd pointed question. Since the government has stopped responding to that vacuum with its own counter-vacuum, people and things are getting sucked into the Coalition vacuum in a way that the party's leadership can no longer control. Using that vacuum as a platform is about as politically stable as a multistory building in Christchurch (it takes real talent to mix three metaphors in one paragraph, but as ever it's the thought that counts).

People want to vote Liberal because they want stability, and people only do vote Liberal when they can credibly offer that. Nobody votes Liberal because they're enamoured with some eccentric in sluggos who could do any random thing at any random time to any random person or group of people. Nobody who insists the contrary ought to be as safe atop the Liberal Party as they appear to be.

Barking at nothing, part 2

Why is there a parliamentary press gallery? What is it for? It is an institution that has outlived its usefulness, and it is a symptom of mainstream media failure that they continue to focus on it as much as they do.

We need to know how we are governed. We need to know what services the government is giving us, what laws the government is imposing upon us, what it is doing with all that tax. We turned to the mainstream media to act as the trusted (well, only) intermediary between the government and the governed.

For most of this country's history, the only way to find that out was through the media, and specifically from press gallery reporters. Government took place behind closed doors and was largely impenetrable. It only broke into clear sight when it was debated in Parliament, or in Cabinet, or came from a minister's office: journalists there had the ability to explain what it was that came from these bills and other instruments, and the interplay between personalities that we call politics, and how said personalities and interplay shaped the outcomes of government. When the first colonial parliament commenced in Sydney in 1856, it had a press gallery from day one. All subsequent parliaments in Australia were also set up with one.

Today, it is no longer true that the press gallery is the only place you can find out how we are governed. You can get that information in government reports, press releases and other information to a device wherever you are. You can get information directly from government departments, opposition parties, interest groups and some of your better blogs. Politicians hold media stunts using different parts of the country as a backdrop. You don't need to be in the press gallery in order to find out what's going on in government and politics.

In the US, media outlets don't just have a "Washington correspondent". They have a correspondent at the White House, a few at the Congress, one at the Pentagon and another at the State Department, and still others at different agencies of government (such as the Supreme Court).

Australian media organisations are lazy and stupid taking up space in a press gallery and assuming they've got politics covered.

It would be great if there was a High Court correspondent with legal knowledge, who could explain goings-on there in plain language, rather than journo cliches. It would be great if there were more defence policy specialists, following not only the ADF and the Minister and Shadow, but also the contractors and lobbyists. There should be foreign policy specialists.

Hell, all politics/government reporters should focus on policy first, and then assess politicians on how relevant they are to the debate. We might never hear of Christopher Pyne or Mark Arbib ever again.

If you want to know what's going on in government and politics, we are getting to a stage where it's actually better for journalists not to rely on politicians to tell them what's going on. Just because a politician says something, it doesn't mean that will happen.

People who are shocked by the extent to which the people of NSW abandoned Labor should consider the announcement of the Parramatta-Epping railway. Parramatta and Epping are two Sydney suburbs which each have a railway station, but those stations are not connected directly. In the late 1990s the Minister for Transport announced (actually re-announced a commitment from the previous Liberal government) that a line would be built to connect the two, and the press gallery trooped out to record the minister announcing that it would be completed by 2010. Then, after a while, it was re-announced again, and again, and again and again and again. A third of the track has been completed at twice the budgeted cost.

It became a joke, but that didn't stop journalists reporting it with a straight face. It didn't stop editors and news directors sending journalists out to cover those announcements, as though they were really news. The fact that a minister makes an announcement isn't news. The sun rose in the east this morning too, bears do poo in the woods, the Pope really is a Mass-going Catholic, and politicians make announcements: none of these things are news.

If mining activity is going gangbusters then surely this must cast some sort of light upon political rhetoric that taxes targeted at that industry will ruin it. A journalist cooped up in Parliament House, subject to phone calls from idle people and the appalling dramaturgy of "parliamentary theatre" cannot be said to know anything at all, regardless of how well or badly they report politics as a horse race or as Hollywood.

The fact that Tony Abbott contradicts himself and says things which simply aren't true is starting to be seen by journalists as an anomaly, rather than as fascinating or some sort of post-modern oddity which journalists observe but over which they have no control. It took a bunch of comics to give him the grilling that professional journalists couldn't bring themselves to do. It simply isn't worth drawing any sort of link between what he says and what might actually happen to our taxes, our society. After two years and an election he still has no policy consisting of more than dot points. He is a gibberer and even if he does get in he's just going to shrug his shoulders and say I lied, and a disconcertingly large number of press gallery will just accept it.

