A modest proposal for NewsCorp

When pictures circulated on social media of journalist James Foley being executed by the Islamic State, journalists came over all sniffy about how vulgar social media is.

Once those pictures were published in the Murdoch press - first The New York Post, later in Sydney's Daily Telegraph, the snobbery about social media seemed to have gone into abeyance. In its place is some sort of general malaise about the world that we live in, rather than experienced people identifying the problem and calling it out.

The IS is posting those pictures because it wants to draw the United States and other western powers into another war on their territory in western Asia. This does not oblige the Murdoch press to run those pictures. What obliges the Murdoch press to run those pictures is the fact that its business goes up slightly when its major markets (the US, UK, and Australia) are at war.

The sales of newspapers have been in longterm decline for many years. That decline is lessened slightly when there's a war, or the prospect of one. People tune in to small-n news outlets to find out what's going on, and to hear the ploughshares beaten back into swords.

The Murdoch dynasty was forged in the First World War, and the pattern of its coverage was set at the time. It belittles politicians who oppose war, or who work to avoid conflict, as gutless and treasonous. It praises politicians who wantonly splash around blood and treasure as courageous and patriotic.

Over the period 2001-03 we saw the US government decide to go to war over a very slender pretext, the so-called 'weapons of mass destruction'. The Murdoch press was sufficiently powerful in all its main markets to force those markets to war in Iraq regardless. It destroyed politicians, including some with decorations for battlefield bravery, who urged caution or at least other means of removing Saddam Hussein. It praised fabulists who made silly promises that the war would be a cakewalk and that western armies would be welcomed as liberators. It invited itself to military funerals and splashed images of grieving, powerless widows across its pages in the hope that product ads on those pages might somehow be more attractive to consumers than they would be otherwise.

The Murdoch press wants war again.

For some years now, Sydney's Daily Telegraph has been playing a double game with its readers: it claims to represent western Sydney and rails against misrepresentation of it, while at the same time misrepresenting Muslims in the area as violent extremists. It has insisted that Muslims denounce extremists without similarly demanding that Christians denounce, say, pedophile clerics. Now it is doing the IS's dirty work for them, in the hope that its business model might be boosted by social discomfort, exclusion and maybe even violence on the streets of Sydney and other Murdoch markets.

It should be unthinkable that a major news organisation should succumb to propaganda from the self-declared enemies of its audience. Yet, the IS wants war, Murdoch wants war, so Murdoch outlets run IS propaganda as though it were 'high quality content'. It wasn't as though intrepid Murdoch journalists leopard-crawled across hundreds of miles of desert to capture those images; they were fed them by IS. Foley worked for GlobalPost; Daniel Pearl worked for The New York Times; there are journalists who put themselves in harm's way to get the big stories, and then there are Murdoch journalists. Murdoch outlets were happy to help the IS in its call for war because it shares those aims.

When journalists from Al-Jazeera English were imprisoned in Egypt, journalists around the world protested at the abrogation of their colleagues' rights and dignity. When the same journalists were confronted with the execution of Foley, a sentence from which no appeal or pardon is possible, there was no protest. Some declined to turn a dollar from the ordeal, but Murdoch outlets happily did.

If you're a journalist - and you put yourself in harm's way doing your job - keep in mind the possibility that Murdoch will turn a dollar from your crisis and stalk your relatives in their grief.

When Tony Abbott left open the possibility that Australian military forces were not only open to engaging in humanitarian missions such as aid to the Yaziri, but could well participate in conflict in the region, he is not acting at the behest of the US Administration. He is acting at the behest of the Murdoch media, who want Australia involved in any such war as they successfully pushed in 2003. Abbott is Murdoch's Manchurian Candidate.

Murdoch outlets are running the IS images because they are gunning for war. It is extraordinary that they are so weak, so unprincipled, that they allow a small bunch of semi-literate bullies far from their traditional markets to dictate their corporate tactics like they do. Their readership will complain, but they will flout the wishes of their readership because the wishes of Rupert Murdoch are for provocation to war. When Murdoch executives excuse their behaviour as though they were mere vessels of their audience, and as though the audience is to blame for Murdoch vulgarity, consider today's output and think again.

Those who do not believe Australians should go to war in IS territory will be marginalised, and the smarter ones are ready for that.

There is, however, a solution that is right and proper. One which plays the IS at their own game and which slakes the almost satanic bloodlust of those who run the Murdoch press.

It's traditional to say that there are some Very Fine Journalists 'working' at the Murdoch outlets - but who are they? Gideon Haigh, perhaps - but he's a freelancer rather than someone in a position to set the tone of a masthead or the organisation as a whole. Samantha Maiden sat on this until ordered to Make Glorious Propaganda Against Running-Dog Hockey and lacks the courage to pursue that rort wherever it might lie, like the non-Murdoch elements of the UK press did with that country's MPs. Malcolm Farr is asleep and Simon Benson is a joke. Sharri Markson is Brynne Edelsten without the wit, talent, or news sense. Paul Kelly said in 2012 that the Coalition had fifty fully-costed policies ready to go, but the evidence from this government is that they've never had any. None of Murdoch's journalists content providers are worth anything, as journalists or in any other capacity really.

It is undeniable that the best possible use of any and all Murdoch employees, those with bylines or without, is to issue them with giggle hats and rifles and drop them into the area around Mosul dam. Maybe they could capture a printing press there and churn out some of that high-quality content that nobody wants to read. Joe Hildebrand and Miranda Devine could disport themselves like Rudd and Hockey on Sunrise. They could bust their buddies Glenn Mulcaire and Andy Coulson out of prison for some Dirty Dozen-style redemption. You can't think of a better use for such people, and neither can those who employ them.

Maybe they might see that Muslims in Mosul are mostly people going about their business and no threat to social cohesion, neither there or in Australia. Their employment, however, depends upon them not seeing it, which is a pity: more so than the fact that nobody else has a more constructive proposal for NewsCorp than that in the preceding paragraph.

Journalists can get very sniffy about social media, but rather than finger the Murdochs when they step out of line they assume - wrongly - that they are acting in accordance with the audience. They see opponents of Murdoch manipulation as cranks. They were fooled last time, and are gearing themselves up to be fooled again, as though misleading the audience they are supposed to serve was a lesser tragedy than them losing the jobs they have no right to occupy. Start noticing that Murdoch is beating the drum for war and that he has no grounds to do so. Once you do that, you can empower decision-makers to go against Murdoch. And if you can go against Murdoch on a big issue like war, you can go against the old bugger on other issues too, and get on with your life.

In the olden days newspapers were sold on the basis of hype and bullshit. People are awake to this now, which explains the decline of newspapers and other traditional media. War should be an instrument of state policy, a resort when politics has failed, rather than a (poorly executed) business model. A company in the information business should be dominating the information age but it is barely getting by. The idea that we have to get stirred up and go to war to pump a few extra bucks into an exhausted business is pretty sad, but those who get stirred up in service of that are sadder still.

NewsCorp is like the Soviet Union: it might seem overwhelmingly powerful to some, especially those unable to laugh at its flaws and contradictions. One day the whole farce will be over, leaving a whole bunch of people who yearn for leadership of whatever quality without it, while the rest of us will adapt to its historic downfall much easier than might be imaginable today.

Update 23 Augusr: NewsCorp is refusing to accept the decisions of the newspaper industry referee, the Australian Press Council. This is wrongly portrayed as some sort of general malaise with the APC. It should be reported for what it is - the toxic Murdoch culture reasserting itself - with appropriate questions about what they are trying to hide.

Capability, decency ... and the Abbott government

And for one crowded hour, you were the only one in the room
And I sailed around all those bumps in the night to your beacon in the gloom
I thought I had found my golden September in the middle of that purple June
But one crowded hour would lead to my wreck and ruin

- Augie March One crowded hour

Traditional media reviews the performance of a new government at the hundred-day mark, and at the first anniversary of its taking office. The hundred-day reviews of the Abbott government catalogued how petty and nasty it was, overlooking the inconvenient truth of the gap between what it said it would do and what it actually is doing. It's too early for the anniversary, but bugger it, let's have the review anyway in light of current circumstances.

The Abbott government was elected in order to:

• Can the carbon pricing mechanism as its first order of business
• Can the mining tax too
• Stop asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat
• Run everything else pretty much as the Gillard and Rudd governments said they were going to, but with a bit of political stability

Since last September the Abbott government has:

• Finally abolished the carbon pricing mechanism, but with a lot of palaver and no credit for having done so
• The mining tax still in place (consider this: the persuasive skills of this government are so bad that they can't even persuade a mining billionaire, who campaigned against the mining tax, to abolish it. It's supposedly a massive impost on our economy, yet ten months later its abolition simply fell off the legislative agenda)
• Still dealing with asylum-seekers coming to Australia by boat, and there's no commentary about on-water matters until there is, and while Morrison is a minister in disarray the press gallery yearn to hear from him
• Botched everything else - education funding, interference in the national broadcasters, welfare, health, has been trashed to the point where you're entitled to believe everything this government says is bullshit; and last but not least
• Suddenly become destabilised. Unlike under the Gillard government, the press gallery is not implying that leadership tensions within the government are at fever pitch and that any moment now, the PM is going to be rolled. This means the government is stable, right? According to Madonna King, the leadership tensions of December 2009 have not been fully resolved, with Hockey, Turnbull and Abbott at weapons drawn like the warehouse scene from Reservoir Dogs. The press gallery had a) no idea about this LIBERAL SPLIT SHOCK or b) covered it up, before King embarrassed them for the higher cause of telling the truth about how we are governed plugging her book.

Given all that, and the feigned surprise of the press gallery about how we've all been had (how could they possibly have known?), the crash of MH17 ten days ago and the Abbott government's initial reaction to it was something of a surprise.

Since the fall of the Fraser government, the Coalition has stuffed its foreign policy with warmed-over US Republican suspicion of the United Nations. Certainly this government's disdain for UN refugee protocols, and its contempt for Rudd's quest for a Security Council seat, is a matter of record. Yet, the government was right to recognise MH17 as a problem requiring concerted international action through established forums; it dispatched Julie Bishop to New York without stating up front exactly what she was supposed to achieve by going there, a breach of its standard practice. This meant anything she did achieve was a bonus.

