The difference

The difference between the Australian response to the war with a barely organised rabble in Iraq and the response coming from other countries is important, and it reflects badly on us.

US President Obama, UK PM Cameron and other world leaders have made it clear that Daesh are a foreign entity to be degraded and disrupted before their influence spreads.

Tony Abbott has explicitly linked the activities of Daesh to goings-on in Australia, that it represents an internal threat as much as an inexternal one. He has invoked the recruitment of Australians as a reason to go to war with Daesh that does not seem to be present with other multinational operations that cause death and destruction in this country, and the prospect that trained and experienced killers might return and create havoc. No other national leader has done this - not even those from majority-Muslim countries closer to western Asia, which have a far more substantial and pressing problem on both counts.

He even addressed the UN about an incident hours old, involving a messed-up teenager whose links to Daesh were neither strong nor clear. Mental health facilities in this country are full of people who want to kill the Prime Minister, or who think they are Prime Minister, and/or who see persecution everywhere.
Cuts to those services mean that police have to deal with those people, without training or resources. Tony Abbott has misled us on so much for so long, with so little challenge that I would not be surprised if this incident turned out to be bullshit too.

As if Abbott was going to talk about climate at the UN. Are you stupid? Do you think anyone following Australian politics for longer than a week is even sillier than you are?

You would only call for Muslims to denounce Daesh if you haven't been listening to what they have said and done, or if these people have to jump when you bid them to. Daesh are not representative of Muslims, and only Murdoch headline writers think otherwise. Every significant new wave of migrants has faced similar pressures to 'fit in'.

The reason why Brandis canned a revision of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, despite upsetting part of its base, was to maintain relations with Muslim communities to thwart or monitor Australians joining Daesh. A wise government would take action against those who think they have a licence to harass people they perceive as Muslim. This is a start. Police don't need any more powers/resources than they have already to enforce existing laws. If this really isn't a war against Islam generally but against Daesh-addled ratbags in particular, the first step - the sine qua non - is to stand against harassment of Australian Muslims.

The Fairfax press published the wrong picture of the person concerned, which is important for a number of reasons:

• Bad journalism used to be limited to simply quoting press releases and speeches, like Latika Bourke does. Now, bad journalism includes sloppy combing of social media. Crap MSM journalism, not internet or Young Warwick Fairfax or whatever, is what's killing traditional media.
• There is no link between that image and the apology. The guy in that picture will miss out on opportunities because future searches will link him to terrorism. If Fairfax had injected him with asbestos or had him install roof insulation without training, they could hardly have set him up worse for life.
• Journo culture in Australia is so toxic that the guy in the photo and the impact on him will be belittled relentlessly and ignorantly. If he complains he'll be some unreasonable whinger. Yes, it was an easy mistake to make; but big-mistake-little-apology is just one of those MSM traditions that must die, along with the careers of all those who would defend it.
• Nobody is calling for the severed head of the Fairfax Media Picture Editor, but (yes I'm going to go there) Peter Greste is not rotting in an Egyptian prison for the sake of some untrammelled right to fuck up to such an extent, and get away with it.
• If it's easy for Fairfax Media to make a mistake, why is it no less easy for ASIO, the Federal and/or Victorian Police - and even George Brandis or Tony Abbott or Bill Shorten - to also make mistakes? And if you accept that they make mistakes, why treat their words with more gravity than they may warrant?

Any journalist who thinks I simply have some inexplicable hatred of the MSM is free to just piss off, and probably will when the next rounds of sackings come through.

Tony Abbott has never been a champion of freedom. In Battlelines, in other utterances and publications, he has consistently said that freedom and security are opposites and that he supports more of the latter than the former. It is one of the few things he has been consistent about, one of the very few issues on which he can be trusted. Tony Abbott is ambivalent at best, and at worst hostile, to your freedoms. He wants a society where you beg him for indulgences and are pathetically grateful for whatever he might deign to dispense.

The same applies to Brandis, as I've said elsewhere.

Journalists should have been awake to this when helping us, and themselves, decide whether Abbott would make an effective Prime Minister, and by extension Brandis an effective Attorney General.

Instead, we have people like Paul Farrell and Jonathan Green decide that Abbott's moves against freedom are something of a surprise. Green is right to say that Brandis, the buffoon of travel rorts and bigots' rights, has not suddenly become the wise and firm protector of the common weal. Green is wrong, though, to imply this has come about all of a sudden, that it was not foreseeable before last September; close and privileged observers of public affairs have been negligent in failing to point it out.

Belatedly, Farrell has stirred:

Really, we can only blame ourselves. Could all journalists, collectively, have done more than throw together a handful of submissions? Most major news organisations in Australia raised concerns about the bill and the new offences. But there was no concerted campaign, no unified push to stop these disclosure offences succeeding. We’re now stuck with these laws, probably until someone is made an example of to spur journalists into action.

There is a small comfort in all of this and that is that the laws simply won’t work as a deterrent. They won’t discourage whistleblowers. And they won’t discourage fearless journalists from reporting on our intelligence agencies when it is in the public interest to do so. The disclosures by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning – and the reporters who told these stories – have shown us that people are willing to take extraordinary actions, at great personal risk, when they believe it is necessarily to do so.

It will just mean that some of them will go to jail.

Yep: Australian journalists regard Peter Greste, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning as them, not us. There are no fearless journalists in the press gallery, just sad little dropseekers who occasionally stumble over something big and then pretend it never happened. They gave Tony Abbott the easiest ride to the Prime Ministership since Whitlam; after a few pantomime slaps over the budget emergency/non-emergency, this pattern has continued.

The press gallery is unconcerned about these laws because anything that isn't in a press release, won't be covered by them. Some of them might have their photos taken with tape over their mouths (unless Brandis' press sec ticks them off for doing so), but that's about all.

This post was considerably longer than it was, before I read this by Katharine Murphy. Yes, that Katharine Murphy, the self-confessed press gallery herd animal. It's unusually good. Impressive, even, for the most part. The best traditional-media piece so far on this topic.

She is spot on in her insistence that journalists can and should go into the details of what's going on, rather than just ripping a press release off the telex and zooming out to Endeavour Hills or wherever. You can't present the work of police officers or politicians or other non-journalists in a sensationalist, simplistic way, and then insist that journalists:

• are hardworking
• are sensible and sensitive
• balance moral/ethical dilemmas
• are under stress
• do their best to get it right, and
• when if they don't get it right - well, fuck you.

In an article concerned about framing, Murphy lurches back a decade to frame society as a three-role drama: government, media, and a passive public that cares little for either. She won't or can't even acknowledge social media, let alone credit it with informed critiques as well-made or targeted as hers. However unwittingly, she exposes the fallacy, the sheer emptiness of the traditional media notion that you have to be in journalism to be able to criticise it (and even then you have to pull your punches, as Murphy duly does).

The comments on Murphy's piece are worth reading too. Journos are told never to read the comments: they transmit to an imagined audience but block reception from the real one.

Our country has the wrong government. We have the wrong media reporting on its activities. Both of these things must change.

Good analysis requires perspective

Solid, intelligent analysis of how we are governed is possible. It is just not possible from within the press gallery.

This is what proper analysis looks like. Read it all, see you when you get back.

Westacott says that "never before has the public sector faced a more complex set of challenges". It's as if she's not heard of the "challenges" of: setting up the Federation, World War I and its long, severe, economic aftermath in Australia; the 1930s Depression; World War II and postwar reconstruction; the existential threats of the Cold War; the seemingly intractable difficulties of "stagflation" in the 1970s; and so on. Beside these "challenges", those of the present, for all their difficulty, are not nearly so complex.

It's not just that Westacott is talking historical nonsense. She has based her recipes on a false premise and she neglects the history and current circumstances of the Australian Public Service as well as the fundamental differences between the public and private sectors.

That's a takedown: it's about something other than attacking the person directly, but about the national context that the target here (BCA CEO Jennifer Westacott) sought and failed to address. It isn't ad hominem (e.g. Keating at his most caustic), and unlike most parliamentary insults it doesn't come from some stale catalogue of cliches (e.g. "depriving some village of its idiot"). This is why people despise parliamentary banter: it isn't half as well-considered as this.

So what is her game?

That simple question elevates this above most political commentary. When you're an experienced observer of politics you can look beyond what is said to the longer game of what the speaker is hoping to achieve. Again, the press gallery took Abbott on face value, and failed to ask what his real game was: had they done so the current shambles would have been more apparent when we went to vote last September.

Of course, these are not so much "insights" as modern management aphorisms; they're about as useful as such things usually are. Their consideration is not helped by the number of blunders Westacott makes in elaborating them.

Again, the intolerance for nonsense that obviates the ad hominem attack, followed with a point-by-point rebuttal.

The point Westacott overlooks is that the boundaries of innovation and risk for public servants should be defined by their ministers. There's no point in urging an "innovation mindset" on officials if that's not what their political masters want.

This is what it means to have the real understanding of politics which the press gallery, and those who employ them, insist they have but do not.

If the utterings and witterings of Tony Abbott and his frontbench had been subjected to that level of scrutiny there would not be a Coalition government now. If the last Labor government had been subject to that quality of scrutiny it would have lifted its game. By defying the instruction to not write crap and adopt and adolescent pose of sneering scepticism, the press gallery ensured that the Gillard and Rudd governments merely survived and that excellent policy was tossed out with a great deal of policy bathwater - not that the press gallery could tell the difference.