Politics and politicians have an impact upon government services as delivered, but a journalist need not be in the press gallery to report that. Being in the press gallery or having spent time there has an absurd amount of cachet among journalists, and when you consider how badly they fail at conveying any sort of meaning from the experience it should be something that falls off the resume.

If a bunch of journalists go into a location where they're outnumbered by PR people, they are probably in the wrong location. That's what happens in Parliament. Journalists are beset by gibberers. However much the journalists love it there is increasingly little link between what they write/say and what really happens, or even matters, which is why journalists can spend their entire careers on stuff like the imaginary challenge from Kevin Rudd/Stephen Smith against the Prime Minister.

The idea that the media can be managed is a lie. There are increasing resources devoted to preserving and extending this lie. The idea that it is worth managing the media at a time of media decline is also a lie, and silly. No politician should expect to have their words reported verbatim and everyone, everyone promising such is a charlatan. Journalists should have nothing to do with people who pretend to manage them.

Politicians tailor their output to catch the eye of journalists, who are looking for cliches. Parliament is designed to be the venue of great national debates, but great national debates occur far from the Parliament. Apart from each year's budget, the last truly unmissable parliamentary speech of national importance was Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generation on 13 February 2008. When the ALP rolled Rudd, everyone at the US Embassy or the AWU knew before even the better-connected members of the Press Gallery. All that connection-building, all that skulking in corridors and drinking in Kingston bars was wasted in the face of such a big story going begging. If the press gallery didn't pick up on that story, what did they know about anything? The press gallery is a waste of time.

Part of the reason why the press gallery is a waste of time is because politicians increasingly are. Party leaders notice that journalists don't interview colourless public servants, even though they know what's going on better than politicians, so they preselected party hacks who can't deliver a speech and who read the speeches written badly for them. The idea that these banal people might do something innovative and interesting is about as likely that they will do anything catastrophic, but neither are of sufficient consequence or interest to warrant the investment that goes into the press gallery.

Part of the reason why press gallery journalists report non-stories is the disconnect between journalists and their audience. Journalists disdain education, which means they're looking for cliches to dish up to "punters". People who are interested in politics and government are asking questions that simply don't occur to any but a handful of journalists, such as:

• Is there anything else that can be done about intractable problems, other than the feeble and self-defeating pantomime before us?
• How might money, time and resources be better spent? (a good Opposition will suggest alternatives, but I can't remember the last good Opposition we had);
• How do the policies of political parties affect people who work in, or are otherwise affected by, those policies? The odd colour piece at election time isn't good enough;
• What is it that parties do, anyway?

Bloggers answer those questions, not journalists. When confronted with economic policy most journalists do things like "beer, cigs up", or televise that groaning from the floor of parliament that has viewers lunging for the channel-changer. A few bloggers will paint the sort of complete picture that newspapers aim to achieve with special supplements, or that ABC Radio aims to achieve with AM and PM. Journalists can't handle policy and they can't get it across well, regardless of the medium, and they never will so long as they are confined to the parliamentary press gallery.

Smart journalists should fan out away from the press gallery because if you want to tell us what's going on you need to know what's going on, and you're unlikely to ever find that out in Parliament. We need to know how we are governed, and politicians can't tell us that because they just don't know, they've lost the words to describe it and bring people along with them. For journalists, it's time to strike out to the territories, find out what's going on and present it well. We will be grateful, but there are less grounds for gratitude for the sorts of journalism that comes out of the press galleries than you might imagine. The press galleries are broken and cannot be fixed. Abolishing the press gallery need not mean some sort of catastrophe for democracy, and maybe we might have to wait until Laurie Oakes or Michelle Grattan have died - it could be the very thing that breaks the politico-media complex and makes both politics and journalism better off.

Sold out

The estimable Matt Cowgill has important issues to raise on retail sector workers' wages, but he has overlooked some key issues in the retail industry's employment practices.

Firstly, Cowgill coyly dodges the declining proportion of retail sales to Australians conducted in retail outlets located in Australia employing retail workers able to be legally employed in Australia, and possible effects of this decline on said employees over time.

Secondly, there are wider political, managerial and media issues surrounding Australian retail which are not subject to the kind of searching analysis conducted by Cowgill and all-too-few others.