Bishop got all the credit for that motion before the Security Council from pretty much all of the press gallery. Little credit was given to Australia's permanent legation at the UN, and you had to go to foreign news sites to see the significant input from Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak. One day the whole, nuanced tale might come to light, but for the moment it is jarring when the Dutch and others make the big decisions that flow from what, apparently, was an Aussie diplomatic triumph. So much for the first draft of history.

The press gallery has been deaf to the shifting global power relations evident in responses to this incident. Do the press gallery, and the traditional media outlets that employ them (for the moment) not realise that Australians can access foreign news sources?

Bishop couldn't even credit Rudd, Gillard, and Bob Carr for having put Australia onto the Security Council, and apparently she is denying a DFAT briefing to the Opposition (how she howled when she was in the post Plibersek occupies today). The woman who ran down the clock on people dying from asbestos-related diseases is now bending over backwards for victims of a much more abrupt act of negligence. For all her flaws, this could well be her finest moment.

Putin has been a world leader for as long as Abbott and Bishop have been frontbenchers in Australian politics - there are no examples where Putin has caved to world opinion, and Abbott won't and can't change that. People like Campbell Newman or Joe Hockey insisting that Putin might not be welcome at the G20 in Brisbane later this year has the potential to more than negate Bishop's diplomatic achievement.

Russia does not have the ability to project power beyond its borders that the Soviet Union did. In Georgia and Ingushetia we have seen that Putin relies on bands of thugs, with Kalashnikovs in one hand and vodka bottles in the other, roaming around making the territory ungovernable but in some vague way 'loyal' to Moscow. This is how Russia denied an intact Yugoslavia to the West, by arming marauding Serbs and reducing other players in the Balkans to their level. This is what he's doing in eastern Ukraine: given what we know now the shooting down of MH17 makes no sense geopolitically, but only as a horrible error. The audio evidence from intercepted communications, and the sheepishness by the Russian government, point to that conclusion. Abbott was dumb to paint Putin into a corner, this piece was a little too cute in ignoring Abbott, and The Daily Telegraph dumber still for making it appear that Abbott forced concessions from Putin.

All that said, the idea of Tony Abbott being competent and dignified is pretty surprising, and without seeking to verbal him Tim Dunlop takes a similar position.

Imagine there was a vicious dog living in your street, and that pretty much every time you and your neighbours went past it the dog reared up and barked menacingly. Imagine your entreaties to the owners were met with abuse, or jeers at your powerlessness. Now imagine walking by that house and, instead of barking, the dog began singing Donna e mobile pitch-perfect and enunciated beautifully - this is what it's like watching random acts of competence from the Abbott government.

Commentators are expected to have a response to every situation, but sometimes slack-jawed mute amazement is most eloquent.

After the amazement comes one of two reactions: either embracing the new situation, or a retreat into denial. However much I disagree with the findings of so-called "9-11 truthers", I have some sympathy with their inability to credit disaffected Arabs with such an event and their insistence on bigger targets like the Rothschilds or the CIA. However, as I said earlier, Abbott killed his golden moment with overreach.

The idea of sending armed federal police into a conflict zone was dumb, though understandable given the Dutch army's role in Srebrenica. It should have snapped the press gallery out of its "universally agreed" praise and support for Abbott, and reminded even its most consistently worthwhile correspondent that it too can be guilty of overreach:

Death and tragedy reset the national political conversation.

Tingle refers to the all-too-brief lull following the death of John Gillard and the low "died of shame" attacks from Alan Jones, Joe Hockey, and Tony Abbott against his daughter. Does this mean Australian politics - and the reporting thereof - will sink to a new low over coming days?

There is a restraint in what issues journalists ask questions about. A sudden observance of appropriateness rules.

Not really. Tingle's press gallery colleagues speculate whether MH17 (and the unqualified press gallery praise for Abbott's response) will give Abbott a "poll bounce", even while the dead passengers remain unburied. This is ghoulishly indecent and reflects poorly on all members of the gallery, and their editors, lowering their behaviour to that of the Murdoch journalist who rifled through passenger luggage spread across the steppes because they just can't help it. It negates whatever propriety Abbott and Bishop showed in the hours after the incident.

So whatever else is said about MH17, it stopped the noise generated by the Senate and Clive Palmer in its tracks.

It just did the same thing in a different form. The "noise generated by the Senate and Clive Palmer" was all about applying pressure to implement the government's agenda, to save an already failing government from itself. By contrast, the unstinting praise surrounding Abbott's initial response to MH17 was all about applying pressure to implement the government's agenda, to save an already failing government from itself.

Context is also playing a grotesque game with the portrait of Joe Hockey painted in Madonna King’s new book Hockey: Not Your Average Joe.

See above - the idea that this government, for all its shortcomings, presents a unified front is no longer true, and given the effect that polls have in Canberra the centripetal pressures on this government will only increase. Abbott, Hockey, and Turnbull are each diminished. None has any real incentive to pull together for any cause wider than themselves. Ten months after it was elected to supposedly address a budget emergency, no budget has been passed, and even the crisis has evaporated.

Tingle goes on to describe a critique of health policy by the AMA, but such criticisms were eminently foreseeable after years of policy dereliction from Peter Dutton (now Health Minister, Dutton had been Health spokesman for most of the Coalition's time in opposition; he has apparently done no policy work to speak of, despite its significance to the national budget and political sensitivities, leaving himself and the government open to criticism long before Owler's speech. You want context? That's context).

It seems 'context' is the press gallery's way of asserting that its interpretation of events is the only possible interpretation, a point echoed feebly by Annabel Crabb and Murdoch pissboy and propagandist Simon Benson:

What Abbott has exposed this week more than anything is the complete vacuum of leadership Australia had been living under in the six years of Labor government.

Rudd, Gillard, Combet - and yes, Shorten - any of them would have done what Abbott did, without the overreach and without having to fend off frantic attention-seeking behaviour from Tony Abbott (and Simon Benson). The rest of Benson's piece, and his body of work more generally, might fairly be described as crap.

The competence and decorum shown by the Abbott government was shown to be an aberration, reverting as it is to incompetent policy and indecorous politics. Those of us who (generally) aren't impressed by this government can draw no vindication as there is no safe, capable, real alternative. The adults boxed Abbott in to accepting things like UN Security Council resolutions, and there is some hope that may yet be replicated in health policy.

This government can only be rendered competent when its other sneaky, half-baked alternatives are firmly closed off. The press gallery are not yet awake to this, and may never be - they are waiting pointlessly but earnestly for a "poll bounce", a return to their 'golden September' of last year. The polls are, as ever, beside the point. All we should reasonably foresee from recent developments is "the tenderness of patient minds/ And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds".

Poor journalism is a crime

Greed, incompetence (and the internet) are the least of our worries when it comes to public interest journalism. The main problem contemporary mainstream journalism has lies in its choice of stories, its sources for stories, and the depth to which it will go in explaining what the story is and why it matters.

For almost a year, it has been clear that Clive Palmer will be influential in deciding what legislation passes in this parliament and what does not. Profiles of Palmer before and since the last election in traditional journalism outlets focused on:

• His girth
• His robotic dinosaurs
• Whether or not he is entitled to call himself 'Professor'
• Whether or not he is entitled to call himself a billionaire, given currency fluctuations etc
• His proposal to build a cruise ship in China and call it Titanic II

None of that stuff is particularly relevant today, or at all really. Almost none of those stories were worth writing. None of them stand as 'first drafts of history'. None of the costs involved in writing those stories, getting those journalists to and from Coolum etc., can be recovered.

But if there's one thing journalists love more than a story, it's being distracted from it: Palmer played them all for mugs in having them write the same, bemused and faintly patronising article. They barely managed to spell 'Bjelke-Petersen' correctly let alone wondering what Palmer learned from him.

Who knows what Clive Palmer wants? Well, Darrin, isn't it extraordinary that such a mystery has made its way to the centre of Australian politics without being properly examined? Isn't it an indictment of all of the lazy fools in the press gallery that they are only now grappling with such a question?

They say you shouldn't negotiate with terrorists, but trying to bargain with an agent of chaos is proving downright impossible.

No editor should publish an article starting with "they say", an opening even more asinine than "so". Besides, Darrin, how many deaths would you say Clive Palmer is directly responsible for? I thought Maxwell Smart cleaned up all those agents of KAOS anyway. This, along with the bold-text lead-in, has all the makings of a stupid article.

It was always going to be tough, but today was the day the circus really came to town.

The town is Canberra and the game is important. The repeal of the carbon tax.

If the game is so important why be distracted by a circus? If you're really busy, like undertaking terrorism negotiations, you don't have time for circuses.

A mixed metaphor isn't just some linguistic faux pas. It's a sign that you aren't really thinking about what you're looking at, what you're reporting on, or even those to whom you're reporting. Like people who write for The Australian, Darrin has chewed up his opening paragraphs with bullshit. It's taken him a while but he has finally got to the point of his article: the price mechanism for carbon emissions.

The carbon tax was electoral poison for the previous Labor government and despite the theatrics from a fortnight ago with Clive Palmer and Al Gore, all of the signs indicated it would be repealed [last Thursday].

There's more to carbon pricing mechanisms than that, but to be fair to Darrin it has been covered elsewhere. It is a pity, however, to regard this issue in such a limited fashion.

It's been toxic for our politicians in responding to it, but Darrin is wrong to refer to it (even allowing for yet another clash of imagery) as electoral poison:

• Two elections ago, both the ALP and the Coalition proposed taxes and other market-based penalties on carbon emissions. It is one of the great what-ifs of Australian politics were the Greens to have supported the Rudd-Turnbull ETS proposal in 2009.
• At the 2010 election both the Coalition and the ALP sent mixed messages on carbon emissions: Abbott had failed to put up the absolute denialist position that had won him leadership of his party and Gillard failed to put a clear policy forward.
• In 2013, Abbott again failed to put up an absolute denialist position, rendering his carbon tax repeal unconvincing, and Rudd failed to be convincing about anything, rendering the effort of putting him back into office a waste of time.

The idea that the political elites have got the policy right but the bloody electorate won't vote for its own best interests is always silly, and doesn't apply here. The only policy options presented to voters have been half-hearted and silly, reflecting backroom lobbying and other pressures about which neither our politicians nor our media have been entirely honest. That lack of honesty limits the public debate, which in turn warps the electoral verdicts that come from such a debate; any "electoral poison" proffered to this government or the one before it is a concoction of their own making.