Let's contrast the above piece of analysis with the sort of thing you get from the press gallery - and not just from some poor newbie, or your bog-standard drone, but from someone who (by press gallery standards) produces reflective, thinky-thoughty pieces. Over to you, Katharine Murphy:

As a rule of thumb, politics would prefer to deliver voters steadiness and certainty, but increasingly this [sic] is a commodity in short supply.

So if you can’t deliver certainty, then uncertainty will have to do. And uncertainty has its own potent rhetorical currency.

It was the press gallery, of which Murphy was then (and strangely, remains) a senior member, who heard and reported Abbott promising to deliver certainty, without really questioning whether he had the capacity or even the inclination to do so.

The current uncertainty frame in national affairs isn’t actually a construction, or a complete invention delivered to us by a manifestly cynical political class.

Well, largely they are.

The current government, when in opposition, declared that the government had a debt crisis. It doesn't, but people like Murphy either simply reported that it did, or pretended there were two valid sides to such a question. They assumed, but did not check, that there was a real strategy for reducing debt rather than the same hopin' and wishin' that we saw from the previous government. They did not bother to do some basic checking on what Liberals do in government; namely, that when they do pay down debt it's a historical accident.

The current government, when in opposition, declared that it had a plan to deliver economic growth and jobs, and that key to this was the abolition of taxes paid by only a few big companies. The taxes went in their own good time but the jobs growth (and economic growth more broadly) hasn't materialised. This was foreseeable by anyone not so gullible as to take Tony Abbott at his word - someone like Katharine Murphy.

Reasons to feel bloody terrified are many. In no particular order, there’s Russian aggression, there’s Chinese regional ambition, there’s the consequences of the decline of American exceptionalism and the perceived vacuum of leadership in the White House, and there’s that sectarian violence in the Middle East and its deeply unpleasant consequences for all western liberal democracies.

Knocks "stop the boats" into a cocked hat, doesn't it? Doesn't it? What do you mean, simply reporting those words was all that was necessary? This geopolitical gibbering context is the sort of thing you develop from too much exposure to Peter Hartcher.

See the quote above on other points in history which had their own challenges, and see Murphy's global impressions for the shallow affair it is.

There’s concern about the direction of the economy, about job security and cost of living pressures. It doesn’t matter, apparently, if the data tells us we are travelling well enough and certainly a great deal better than elsewhere – the concern persists and wafts.

The data doesn't tell us that.

The data tells us everything is slowing down, and that there is no countervailing narrative that (or how) things will get better and that here are ways of joining the upward trajectory. As Paddy Gourley points out, sources of future growth from research and innovation are being cut back, not boosted. It's not that we're innumerate - we read things all too well, better than those in close proximity to the decision-makers who feel it's their job to make allowances and excuses.

Tony Abbott made a really big promise before the last election – he promised to end the chaotic cycle of the 43rd parliament and put the adults back in charge. He held out a chimera of certainty. Then he manifestly failed to deliver it.

He was never in a position to deliver it. This isn't being wise after the event it was starkly evident long before September '13 to anyone without a vested interest in the outcome. Everyone who reported to the contrary was wrong to do so, and has committed the most terrible fraud upon this country.

The press gallery put all of its credibility in Abbott's basket, and it has blown the lot.

This parliament has opened much like the last one, only it’s actually more lacking in a basic organising principle.

Yep. this was obvious just after the last parliament was elected, when you consider what might have happened if Windsor, Oakeshott et al had made a different decision. The idea that Abbott had to be taken at his word, and that the only way to assess an Abbott government was to have one, was both the unanimous press gallery position and deeply, deeply stupid and wrong.

Surprises emerge from back pockets.

Only if you're not paying attention, and if you have learned nothing.

The Coalition has been unable to communicate clearly what it stands for.

This has been the case since 2007, when Howard lost office. It was clear since Abbott became leader. He was clear about nothing other than the last Labor government was 'bad', which was all Murphy and the press gallery wanted to hear, all they reported. Murphy's failure to identify her own agency, and those of her colleagues, impedes any credibility she may bring to analysis of our politics.

That, and her childlike unquestioning belief in Mark Textor:

Textor noted soft perceptions about the economy. After years of economic growth in Australia “there is now a distinct possibility that easy prosperity may not continue”.

Again, the failure of agency here. This isn't a matter of disclosure, it's a matter of Murphy's ability to perceive what's going on and report on it accurately.

Mark Textor is largely to blame for making the silk purse of a Prime Minister out of the sow's ear that is Tony Abbott. Textor gamed Murphy and her colleagues for years and years, and they never picked it. He's still doing it. It was always the case that the Coalition did not have the answers for this country; Textor helped frame Abbott so that Murphy and her equally ovine colleagues didn't bother asking the questions that might damage the chances of Textor's client. Textor plays the press gallery for mugs and they love him for it.

I’d rate Textor’s assessment of our collective state of being bang on the money.

You would, wouldn't you.

Tony Abbott has moved into a discussion about national security and the steps the government is taking to keep us all safe. In so doing, the prime minister has defined an enemy which is both abstract and “other” and ephemeral – and very real.

Yes, yes but the idea of journalists covering politicians is not merely to quote, or even summarise, what they said. It is to check those words against other objective sources of reality, and to evaluate questions of how well we are governed, whether the priorities of the government are those of the nation, and so on.

In 1981, Robert Trimbole left Australia despite the highest level of police border alerts by changing his date of birth on his departure card. 32 years later, Khaled Sharrouf also slipped travel restrictions by using his brother's passport. Journalists should be alert to the idea that calls for greater powers are distractions from the ineffective use, rather than inadequacy, of existing powers. Instead, journalists like Murphy take Abbott at his word by accepting his word that he's "keep[ing] us all safe".

To put the current public posture at its simplest, Abbott is countering an abstract uncertainty with the imperative of moral crusade.

That's what he always did. The case against Gillard and Rudd was pretty abstract, but Abbott made up in fervour what he lacked in detail. Murphy and the press gallery fell for it then and here they fall for it again.

Prime ministers do what is right and what is necessary. Listen to him. He’s saying that every time he’s in front of a microphone. He wants to assure us that the adults, or in his case, the adult, has finally turned up.

Murphy and her colleagues quote him unquestioningly, giving him the benefit of the doubt, reinforcing him and Textor and the rest of them in the positions in which they are most comfortable.

The basic, reductionist, construction suits. So this is a key transition for him. If he can achieve the balance, Abbott has a good prospect of not only facing and dealing with a bunch of practical threats and problems but of stabilising his government and rebooting its political fortunes.

Murphy and her colleagues do reductionism really well, so they'll do their best to help Abbott. Were they to focus on subtleties and nuances and other points of view, they would serve their readers better but set Abbott adrift.

Shorten is also working himself up into a nationalistic lather about the intrinsic sacredness of Australian jobs and about defending “our industries” ... (in this case high tech Japanese submarine manufacturers, apparently creeping covertly around the Adelaide shipyards) who would make products more cheaply overseas and send them back here.

The Japanese submarines are designed for short-range operations, over a couple of hundred kilometres at most. Australian submarines need to operate over thousands of kilometres. Murphy could have found that (and other issues) out with a bit of basic journalism. Instead, operational issues like that are sneeringly referred to as "Australian conditions" or wedged into a half-baked narrative, and dismissed.

...understand that we are now locked in a process where we essentially hold mirrors up to each other.

We've always understood that, and journalists and politicians have both suffered as a result. The idea that Textor and others accurately capture our thinking about politics and what we want/need from it is risible.

Only when you understand the press gallery as a mirror in which Abbott loves to gaze, rather than as a 'fourth estate' for evaluating and checking state power, does this aimless wittering make any sense.

... it’s this abundance of reflective surfaces that exacerbates the disconcerting feeling that nothing in national affairs is ever quite real – and nothing ever quite penetrates.

And do you think Murphy will get off her backside and question any of the images crafted for her benefit? Never. Does this diminish Murphy and her press gallery colleagues? Yes. Abbott has hocked the credibility of his party and that of the press gallery; he demands still more credit, and Murphy and the gang will give it freely until he and they inevitably run out. They'll be all surprised at that, too.

Nobody should be surprised at the sheer obsequiousness from this blog's very own bunny, Mark Kenny:

Abbott has been using this neat bit of self deprecation for years now, trotting it out on those occasions when prime ministers are required, by tradition and format, to be funny.

It got a solid laugh from an audience of journalists, lobbyists, and corporates, at the National Press Club's 50th anniversary dinner in Canberra on Wednesday night - even if many had heard the punch-line before.

Jokes rely on their power for being unexpected. What Kenny heard there was a roar of appreciation for a politician who has always made a point of making journalists feel important, and feel competent by reinforcing their predictive power.

When Abbott promised a government of no surprises, it was a promise made to journalists. He promised that they would not have to deal with nuance and subtlety and different points of view. They love him for that. Having to run around and gather different opinions is hard work! Because press gallery journalists are morons, they failed to realise that differing opinions is normal for politics, and that any promise of 'slowing down the news cycle' was always nonsense.

A politician promising to slow down the news cycle is up to no good, doesn't know what they're talking about, or both. Nobody in the press gallery is awake to this.

Privately, Abbott has a wicked sense of humour and loves to laugh, but witty pre-written speech-making has never been his long suit.

Privately, Abbott's humour is petty, mean, and inane. Publicly, his speeches (particularly the ones he writes himself) are petty, mean, and inane.

Kenny dares not point this out. Kenny spent years chasing down the chimera that Julia Gillard had someone else pay for her bathroom and found nothing. Here he is applying his chimera-chasing skills again, seeking to achieve solidity from pure wind, with the idea that Tony Abbott is a good bloke who likes to laugh. There's nothing faux-reflective about Kenny, it isn't his fault he has an enlarged bullshit gland.