Retail sector employees tend to fall into two groups: younger people starting their working lives (and mostly going on to careers outside retail), and middle-aged women partly or wholly supporting families. Of the two, the latter are much more likely to join the union than the former. The retail workers' award provision under the new legislation that prevented employees from working short shifts was squarely targeted at students in their teens and twenties who not only sought, but actually held jobs in retail after school which then had to be covered by other employees.

Retail employers are to be commended for fighting for the right to hire students, and in so doing fighting against the organisation that purportedly represents young retail workers (and which, in recruiting new members, puts guilt trips on gullible youngsters for something unionists call "the free rider effect"). Some might be tempted to over-egg that pudding without laying blame where it belongs, but the principle is still important, however freaky it may appear: young people, a politically hard-to-organise group of people, were screwed by their union and a Labor government, and their interests were upheld by the employers.

If I was still in the Liberal Party I'd be going hard at this issue. One reason I'm not in the Liberal Party, however, is because it's weighed down by the sorts of people who pay undue attention to the head of the retail workers' union. For all the unreconstructed union-bashing in WorkChoices, John Howard had a solid relationship with SDA leaders, directly and through ciphers like Kevin Andrews. It is inconceivable that any senior member of the Liberal Party would have anything like that level of influence in the ALP.

Retail workers can be hard to agitate but they were easy to organise back in the days when the union did sweetheart deals with Coles and Woolworths. Back then, retail employers would only complain about wages as a gambit in wage negotiations, and then keep quiet once the deal was done. These days there is a greater proliferation of employers and fewer sweetheart deals, making for your traditional tension between employers and employees (particularly when retailers are as rattled as MSM proprietors, with their business model under attack across a number of fronts).

The SDA, meanwhile, has moved on from mere retail employees to being a force in the ALP. Each state has a Labor Senator who is a former employee of that union but who still owes his or her job to them. The shift of focus by the SDA to politics has not been to members' benefit.

Cowgill's graph showing the dip in employee wages after the introduction of the Fair Work Act 2009 (legislation that strengthened the SDA's hand out of all proportion to its actual representation of retail workers) is telling, and not flattering to the union. One non-wage indicator of the extent to which the SDA valued its relationship with employers over that with its members was over seating. Retail workers are expected to be too busy-busy to sit down, even when there aren't many customers to serve. Ironically, younger workers have fewer problems with spending long periods on their feet, but older workers - the ones more likely to join unions - suffer knee, back and foot problems from having to stand on hard floors for extended periods and lift things. Occasionally there is training performed by larger employers for its employees, or by the union (again, mostly for the easy-to-organise employees of larger multi-site retailers), on which employees of smaller firms miss out. This training tends to be a tick-the-box effort for the trainers and the training organisers as much as the trainees. Occasionally the SDA produces OHS reports castigating naughty employers for not allowing employees to sit at checkouts, for example, but nothing much is done about it.

Aldi has no sweetheart deal with the SDA, and it allows its employees to sit at the checkout (as Aldi employees do in Europe). It is stronger at enforcing safe handling and other safe work practices than, and its workplace injury costs are a fraction of those of, its competitors. Aldi employees aren't just paid for their time but for their throughput at checkouts, which is why customers wait for shorter times at Aldi checkouts than at other supermarkets. Regardless of employees' experience, though, the SDA are terribly upset at Aldi for their lack of interest in cutting a deal with the union. Who do they think they are?

Retail employers should expect to be no more successful with their bleating about wages than they were about GST, or whatever other excuses they make for their own laziness in the face of e-business and other changes to their industry. No wonder foreign retailers like Zara, Harvey Nichols and Costco are lining up to take on these mugs.

Journalists covering industrial issues reported the disenfranchisement of students from retail work, but didn't examine why this happened. Journalists covering business issues cover retail employers, and write stories that - almost always implicitly, and usually unintentionally - reveal them to be run by mugs. Journalists covering the federal parliamentary press gallery occasionally mention the SDA as one faction in the Labor Party, but usually pass over them because the SDA don't spend a lot of time courting the media - as any journalist will tell you, organisations that don't actively court the media obviously have no story worth telling, while those that aggressively seek media attention must be fascinating to journalists and to the wider public. It is a slander (if not a heresy) to claim that there may be any difference between what fascinates journalists and what those who read/listen to/watch them want and need from the media.