If the 'signs' tell you one thing, and the reality went against the 'signs', then the reliability of the 'signs' should be called into question: but not in Canberra, where you can blame reality for not living down to your predictions and keep your predictive abilities intact.

However, in what can only be described as chaotic scenes, the Senate instead voted down the Government's attempt to kill-off the carbon tax once and for all, thus robbing Prime Minister Tony Abbott of a much-needed political win.

The man was elected into government with a handsome majority and enjoys the trappings of office; this remains true today. Again, can the repeal of the carbon tax only be regarded as a political win/loss for the incumbents? Was it really a 'robbery', an illegitimate denial of something to which the government was entitled? Is this the first government that has lost a vote in the Senate, or suffered some sort of political setback?

If the government will not lose office as a result of this vote, how much of a setback is it really?

The decision is a major setback for Abbott who desperately wanted to "axe the carbon tax" as one of the first decisions of the new Senate.

Actually, Abbott said it would be the first thing his government would do last September. Then it was pushed forward to the sitting of the new Senate, which took office on 1 July; it isn't clear why the government waited nine whole days until last Thursday, but now it has to wait again. Cheer up: young unemployed people will have to wait six months to receive unemployment benefits, and if the government had to wait another six months would it be so bad? Such income as it does raise will be handy for the budget deficit, and we'll see what effect it has on actually abating carbon emissions.

Government MPs were extremely keen to push the recent budget firmly into the rearview mirror.

There's a question there as to whether you have to live your life according to what government MPs are keen to bring about.

Again we have another mixed metaphor: you don't push anything into a mirror. The rearview mirror on a vehicle is not for idly watching things receding into the distance, but to identify things coming toward you that might not be visible from the front or the sides. Notice how Darrin's mixed metaphors make it harder, not easier, to understand what he's on about.

The sticking point in the end was a PUP amendment to guarantee that the savings from the carbon tax repeal by energy producers, gas producers, and electricity producers would be passed down the line to consumers.

It's stupid that the government could not have seen that coming. That was the essence of its pitch to voters. The press gallery are stunned that Palmer is holding Abbott to Abbott's own promises. The mechanism for ensuring price cuts were passed onto consumers should have been built into the bills, or kept in reserve - the fact that the government was caught unprepared is not an indictment of Palmer but of the government. It makes it looks as though consumer impacts of the carbon tax were somehow beside the point for this government, rather than the main game.

The Government couldn't buy it, citing possible constitutional problems in allowing the Senate to pass an amendment relating to taxation.

The Senate can pass amendments relating to taxation, Darrin, it just can't initiate them.

The Government's Leader in the Senate, Eric Abetz, said [last Thursday's] dramas amounted to a technical glitch.

He would say that, wouldn't he. The fact that the Coalition hasn't got this policy through is largely his fault. There is a real story to be told about Coalition activists being disappointed in Abetz, and him being less than adequate for the role he occupies - but oh no, let's focus on Palmer, given that we don't really understand him:

So instead of the next few days basking in the afterglow of a major victory, the Government will now get to spend the weekend working on a set of amended bills to present to the House of Representatives on Monday.

Aww, diddums! Have you ever had to work across a weekend to get something done for Monday, dear reader? I have, and I didn't have Darrin moaning on my behalf about how dreadfully unfair it was.

And the media chatter over the next few days will focus on the Government's tactics and therefore its competence. This is clearly a bad look for a team already struggling with form that wouldn't look out of place in a bright yellow jersey in Belo Horizonte.

Oh no, another metaphor.

The Coalition is not competing for government, in the way that the winner of the FIFA World Cup is (as yet, and at last Thursday) undecided. The Coalition does not quite have seven members on their side for every one against, but it's a far cry from the balance of the previous parliament. Even so, this government has shown itself to be the ultimate in fair-weather sailors: it cannot manage any political situation which has not been comprehensively sewn up in advance.

To continue Darrin's metaphor, Brazil will not get another crack at the Cup next week: it's over for them. Is it really over for this government? As someone who predicted this government would not get as far as it has, do I dare ...?

The form of the German team coming into the FIFA World Cup was known far better than that of Palmer and his party to last Thursday's vote. There was no nonsense about dinosaurs or academic titles or whatever: they were taken seriously, their strengths and weaknesses were analysed closely and dispassionately, and for all the journalistic blather about 'shock results' the fact is that the German team have been - and may yet be - worthy winners.

It is a failure of journalism for Clive Palmer to be so poorly understood.

And therein lies the rub. No one, including the Government, knows what Palmer wants.

The idea that the government does not understand one of its political opponents is risible. This government is either going to be blindsided every damn week, or else they are going to learn some lessons and adapt accordingly. The latter is more likely (to some extent) but the tension of watching the stuffed shirts who run this government get over themselves will be palpable.

One thing is for sure. The early signs are that this Parliament will be just as chaotic as the last.

But we know how untrustworthy those 'signs' are, right Darrin?

When Tony Abbott was puddling around in student politics, Clive Palmer worked in the office of Queensland Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. In the lead-up to the 1983 Queensland state election, the Liberals split with the Nationals and voted with Labor to create a parliamentary Expenditure Review Committee. The National Party's campaign director at that election was Clive Palmer: he knows how to mess with Liberals.

One member of the Queensland parliamentary press gallery at that time was Malcolm Farr. He should be able to describe Palmer better than this. The government that Palmer was promoting back then was deeply corrupt and inadequate to the job of running that state, something the 'fourth estate' should have twigged to and exposed; the Fitzgerald Commission was scathing of the media for failing their public duty to the people of that state. Farr's employer, the Daily Sun, lost credibility to the point where it closed down and Farr's career should have gone down with it. Instead, he landed a job within the Murdoch realm and drifted onwards in journalism. Like Fairfax's Tony Wright, Farr has been in the Canberra press gallery too long to have any fresh ideas yet not long enough to be a 'doyen' like Paul Kelly or Laurie Oakes.

CLIVE Palmer is belting the Government around the Senate and Tony Abbott is looking vulnerable.

But far worse for him, he is looking impotent.

(The pronouns in the second paragraph refer to Abbott. Surely you don't need a subeditor to identify a subject after so long writing professionally.)

Mr Abbott is being bullied by a ragtag group of crossbench senators learning on the job but mobilised by Mr Palmer, a canny student of power politics.

Abbott is not being bullied. Stymied, maybe frustrated - not not bullied. There are ten times more Coalition Senators than PUP Senators. Where is the physical violence, the sledging (and who has the worse record of that behaviour, Palmer or Abbott)? Has Palmer alleged that Abbott's recently deceased parents died of shame? Clearly this is a silly thing to say, worthy more of Piers Akerman than the normally more measured Farr.

When the Government wins a vote in the Upper House, Mr Palmer ensures he gets some of the credit.

When the Government loses a vote, Mr Palmer makes sure the Government gets all the blame.

In less than two weeks Palmer has the measure of Abbott, while Abbott doesn't know where to start when it comes to Palmer. Both Howard and Rudd would have had their Senate leaders' guts for garters if they had stuffed up to the extent that Abetz has - Farr knows this, and yet can't bring himself to report it. The composition of the Senate has been different to that of the House for a generation, and yet experienced press gallery reporters act all surprised when the Senate votes differently. This is a structural weakness in the way our politics is reported; as a senior reporter Farr bears responsibility for that.

Voters expect Governments to get things done and could quickly decide Mr Abbott simply can’t do his job should his agenda continue to be frustrated in the Senate.

By this point in Julia Gillard's Prime Ministership, Malcolm Farr had pretty much written her off.

(Clive wore a flanno at the press conference)

No he didn't. A 'flanno' is a shirt made from flannelette; the shirt Farr refers to is a checked cotton number similar to the ones that Malcolm Farr wears on the ABC's Insiders. What else are you wrong about Malcolm?

The PUP senators and others on the cross bench will eventually vote to remove carbon pricing but the process will be messy and reflect badly on the Government.

This government will look like it is not across the details. This is because it is not across the details. After four decades at the heart of conservative politics, if the Coalition does not understand Clive Palmer then what does it understand? About as well as Malcolm Farr understands words like 'bully' and 'flanno' and 'fourth estate'.

Then there's this sorry effort. The man who made his career insisting that someone other than Julia Gillard paid for Julia Gillard's renovations twenty years ago basically admits that he's a busted flush:

"Axing the tax" applied to Labor's two most "pernicious" imposts, the carbon and mining taxes. The former worked so well it became the economy's job-killing wrecking ball and python squeeze all at once. The latter raised virtually no revenue to pay for billions in new spending justified against its projected growth.

The carbon tax was never a "job-killing wrecking ball and python squeeze all at once". This was Coalition hype swallowed only by gullible people, including those inside the press gallery. Sometimes politicians say things that aren't true, Mark - you can have that for free, and you'll only be a proper journalist once you realise that and your reporting improves accordingly.

Expected savings from dismantling a complex institutional web of carbon pricing architecture have proved illusory.

Thanks to Clive Palmer's Senate trio and his on-off bloc including the surprising motoring enthusiast Ricky Muir, major pieces of that architecture will remain.

Is it surprising that one could be enthusiastic about motoring? Is it surprising that Muir is a motoring enthusiast? Is it surprising that Muir votes with PUP sometimes and not others? Is dismantling a web, partly or wholly, costly in all sorts of ways not visible from Canberra? What a funny piece this is. it ends badly for Kenny though:

The dominant characteristic of the new Senate is unpredictability. Fault lines run in every direction. If the path of these clearly mandated changes is so contested, what can we expect in the case of budget nasties like the GP tax that were never even mentioned?

Dunno Mark, maybe ask a journalist. Kenny is like a drunken poker player at the end of a long night flopping his poor hand of cards on the table and admitting, "I've got nothing", but without the good grace to leave the table. The Sydney Morning Herald could go the way of the Brisbane Sun if its reporting continues to plumb these depths.

While Darrin Barnett has been clueless, and Malcolm Farr and Mark Kenny have been pathetic, the prize for all-out crazy goes to Harto's piss-boy, Simon Benson:

POLITICIANS like to indulge a folly that Australian voters always get it right on election night.

At the heart of this misconception is a crude and fanciful logic that the will of the majority can produce only a single outcome — which by definition has to be the right one.