Yet, there is a sense about Abbott that despite his considerable intellectual power - foolishly overlooked by those who would want it to be otherwise - he is more at home in parliamentary attack mode, or at least when defending a serious position or argument.

The idea that there are great hordes who think Abbott is stupid is a straw man. However, the case that Kenny is an intellectual fizzer is strong. Abbott is good for a blast of bluster and not much good beyond that. Nobody who has observed Abbott up close for years and years, like Kenny has, should be puzzled by this. Kenny goes the straw man on a daily basis, a sure sign his analytical skills are non-existent.

That said, there is still something impressive about a prime minister who despite his time constraints and legions of staff, insists on crafting most of his own speeches. This is Abbott the writer and thinker.

Abbott is wasting time by ploughing away at something he's not good at, while other issues that need his time and attention go begging. This is something poor leaders do.

There's little impressive about the speeches themselves. School captains across the country blow the Prime Minister off the stage in terms of writing and giving speeches, which is why Abbott never goes to schools.

Even back in his day, Menzies had lamented the drift in political coverage of Canberra, criticising reporters for relying on mere pieces of paper provided to them by politicians – press releases – while the oratory and theatre, or "cut and thrust" of parliamentary contest went less reported.

Neither side of politics has shied from making similar criticisms since. Who can forget Julia Gillard's admirably economical plea to the Canberra gallery delivered from the same podium: "don't write crap".

Well you did, because you wrote nothing but. The coverage of parliamentary theatre has increased, without improving our understanding of how we are governed. This says a lot about the media, which neither Kenny nor Murphy are prepared to face (remember, Kenny and Murphy are both experienced members of the press gallery).

"The best contribution, if I may say so, the media could make right now is not to be more right wing, or more left wing, but to be more ready to give credit where it's due and to acknowledge the strengths as well as the weaknesses in our country and its people," [Abbott] said.

A government is evaluated against the strengths and weaknesses of the country. A government that simply trumpets the strengths of the country is being vacuous. A government that neglects or exacerbates the weaknesses of the country deserves criticism. Kenny, Murphy and the gang can't and won't do that.

In any event, Abbott's complaint suggests he believes he has not been given sufficient credit for his successes in ending deaths at sea from people smuggling, concluding free trade agreements and for his deftness on the world stage. This is not so.

Cute use of "deaths at sea" - a man shot in the head or who dies from a preventable condition in an internment camp is no less dead than those who drown.

Abbott hasn't "concluded" free trade deals. The Korean deal contains sovereignty-wrecking measures to invalidate our laws, and it is [$] not a high priority for the fractious KNA. He hasn't been deft at all in diplomacy. He's pre-empted the US and been oafish toward everyone else. Prime Ministers in trouble get their spinners to claim they're diplomatic geniuses, but Kenny is so "in tune" with Abbott that he overlooks actual practice in that regard.

Perhaps more substantively, Abbott also used the opportunity of the speech to remark on his own journey over some 30 years in public life and 20 in parliament, putting it up it as a model of how change can be embraced even against the necessary inertia of conservatism.

"I will admit to two significant policy areas where I am now different," he ventured, nominating multiculturalism, and paid parental leave. "In other words, there were good conservative reasons – liberal conservative reasons – for changing a traditional position."

The weakness of conservatism is that it can't distinguish between a passing fad and a permanent shift. Inertia, in itself, is not "necessary".

Abbott's supposed shift on 'multiculturalism' has to be assessed against his treatment of Muslim Australians regarding terrorism (compared with the treatment of other faiths with the terror of child abuse, for example), and the abandonment of his pledges to Aborigines. Abbott is not entitled to be taken at his word. No politician is. Kenny's insistence that he must, a Crabb-like bit of theatre review, shows that he fundamentally does not get what his job is.

In all, what we learned from Abbott's press club speech was that he remains firmly convinced of his own conservative position with minimal exceptions, and, that he thinks he gets a hard time from the media.

No Prime Minister in my lifetime (I've been an avid consumer of press gallery output since Fraser was PM) has gotten an easier ride from the press gallery than Abbott.

There was one final reason Abbott agreed to address the press club's black tie affair rather than its regular lunch-time series, and it was apparent in his final line: "I have to say, tonight, is my vision for the National Press Club – a speech with no questions afterwards."

Witty after all.

Abbott just wants to be taken at face value, and the press gallery has shown - and continues to show - that it is happy to oblige. Kenny can't distinguish wit from shit.

Penetrating but not personal analysis helps us think about what our leaders are doing, and how they might do it better. Paddy Gourley, who is not a member of the press gallery, is far more perceptive than senior press gallery members Katharine Murphy and Mark Kenny, who are heavily invested in this government and the way it relates to the traditional media.

We need better analysis of what our leaders are up to. We are never going to get it from the press gallery. It's one thing for Mark Textor and Tony Abbott to write their own pieces - but despite their limbo-dance under the low bar set for them we should expect more from those whose job it is to analyse them.

"Yeah, what he said" is not journalism.

Media consumers do not simply have to accept to accept their self-serving, badly constructed (but engaging! You had to be there!) framings. We need more than unquestioning agreement or minor, set-piece quibbles from those whose job it is to work out how we are governed. Good analysis requires perspective that the press gallery beats out of capable journalists.

Breaking news

Politics involves working out competing ideas about how public services, and the community more broadly, is run. A stable political system is one which can accommodate competing ideas without breaking down, or causing civic violence that requires a response of state violence in the short term, and dispossession of certain groups from the political system over the longer term.

Australia has a stable political system. Some people think this stability requires the absence of debate. They tend to be people who aren't interested in policy processes and outcomes, neither generally nor in particular, and how they affect people's lives, but who get their jollies from the 'horse race' aspect of politics and being 'in the thick of it'. It is hard to credibly maintain this approach at the level of municipal politics, but the scale and isolation of Canberra's press gallery create the conditions for this condition to become endemic.

There are far too many horse-race people as it is, and their presence in positions of power within our political system is to be deplored. Leading members of our political parties and pretty much every member of the press gallery operates from this toxic set of assumptions. It is a vast exercise in self-indulgence to cultivate and maintain this attitude at the public expense, and (for journalists) at the expense of their large but struggling employers.

Almost all reporting on federal politics occurs at the level of the horse-race, with no capacity or interest in explaining how this political to-and-fro leads to certain outcomes in the community. This does the community, and individual readers, a disservice. This disservice explains why disengagement from politics and from traditional media is rising sharply and in correlation (not coincidence). This cannot end well for traditional media, nor for the two-party political system, which includes the student-politics-as-training-ground political elite.

Let's take this story. It is entirely natural that a party losing government will revisit policies, particularly contentious ones like asylum-seekers and why those who come by sea are treated so differently than those who come by air. Yet, because of the limited perspectives and journalistic skills of the press gallery denizens who wrote that piece, all they can focus on is the SPLIT SHOCK aspect:

The move comes just three weeks after Labor immigration spokesman Richard Marles told the National Press Club that he fully supported offshore processing and that the Rudd government should never have dismantled the offshore centres ... The motion was due to be debated about a month ago but it is understood it was delayed so that it wouldn't clash with Mr Marles' appearance at the press club.

What this says is that there was never a good time to debate policy, before National Press Club appearances or afterwards. What the proponents of this policy are trying to do are change the minds of Marles and others in their party's decision-making systems, and hence change what they tell the National Press Club - and even what they might do in government.

"We support offshore processing at Nauru and Manus Island as a step which has saved lives," he said at the time.

But a copy of a motion cites the death of Iranian asylum seeker Reza Berati, the "inhumane, unsafe and completely unsatisfactory conditions" for asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru and a lack of independent oversight of the centres, and the lack of processing of asylum claims in both countries as justification for the move.

There is a debate to be had in the two paragraphs cited above, if only the journalists had the wit to draw it out.

It's one thing for the Australian government to decide who does (not) come into this country. It is quite another for it to decide who lives and and dies among people who are not at war with us, and who are vulnerable people not supported by the governments of the countries they came from. This is the debate being had here, apparently within the ALP's normal decision-making forums and processes.

Let us have no nonsense about priorities or time. These journalists have nothing better to do but get some perspective, and there is plenty of information available within and beyond Canberra to build that perspective. This is a debate that does not improve with repetition. Fairfax and traditional-media outlets generally do themselves and their readers no favours by pretending that differences of opinion is a story in itself.

Differences of opinion are a given, even among people of goodwill who like one another and who work well together. Surely journalists know this. Differences of opinion are not, in themselves, a story, and insistence to the contrary by lazy journalists result in them - and their beleaguered employers - being ignored.

Ms Parke and Ms Burke both declined to comment when contacted by Fairfax Media and it is understood the motion is unlikely to win majority support in the caucus room, with many Labor MPs simply unwilling to re-start debate over an issue that plagued Labor for six years in government.

Ms Parke and Ms Burke both know that Fairfax Media lies outside their party's decision-making processes. Neither want to create the impression they are grandstanding at their party's expense. If you understand politics, and respect your readers, then that's the understanding you'd convey to your readers.

If you don't understand politics, and you condescend to people using journo cliches, you end up dribbling the sort of crap Whyte and Massola have dished up. It is standard political reporting, to be sure, but a low and frankly doomed standard at that.