There is a whole set of stories to be told about the SDA and its political influence, and how they and a bunch of (at best) second-rate managers control what is still one of the major sectors of our economy. Such stories represent the kind of high-value journalism that MSM defenders fancy themselves as producing on a regular basis, but the reality is that journalists can't and don't tell those stories.

Communication

Communication always leaves me incomplete
The grass is greener, but it's grown beneath my feet
Love inspiration is a message on a wing
But I have left it in the words you'll never sing

Senator Stephen Conroy is, among other things, the Minister for Communication. One of the projects for which he's responsible is the shutdown of analog television, opening a digital transmission spectrum, and having both broadcasters and viewers shift from analogue to digital.

There are arguments for giving people set-top boxes:

• The government has arbitrarily devalued people's analog-TV assets;


• The boxes don't limit what sort of television set people can have;


• There is a little light on the box that winks at you, and the sorts of dills who worked for the NSW ALP government think it will remind people to vote Labor;

By "people", I refer to the sorts of people for whom a television set is a significant asset, the sorts of people who regard a television set as a major conduit to the world. Some will have made their own arrangements regarding a digital television, while still others need not have a taxpayer-funded set-top box (not even if they earn a paltry $150k). Still, it's a nice thought.

It should be more than a nice thought, though. It should be an actual policy, fully costed and explained in more detailed terms than the dot-points above. It should exclude those who are perfectly capable of buying their own televisions. It should be opt-in rather than opt-out or no-opt, with information available for people who don't speak a lot of English or keep up with latest developments in public policy.

Communication let me down
But I'm left here
Communication let me down
But I'm left here, I'm left here

There should have been a blitz before the Budget explaining the digital switchover, and the compensation for people facing disenfranchisement from a key element of the public sphere. Conroy was the man to do such a thing: for someone brought up politically in the back alleys of Victorian ALP (not the funky, grafitti-covered alleyways of contemporary Melbourne, but those dark with something more than night in which person-to-person interaction is limited to a blade in the ribs), he has proven surprisingly deft in making a case and getting his message through.

The NBN remains a triumph, regardless of the odd little campaign by The Australian about who said what to whom at Alcatel in the '90s (surely no worse than the sort of stuff that goes on in News Ltd's Western European branch offices). Turnbull has dented that juggernaut but not completely defused it, and he has not allayed the suspicion that he'd tweak it a bit, get rid of Mike Kaiser and basically rebadge it as Liberal nation-building, similar to Menzies' opening of the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

Mike Kaiser: there's someone who's been heavily invested in by Labor for a relatively low yield. This is his time to step up, take some flak on the minister's behalf so that he can get on with issues like the digital switchover, or Victorian ALP preselections, or whatever.

Conroy may well have been spooked by Turnbull, but the more accurate answer is probably that he no longer cares. He has, as Neville Wran put it, been up to his eyeballs in blood and shit for so long that he'd rather go snowboarding in Vail with Kerry Stokes than go around foisting set-top boxes on unsuspecting punters.

Telex or tell me, but it's always second-hand
I'm incognito but no rendezvous's been planned
Dictate or relay, I could send it to your home
"Return to Sender" - I could sing it down the phone!

At the very time when the government could do with a tough and uncompromising presence in getting its message across, Conroy has botched what should have been a popular idea: ameliorating rapid technological change with social equity, part of Labor's historic mission etc. He's done it by neglect rather than any obvious or deliberate spite.

Conroy should have explained why set-top boxes are part of bringing everyone along into the twentyfirst century. Installing a set-top box is something so simple he could do it himself, with cameras rolling natch, into some poor old person's home in a marginal seat. A cup of tea, a dig at the Liberals, and it could've made for a substantial set-piece announcement; instead, it's slightly weird policy at best and an expensive boondoggle at worst, indefensible by anyone not fully across what passes for media policy in this country.

If Conroy is fed up, he should just go. If he's got any fight in him, he should fight for people staying in touch with the world around them when their options might be otherwise limited. Allowing Gerry Harvey to rag him over the cost of set-top boxes would have got the goat of old-school Labor, and even stirred up Conroy more than it apparently has. Should Conroy be moved to another portfolio? Does he need a fresh parly sec who can make their name by pushing such a barrow (and who, pray tell, are the bright sparks on Labor's back bench, as opposed to all those dull-eyed hacks just waiting their turn?)?

Communication let me down
But I'm left here
Communication let me down
But I'm left here, I'm left here, I, I, I ...