This is ridiculous.

The fact is that, unless there is a hitherto unrevealed mystery behind the collective ambition of the electorate to turn the senate into a political asylum, the Australian people got it wrong last September.

Horribly wrong.

It's a folly, yet Benson fell right into it. I remember Liberal staffers of my acquaintance saying this to me, and it's bullshit - politicians and journalists don't get to second-guess the voters in a democracy, the voters are sovereign. Maybe that's what they are trying to do with polls and focus groups, keep one step ahead of the voters - but I'm yet to hear of an election where that qualifier 'usually' applies, where the voters 'got it wrong'.

The government lost a vote in the Senate. Get over it, Simon. The Democrats and Harradine used to regularly trip up better governments than this one.

Based on the theory of voters being right, what has been witnessed in just one short week suggests that Australians elected to simply transfer the chaos and insecurity of three years of minority Labor government from the lower house to the senate.

That 'theory' is what I like to call democracy, Simon. We thought Abbott could handle a bit of horse-trading - clearly he can't, and he'll have to learn or be replaced with a government that will. I don't think he can learn: the fact that Abbott spent budget night drinking with Simon rather than either/both touching base with Palmer supports that.

The crossbench of the senate, which now consists of 18 independents and minor party MPs (the 10 Greens), has asserted its new authority over the government in ways that Tony Abbott failed to anticipate and in a manner which has many in the Coalition horrified.

The election was last September, Simon. It's now July of the following year. Maybe they, too, were misled by a dumb, lazy media. Maybe they're not as good as you and your Murdoch colleagues said they were.

Not only have Palmer and his minions refused to honour commitments to support the government’s repeal of the carbon tax, they have punched a further $10 billion hole in Joe Hockey’s Budget, turning a budget emergency into a $50 billion fiscal calamity.

If you're going to all that effort to put a budget together, why not a bit of old-fashioned politics to make sure you have a majority coming with you? Isn't this basic? Why the violent imagery, Simon - doesn't that just remind everyone of Barbara Ramjan and make us resent the fact Abbott is in government at all?

At the start of the week the Coalition was confident it would be able to drop the guillotine on Labor and the Greens to ram through a vote on the repeal of the carbon tax by Tuesday lunchtime.

Tuesday came and went, as did Wednesday and Thursday.

The carbon tax remains.

Abbott hadn’t factored in the possibility that at least one of the new senators might be, in the words of one Coalition minister, “completely stark raving mad”. And they weren’t talking about Palmer.

Of course not - Palmer isn't a Senator. The fact that the government doesn't understand a senator elected almost a year ago - and thinks an insult is the way to build a relationship with that person - is telling. So too is the lack of a sense of urgency in the delightful phrase "Tuesday came and went, as did Wednesday and Thursday" - lovely if you're talking about a walk through the forest, negligent if you're talking about voting through a government's legislative program.

If I had to describe a sitting Senator as “completely stark raving mad” - and I profess to no psychological qualifications - pop-eyed and wild-tongued Eric Abetz would get my vote. Simon Benson can't see it, there's no telling him.

It should have come as little surprise that Palmer yesterday reneged on a promise of only two weeks ago to support repeal of the carbon tax.

Well Simon, a) you weren't reporting it (once again, the press gallery can only predict things after they've happened) and b) he hasn't reneged, he's said he's still open to abolish it and negotiations are continuing on that basis.

The role of the senate is to act as a house of review and a mechanism by which parliament can keep checks and balances on the government.

And this is what's happening here, no? The government has been checked in the Senate, by a man dressed in a checked shirt (not a flanno). Ben Oquist isn't on the lobbyist register for the same reason that Peta Credlin or Tim Wilson aren't, and because you don't bother name-checking lobbyists visiting ministers and other parliamentarians why even bring it up?

According to the parliament, the constitutional role of the senate is implied as thus: “The requirement for the consent of two differently constituted assemblies is a quality control on the making of laws. It is also a safeguard against misuse of the law-making power, and, in particular, against the control of one body by a political faction not properly representative of the whole community.”

We are now faced with the very outcome the constitution sought to guard against, namely one person, Clive Palmer, has control of the senate.

As opposed to Tony Abbott having control of the Senate? Have you been taking constitutional law lessons from George Brandis?

What Australians may not yet realise is that the new government is also a hung parliament — by virtue of Palmer directing senate outcomes from the lower house.

It's been ten months since we voted, Simon. Hung Senates are pretty standard in Australian politics, and it's not clear how you get to be National Political Editor without realising that.

... the senate has become a cesspit of self-interest.

Senator Muir voted against what would appear to be the interests of his party, and this somehow represents self-interest? A mining billionaire had senators vote to retain a tax that costs him millions, yet that's self-interest?

It isn't self-interest. This government lacks attention to detail. Here's another example. Start reporting what happens, rather than flying off the handle or admitting you can't do your job.

Michael Gawenda's thoughtful piece on contemporary politics and media deserves more examination than it will get here, and it doesn't even refer to Palmer. Even so, in attempting to get to the nub of this government's unpopularity Gawenda misses an important point:

The far more likely explanation for the government’s poor opinion polls and for the fact that Tony Abbott is deeply unpopular is that people feel that they have been fooled. They saw Abbott relentlessly pursue Gillard for her broken promises. They heard him say many times that he would never break a promise he made to the Australian people. They did not believe when he came to power, he would break even more promises than had Gillard.

Gawenda overlooks the fact that the Coalition was not properly scrutinised by the media. They treat the shortcomings of this government as surprising, when they were eminently foreseeable and worth investigating well before last September. Professional journalists and tough-minded editors should have been offended by Abbott's evasions and lack of detail, and the all-too-sudden conversions on key issues like education funding and the ABC, reversed once the election was over. The Abbott government holds office because the media failed to do its job. The media fooled the people about how bad the last government was, and conversely made this government out to have been better than it has proven to be.

The press gallery should have done its homework on Palmer - and Abbott's capacity to deal with him - to a much greater extent than it has. It should not be surprised that Abbott's tactical incompetence of 2010 are being repeated here - indeed, Abbott's competence in dealing with those who do not have any formal obligations to him should have been questioned pointedly and regularly. The fact that the supposedly hapless Gillard government won every vote against Coalition strategists like Abetz and Pyne should have forced a reassessment, which might have put a more nuanced choice to voters at the last election.

If the imprisonment of Peter Greste didn't make the press gallery lift their game, what will? Their risk of suffering his fate is negligible, but you'd think all their gob-taping and selfie-taking would inspire journalists to exercise what freedoms they have. Greste seemed to have done more research on the convoluted politics of Egypt than Simon Benson or Mark Kenny have done with the Australian Senate.

Do not believe the press gallery when they are suddenly surprised by events in Canberra - they are almost all dumb, lazy people failing to understand what their jobs are and doing them badly. We are all worse off for that.

Being subject

The recent royal visit did not demonstrate continuity, but its opposite. The old tropes are inadequate and this country is undergoing fundamental change, which traditional media can barely describe or even understand.

When agents of the Murdoch media tapped Prince William's phone, they set off a chain reaction that none of them could have foreseen. Other celebrities need to keep themselves in the public eye to land the big roles and boost their going rate. Prince William's position, and the privilege that comes with it, does not depend on publicity. He does not need the media and has been raised to disdain them; they killed his mother. He pressed charges, against the conventional wisdom that keeping the media onside is a Smart Move.

The Murdoch media lost a royal editor and a key investigator ('professional journalists' having lost their investigative skills), and investigations are underway as to how high up the Murdoch hierarchy the phone-hacking went.

UK Labour leader Ed Miliband realised that no amount of Blairite grovelling would ever get Murdoch onside. He cornered the Cameron government into calling the Leveson Inquiry and giving it sweeping powers. That decision set Miliband above political-class hackery and forced press gallery to snap out of its clichés as they no longer served to describe him.

In Australia, Murdoch has a much tighter grip over the media, in its own right and in setting a tone that the timid non-Murdoch media seems bound to follow. The coverage of the recent visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince George can only be described as fawning. There was no sneering, no crap about elitism or dressing rudeness up as iconoclasm: the Murdoch media observed protocol scrupulously, because even the slightest departure from propriety would have rebounded on Rebekah Brooks and her co-defendants. Kiss the hand you cannot bite.

IN this era of butt selfies and slut walks, Kate Middleton, aka the Duchess of Cambridge, is a revolutionary.

In her clumsy way, this is what Miranda Devine was getting at with the above quote and the rest of her piece. Name me one person more responsible for "this era of butt selfies and slut walks" than her owner, Rupert Murdoch. Devine got where she is through an accident of birth and by doing what she was told. For her sins she has been tasked to write about someone who's also been obedient and attained an even more lofty position. By shouting out to the Duchess she is trying to validate herself. She is trying two psychologically tricky things that I doubt she has ever done before: she is conferring superior qualities onto someone who is younger and prettier than her, with even fewer career achievements; and she is sucking up to someone who can do her career no good at all, someone who can be forgiven for being ignorant of her very existence.

The Murdoch media has also done its best toward a less powerful entity than the royals, one on which it relies but over which it exerts greater control: the Abbott government.

As I've said, the month or so before the Budget involves discussion on spending priorities, particularly in terms of what gets cut. The royal visit was the biggest distraction going. There are no big sporting contests to distract attention, and pensions and healthcare are so primal that debates cannot be left to wonks and spinners. Media space devoted to a handsome young family is media space not devoted to cuts, cuts, cuts; nor to Bill Shorten's attempts to pry open the doors to the crypt to which the Murdoch media has consigned his party.



The herd of media at staged photo ops, scrupulously obeying the conditions of those events, is self-validating for those involved and for those who employ them, in ways that public opinion cannot hope to penetrate.

The one that was most telling about this government was the picfac at Katoomba. Clearly, the royals' publicity machine wanted images of "the real Australia", the outback, while the government wanted them in the cities for economic and political reasons. As British racists claim that "the wogs start at Calais", so do insular Sydneysiders believe that the outback begins at Echo Point; and that, dear reader, is why the royals were photographed there, a place of real significance to Aborigines but from which almost all trace of Aboriginality has been scrubbed.