If you can bear it, here is more of it, this time about the Liberals. There's plenty of information out there about Australia's air defence needs and the strengths and weaknesses of the F-35, and none of the three journalists cited could be arsed going into it - even though the issue has been live for more than a decade. This article covers the cost of the JSF, but misses a number of vital elements:

• There's more to air defence than mere dollar cost.
• The cost of these machines does not fit with the austerity model put forward by the government on other issues.
• Throughout the JSF project, costs have skyrocketed and cost estimates are unreliable.
• The effectiveness of the JSF can only be judged against a knowledge of Australia's air defence needs and an understanding of other products in that market: neither are present in this coverage.
• Yes, it is the place of Australians to judge the effectiveness of military hardware purchases.

Political parties should be able to handle discussions about policy. A party that cannot bear to bring up divisive discussions is probably a party that is not ready to return to government. Individuals who are that battle-scarred should be replaced. However, if that party is being denied the information it needs to have a debate and make decisions, and then convince others of the merits of its position, then such a position is understandable. Within political parties, and beyond them, the media cliche of SPLIT SHOCK is a prophylactic to understanding rather than a facilitator of it.

Soon, someone like Katharine Murphy will bemoan the banality of our political debate, with no insight or admission about their own role in that, and certainly no answers: their laziness in coming to grips with complex issues, and underestimating the subtlety of their audience to cover up their inadequate explanation skills.

The Conversation tries to set itself apart from the media by using academic experts rather than journalists. However, they do not engage this expertise with an understanding of political processes, using a ruse whereby journalists are given meaningless academic titles like 'Adjunct Associate Fellow' and allowed to dribble on without having learned anything about politics, or journalism, or much of anything really.

Michelle Grattan thinks politics is all about singing from the same songsheet, and deplores "untidiness and some dissent". She trips over a number of silly images on the way to her story, which fails because she won't/can't engage with issues:

In Canberra the Ides of March has recently come in June

No it hasn't. The examples Grattan cites involve very little actually being resolved as a result of the "special frisson" she describes.

Abbott, after arriving back early on Monday from his around-the-world trip, has found some of the first Senate jabs in the struggle over the budget bills coming from his own ranks, with Liberal senators Ian Macdonald and Cory Bernardi attacking the debt levy (which, however, will have an easy Senate passage courtesy of Labor).

Abbott will almost certainly have been aware of this before and during his trip overseas. Macdonald was cheesed off at Abbott because Abbott promised that all shadow ministers would become ministers, but broke his promise to Macdonald. Bernardi is a knucklehead and is in the departure lounge to leave the Liberal Party. Grattan should be awake to this and convey it to her readers: again, the mere fact of dissent is insufficient to support a story.

Abbott palmed the questions off but more generally the government says the material is out of date and what’s relevant is the future, with the budget numbers pointing to alarming trends.

Does the HILDA study address those concerns? Does some reliable third-party source of information help us decide one way or another? In politics, unlike other fields of activity, The Conversation is pretty much worthless.

Even so, the survey does suggest that, as with other aspects of the budget, the government has been somewhat over-egging the problems.

If criticism of the government is valid, you have to wonder about the journalists, and MPs outside the government (particularly the opposition) who allow Abbott to "palm off" important questions. Grattan doesn't realise that a report like this represents an admission of professional failure on her part.

Bill Shorten - who’s been riding high on the polls and is in a better political position than he would have ever dreamed

Press gallery journalists seek access over all other considerations - you know you've got access to a politician when you can access their dreams.

More immediately concerning for Shorten was a claim on Monday at the royal commission into union corruption that when he was a parliamentary secretary in 2009 he had contributed $5000 to the campaign of a candidate in the Health Services Union.

The candidate, Marco Bolano, was an ally of the union whistleblower Kathy Jackson.

Two things should be said about this, and neither should need to be said to anyone with such experience in covering politics.

First, the whole idea of the Heydon Royal Commission into certain trade unions is to get at Shorten, in the same way that the Fraser government set up the Costigan Royal Commission to go after then-ACTU President Bob Hawke. If Grattan's experience has any value, it is in drawing and testing these kinds of comparisons rather than presenting these developments breathlessly as unforeseeable instances of 'untidiness'.

Second, Jackson isn't a "whistleblower", she and her mate Bolano are part of the problem with the HSU. The idea that she was a "whistleblower" was all very well when she first went to Fairfax, hoping to throw them off her scent and play the once-great Kate McClymont for a mug, but there have been developments since then - or before then - and Grattan has no excuse not to be across them. She is being lazy here.

On yet another front, Labor figures on Monday night were grappling with a controversial motion due to be debated at caucus on Tuesday calling for the opposition to reverse its support for sending asylum seekers to Manus Island and Nauru, and to declare that these centres should be immediately closed.

Yeah, well, we examined that earlier. Grattan's snippy final paragraph contains nothing about the effects of that policy on actual asylum seekers, no qualms about morality, nor better ways of doing things. It is wholly inadequate for describing a vexed issue and how it plays out in the normal course of politics.

Even some in the left argue the motion was ill-advised, which shows how far the ALP’s thinking has changed over the years.

Not really. Detention of sea-borne asylum-seekers was initiated by the Keating government in the early 1990s. The then immigration minister, Gerry Hand, was from the left, which shows you there hasn't been as much change as Grattan would have you believe.

After four decades on the job Michelle Grattan practices a kind of goldfish journalism where every new development is a surprise and there are only ever two choices: the status quo or chaos.

Indulging one old journalist might be a mistake, but indulging two looks like carelessness. Shaun Carney, so acute on the downfall of Howard, floundered with Rudd and Gillard and was rightly let go by The Age. Former editor Andrew Jaspan, now at The Conversation, has let Carney have another go:

And yet, for all the energy attended upon them, experience suggests that budgets can generally not be expected to remain in the national conversation for long. Most years, a budget will have lost its news value by the Friday after its release ... But not this year: the 2014-15 budget is the exception that proves the rule. In political, financial and social terms, this budget has so far shown itself to be a game-changer. It has reset the political debate, sparking a community reaction full of heat.

The reason for this is because the budget was the point where all the hot air from Abbott, Hockey et al coalesced and took tangible form. It was where all that uncritical media coverage was shown to be hollow, where the entire press gallery revealed that it hadn't asked the right questions at the right time.

It's quaint that Carney regards "the national conversation" as the same as "what editors of newspapers, TV and radio stations choose to cover".

If you can't get over the SPLIT SHOCK narrative, it will have escaped your notice that Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald put more cogent questions to Finance Minister than all of the other Senators put together and cubed. The manifestation of all that anti-budget energy as heat rather than light should be recognised for what it is: a failure of journalism.

But with its first budget, the government – or more particularly, its treasurer – has presented a set of policies that attempt to redraw and redefine the role of the state. These policies challenge not just what took place under the previous Labor government but also under John Howard.

If you're going to attempt a massive reorganisation of the way the government relates to the citizenry, and vice versa, then be prepared to take the time and put the work in. This government hasn't done that, despite an easy ride from the press gallery and a more than accommodating ALP.

So the government is clearly experiencing trouble because it said one thing and now wants to do another. And yes, of course, this seems odd because of the way in which Tony Abbott successfully pursued Julia Gillard over her carbon tax reversal.

All governments say one thing in opposition and do another in government - hardly "odd". What's happened in this case is that not only have the Coalition under Abbott been deceitful (and that only blogs were alert to this, unlike the credulous traditional media). They developed a set of ideas that were ill-considered and not debated at any level within the community. They appear to be disjointed bits of policy that the US has since moved away from, like privatising the public health system, not relating to Australia and its social and economic conditions in any practical way.

Others, often more sympathetic to the government, including some Liberal MPs, offer the assessment that a good deal of the problem goes to messaging.

I was a member of the Liberal Party in NSW from 1986 to 2000. The party spent much of that time in opposition on both the federal and state levels, and tended to blame the messaging: we need to get our messaging out, if only we could get our messaging through, blah blah messaging blah. Preselection candidates boasted of their 'media experience'. It's as though all problems were technocratic rather than deeper-seated.

On climate change, the government has specifically rejected the application of a price signal.

Abbott said in Washington last week that raising fuel excise was a de facto price signal.

Distilled, the government’s message on the co-payment is that because there is a budget emergency, the impost must be introduced but not a dollar of the proceeds will go to ameliorating the emergency.

That's a stuffed-up piece of messaging right there. Keep in mind that messaging is Abbott's strength, the reason why the Coalition is in government at all. If Abbott has botched that messaging, what hope can anyone have that things will get better for this government?

Do today’s Australians, many of whom – rightly or wrongly – view their taxes as a form of downpayment on an age pension and medical care in their retirement, think that contributing 8% of their wage to the nation’s welfare bill is so bad?

Hockey complained that opposition to his budget was a throwback to the 1970s.

From 1978 to 1983, the Treasurer was John Howard. Howard's budgets were always in deficit. They trimmed welfare spending, in response to public sentiments that welfare recipients were 'bludgers' after decades of low unemployment (shamefully, this extended to less-than-generous benefits and assistance to Vietnam veterans). There was a lot of talk about 'nation building' but little to show for them. In that sense, Hockey's budget is a very 1970s document.

In a situation where half of Australian households receive welfare payments, and where nobody is living the 'welfare queen' lifestyle made popular by John Laws or Mike Carlton in their pomp - Hockey has played the "dole bludger" card but it sits on the table like a two of clubs, rather than the trump he and Abbott had intended. Messaging be damned: this is a failure of judgment pure and simple, and Carney dares not risk his few remaining contacts by calling this out.

The last time there was such sustained public antagonism to a budget was in 1993 ... That broken promise was the deal-breaker between the electorate and that government ... They were different times, of course

Of course. At least Carney is trying here to understand what has happened with this government, and stopped trying to pretend that everything is "unprecedented", "extraordinary" or otherwise using hype where it clearly does not, as the old saying had it, "sell newspapers".