The digital switchover will look good in retrospect - a bit like the switch to metric measurements, which was similarly mishandled by the McMahon and Whitlam governments. Mishandling a key social equity facet of technological change and assuming that all such changes are going to be bungled is not what this country needs.

The Liberals cannot put up a convincing case that they will handle things better - or even that they understand technological change issues. Lumping it in with "waste" won't do, it shows the Liberals don't understand media or social dimensions of technological change. Conroy can't count on the Liberals continuing to fudge these issues, and to his credit he hasn't until recently.

I'm sitting here by the telephone,
Waiting for the bell to ring
Short change, fumble
Dial-a-heart trouble
And I ain't got time for searching through the rubble, oh no!
Well, I know ...

- Spandau Ballet Communication

The return of George Megalogenis to the national conversation was never more welcome than with this - read the whole article, but I particularly liked:

The Abbott formula is a form of 21st-century Fraserism. Shout your way to power, then do nothing with it because the only thing wrong with Australia, really, was the election of a Labor government.

On the issue of digital communications and the right party to manage the twentyfirst century in all its complexity, surely someone from the government can step up and make the case. This government is led by two backroom operators, and one of them will probably have to go by Christmas. What's Conroy's excuse?

Transforming Fairfax?

I have been reading The Sydney Morning Herald regularly for thirty years, and am a regular consumer of The Australian Financial Review and The (Sunday) Age. I'm tertiary-educated. I earn an above-average income, and there is probably a correlation between my spending patterns and Fairfax advertisements. The success or failure of any transformation of the company is far more dependant on people like me than on just another CEO like Greg Hywood, who says things like:

There is no ambiguity about our vision and our mission. We will be a company that creates high-value, premium journalism and content for print, online, mobile and beyond.

We will do this by investing in quality, independent journalism that differentiates us from our competitors.

We will invest in our journalism to create markets for many different audiences. We will leverage those audiences for our customers and clients.

And we will do this better than anyone else.

Today we are announcing the operational changes that are necessary to deliver the strategy.

We must do things differently if we are to deliver on our commitment to the highest standard of quality independent journalism. Standing still is not an option ... We have no intent or interest in managing this company for decline. We want Fairfax to grow, to be strong and to be respected.

There is real possibility in such a vision, as well as the possibility for disappointment. The devil is in the details so let's go there and see what he's up to (other than welcoming Osama bin Laden).

We will increase our investment in quality journalism for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sun-Herald, The Age and The Sunday Age – and The Canberra Times. This is fundamental to our strategy.

We will immediately look to recruit a number of high-quality reporters and writers. We will expand our trainee programs. We will invest in comprehensive multi-media training and equipment.

All that is long overdue. There is, however, a lot of work to be done on reallocating existing resources before you start pulling stunts (dramatic initially but low-impact over time) like getting rid of subbies.

Politics reporting is one area, and much other news falls victim to this as well. There should be a greater focus on the process of developing and analysing policy, including examining interest groups and lobbyists: they have to be registered, yet no journalists regularly explore the linkages between interests, lobbyists, staffers and politicians. There are some pieces on how policies affect us after they are announced, but precious few during the formulation process - as a democratic people we are left to accept the compromise the government hands down to us, for if we reject it there's nowhere to go but CRISIS CONFLICT DRAMA SHOCK.

Rather than running so-called "colour pieces" for their own sake, they should be linked to the policy process. When a politician comes to a school to make an announcement on helping children with disabilities, it's all very well to focus on the content of a speech/press release but there is scope to speak to people who have worked in that area about that content: how credible they find it, whether it really addresses the issues they face day to day.

If politicians have anything to say about policy and the execution thereof, it can be worked into a story that has the appropriate focus. Anything that politicians say that cannot be tied, however tenuously, into policy debates, can simply be ignored. The fantasy that splicing a couple of press releases together constitutes "high quality journalism" is should be left to the sort of media executive who broadcasts rightwing pap to mugs and dyes his hair with furniture polish.

It is no longer sufficient to focus on conflict: we don't live in some anodyne conflict-free world (if we ever did) against which conflict represented in the media is exciting and worth paying for. Conflict is all around us, we don't need to pay for it. People are prepared to pay for understanding, and if your "high-quality journalism" offers that then bring it. In the same forum where I found Hywood's piece, Peter Lewis of Essential Media Communications said:

A majority of people follow the news closely but don’t think the media does a good job of helping them understand the issues.