That said, one can only do so much. Those pictures where the Duchess attempts to maintain a sunny disposition in the leering company of Abbott, or where Prince George turns his grimacing face away from Abbott, undoes any cudos he and his media people hoped to get from the visit. The Cambridges were polite to Abbott, but they weren't loyal; they weren't grateful. They made him look cloying and desperate in ways no Labor leader has managed to do for long.



You'd think that such an ardent monarchist would have found a way to deal with the actual royal family. If anyone can integrate the royals deftly and comfortably into our national life, surely Abbott is the leader to make it happen. After his non-engagement with Prince Charles and his embarrassing schlockfest with Prince Harry, as observed earlier, the question must be asked: does the constitutional monarchy really have a future in Australia? By treating them as photo props, he makes the royals appear more alien to this country than they would otherwise be. After this royal visit Tony Abbott has made it easier, not harder, to argue that the monarchy is superfluous to our country.

You'd think that experienced newspaper people would realise that one of the key roles of a constitutional monarchy is to honour those who died fighting in their name. Every time the Queen or Prince Charles visited this country, they laid a wreath and spoke warmly of those who fell. By honouring those remembered at the going down of the sun, and in the morning, they preserve their own positions and they know it. How silly is it, then, to be surprised that the royals might pay tribute in the same way they always do? You can either be a credible paper of record or you can disgrace yourself with ignorant drivel, but not both.

Of course, in 1999 most Australians voted against a particular form of republic that would disrupt the political system as little as possible. Peter Brent believes that Australians will never vote for far-reaching reforms, and he is entitled to his opinion. It is possible for pollsters to be surprised, even ambushed, especially as political journalists have taken to cowering behind them and only predicting things that have already happened.

Beyond the Murdoch media, and beyond the questions that pollsters dare not ask, the political system is being remade. The Coalition, having enjoyed hefty margins and considerable goodwill, are sinking without a concomitant rise in Labor fortunes. The idea that Clive Palmer and Tony Windsor, as former members of conservative parties, are basically Coalition people has been proven to be delusional to anyone who will face it. There is a vitality in this part of our political system that the Greens have only in fits and starts, and which is dormant in the majors.

At some point, one-off victories here and there will form patterns that not even pet psephologists can ignore. Those victories will have effects on the political system that press gallery veterans can't understand or explain. Piping Shrike is right to say that the rise of Palmer is an indictment of the politico-media complex and not, as they would have it, of the electorate. The constitutional monarchy, like other aspects of the Constitution, might not be revolutionised but nor will it be as immune from change as Abbott and Brent would hope.

Rupert Murdoch's business model involves staying close to the political system. Yet, Murdoch's media do not help you understand what is going on within that system: the differences between what this government says and what it does, and how else we might be governed better. If members of the alternative government, and those emerging as alternatives to both the incumbents and the previous government, regard Murdoch media as an obstacle then it cannot last.

The royals don't need Murdoch, or Abbott, and it would be best if they did not come again for a while. Abbott and Murdoch, on the other hand, need one another more as each day passes.

Victory over the 24 hour news cycle

Journalists complain about a phantom that they call "the 24 hour news cycle" which supposedly makes their jobs tougher. Even press gallery journalists, whose day starts with listening to AM and is all over by mid-afternoon, regard this as something real and try desperately to convince others of it. It was always bullshit but over the past week, the Australian media have shown how to deal with it: pretend it doesn't exist. Plug away with stories that aren't "breaking", or in any way important, and this could be the cure for an affliction that was never real.

Right now, the federal government is putting together its Budget, which will be formally announced and released in May. This happens every year, and you don't need to be a member of the press gallery to know this.

During April, the media is usually full of speculation about what will or won't be in the Budget. Interest groups, bureaucrats fending off incursions from the infidels at Treasury, and even government ministers other than the Treasurer - all background journos and leak documents, and the resulting discussion has an impact on what goes into the Budget and ultimately on what sort of government we have in this country.

This April is different because public servants have not only been told to shut up (this happens every year, no matter which party is in office); but that the government will go through their private lives with a fine-tooth comb and that anyone found to have been leaking, or being disparaging, or even expressing qualms about government policies. However unwittingly, press gallery journalist Samantha Maiden declared closed the traditional multifaceted April debates closed without even realising it.

The institutions of the permanent public service have been commandeered to serve the political interests of the incumbent government. This used to be a big deal and senior journalists, senior public servants and other worthies used to force governments to back down when they did this in the past; no longer.

Maiden has presented this as a problem for the public servants instead of a symptom of a weak government suspicious of those who serve it. Greg Jericho, a former public servant whose career collided with his social media activities to the detriment of the former, can be forgiven for regarding this as a problem for public servants rather than the country more broadly; Maiden can't. Having been diminished as a source of truth by simply quoting Abbott's assurances that he wouldn't be bringing back knighthoods, Maiden has again simply transcribed what she heard with no further consideration about what it means.

Samantha Maiden has done everything a journalist can do to keep on side with this government, and with her employer (but I repeat myself), and all she gets is humiliated. An experienced journalist reduced to a blogger's punchline, I ask you! Give her a Walkley.

There had been a Commission of Audit. The government decided not to release its findings before the WA Senate re-election on 5 April; that election has come and gone and that report has still not been released. No one seems interested. The contents of that report might take the place of the usual April debate around the Budget, but nobody will release it, officially or unofficially. It's one thing for the government to decide that it will not respond to or even court public debate, but it's a pity that the press gallery and even the opposition won't either.

The coming Budget will be the first for a government that likes to talk big, but which can't really deliver. The Treasurer, Joe Hockey, has often been regarded as both a buffoon and a very smart guy; I saw evidence of both when I knew him in the early '90s, and press gallery journalists have also seen proof of both; this coming Budget will see which of those qualities (and the many others he brings to the job, for good and ill) best inform his legacy. One thing is clear: he doesn't want any debate. Whether you're a public servant or not, you'll take what he gives you and you'll shut up.

In the absence of pre-Budget speculation and debate there were some announcements about trade agreements. It was not necessary to go to Tokyo and Seoul to get announcements that were freely available from government websites. In both locations, media footage of Abbott shaking hands with various dignitaries was freely available from local media. When Abbott did a press conference in Seoul and refused to take questions, press gallery journalists expressed surprised, as though walking away from press conferences was not something you'd expect from Tony Abbott.

No agreement was actually signed in either location. No acknowledgement was made (by the government or its press gallery) of the efforts of previous governments, and of potentially critical public servants, in securing those arrangements. The task of reporting those agreements was left to the press gallery rather than to business journalists, surprising when you consider the idea of those deals is to boost trade and economic activity more broadly.

The press gallery focused on agricultural exports, as though Australia's economy hasn't changed in the past century and agriculture is the be-all-and-end-all of our exports. Japan promised to cut its tariff on beef from about 40% to about 20% over 15 years, and no journalist I can find has really explained what difference that would make (not being in the beef industry myself). As Mr Denmore said, coverage seemed more concerned that we think well of the government rather than focus on what might (not) be in it for the country more broadly.

Andrew Robb could well be the only member of this government with any negotiating skill to speak of. If he had been involved with the post-election negotiations in 2010 it is entirely possible that Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott, and Andrew Wilkie would have been more amenable to a Coalition government, and history might have been different.Rather than ramping up their negotiation efforts they went the other way, and seem vindicated by the last general election - until you consider that after six months of Abbott government:

• Labor's carbon tax and mining tax remain in place;
• Supposedly bipartisan policies like reforms to education and disability funding are unclear or in tatters; and
• Coalition commitments like paid parental leave have not yet been introduced to parliament, let alone passed through it.

What is the different between being in that position, and not being in government at all? Believe it or not, there are some members of the press gallery who actually believe Abbott has negotiation skills despite all available evidence. Not being a public servant, or a journalist, it falls to me to point this out.

If I was an experienced press gallery journalist I'd note that Julia Gillard was dead to the press gallery by this point in her term in office, and called a 'liar' to her face. Tony Abbott is still quoted as though his words were achievements in themselves. The way he glides through, achieving little while having journos hang off his every word, reminds me of the way the NSW parliamentary press gallery used to fawn over Bob Carr.

Bob Carr has been a leading politician in NSW and Federal politics for two decades. Everybody knows what he's like: a bit of a wanker, with that Whitlamite combination of self-deprecation and self-aggrandisement where nobody (including Carr) can truly be sure where one ends and the other begins. The idea that press gallery journalists who've seen him go around for a few months can appreciate him on a different level than the rest of us is a ridiculous conceit, insiderism at its worst. It only shows what contempt journalists have for us that they can maintain it in the sheer absence of any proof.

The first sentence in that tweet is flatly untrue; the press gallery reports announcements as facts. And as for the second - if you seriously imagine that Bob Carr is being candid, or capable of being so, I have a bridge (or a rail line from Parramatta to Epping) to sell you.

Carr's career seemed to show the futility of traditional politics. He was a loyal member of his party and held high office within it, but could barely get preselected and nearly got rolled by lightweights like Brian Langton. His big achievements as NSW Premier (e.g. the 2000 Sydney Olympics) were mostly initiated under the previous Coalition government, while initiatives that came from the very bowels of the NSW ALP (e.g. electricity privatisation, Eddie Obeid) were more trouble than they were worth. He was every bit as disdainful of the sort of person who joins the ALP as Joe Bullock. He was a warrior for the Labor Right but his better ministers were Left (Andrew Refshauge, John Watkins) rather than his own people (Obeid, Joe Tripodi, Reba Meagher). He remains Labor's anti-immigration champion, the nearest thing the "fuck off we're full" crowd have to intellectual heft and policy substance.

He was Foreign Minister from March 2012 to October 2013 - a term of 19 months. He went to a lot of conferences in that time but didn't appear to have achieved very much as Foreign Minister. 19 months was two months longer than Percy Spender had in the same job (December 1949 - April 1951). Spender set up the entire post war foreign policy architecture for Australia in his tenure. Thank goodness Carr is so witty because there's nothing comparable to the ANZUS Treaty (positioning Australia on the US side of the Cold War) and the Colombo Plan (positioning Australia as a leading education provider and a major soft-power force in the Asia-Pacific region), which were all conceived - and concluded - in this brief period. Spender became Vice President of the UN General Assembly; Carr, for all his lack of humility, was just another rotating member.