Our politico-media system seems to break before it can bend.

Julia Gillard's conventional political compromise in pursuit of a price on carbon led the media to stop taking her seriously, and to take her opponents more seriously than they warranted. Hockey will need to compromise to get this budget through, and it will make or break him. The traditional media are following rather than leading new media when it comes to politics; and we will have a new politics created though a new media before the likes of Massola, Kenny, Grattan and Carney can even understand it, let alone report on it.

What they think of as strength is really a kind of brittleness, but they continue to portray flexibility and debate as a deviation from normal business rather than the business itself. For all their experience, they are constantly surprised by foreseeable, regular events. People who are surprised by foreseeable, regular events cannot provide steady and responsive leadership nor news of consistent quality. These people should neither be surprised nor snippy when people stop listening to them.

Judged on performance

We have a government that doesn't consult with us, which doesn't evolve ideas over time and which regards public input as some sort of failure on their part, to be vigorously resisted. They want to be a longterm government but are behaving like a short-term one; their lack of confidence in their own longevity is soundly based.

We have a media that, for all its close observation of politics generally and the Coalition in particular, can't make head nor tail of what they see in front of them. People they've known for years have become strangers once in office. It isn't only the rookies who are making these errors - the most senior members of the press gallery have no real clue about what's going on in our national politics.

Michael Gordon strikes a pose between Abbott and Shorten. He seems to believe Shorten is under an obligation to spell out detailed policies, a stricture Gordon never imposed upon Abbott in that role (keeping in mind there was a much more realistic prospect of an early election in the last parliament than there is now). Gordon is pessimistic about this parliament:

The result is a war that will be waged on the floor of the existing Senate until the new senators take their seats on July 1, and then become mired in negotiation and brinkmanship with an eclectic crossbench – a war likely to continue the brutality and divisiveness that has defined Australian politics in the past six years.

Negotiation and brinkmanship sounds like standard politics to me. Why not to Gordon, who's been reporting on federal politics for decades? Why this crap about war - at a time when actual armed conflict is literally tearing apart real people and countries, isn't it more than a bit silly to portray a bit of banter between, say, Christine Milne and Eric Abetz as 'war'? Was Australian politics before 2008 really some sort of sylvan glade in which it seemed always afternoon? Gordon is attempting the very sort of empty hype and bullshit which was once thought to 'sell newspapers', but which we now realise (too late!) does the opposite.

While some have given credibility to veiled threats of a double dissolution election ...

Well Michael, Abbott and other Coalition figures seemed pretty definite about it before the election. You're old enough to remember Hawke bringing on the 1984 election. You might have the credibility you seem to assume if you had called Abbott out at the time. This is what I mean about the press gallery losing credibility, and it has nothing to do with partisanship (yours or mine).

Does the national political editor of The Age have anything to say about the vacuous way politics is practiced these days? Reader, he's as bad as the worst of them:

Those [Coalition] strategists flirting with the idea [of a double dissolution election] could do worse than review the calls to talkback radio on Friday.

Talkback radio sentiment is a 1970s metric, skewed toward the very same individuals who were ringing, say, John Laws in the 1970s, but who have now moved into a different demographic. It isn't particularly representative and iSentia - and by extension, Michael Gordon and The Age - does a lousy job of pretending to turn talkback crap into demographic gold.

The early budget battles will be over plans to introduce, without specific mandate, the $7 Medicare co-payment, the return of petrol excise indexation, other measures that will increase the cost of living and a new regime for the young out of work that will save $1.2 billion over four years.

This isn't "without specific mandate", it's directly contrary to any interpretation of 'mandate'. Abbott specifically promised not to increase costs of living, and here he is increasing the cost of living. There is a considerable body of evidence that the "new regime for the young out of work" will cost the economy a hell of a lot more than $1.2 billion, and Gordon should have tapped into that (or at least acknowledged it).

If the Coalition’s central narrative is to address what Abbott calls Labor’s "debt and deficit disaster", the subtext ...

Oh, bugger the subtext. This government will not be judged on its subtext. It is making life harder for people who are already doing it tough.

Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews says exemptions will cover the vulnerable, but does not shy from the punitive aspect:

Andrews is not entitled to be taken at his word, as Gordon does. He's stuffed up bigger challenges than this. What exemptions, how to define 'vulnerable' and 'punitive'? If Michael Gordon was a real journalist these weasel words (from a confirmed weasel) would be ringing alarm bells.

The broader debate, and the one that will frame the 2016 election, concerns the Coalition’s plans for pensioners and the intention to, in Shorten’s words, outsource the burden of its savings task to the states by refusing to continue Labor’s spending on schools and hospitals beyond the forward estimates of Labor’s last budget.

What an awful sentence that is. Never mind outsourcing sub arrangements, that is the sort of sentence I write for free late into the evening of a long day. Seriously, someone of Gordon's experience has no excuse for that. Let's see if it means anything.

It isn't clear why pensions is a 'broader debate' than youth unemployment, or why it's strangely decoupled from debates about education and even health. It isn't clear why the 'savings task' takes precedence over education tasks and health tasks, or why Gordon has failed to unpack that assumption on the part of the government.

It’s hardly a broken promise because nothing will happen before the next election.

It is. Nobody currently relying on the pension was told that the pension indexing arrangements would be reduced in this manner; financial plans have to be adjusted in light of that announcement on top of the normal caprices of the market. Abbott assured pensioners of stability and no journalist called him on it.

On hospital and school funding, the charge is that the Coalition has ripped $80 billion out of funding to the states and given them only one option to recoup the money: support a broader and heavier GST.

How high does the GST have to be raised before it recoups $80 billion? Has that funding really only been withdrawn from "the states", or from all of us who live beyond the ACT? Again, Gordon pays no mind to that.

With reviews of taxation and federal-state relations in train, the Coalition’s plans for future funding in these areas will be clear to voters before they next go to the polls ...

We're talking this year's budget, not 2016. $80 billion has been ripped out of this year's budget for education and health. Victoria (where most readers of The Age live) will go to the polls by the end of this calendar year, and who do you expect them to vote for: the party which takes it up to Abbott or . Even if you did have some arrangement in place two years from now that restored (or even increased) that amount, the disruptions will be far greater than Canberra shinybums (Gordon included) can possibly imagine.

The fact that he hasn't really thought about it is bad enough. If you discount the idea that Gordon is biased in favour of this government, then quite why he feels obliged to assure us that the government has it all in hand (despite evidence so far) is a mystery.

If Shorten opposes broadening or increasing the GST (or both), his challenge will be to spell out another way to fund better schools, hospitals and the National Disability Insurance Scheme he helped bring into being.

If Gordon held Shorten to the same standards that he held the previous opposition leader, then Shorten would simply frustrate the government and offer nothing positive and Gordon would hail him as a political genius. Just like Paula Matthewson has.

No organisation anywhere in the world would accept a sudden $80b shortfall with equanimity. Education and health are matters that affect real people everywhere around the country. It is not merely a matter for federal-state intergovernmental relations, still less some Canberra insider game.

The Budget revealed cuts to health and education funding for the states and territories commencing in four years' time (which is conveniently after the next federal election).

Not everybody plans their lives around federal elections: both my children will be in primary school in 2017, and you can't just turn education systems on and off at the click of some fingers in far-off Canberra. This isn't "amateur theatrics", it's as real as it gets.

You want to know what are the real unbreakable laws of modern politics? Here's one:

Everybody who talks about how something is not what it is but it's actually a pie, see, and then goes on about carving up that pie while also growing it, and then invokes some mad Lewis Carroll imagery of slicing an expanding pie, implying that pies exist for their own sake rather than to be eaten - everyone who does this looks like an idiot. Most people who do it are, in fact, idiots.

There are no exceptions to this rule. It certainly is not invalidated by federal-state memoranda of understanding nor any other legal instrument, and indeed many of those reinforce it.

Truly, nobody who gives a moment's thought to the words they use tosses their credibility into that particular bin.

Matthewson is wrong to claim that the real political game (insofar as it somehow supersedes that of education and health) is one of reorienting the states' tax bases. Chris Pyne says the states have plenty of tax options - as usual, he's wrong and doesn't even care what the truth of the matter is.

The real political game, as it was under Howard, is to force the Coalition out of office at the state level so that the Coalition is not conflicted or diverted politically between federal and state governments. For the Manichean Abbott, the federal-state blame game can be clarified by abandoning state government (and its pernicious moderating influences) to Labor.

• If the Liberals had wanted Steven Marshall to become Premier of SA late last year, they would have kept Tony Abbott well away from there. Marshall isn't where Abbott was in 2010 - he is the punchline in a vast joke he cannot yet understand, but which might crush him once he does;
• Over the next six-and-a-bit months you can expect a number of "harsh but necessary" decisions from Canberra targeted at Victoria that will embarrass, if not devastate, Denis Napthine's re-election campaign. Neither he, nor the national political editor of The Age, will have any idea until after they are announced. True, Napthine has his own problems - but the feds will be quick with "state issues" and press gallery potplants will not challenge them on that either;
• Next up is NSW. O'Farrell was the only politician in Australia who consistently put the wind up Abbott, and it will the the making of Baird if he does so with Abbott. A great deal of money that could be used to shore up nervous federal backbenchers is staying in donors' pockets thanks to ICAC, or being spent on the NSW campaign. Now do you see why Abbott wants state Coalition govts gone?
• Half the seats that are needed to tip this government out are in Queensland, and do you think Abbott wants to be hostage to that stumblebum Newman?
• Look, Matthias runs the show in WA, and who even cares about NT or Tasmania; and last but not least
• Mark Textor will reprise his role of a decade ago with the state parties, where he took their money and gave dud advice to ensure Howard's supremacy went unchallenged. Paula Matthewson and the rest of the press gallery will continue to regard him as a genius.