That's the gap in the market. Fairfax has the chance to fill the slot occupied by default by the ABC, which Channel 9 came very close to securing in Kerry Packer's final years. Murdoch will never fill it and we're tired of waiting for the O'Reilly boy to step up. Only smug-but-rattled Fairfax can fill the role of national explainer, but it's yet to be seen whether current management and staff will or can steer the company away from the cliff.

Back to Hywood:

Under this restructure it is planned that copy sub-editing of news, business and sport will be outsourced to AAP through its subsidiary Pagemasters.

Subbies not only fix journalists' apparently atrocious spelling and grammar, they have a role in determining what the story is: an outsource provider can't really do that.

As you will be aware, Pagemasters has been successfully producing many of the sections for our metro mastheads for the past three years.

Really?

Take, for example, all those articles in the health/lifestyle sections on studies repeatedly showing that a small amount of alcohol taken regularly improves digestion and has all sorts of health benefits. I used to assume those 'studies' were funded by the alcohol industry, though this was rarely disclosed, and looked on them benignly as free ads for the companies and make-work schemes for lazy journalists. Having read stories like this and that I now realise that these 'studies' should have aroused the suspicions of functioning journalists, and at least some of them in a big-time high-quality media outlet should have the skill to drill into scientific research like this (you'll need to be a subscriber) and tell you in plain language what's going on.

It may be that the subbies Fairfax employed until recently were the wrong people to make a call on an issue like that. It may be unfair to load editorial policy responsibility onto sub-editors. Certainly, it's a specific example of the type missing from well-meant but unfocused rhetoric about "high quality journalism".

A decision taken has been to end our NZ Press Association news service subscription. Instead, we are investing in our unique content with the formation of the Fairfax NZ News Service.

Questions about this include:

• Aren't journalists taught never to write in the passive voice?


• Why stop with NZPA? Why not axe that reverse-sewage system that provides you with Hollywood/royal gossip?


• What is the point of Paola Totaro filing stories from Europe that can be gleaned from anywhere else?


• Why have regional experts like David Jenkins retire with no replacements to take on their level of regional knowledge and descriptive skill?


• If you're so keen on premium journalism, are you going to get Katharine Murphy and Brian Robins to pack their bags?

There are others.

Australian Regional Media

... The nature of local newsgathering - particularly user-generated content - provides unique local content that strengthens our already strong local franchises.

Questions arising from that include:

• Why only in Australian Regional Franchises? Do you not think this would also be the case in big-city papers, or in NZ?


• Will there be any career paths for people joining, say, the Woop Woop Bugle and making it all the way to The Australian Financial Review, as used to happen in the olden days?


• When Fairfax basically reworks a press release written by someone with a barrow to push, is this "user-generated content"?


• Doesn't "user-generated content" make a mockery of the idea that you need skilled, trained and experienced journalists to provide content? The idea that news outlets hold to such a lofty principle is the explanation I use for them not running the story proposals I have submitted to them.


• What makes you think some warmed-over nonsense about Hollywood celebrities or European royalty in any way enhances any given Fairfax brand at all?

There are others.

I know there will be strong views about these changes – both positive and negative. We believe they are the right decisions – the only decisions that make sense – and the only decisions that will allow us to lead the way in quality independent journalism. We believe quality independent journalism is the key to the success of Fairfax.

I know there will be strong views about these changes – both positive and negative. We believe they are the right decisions – the only decisions that make sense – and the only decisions that will allow us to lead the way in quality independent journalism. We believe quality independent journalism is the key to the success of Fairfax.

Part of the challenge to those muttering over strike action over what will inevitably be called SubbieGate is to suggest what should be done, rather than simply reject Hywood's There Is No Alternative approach, given the hard-to-disagree final sentence. To borrow from Kipling: what do they know of journalism who only journalism know?

I've done my bit, but then I'm just a blogger and a consumer unschooled in rooly trooly journalism. What do I think of transforming Fairfax through a commitment to premium journalism? Like Gandhi said when asked about Western civilisation, I think it would be a good idea.

The journalist who punked himself

Jim Schembri was a film reviewer with a Melbourne paper who gave away the ending to a film in one of his reviews. Now he says he did it deliberately. I hope your copy of Chomsky keeps you warm at night Jim, because you're like a bird that has fouled its own nest.

The idea of being a film reviewer for a mainstream media outlet is that you know more about movies than most people, that your opinion is worth listening to, and all the better if you can convey this in an entertaining way. Jim Schembri did that, and many people in Melbourne took his advice on what films to (not) see.