Gillard gave Carr carte blanche in foreign policy - he could've done anything. No press gallery journalist really evaluated Carr while he was in office. They had no petard to hoist him by until Carr provided his own. Those who employ press gallery journalists got someone in from ASPI or Lowy to comment on foreign policy rather than those who actually rubbed shoulders with Carr in Canberra - what would they know? All that other stuff in today's papers/radio/TV - the weird diets, the book-club and trivia-quiz approach to history, the disdain for quotidian politics - we in the nation's most populous state knew that already.

People who are reading Carr's book claim all proceeds are going to charity. People who are reading Carr's book haven't paid for it, and are burnishing it only to make it reflect on them all the brighter.

It was nice of the Murdoch press to finally twig to Carr after plugging him for so long: Carr sold his soul to Col Allan long before Rudd did.

Speaking of the Murdoch press: it was commendable that they joined, late and half-heartedly, in the general mirth surrounding Abbott's announcements on knighthoods and dames. It was pathetic that both kinds of Australian traditional journalism, Murdoch and non-Murdoch, all lined up to be Momentous about Lachlan Murdoch rejoining the family company: all that Dynastic Succession crap. You had to go outside Australian traditional media to read how he move made a mockery of any sense of strategic direction and how undistinguished Lachlan and James Murdoch were and are.

One of the abiding myths of the Australian media is that the Murdoch are geniuses, and that they can run a media company while others can only imitate. The farting bobbleheads atop News Australia are credited with being in touch with Everyday Strains in some mystic way, yet they give the impression that any oaf could do what they do. The financial performance of Murdoch and non-Murdoch media is about the same, but when something big and important happens the last place you go is to a Murdoch outlet. Lachlan Murdoch offers little to remedy that, and James Murdoch offers nothing at all. Why all this stuff about them when there's so much more going on? If they're so wrong about their own industry, about what might they possibly be right?

By focusing on trade agreements, Bob Carr, and Lachlan Murdoch, the Australian media seems to have slipped the surly bonds of a phantom of its own collective imagination, the "24 hour news cycle". None of those stories are particularly urgent. None of them affect our nation in any real way, nor the manner by which it is governed. There is no such thing as a Slow News Day, only Lazy Journo Day or Dumb Editor Day. The only leading story in the Australian media that remotely resembles a rolling, anything-could-happen-anytime story is the disappearance of MH370, but after a month non-journalists are right to be tired of "Breaking News: Still Nothing ... Breaking News: Still Nothing ...", etc.

What now? When will the traditional media realise that its power to focus on some inane thing or person, and foist it on the rest of us as The News You Need, is waning? Perhaps it will stop blaming The Internet and start realising that audience-repellent content does more damage to their prospects of survival than whatever comfort might come from journo cliches. After the last few days, any journalist complaining about the "24 hour news cycle" should have all the credibility of a sailor wittering about mermaids, and about the same career prospects.

Disguise fair nature

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage ...

- Shakespeare Henry V

This past week has shown that a directionless government can easily lose what little focus it has. This past week showed that a party which is a 'flat track bully' when the polls go with them will go to water when polls are less than favourable. This past week has been all about ramping up for this government's one true test: the repeal of the carbon tax, the rod for this government's back.

After disasters on foreign policy, immigration, education, and other issues, the government needed a focus. The Murdoch press would have looked really silly if they had continued lionising this bunch of turkeys, so they dusted off their old campaign against public broadcasters. It was feeble, a fraction of the ferocity we saw in Howard's first term when gutting the ABC was a real prospect, complicated by Murdoch's grumbling about losing the Australia International TV gig and its phone-hacking corruption cases in the UK.

Despite being old enough to know better, Mike Carlton was taken in hook, line, and sinker:

Putting the ABC to fire and sword is unfinished business for the Tories ... They did their best, but it didn't work. Battered but unbowed, the ABC sailed on. But the Tories have long memories, and the Abbott lot are determined to succeed where Howard failed ... The idea is to goad the Tories into action, and so far it's working splendidly ... There is an eerie, Orwellian air to the Abbott government.

Oh, please. There are at least three reasons why Carlton is wrong.

First, Carlton should've disclosed that his wife works for the ABC. This is a basic bit of journalistic arse-covering which someone of Carlton's experience had no right to overlook.

Second, there is no proof that Abbott will succeed at anything which Howard failed. The braying of Bernardi is itself a signifier of irrelevance. The same people who put paid to Archer Daniels Midland taking over Graincorp are the people who put paid to Howard doing over the ABC, and the same people who will stop any meaningful action against the ABC by this government: if you're going to gabble on about political matters, look at where power actually lies.

If you wanted to wipe out the Nationals altogether, and such Liberals who currently represent regional electorates, you'd make the Coalition hack into the ABC. The ABC is a far greater national and community unifier than any political party, and Coalition MPs know that (even though this clueless press gallery journo doesn't, wittering on about Peppa Pig in the face of the ABC's ageing, dispersed demographic). The ABC is so hard-wired for 'balance' that it cannot take its own side in an argument, which means that Carlton's over-the-top effort defines the gullible but fails to rouse them.

Third, Carlton has lost the right to be taken on face value. In the 1980s Carlton was the second-most-popular host on Sydney morning radio. He was beaten by a genial man named Gary O'Callaghan, whose role in life was to give people a smile on their face and a spring in their step. Carlton went after O'Callaghan with snarling ferocity and eventually triumphed, and established from then on that to win at Sydney morning radio you have to be a prick. Alan Jones, Kyle Sandilands, all follow the Carlton template: Carlton himself attempted a kinder, gentler comeback years later and was rolled by his harder-edged successors. It's been a while since he was the journalist he claims to be; he is no more a journalist than I am.

Before the last election Carlton insisted that Abbott wouldn't be so bad as PM, that there is something ennobling that seeps off the walls of the Lodge as you sleep there and that Abbott would rise to the job. If that was going to happen, it would have happened by now. Carlton has joined the ranks of the duller press gallery hacks, acting all surprised that Abbott is every bit as bad as he said and proved he was going to be.

The stale bullshit flung by culture warriors within Team Murdoch and the Coalition was an attempt to rally the troops in preparation for next week's assault on the carbon tax. Abolishing that impost is the biggest test of this government's credibility - now that promises around debt, boats, and school funding have all been abandoned, this is pretty much the nearest this government has to any substance at all. Given the current configuration of the Senate, it cannot abandon this promise, but going through with it will be disruptive and have no benefit. Just as banks do not pass on savings from Reserve Bank interest rate cuts, so too power companies will not pass on any savings from an abolished carbon tax.

We all know it's a sad pantomime, but Coalition MPs can't be allowed to think that. They must hurl themselves at the Parliament with ferocity; the way to do that is to have the Murdoch press pump out the bile, and when it comes to the ABC there's plenty to go around. The fact that they can wind up an easy mark like Carlton on the way through is a bonus.

Mark Kenny embarrassed himself yet again with this. Everything in that policy imbroglio, Sophie Mirabella (remember her?) had been wrestling with for three years, with she and Abbott lambasting Labor for doing both too little and too much for our car industry - and now Kenny acts all surprised as though yet another Abbott government policy failure had been entirely unforeseeable.

Quite why Qantas wants to subject its fate to the geniuses who put Graincorp and Holden where they are today is unclear. The head of government relations at Qantas (Geoff Dixon's old job) is Andrew Parker, who used to be a high-profile lobbyist in Canberra a decade or so ago, and well-connected with the Coalition. I thought a campaign run by him would be more focused, more effective than this one has been.

The government conceded the failure of the Foreign Minister on the essential big-picture aspects of her job by sending her to the Philippines. There she did not apparently hobnob with her counterparts in government or profess our undying friendship/ trade/ cultural/ ties etc with that country, but instead went patronising victims of Cyclone Haiyan. Going around patronising people is what Margie-and-the-girls are for, not the Foreign Minister. If the Foreign Minister isn't up to Foreign Minister work, then we need a new Foreign Minister rather than for Julie Bishop to carry on as she is.

I want a stamp in my passport indicating that, if ever hospitalised in a foreign country, I am not to be visited by the Foreign Minister. It should be possible to do that without having my passport revoked altogether.

Given the treatment meted out to Nicole Feely as John Howard's chief of staff, and now Credlin - and of course the vile treatment of Julia Gillard that went well beyond the treatment meted out to an opponent - it's clear that the Coalition has a deep-seated unease with women in power. After the hoo-ha surrounding the Governor-General, we see that the Coalition is uneasy about women in figurehead positions.

Bronwyn Bishop as Speaker is no worse or better than she was as NSW State President of the Liberal Party in the 1980s, ignoring objections and conflating obstinacy with courage, observing traditions and niceties only when they suit her. When this government starts to look bad because Question Time is a monkey-house just like it was before the election, Bishop won't be able to improve things. When Sophie Mirabella was proposed as a suitable head of the ABC, it was again as a figurehead doing as she is bid rather than as an suitably effective manager of national traditions.

I've dealt with Credlin before on this blog and the whiny detractors quoted in the more recent Aston/Johnson piece remind me of nothing so much as the Fitzgibbon/ Husic/ Bowen briefings against Gillard. Gillard, at least, faced popular election and took public accountability seriously; Credlin didn't get where she is through accountability. The assumption that she is enforcing higher standards of governance and quality on this government in the selection of staff and dictation of government processes is, at best, questionable; this government only talks about higher standards and better government. Look at the parliamentary ranks: there is no deep reserve of Coalition talent ready to take key advisor roles.

When long-serving opposition staffers burn out in government's earliest days they need to be replaced by cooler heads, less enamoured of electioneering and even less personally loyal to particular politicians. Such people are most likely to be found in state parliaments, where Coalition governments have been at it for a while now. Who would move from a real job in a major city to work for, say, Peter Dutton or Chris Pyne? How many of those people have been impressing Peta Credlin from afar? Can she really resist the temptation to replace someone who's good at their job but not loyal to her with someone utterly loyal but second rate (and not only staffers, but ministers)?

Credlin is the internal lightning-rod for all dissent within this government. That will spare the leader, but only for a while. This isn't clever or novel politics - the Coalition has form.

It wiggles, it's shapely and its name is Ainsley Gotto.