Mind you, if there is such a thing as "faux hysterics" it follows there must be such a thing as "true hysterics" - and if anyone can make the distinction Matthewson is the very person. The wide boys and girls of the press gallery have no excuse for misreporting as they do, they have seen this movie before. Particularly Peter "single source" Hartcher:

As Joe Hockey set about deciding how to cut welfare payments, he asked for a comprehensive list of all entitlement programs. He couldn’t find one.

The guy had been shadow treasurer for four years. What the hell had he been doing? Had Hockey and his plucky staff not reverse-engineered such a list, and if not why not?

The federal government today collects revenues equivalent to 23 per cent of Australia’s GDP. It spends the equivalent of 26 per cent. The simple reality is that the annual shortfall is 3 per cent of GDP.

If that is allowed to persist, there is only one possible outcome. Corrective action was needed.

The previous government was well aware of that and was not, as Hartcher implies, blithely ignoring it. The previous government delivered six deficit budgets and was widely held to have failed. The incumbents project that this budget and the next five will be in deficit, but that's OK.

Over the coming term of government there will be a return of the El Nino weather patterns to eastern Australia. Receipts from agricultural exports will go down and it is eminently foreseeable that taxpayer cash will be shovelled at improvident yokels, to an extent that makes a mockery of those budget forecasts. Yet, just as the press gallery rose as one to assert that Chris Pyne didn't call someone *else* a cunt, so too will they make excuses and accept government assumptions of ongoing deficits and 'unforeseen events'.

The lesson of history is that the only time that a government will impose real discipline is in its first budget.

Is there 'real discipline' in this budget - not particularly - a bit of trimming, cost-shifting to the states, and class warfare, but that's about it.

These were the declared values, but there were also the grudges and frustrations. The deputy prime minister and leader of the National Party, Warren Truss, said this about age pensioners in a post-budget speech to Brisbane’s Conservative Club: “Increasingly the lifestyle - and the savings for superannuation - are being seen as the opportunity to enjoy a few cruises and the luxuries of life for a few years until it runs out and then people wish to fall back on the aged pension.”

The minister for social services, Kevin Andrews, told a press conference on Monday: “The days of easy welfare for young people is over. We want a fair system, but we don’t think it’s fair that young people can just sit on the couch at home and pick up a welfare cheque.”

Grudges and frustrations my arse - these are people who scorn those they govern. These are the sorts of statements that slip out in the final term of a long-serving government, not the first (unless they are the same?).

And some of the frustration in the Coalition was frustration with their former leader and Liberal hero John Howard. A government strategist told me: “It’s horseshit that a family earning $170,000 with three kids still gets government support.”

Really? Remember when The Daily Telegraph thought anyone earning over $150,000 was doing it tough? Hartcher must have missed that, too. I bet his "government strategist" didn't.

We have now learned, very starkly, that even some of the Liberals who know Abbott closely were quite wrong about his values.

His former cabinet colleague, Peter Costello, wrote a column in this newspaper in 2011 to issue a warning to the Liberals: Abbott didn’t share the core beliefs of the party mainstream, the party of Howard and Costello.

He pointed out that Abbott had “worked closely with the DLP in his student days”, a reference to the old Democratic Labor Party of BA Santamaria.

“The DLP was good on defence and the Cold War but it was not up to much on economic issues,” Costello wrote. He said that the senator recently elected under the resurrected banner of the DLP, John Madigan, should be left to “run the case for protection and regulation”.

“That is not the future for the Coalition. Its leaders are there to promote and implement Liberal policies like freedom in the workplace, open trade, lower tax, and careful spending of taxpayers' money.”
The evidence now before us is exactly the opposite. The Abbott-Hockey government is revealed to be a more ideologically conservative outfit than Howard-Costello.

Rather than relying on Costello's columns from three years ago, it is fair to assume that the political and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald would be in a position to observe and interrogate the Coalition about their approach to government.

The budget conducts a frontal attack on three Howard legacies. One is the family payment system. It will remain as a support, but the government proposes to strip out elements that it considers to be “middle-class welfare.”

Peter, it doesn't; I say this as a recipient of Family Tax Benefit B.

Second is the Howard urge to centralise power in the federal government at the expense of the States. Abbott and Hockey are proposing the exact opposite, to devolve power to the States.

With the pretty important exceptions of health and education, I reckon this holds - and the political skills of both the federal ministers for health and education aren't much chop. Never mind the blithe statements Peter, look into this.

Third is the Howard boondoggle known as the ethanol production subsidy. It’s gone.

Not for long. Do you know how many seats Katter and/or Palmer stand to gain in Queensland if this is mishandled?

The Abbott-Hockey government is also more pro-market and pro-deregulation ... [Howard] never proposed a co-payment to visit a doctor.

This is a non-sequitur. Small businesses are being levied with additional paperwork and compliance.

Abbott’s plan would begin to repair the budget; it would also make Australia a more unequal society. The cuts to welfare are permanent. The 2 per cent tax levy on the rich is temporary.

The first sentence is true, the rest assumes some sort of link between what this government says and what it does. Honestly, there's no helping some people.

Bill Shorten’s budget response is also revealing. He is modelling himself as opposition leader not on Labor leaders Bob Hawke or Kevin Rudd but on Tony Abbott. His budget reply was all snarls, no solutions.

Bob Hawke was opposition leader only for the duration of the 1983 election campaign; he never delivered a reply to any budget John Howard delivered nor even fronted Question Time in that role. Kevin Rudd also offered few concrete solutions, frustrating the then Coalition government no end. Peter Hartcher has no excuse for not knowing this, especially as he's got the ouija board out with Don Chipp.

And Clive Palmer party [sic]? He’s talking mumbo jumbo and shaping as a classic populist opportunist. He’s committed to blocking the Medicare copayment, but he remains a wildcard. Some of Abbott’s most dramatic proposals for Medicare, universities, welfare and health and education depend on him. We have not yet seen how he will conduct his party in Senate negotiations.

Here's an idea: why not make like a journalist and ask Palmer questions. Stop treating him like he doesn't matter and acknowledge that he's part of the landscape now. Find out how he's reacted to similar situations in the past. How different would political history have been if Abbott's performance as opposition leader had been similarly written off by supposedly serious political analysts:

And [Tony Abbott] party? He’s talking mumbo jumbo and shaping as a classic populist opportunist ... he remains a wildcard. Some of [Gillard]’s most dramatic proposals for Medicare, universities, welfare and health and education depend on him. We have not yet seen how he will conduct his party in Senate negotiations.

Anyway, back to it:

And, like Shorten and the Greens, Palmer remains in blithe denial that there is any need to start addressing Australia’s deficit.

Start? When did it ever stop? Will we ever break out of the fetish that the budget deficit is the most important facet of the economy?

After all that it almost seems redundant to give Lyndal Curtis' facile and ignorant piece a going-over. It is of a piece with Katharine Murphy's out-of-office message.

If nothing else is clear from the past few years in federal politics, this is: election promises are often not worth the paper they are printed on.

Maybe it is time to ask for less.

If I had read that on a mobile device I would have thrown it across the room. Neither the quality of major party candidate offerings, nor the limitations of journalists, should cause citizens to ask less of their government. Yes, government is hard and I'm sure that attending press conferences and coffee at Aussie's can be a bit arduous at times, but this is an article by someone with no perspective of what her job is really about.

So many governments have broken promises over the years that we take them with a grain of salt when they are made.

But factoring in a lack of trust as a given does not serve the democracy well. It leads to distrust of politicians and disengagement from the electorate.

Neither credulity nor cynicism are appropriate for people seeking to send representatives to govern them. What people need is information. The idea that the press gallery should observe parliament and parliamentarians so closely, and yet be unable to report on what's going on, means that the press gallery has failed.

So is it just the politicians' problem, or are we all - the media and public alike - to blame for what we ask of politicians particularly during election campaigns?

The assumption that the media is the public, the public the media - is both total nonsense, and totally necessary for press gallery journalists to persist in doing what they do.

Let's be clear about what Lyndal Curtis does - first, politicians make a statement, then give a bit of background. Curtis crafts some questions that will elicit the key lines in the statement, and a bit of background. If there is a response from another party, she will forewarn the interview subject so that they can develop some lines. Then, the interview takes place in which the lines are trotted out in her presence, for a press gallery journalist has succeeded when this occurs.

Challenging questions are batted away and allowed to stay batted. Then, the day's work is pretty much over, but you can pretend that "the 24 hour news cycle" is really a thing if there's a meal allowance in it for you.

Elections have become a game of "rule in, rule out" proposals or changes across the budget.

Why? Who says? Having recognised this, how do you snap out of it?

They are asked for certainty in a world which is fundamentally uncertain. Even governments campaigning for re-election - who are in a better position to know what they will face after the poll - cannot predict every twist and turn of an economy open to global forces.

The urge for specific promises and the fear of a scare campaign moves politicians ever more into the realm of tight messaging and denies the opportunities for a real debate about what is needed or what may be needed.

The media (and I include myself in that) has to bear a large part of the blame.

Who is better placed to change the way interviews are conducted than Lyndal Curtis? Nobody.

So what is she going to do about it? Nothing.