Now he's just another online voice: your guess is as good as his as to what's worth seeing, and thanks to The Age for paying him to see those movies that others have to shell out for.

The response was vehement. Everybody wanted answers. "Why'd you do it? Are you nuts?" They demanded replies. "You changed the copy! Admit your mistake!" I remained silent. That fuelled the online anger - including the niche news-gossip site Crikey, which highlighted my apparent error.

The stream of responses perfectly illustrated what media analyst Noam Chomsky calls the constraint of concision - that limited time and space vitiates reason or debate and, instead, promotes amplification of and conformity to an orthodox line of thinking. This was starkly demonstrated by the huge degree of retweeting about what a louse I was.

Schembri could've busted the constraint of concision around this event, but he chose not to - and that those bound by that constraint have somehow fallen into a trap of his devising. Now he expects to be believed when he clambers onto his employer's platform and claims that while he deliberately misled some people for whom he cares little (Twitter users), normal service is resumed for those upon whom his livelihood depends (readers of The Age).

Wait till Jim Schembri discovers that those who use Twitter are also those who read The Age. Oh Em Eff Gee.

Tellingly, the intellectual scope of the Twitter chatter - which became so intense it began "trending" in Melbourne for a short time - narrowed to such a degree the powerful impression was that the only person on earth who had run a spoiler online was me.

No Jim, but you were the only mainstream media "professional" who did this. Now your opinion is worth no more than anyone else's. People gave you the benefit of the doubt enough to ask you why and what, in order to avoid the punking you had apparently planned for them, and by refusing to answer you have devalued your own opinion and made those open to you look foolish. You have diminished a base you've taken so long to build. If you give a glowing review to a movie, are readers to assume it's crap and that you're punking them again?

Yet once Scream 4 opened in the US, a veritable cascade of spoilers poured onto Twitter. It was amazing. Thousands of tweets and retweets revealed the identity of the killer.

It's only "amazing" if you have no real experience of social media and don't understand it. Find one of those spoilers by someone employed by mainstream media - which also takes money for ads for that film. The key differentiator of the mainstream media from social media is that paid writers are supposed to have experience and responsibility that random tweeters don't. All you've punked is your own reputation and that of The Age.

I'm not going to see Scream 4 either, so why don't you just ignore crap movies?

Spoiler-anxious directors need to think laterally and embrace the media they are in such fear of.

Same with mainstream media employees engaging in Twitter wars while waiting to be made redundant (so that the stock market will get all thrilled about Fairfax management shedding redundant payroll-fat like a film reviewer whose contributions detract from his employer's authority). It's interesting that in his last two paragraphs, Schembri thinks he's clever offering suggestions that have long since been superseded.

For everyone who's determined never to read Schembri ever again, there are many well, plenty uh, just as many of course, some, surely nobody at all willing to join the ranks of Schembri-readers in order to justify his presence in that snazzy new '90s building The Age has built for itself. Here is a mainstream media employee who has committed professional suicide, and the only people who noticed are those who used to be his readers. It's one thing to lose Alan Kohler or the real estate ad guy who set up their own publications; The Age is starting to look like a once mighty and venerable institution that is actively alienating readers, willing itself to fail.

Next time journalists complain about the "24 hour news cycle" for the decline of their "profession" and its employers, point them to Schembri blowing off his own readers (and his employer's future base). Here lies Jim Schembri, he was unable to recognise his market because they occasionally used a different platform, and because he did the whole journalist thing of never admitting an error: never complain, never explain, and leave a youthful-looking corpse (or something like that, look up the MEAA code yourself).

Denial is not a river in Egypt

In July 1789, as everybody knows, there was no Twitter, no al Jazeera, no David Burchill, although there was a lot of half-baked historical determinism that ignored contemporary reality. It is creepy that Burchill insists that "We are hypnotised", we are this and we are that (except for opinions held only by lefties with pot-plants), and then he disowns those opinions due to factors that are no longer particularly relevant.

There have been only two popular ideologies of consequence in the Middle East since colonialism's squalid death in the 1950s: Soviet-style authoritarianism, with its specious liturgy of anti-colonialism, and the grand, exultant nihilism of the Muslim Brotherhood and its fellow extremists.

Neither of whom, David, featured in Tunisia or Egypt to any real extent. The MB are scrambling to take credit for the Egyptian uprising but people want things that they can't deliver: real jobs in a real economy that provides those lacking political connections with a greater range of possibilities than starving, or just getting by.