- Dudley Erwin, explaining why he lost his ministry in the Gorton government, 1969

In 1968 Prime Minister John Gorton appointed his 22-year-old secretary, Ainslie Gotto, as his Principal Private Secretary and came to rely on her for political advice. She was the first modern staffer in Australian government, and the Coalition did not take well to her; she was blamed for isolating Gorton from the political forces that ended up driving him from office. In later years Gotto, like Credlin, worked on the staff of Senator Helen Coonan. If press gallery experience meant anything, older press gallery journalists would be drawing contrasts between Gotto, Feely, and Credlin in terms of what it says about the Coalition, Abbott, and women exercising power.

Abbott depends as heavily upon Credlin as Gorton did on Gotto. Any successes of this government will be attributed to Credlin by the media, while any failures will be worn by Abbott and his ministers. Nobody goes into politics in order to be a mouthpiece and/or a punching bag, yet that is the extent of Credlin's vision for them. There is no mechanism for calling Credlin to account apart from a frontal assault on Abbott; Credlin can see those coming anyway, and will be taking names.

When Cormann calls for Credlin's critics to capitulate, he wants the focus on the Labor-Green alliance determined to price carbon. He is also being chivalrous, as are all those people (including those not necessarily supportive of this government) who don't want a repeat of the vilification directed against a prominent woman in politics. Is quietism really the only alternative to vilification for women in public office?

If you want more nuanced, polite discussion, you need something to discuss. Not only do you need policies, but you also need respect for stakeholders and other interlocutors who might cause you to adopt a position different to that identified by focus-group wranglers. You need to abandon your idea that any change of position is a backflip, a backdown, a breach of faith, a weakness. And in that, you see the central shortcoming of the Abbott government right there. The question for Abbott and Credlin and all the other decision-makers (real and imagined) in this government is, what's to discuss?

The limits of insider journalism

If you're going to get a handle on the new government, you could do worse than follow journalists who have spent years not only drinking Abbott's Kool-Aid, but skulling or even bathing in it. That's why you need to read this, a pithier Pam Williams (and eerily similar to that stretch of Rudd's 'concession' speech where he thanked his entire retinue).

Journos fancy themselves as realists, but Steve "We Will Get Him" Lewis is a special kind of realist: a magic realist. Check out this non-story:

TONY Abbott's new government is experiencing its first bout of internal tension with senior Liberal and Nationals' MPs openly jostling for the prized role of parliamentary speaker.

No, it isn't.

There is a bit of fact about halfway down the story, where it says Bronwyn Bishop is Abbott's choice. End of story, insofar as there is one.

Bronwyn Bishop was one of Abbott's mentors. She has been practising for the Speakership since Howard dumped her from his ministry. Her niggly and often irrelevant points of order, references to Standing Orders and other folderol of parliamentary procedure were just so many auditions for a role she would never have gotten under Howard, or Costello for that matter. Press gallery journalists theatre reviewers reported these as odd little acts of vanity on her part, like that scene toward the end of Macbeth where the once-vituperative Lady has clearly gone off her rocker and poses no threat to anyone.

Bishop was and is deadly serious about the Speakership and Abbott will indulge her. Bruce Scott was wrong; the Speakership is absolutely within the gift of the Prime Minister. Had she wanted High Commissioner to London or something like that, Abbott would have given it to her. She wants to stick around and will probably die in office rather than go out with dignity; so Abbott will indulge her in that.

The rest of Lewis' piece is sheer bullshit:

• Scott is the guy who refused to roll over for Barnaby. He's 70 years old and is finished;
• Don Randall is a grub - if Labor are going to give Abbott a taste of his own relentlessly negative medicine inside parliament and out, and if Abbott wants to try and put that behind him, Randall is about the worst choice they could possibly make. He is consistently in the top five of Politicians Most Desperately In Need Of A Smack In The Mouth. So he's close to Julie Bishop, so what?
• Sharman Stone was a bright and capable person who was Deputy Assistant Minister for Bugger-All under Howard, and under Abbott she will scarcely go further; and
• The reference to Kevin Andrews in the passive voice shows that some figments are so weak not even Steve Lewis can make them work.

Nobody should be better placed to give you all the inside information on an Abbott government than Steve Lewis. All he seems to offer, however, is bullshit like this. He is trying to set Abbott up as some sort of Solomonic resolver of problems, but when they aren't even real then Abbott will only look worse when he comes a-gutser against real problems beyond his powers of understanding, let along resolution. Abbott might grow in office, but then so did the far more substantial Billy McMahon.

Lewis' problems with fabulism are a matter of record and he is clearly continuing unchastened down that line. Glenn Milne is now a burnt-out shell for a far lesser offence against that so-called profession. Lewis' future probably includes a few drops ("EXCLUSIVE BY STEVE LEWIS The Treasurer will announce later this morning that ...") but not much more. As if he'll ever bring down a minister in this government.

Today's press gallery is a far cry from the 1970s, where journos told anecdotes about how up-himself Whitlam is, complete with bad imitations of his vocal mannerisms and laughter at the end (similar stories abound about Rudd, without the mannerisms or the laughter). Now the press gallery has what they wanted: a Prime Minister who respects the press to a degree unparalleled since Hawke.

Howard always treated the press gallery like poisonous reptiles: his attempts to look relaxed in their company were never convincing, except that one time in 1989 where he came out with his "Lazarus with a triple bypass" comment. The press gallery hated Gillard because she disdained them, and started flirting with the social media that is dismantling the press gallery with or without official help. They came to hate Rudd, too; journalists with nothing better to do all day but bear witness to a 15-minute grab orchestrated wholly for their benefit got miffed when he was a bit late.

The press gallery should be ecstatic that their boy has been Lodged; they're not, kind of uneasy and not quite believing the situation they're in, not quite believing themselves. This will be where things get interesting.

Not for Steve Lewis, though - that gibberer will bumble along like nothing has happened, until his career finally expires and he wonders how it all came to this. Not even Col Allan can keep this crap going. Give him a Walkley or send him to prison, because Steve "We Will Get Him" Lewis' style of anti-journalism simply has no future.

Huzzah to the future

HAMLET:
Hic et ubique? Then we'll shift our ground.

Come hither, gentlemen,

And lay your hands again upon my sword.

Never to speak of this that you have heard:

Swear by my sword.

GHOST:
[beneath] Swear by his sword.

HAMLET:
Well said, old mole! Canst work i' th' earth so fast?

A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends.

- Shakespeare Hamlet Act I Scene V

This is quite a long blogpost about how rubbish the Australian media is, and how it can't really be saved, so if you can't bear any more of that bloggy stuff from someone who was never a journalist then what are you even doing here?

Recently a student at the University of Melbourne went on an internship at The Herald-Sun, Australia's biggest-selling newspaper, and afterwards wrote about the experience in the campus paper. It caused a great kerfuffle as pretty much every journalist in the country dropped whatever Big-Time Serious Scoop that they were all working on to denounce the intern for allowing daylight in upon the magic. They claimed this person was irrelevant while intensely demonstrating the opposite; complaining that the intern was ill-informed when this a) wasn't the case, and b) is hardly a barrier to becoming a successful journalist in this country.

Compare the "Anonymous" article above to this, written by someone highly regarded and rewarded over the years for skill and experience in journalism. Is the intern's effort really several orders of magnitude below that of the doyenne? The latter has a byline attached to it, but it (too?) is badly written and tendentious in its logic, the professional pursuing a petty vendetta no less than the student.

Oh, and incase you think I'm being unfair to Ms Grattan with that link: point me to her finest work, go on. Dive into four decades of workmanlike-at-best pap and bring forth the deathless phrase that only she could have coined, the complex development rendered clear and complete by her deceptively simple prose.

It was funny that it followed the path of most media-industry kerfuffles, where such a non-issue became very much an issue, and then quickly became boring; but then again that's fairly typical of the Australian media. I'm not being slow to this issue: it is worth revisiting now that the dust has settled because I think a central lesson has been missed from what should have been a valuable exercise for people who pride themselves on Getting The Story Right and in believing that Stimulating Debate Is A Good Thing.

Mostly the debate went in two ultimately fruitless directions:

• What happens in the newsroom stays in the newsroom; and
• Toughen up, princess.

Nobody expected it to maintain the intensity of that week but I didn't expect it to fade away so fast. I thought it would give rise to multiple inquiries and long-form expositions on the subject, as happened at the same university twenty years ago when some female students accused a middle-aged male administrator of sexual harassment. During the early 1990s I can still remember getting onto crowded train carriages in Sydney and seeing several passengers reading The First Stone, day after day.

One prime example - again, highly regarded and retweeted by journalists like Mia Freedman - is this piece by Wendy Squires, who deserves some kind of Germaine Greer Award for Unhelpful Remarks By An Older Woman Toward Younger Ones.

And you seem to have missed the class explaining that losing big mastheads is not a good thing. Not for journalists, the public, or democracy.

Really?

• The Argus shut down in 1957, and then Menzies attempted to ban the Communist Party - no, wait, it was the other way around, those two events weren't related at all.
• Then there was News Corporation's decision in 1987 to shut down The News, the Adelaide paper that gave the corporation its name. Within five years of that closure, Communist regimes in eastern Europe had collapsed and so had the State Bank of South Australia. Coincidence? Yep.

Democracy survives the closure of mastheads, and so do the public. As for journalists, depends who you mean: old-timers like Wendy Squires, with little to show for their career and less time to make up for it, or promising up-and-comers like "Anonymous"? The latter will flourish whatever form journalism takes; the former not so much, lacking the sense or good grace to provide useful guidance.

Note how Squires bestows a name upon the "Anonymous" student. The name she uses came from this article, on a website that MSM people regard as the very acme of the nasty amateur online world, all that is infra dig and unprofessional and threatening about the Fifth Estate towards the Fourth. Yet, when it suits them, the MSM can (as LBJ once said about Richard Nixon) turn chickenshit into chicken salad.

But before we get carried away ...

Before who gets carried away, o seasoned pro?

... let me first congratulate you on your courage.

In her fourth paragraph, after a few opening volleys of condescension, Squires gets around to what's "first". Apparently, such structural sloppiness would have earned her a rap over the knuckles which would have been seared onto her consciousness and made her The Professional She Is Today (or isn't, as in this case).

The congratulations serve to hide another nasty swipe that is leavened by the unintended humour of:

Because a newsroom like the Herald Sun's is actually a microcosm of real life ...

No, it isn't. It never was. You're kidding yourself, and those who told you that were kidding you and themselves; you should not be passing forward this self-serving and ultimately unhelpful bullshit.