Journalists have sent links to Curtis' piece around Twitter, describing it as "thoughtful" (this is code for 'nothing will change as a result of this'. If it was going to change anything, it would have been described as 'controversial'). It will fade away and be reprised in some other form by somebody else, on and on as the traditional media declines, as mulch for the inevitable pieces 'if only we had listened and acted'.

Years of describing any internal party debates as "dissent" or "splits" mean politicians are more reluctant to have a debate, especially in the open.

Journalists describe debates in that way when they can't and won't understand the issues that need to be debated. Malcolm Turnbull's positions on climate change and the republic are well elucidated and nuanced: but if you're a moron, and the editor who hired you is one as well, LIB SPLIT will do. More recently, the decision to purchase the F-35 fighter is written off as a split, here and elsewhere, because journalists can't be bothered getting across the issues and editor's won't engage those who can. If you won't engage with the public you can pretend it doesn't exist, and doesn't matter I suppose. You can even rope the public into the media's stupidity and laziness:

We should encourage and champion debate. Instead, what the media and to some extent the public does - and what politicians' offices have done for some time - stifles debate.

... debate is discouraged for fear of what the reaction might be.

Measured, considered and detailed responses are a potential outcome from a debate. It is not the debate itself but the outcome that is key as far as government is concerned. John Howard was always "happy to have the debate" after he had made his mind up, not before, and Abbott is the same in that regard. It is the mark of a muppet journalist who seeks to pretend a debate is underway when the fix is already in.

We should ask politicians to tell us what the problems are, to spell out their values in how they would approach them - such as whether they believe in the primacy of public services or whether they believe the private sector should play a greater role.

We should ask if there are specific commitments, tell the public the conditions under which they would be delivered.

Particularly if the "we" includes those of you whose job it is to question politicians, Lyndal, rather than just rattle through a list of questions designed to elicit lines from the press release/conference. You should, but you won't.

We should encourage politicians to engage in some old-fashion policy reform.

It is what Labor did with the National Disability Insurance Scheme - pointing out the problems, getting a report on the options for solutions, then discussing it with the sector and through them the public.

It took an electorate, fearful of increases in cost of living, to the point where it happily accepted an extra tax through an increase in the Medicare levy.

This is one of the more lucid moments in Curtis' piece. But then she scrambles to strike that Michael Gordon pose, the view from nowhere:

Treasurer Joe Hockey too has engaged, singlehandedly, in some old-fashioned policy reform.

He began by describing the problem with what he called the "age of entitlement".

He spoke in broad terms about people doing things for themselves that they could afford without the need of government support.

Yes, but he didn't engage with anyone about this, except the IPA. He just throws ideas out there: it's who he is, it's what he does, and no his thought bubbles are in no way equivalent to the NDIS. Hockey did this as President of the NSW Young Liberals in the early '90s, putting ideas out there and retreating once it got too detailed. He did it in opposition, and journalists thought he was a deeper thinker than he is. He still has Lyndal Curtis bluffed, which invalidates her piece somewhat and shows those moments of lucidity as accidental, sporadic and unreliable - as they are for Katharine Murphy.

But maybe we should also ask them to make fewer promises and judge them on results.

How is that going to get us the information we need to make an informed decision? At least she didn't recommend combing through talkback radio.

Before the last election journalists like Curtis had the whole cynicism/credulity problem something dreadful. Anything the Gillard/Rudd government did was assumed to be bogus, but anything Tony Abbott said - you could take it to the bank. I include Lyndal Curtis in that. And Peter Hartcher. And Paula Matthewson. And Michael Gordon. All of them, directly or indirectly, have admitted that they haven't the faintest clue about Australian politics, despite seeing it up close for many years. God forbid that we should start judging journalists on results.

It isn't like I have gone after some junior woodchucks for spelling mistakes. These people, with the possible exception of Matthewson, are senior journalists. Every journalism school in the country wants its graduates to turn out like these characters, and more's the pity.

If we are to understand how we are governed, and to make informed decisions, we must have better information than press gallery and other political journalists provide us with. This is more important than any other consideration - job tenure or brand positioning or even simple pity at their self-delusion.

You were probably wasting your time reading any articles on the budget other than those by:

• Laura Tingle
• Michael Pascoe
• Alan Kohler

Consistent and clear

Katharine Murphy has tumbled to the Peter van Onselen scam of writing basically the same article every three months or so when you have nothing useful to say.

In van Onselen's case, he trots out a shopping list of his backgrounders and posits them as ministers over incumbents who wouldn't give him the time of day. In Murphy's case, she runs a piece assuring us that she's able to see through spin while also confessing that she's more than a bit of a sucker for it, and hopes you are too.

She did it here and at Fairfax, and now she does it there. It's sad schtick and an indictment on editors and others who fall for it. Murphy practically begs to be sacked and nobody ever does it.

The government wants you, the voters, to blame Labor for the new taxes and the nasties it intends to impose on you in next week’s budget. Not them – the people who told you solemnly, hand on heart, before the last election that there would be N-O new taxes – then proceeded to impose them anyway.

This is to be Labor’s fault. Trust me, says the finance minister, I’m breaking my promises not because I’m awful, but because those guys are awful.

Now, before you roll your eyes, let me assure you I’m rolling mine too. As spin and pantomime and rank political cynicism goes, this one is off the charts.

No it isn't. It's entirely consistent with what Abbott was like before the election.

Murphy didn't roll her eyes when Abbott said that the Gillard government was "a bad government". She didn't roll her eyes when Abbott promised to take responsibility. She faithfully reported it and didn't question the assumption that any government could do better than Gillard and/or Rudd simply because Abbott said so. She went to press conferences where "people [told her] solemnly, hand on heart, before the last election that there would be N-O new taxes", and didn't have any basis to challenge such statements. She didn't go digging into policy or into Abbott's record and consider what they meant, whether the Coalition really could be trusted when they said (for example) that funding for pensions and schools and public broadcasting wouldn't be cut.

But the past few years in federal politics have taught me a rather grim lesson: maximum audacity often wins. I’ve seen the Coalition over the past three years carry off more outrageous transactions than the current one, and largely get away with them.

What she's confessing here is the failure of her judgment, and that of her colleagues. Experienced journalists should have been awake to this and called it out. The Coalition gets away with this because the press gallery - Murphy especially - is lazy and stupid.

Whether they get away with it this time depends on the following factors.

It depends on their storytelling capacity. Tony Abbott’s ability to tell a political story with aggressive simplicity was one of the hallmarks of his success as opposition leader. Whether you liked what he was selling or not, the message was consistent and clear.

Journalists are meant to have that capacity and draw together facts to tell a story of how we are governed. If politicians have such storytelling capacity, and you leave the storytelling to them, journalists are redundant. It's sad that Murphy's first consideration of Abbott's words were whether or not she liked them. Abbott's message was only "consistent and clear" because nobody called him on it.

The idea that the budget isn't in crisis was bullshit two years ago, it was bullshit last year, it's bullshit now and it will be bullshit next year, and every time Katharine Murphy professes to roll her eyes about another professional failure on her part. That message was "consistent and clear" because Katharine Murphy had no basis for assessing the budget other than what the then opposition said about it.

He seems to have comprehensively lost this art in the transition to government.

The Coalition's message hasn't changed. There is, however, plenty of objective evidence about the budget and the economic assumptions behind it, as there is every year. Murphy and other press gallery journalists have decided to take heed of that to a greater extent than was the case with, say, evidence relating to last year's budget or the budget before.

And he cannot deliver the simple world that existed in opposition, because the simple world does not exist.

It didn't exist for the previous government either, but they were not accorded this level of understanding. Note that Murphy makes no reference to the current opposition or its leader; it seemed to have been impossible to write about the previous government on its own terms without slipping in a reference to Abbott, holding the government's coat and snickering.

There was always going to be a reckoning, and we are seeing it now.

There is no good reason why that reckoning had to come after the election, rather than before; this is entirely due to the failure of judgment - and the laziness and stupidity - referred to earlier. All of it was foreseeable. All of it was preventable.

As a consequence of the Abbott storytelling black hole, there is no coherence in the Coalition’s messaging, no hope horizon to point to.

It's every bit as coherent as it ever was; it has failed to hold up under the pressures of government, and this was foreseeable. Press gallery journalists should have called Abbott on that while he was in opposition, as they did with Latham, to avoid making his problems the country's.

To borrow from Tim Dunlop, this coherence thing is just Murphy's way of saying she can't handle complexity. Given that her job involves getting to grips with complexity and explaining it simply, she is clearly and consistently in the wrong job.

Let me put this more directly. We can’t know whether this budget is a turkey until we see it. Right now, it looks like a turkey, but I’m reserving final judgment until I see the sum of the parts.

You saw the Coalition's policies and non-policies. You saw Matthias Cormann and Joe Hockey defend the indefensible and assert the absurd. You didn't call them on it, and now here you are assuming that the sum might be more than the parts? To do otherwise would be to admit that this government was always going to do a worse job than its predecessor, and should therefore never have been accorded the credibility necessary to get it elected.

To turn the corner the Coalition has to have a reason to govern, and to articulate its reason for governing.

It needed that before the election. The Coalition said it wouldn't cut cut cut, and if you believed them (as Murphy and others did) the rationale for electing them disappeared. If you didn't believe them, as people like Tony Shepherd and I didn't, then their rationale for government was clear enough. The question here is the quality of perception and the strength to call it.

Thus far, the reason for governing has been manufactured culture war, manufactured border emergencies, flirtations with the notion of itself as small government, appointing mates and fellow travellers to boards, and various revenge fantasies against Labor.