Even today informed observers are hard-pressed to name consistent Egyptian voices for liberal democracy and the rule of law ...

Because they're in prison, David, or floating face-down in the Nile.

... and to find them you have to scour the Egyptian media for lonely coracles of sanity in a vast ocean of paranoia, where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion masquerade as established fact, and the historic failures of a rich region are forever passed off as somebody else's fault.

Yep, and what did you expect from media controlled by a dictatorship - lifestyle supplements? Spinster politicians yearning for love? When you scoured the media of East Germany there was bugger-all reference, flattering or otherwise, to Angela Merkel or Yulia Timoshenko or Vaclav Havel.

The fact that there is no leader of the Egyptian uprising is encouraging. Mohammed El Baradei is presented as a figurehead acceptable to the West. It is to his credit he is smart enough not to throw his weight around; it is to the credit of Egyptians that they aren't fawning over him as any sort of saviour. They seem to want a government that will allow them more opportunities - economic, civic and otherwise - than they have had (or can get) from Mubarak-Sleiman. They want more than the MuBros or even Burchill's communists (if there are any) could possibly imagine.

When you see images of burqa-clad women throwing themselves at armed police (and not in a sexual way), it's mildly interesting from a cultural studies perspective to ask how passive can these oppressed beings really be, and to watch Western journalists fail to wedge them into any sort of cliched narrative. The narrative, however, is not their problem; if they can throw off a beef-witted dictatorship they can make us think differently about who they are and what they want. A people wanting to be recognised for their efforts and talents can't focus too hard on keeping women in the kitchen. This isn't to say that this uprising promises all things to everyone (except David Burchill), but it is fair to give people a break.

In Western societies demonstrations have to be organised, usually by pissants with no ability to translate massed narcissism into meaningful social, political and economic reform. People like Danny Cohn-Bendit, Tariq Ali or Richard Neville are neutered politically by their celebrity, but celebrity was all guys like that ever wanted anyway. Western observers viewing demos are right to be suspicious, but only if they fail to imagine a society so radically different to their own that to be conservative is to be in thrall to an unsustainable fad. When the stakes are both higher (in terms of an economy that must grow to sustain its population) and more personal (there must be food on the table and meaningful work for people to do), the sort of pissantry that so often fuels demos is so overwhelmed that it can't even bob to the surface let alone waddle toward the avant-garde.

The openness brought about by contemporary media (and the fact that media space is no longer so limited that it can be hogged by wankers or commandeered by despots) is like oxygen to the fires that threaten the despotic regimes of northern Africa and the Middle East. Mind you, news from Tunisia these days has been hard to come by. Gaddafi and the Algerian regime have been very, very quiet - too quiet. Not a lot of news out of Southern Sudan, either. Because they're not putting out press releases, yer modern journalist is pretty much ignoring them.

From an Australian point of view, it's heartening that the media have started to focus on Australians with friends and relatives in Egypt. It's great that the journosphere is trusting academics to explain what is going on, recognising the limitations of their profession (and denying the arrogant notion of @tzarimas and others that "a well trained and exp[erience]d journo can do anything!" - anything but save their own 'profession'). It's interesting that the Foreign Minister should contradict the Prime Minister without a press gallery meltdown - could they be getting some perspective on an issue that's bigger than Gillard's earlobes? How willy did altPM look when he "hoped" the situation could be resolved "without violence" when twenty souls lay beastly dead? We should be grateful that Julie Bishop has apparently kept her trap shut.

Time to bring forward the release of any Wikileaks relating to Mubarak, or they'll lose currency. It will be interesting to see how the boofhead government of Israel reacts to them, and how the US will go about building bridges with people they've apparently observed so closely yet do not understand.

It will be fascinating to see what sort of societies come from these uprisings. Fascinating to see what sort of leaders, too: can I just say, in the fullness of time, they are unlikely to be the kind of stage-managed dullards we get here. They are also unlikely to be the sort of knuckleheads indulged purely for their "commitment to the revolution", like Castro or Mbeki. A few basic measures to keep the peace and secure the positions of investors will see foreign capital pour into those places. For those of us far away from these tumultuous places, all we can ask the media is to keep bringing the piccies and the analysis from those who'd know - and for the cliche-mongers, the desperate I'm-really-smart-I-am tools like Burchill or Greg Sheridan, just shut up and piss off.