The newsroom of the Herald Sun is no more a microcosm of 'real life', or even real life in Melbourne, than the things growing under Wendy Squires' toenails are a microcosm of Squires herself. Show me the demographic stats of the rapidly-shrinking staff versus that of Melbourne or Victoria or Australia or [insert your definition of 'real life' here] as a whole. Show me the mature and dignified manner in which the Herald Sun copes with even mild and constructive feedback (never mind the trolls).

The only people who think that "a newsroom like the Herald Sun's is actually a microcosm of real life" are those who entered such newsrooms at impressionable ages, have known no other working environment or intellectual stimulation other than those the job provided, and who face a post-newsroom future with the same dread that "Anonymous" has for the prospect of going into one.

And so, your shock at life outside the bliss bubble of like-minded souls at uni is understandable. It's a cacophonic mash-up of personalities and politics in the working world - as I'm sure your course teachers will explain in due time.

More sarcasm from Auntie Wen, with the hope it will give her arguments a force they don't have. Think about a university, now about a tabloid newsroom: if you had to label one "a cacophonic mash-up of personalities and politics", and the other "the bliss bubble of like-minded souls", which would you apply to which?

You see, a lot of people have found your comments ungrateful ...

At the risk of displaying journo-like qualities, which people? A lot of like-minded souls?

That you had the opportunity to learn at the coalface of newspapers, only to ultimately decide it was all too grubby and beneath you. People who really want to learn can get shitty about things like that.

Not really. I like to learn. I reckon it must have been like going to Sovereign Hill and watching coopers or loom-weavers or COBOL programmers at work. Dying trades are so cute!

Let's look at some examples in your story. There's the senior Hun journalist you recall asking, "Why are they [the gay community] making such a fuss [in regard to gay marriage rights]? It's been this way for millennia, why change now?"

Another affront you mention were comments on a piece about an overweight man who was trying to lose 200 kilograms through hypnosis: "Of course he's fat, look at what he eats" and "How does someone let that happen?"

In being mortally offended by these statements you seem to have overlooked the pink elephant fact that a significant portion of the Australian population is saying the exact same things as the staff at the Hun. Maybe not in your media class, Sasha. But I'm sure any minute your teachers will explain that most journalists don't go into the profession to preach to the converted. The real aim - and thrill - is to educate, enlighten, entertain and inform.

What's missing from that is the example Squires wants to show (what she assumes is there but can't prove) where the dross of oafish comment was turned into  educative, enlightening, entertaining and informative pieces. And printed in the Herald Sun. Squires assumes they are there (you there, stop laughing), but she can't provide any proof. That's a no-no in terms of lofty journo ideals, but you'd have to check with Squires or "Anonymous" as to whether newsrooms are cool with no-proof journalism these days.

But back to your complaints. It appears "white, elitist opinions" were not the only affront you endured during your work experience incarceration. You were also personally slighted - "I was consistently subjected to patronising attitudes, being referred to as 'Little Bud', 'Champ' and 'Kidlet'. Men were also continuously and unnecessarily sexist, waiting for me to walk through doors and leave the elevator before them."

Again with the sarcasm. Kim Powell deals pretty comprehensively with the idea that such people are just trying to be friendly or inclusive, and without being snide like Squires.

But where you disappointed me most, Sasha, is that you missed the very point of your argument, which was a valid one. Yes, the media deserves to be outed and shamed. I have spent 20-odd years in the business and can attest, heart and soul, to experiencing rampant sexism and more. In fact, I wrote a novel about this very thing ... set in the world of free-to-air TV where I unhappily resided for a year. The opportunity to expose the abhorrent treatment my female colleagues and I endured was worthy of not just burning career bridges, but detonating and decimating them. So, I get where you're coming from.

But without sounding like the relative who walked to school barefoot in the snow - it has always been a lot worse than you exposed. There was too much emotion and not enough fact in your argument. The instances you note hardly make a toe-curling point in an environment where women are still sacked for being fat, pregnant, old or, worse, opinionated.

So a student with a short experience in a newsroom did not draw upon "20-odd years in the business" (is the hyphen redundant there?) but upon what was personally witnessed and recorded. This makes her a poor journalist, does it? Surely decimation would be redundant following a detonation? And if Squires' career bridges really have been burnt, why isn't the option of being published in Fairfax closed to her?

Oh, and she failed to write a novel about it, so that makes her a failed novelist as well (Squires may well be a failed novelist herself; I'm not going to rush out and buy her tome either, but having written a novel is no proof or otherwise of journalism)?

I reckon you will make an editor one day. It just won't be on a mainstream publication; that is, one that will reach the very people whose opinions you want to change.

What will "a mainstream publication" look like by the time "Anonymous" is as old (and hopefully more distinguished) as Wendy Squires is today? Who will guarantee that the Herald Sun will even exist then, let alone be classified in that manner? Maybe you could get a youngster to show you how to Google, Wendy, it won't hurt a bit.

It's time here to do what intra-journosphere squabbling will never do, and that is raise the standards of journalism. I am an enthusiastic consumer of media, an industry with declining sales, so whether you have 20-odd minutes of journo experience or 20 years, you need to keep in mind a saying from my profession that should apply to the profession trade of journalism:

Never assume. It makes an ass of u and me.

Wendy Squires has made much, much more of an ass of herself journo-wise in her small-f farrago than "Anonymous" has, and has fewer excuses. But far from being fully condemnatory of the oafs she worked with, and offering pissant excuses for those she didn't (but who Powell and "Anonymous" did), Squires has missed the wider point about such behaviour that "Anonymous" grasps clearly and strongly.

Imagine an experienced journalist and/or a manager of same, and who happens to be male. Imagine such a person presented with a young female intern, making her feel as though the most important thing about her is the shape of her body and her youth: the intern may be guilty of a lack of judgment at having come to such a place, but the senior journo/editor definitely is for creating and maintaining such a culture.

Senior journos and editors who are stuck in that mindset, and who are doomed to propagate that mindset, cannot be said to have otherwise impeccable news and business sense (though this is one of the abiding fantasies of the journosphere). What other misjudgments have these clowns made along the way that have contributed to the decline in sales and sheer damn respect that has beset the Australian media, and sent once-proud organisations to the brink of bankruptcy and irrelevance?

It is a cop-out to say that sexism and harassment exists everywhere; most other organisations have measures in place, and cultivate supportive cultures, that minimise if not eradicate such behaviour. Do you want cop-out merchants running your company and training future staff? What hot stories or business opportunities are going begging because the cop-out boys, the leerers and scoffers, the group-thinkers who all went through the same cadetship program, occupy the commanding heights? What emerging technology have they waved away as a fad, only to embrace something that is crumbling before their eyes? "Anonymous" knows that sometimes the only way you can get someone off their high horse is to shoot the horse.

All that crap that Squires and other experienced journalists go on about how people who've survived long enough in a newsroom have "a nose for news" and that sexism and other forms of social myopia are mere human flaws that can be overlooked (or written about in throwaway novels) is rubbish. If you're running a wilfully dumb organisation, you have no business telling me what is going on in the world. "Anonymous" knows that she is going to have to carve her own main stream in a new landscape, because Squires and her pals are going to bequeath the next generation of journalists pretty much bugger-all.

Alexandra Wake of RMIT and Jenna Price of UTS both administer internship-style programs for journalism students, and wrote pretty much the same article in response to the "Anonymous":

• We have to maintain good relationships with the people you dumped on, "Anonymous", thanks for nothing!
• Aww, it's alright and no long-term harm done, thanks for caring!
• You've got to be in it to win it!

I have some sympathy for their positions, but I despair of the idea that those who run our major media organisations are the same people who can turn things around, including fostering and hiring people who are better than they are.

Price gives an example of how her journo-persistence paid off:

A long, long time ago, in a newspaper far, far away, I was a bossy cadet who called herself a feminist. The blokes on the subs desk would make fun of me endlessly. But we women reporters collectively organised to get the term Ms recognised by the then editor-in-chief. A tiny victory.

In the community which that newspaper covered and served, that battle had been fought and won 10, 20 years before. If the subs or the editor was as across that community as journo-lore assumes they are, then that "tiny victory" would have been won long ago. This isn't to belittle Price's efforts; it shouldn't have been her role to manage upward like that in an organisation that should pride itself on its openness.

The idea that you can only reform an institution from the inside is one with which I have great sympathy: I'm a gradualist by inclination, and in my politics I regard the various flavours of far left and right as irrelevant with their calls for smashing this and that. I took the in-it-to-win-it approach to membership of the Liberal Party, another organisation not lacking in obtuse oafs. Increasingly I'm not convinced the Australian media is as good an example of gradual reform either, despite what Wake and Price might hope. You don't have to become a Muslim to deal with Lashkar-e-Toiba. If you did an internship at Phillip Morris it might turn you off smoking, whether or not Wendy Squires gets pissed off about that. No amount of push-from-within could turn Cobb & Co into Qantas.

However much you might have to work with the sheltered workshop that is the Herald Sun, and whether the people there are naughty or nice (or a bit of both), the fact is there is a duty to prepare students for a workplace where the people who run it are probably running it into the ground. There's little an intern can do to change it; to throw your heart and soul into it might be no less educative or constructive than the good old point-and-jeer.

I am not saying that Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood is anything but a gentleman, but I will wager he has worked with many of the same sorts of people that Squires and "Anonymous" identifies. He may even have such people report to him. He has been in his role for some years now and had to announce these results: when he was first appointed, he was praised for being steeped in the sorts of newsroom cultures that Squires romanticises and "Anonymous" demonises. And yet, if his career had been in merchant banking or something other than journalism, how could things be worse? Has he rooted out the sorts of boofheads that all those quoted above have had to deal with, or are they still running the show and making the sorts of misjudgments whose consequences Hywood had to announce yesterday?

Huzzah to the future indeed. The future may or may not include the Herald Sun, but journalists whose tolerance for feedback is so low that it trips up their bullshit detector have less a place in that future than they assume. An oaf who has been wilfully blind and deaf to changes in our society simply cannot report usefully on it, let alone run organisations that do so: this is the enduring importance of what Twitter called #interngate. When "Anonymous" realises that, the future in journalism may be more assured than it might appear; I'd certainly give her the benefit of the doubt over some of the socially-retarded fools clogging up that industry.