And you expected, what? This time last year, it was obvious the Coalition would be like that. This time last year, nobody in the press gallery investigated or even considered the eminently foreseeable current predicament as a possibility, and sneered at those of us who did.

That combination has landed the new government waist deep in quicksand. I gather if you find yourself in quicksand, the best prospects of survival stem from not moving. Stop thrashing around. Develop some first principles. Start thinking. Start visualising the way back.

You do that before you get into government, not afterward. Standing still (or "slowing down", Textor style, in the way that telcos shape internet access for those who've exceeded their download allowance) is not an option. "Thrashing about" might be indistinguishable from purposeful activity if you have learned nothing from Kevin Rudd, despite years of observing him up close.

The nature of this government was foreseeable before it took office. Yes it was. Asking them pointed questions was and is not the act of a partisan, but failing to do so was gutless on the part of the press gallery and injurious to the public good.

That quicksand metaphor applies to Murphy, the press gallery and perhaps to journalism more broadly. Stop thrashing about, get some principles and act on them. If the exhibited behaviour of the press gallery really does reflect its principles, then not only is it done for but this is no bad thing.

The budget presents risk, certainly, but also an opportunity for the Coalition to finally grow up, settle down, focus, desist from the student politics – and develop the courage of their own convictions.

The "student politics" is the essence of this government and the sum total of its convictions. To argue otherwise is to be deceived, to be unable to understand a government that has been closely followed but little scrutinised. It is a journalist's way of admitting they have been played for mugs and dupes, and that intelligent readers are right to shun them. Too much rolling of eyes, not enough focusing and reporting what they see.

We are all watching. I wonder whether they will take it.

We are watching the press gallery to a much lesser extent. I do not wonder whether or not they will take more crap from this government; they've done it before, they'll do it again. To add insult to injury they will try this I'm-with-you pretence in the hope their audience won't continue deserting them in disgust at their inability to challenge power-seekers as to whether they are up to the demands of office.

A vote against the media

Tony Abbott's appeal has always been a mystery to me, having first met the guy twenty years ago. Now, finally, I get it: you've seen in the media how the Labor government is treated like a circus, so vote Coalition and that will stop. There will only ever be steady-as-she-goes reporting of modest incremental contributions to the common weal, delivered by prudent and sensible ministers who are quoted verbatim and given the benefit of the doubt.

Bollocks to that.

Tony Abbott is neither prudent nor sensible. It's a myth that the Howard government was. Abbott's sense of entitlement is ferocious, more so than a thousand welfare queens or a brace of miners, kept in check only by fear of letting so many powerful people down if Labor get back in through his indiscipline. Unlike Hawke with his alcoholism, Abbott can't face the fact that his default personality - all of it, pretty much - is the problem. The Abbott family (diddly dum, click-click) is foisting him on us because otherwise he'll mope around the house with them, asking hard and weird questions about their virginity. Should he attain the trappings of office he would be, as Hillary Clinton said of her husband, a hard dog to keep on the porch.

Then there'd be the usual pantomime about The Budget Is Worse Than We Thought, which will do for all but a few of the policies that Abbott has announced over the past month. The slow media is yet to discover Christopher Pyne's dalliance with James Ashby while Mal Brough gets screwed, not to mention Arthur Sinodinos' with the Obeid family; they think they'll cover this All In Good Time, underestimating the extent to which time is against them. The Coalition doesn't have the deep reserves that enables a third of the Cabinet to fall away and keep up with the competition. The press gallery are wrong to assume they do, or that it needn't come to that.

The slow media have no right to be bored with the pantomime, it is being put on for their benefit. The latest to fall into this trap is Mark Kenny. Just because Katharine Murphy has moved on from Fairfax, there is no need for someone to act all disdainful as though they are somehow above it: I hear you, they cry, and we're sick of it too; but like some ridiculous addict he just can't leave the junk alone. They can't go off and do something else, get some perspective because, dear reader, they're not above it all really. After all those years reporting politics they can't tell which bits are false any more.

One wonders what he would he make of the current dry argument over Australia's future?

Not to mention the decline in language (and keep in mind I am posting this almost a whole day after that was posted. You can bet Fairfax have had plenty of feedback on that and other howlers, and they've ignored the lot.

But then, this is not really about Australia's future, is it?

Yes Mark, every election is about Australia's future. You might not want to report it that way, but it is. That's why, when making decisions about who to vote for, it is necessary to ignore journalists or to wade through vast volumes of bilge in order to winnow out what was said, what was done, and what little from all that might work its way through to our lives.

Unable to see forward, voters are thus left ...

Unable to see? Does he really believe, in spite of all the evidence, that press gallery journalists are indispensible to finding out how we are and shall be governed? What illumination does anyone imagine Kenny and his ilk are offering?

Mention 2010 and pungent memories flood back such as the leaks that stopped Gillard's campaign dead in its tracks in week two and lumbered us with the hung Parliament. Abbott's wooden stake through the heart of WorkChoices, via his melodramatic, "dead, buried, cremated" mantra was another big talking point.

And who can forget the bizarre "Real Julia" declaration - a more abject piece of repositioning has rarely been attempted. Of course, voters never forgot Gillard's "no carbon tax under the government I lead" pledge.

The current election campaign, however, has failed to live up to even these tawdry standards.

Note the examples Kenny gives, of campaign talking points crafted for clowns like him rather than for digestion by actual humans. As a senior journalist he had a responsibility to insist that he would never sink to such depths, but he's shirked that and blames others for his weakness.

Rubbishy unsourced yarns have blown up like summer storms.

When you've covered politics for as long as I have, you'll realise that press gallery journalists like Mark Kenny have lived on 'rubbishy unsourced yarns' for three years. He was the one who flogged Gillard-AWU long after even Abbott started looking sheepish about it. It's got to the point where you automatically assume that any report from Mark Kenny is a rubbishy unsourced yarn. This is why you smack him down when he comes over all lofty.

There was the claim that Rudd had berated a make-up artist, until it emerged that he'd done nothing of the sort. Another alleged that he'd postponed a national security committee meeting on the Syria crisis to film a celebrity TV cooking slot, until it turned out he hadn't.

If I was a journalist I'd investigate whether the Liberal Party was putting those claims about, rather than passively noting them as though they came out of thin air.

The parties themselves can hardly complain. Constrained by Labor's blood-strewn path to the poll, its recycled leader has struggled to reconcile his role as the last PM's assassin against an ill-defined promise of "a new way". Labor still has not explained what this "new way" actually entails.

Fair point, but if he did how would you know? Can you explain how the current education funding model works, and how the proposals from each of Labor and the Coalition will change the status quo? What do you mean, no? What do you even do on the bus all day Mark, play Uno with Kieran Gilbert or swap rubbishy unsourced yarns (RUYs) with cousin Chris?

On Tuesday, Rudd held a Sydney harbourside press conference to explain the plan to relocate the Garden Island naval base to Brisbane. It was already going off the rails, but running into a fuming NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell, made it a train wreck.

Quite the mixed metaphor for a shipyard. And "running into" O'Farrell? Oh, please. Do you even know how these things work? O'Farrell does, ask him.

Labor's troubled campaign has allowed Abbott to sail through with minimal pressure.

No, a dumb and lazy press gallery has done that. Fearful editors afraid that Labor will not intervene to stop new technologies that undermine their business model have given Abbott a rails run for three long years.

His gold-plated paid parental leave scheme not only makes a mockery of the claim of fiscal prudence, it reverses the precept of the modern liberal democratic state where tax rates reflect people's capacity to pay, and where the least well-off are given assistance on the basis of need.

That's all true of course. It was true three years ago too, when he first proposed it without consulting his front bench. And now he's done it again, to them and to the press gallery. Ask Mark Kenny if he can explain the PPL and why it's different to the Gillard government's scheme. Ask him why the model presumes a model of fulltime employment that is vanishing before our eyes, particularly for women - hell, ask Tony Abbott that, because Mark Kenny won't and neither will the morons who follow Abbott around and confuse themselves with journalists.

Kenny can't imagine why election campaigns can or should be different to this, but he remains convinced this kind of RUY reporting is all that you deserve. Fairfax's traditions of great journalism should be enough to force him out, but the contrast is not obvious because the organisation clearly has no pride in those traditions. People tell broadcast media vox-pops that they are tuning out from the media and making their own minds up. They tell pollsters it's pretty much 50-50 and they're disengaged, but with 3% margin of error you can textor that to a firm 52-48 without necessarily lying. There is no reason why the polls should be better than the journalism, but there is every reason why the journalism should be better than it is. All we need are different journalists.

People are voting against the media because they are not providing the information that people need to make a decision. In a democracy it is people who make the decision, not pollsters or journalists or other dingbats like them. The metrics that slow media uses to measure consumption - clickthroughs and guesstimate multiples of how many see a bought newspaper or see/hear messages pumped through the air - are deliberately shallow, treating all content as equally worthy. Politicians selling different messages have no hope with a media that takes them all at face value, striving for a mean centre which doesn't exist and hasn't for years.

If you think Stephen Conroy was mean to the media, what with Convergence and Finkelstein and his slapdash attempts to beef up the Press Council, imagine what will happen once politicians realise the media have stopped being a conduit for information and have become a bottleneck. Neil Chenoweth might be ready for Col Allan to turn, but he doesn't realise that Allan has nowhere to turn - not even to Murdoch, who will be inevitably disappointed by Allan's bullshit. Neither does Mark Kenny, nor Katharine Murphy, nor any of them really. The late Slim Dusty was wrong: there's nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear, than a pack of obtuse and banal journalists to whom even avid consumers of political content have stopped listening.