Flinching at the future

I look to the future it makes me cry
But it seems too real to tell you why

Freed from the century
With nothing but memory, memory

And I just hope that you can forgive us
But everything must go

And if you need an explanation
Then everything must go

- Manic Street Preachers Everything must go

In 2018, traditional broadcast media is dying and politicians are starting to look for alternatives to standard media management. Two recent incidents from two current politicians, and the responses from the media covering them, show that the place of the media in the future of politics is clear: there isn't one.

Disintermediation

There are those who govern, and those who are governed. For the past two hundred or so years in western democracies, the entirety of Australia's post-settlement political history, that relationship has been mediated by accredited media. Accredited media was supplied with details about government decisions that had been taken, and it also took to reporting both reactions to those decisions, and proposals for government decisions not yet taken. In that gap, between the government and the governed, Australia developed political systems and cultures developed and are developing still.

For much of Australian political history it was possible for a politician to build a career through close, physical contact with the community they represented. Since the 1960s politicians had to deal with broadcast media as the most efficient way to reach a mass audience: one of the reasons why Gough Whitlam was so lionised by journalists in the late 1960s/early '70s is because he took broadcast media journalists more seriously than his Coalition opponents at the time. For a generation, it was largely only possible to get into politics through a major party; and the major parties outsourced their public outreach function to broadcast media, which operated on a similarly clubby and oligopolistic basis as the major parties themselves.

Today, political parties have their media relationship down to a pretty fine art, bound by conventions (such as 'off the record', or observing publishing deadlines) and imposing tight rules to govern the press gallery within Parliament House. However, the environment has changed around them to the point where this fine art actually works against the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed. That relationship is paramount, and it prevails over secondary, failing relationships with the broadcast media.

Over the mainstream media

I hate journalists. I'm over dealing with the mainstream media as a form of communication with the people of Canberra. What passes for a daily newspaper in this city is a joke and it will be only a matter of years before it closes down. 

- ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr, 8 March 2018

When The Canberra Times (the daily newspaper referred to above) discovered Barr had said this, it initially couldn't believe it, reduced first to dumb and incredulous reporting of his words; then it went officially berserk. No calm and measured reflection on changes to technology and reader information needs. For years, senior management at Fairfax Media has sought to assure investors that it has a strategy for transition to digital: the hysteria from The Canberra Times shows either no such strategy exists, or it is so tightly guarded a secret that head office will have to do the whole lot by itself.

Instead, The Canberra Times carried one unsourced assertion from Barr and another from its editorialist about readership figures, and then insisted that its coverage of municipal Territory affairs is equal to detailed scrutiny of government. Of course, most of its coverage is merely relaying press releases; as with the federal parliamentary press gallery, the person who drafts the press release does much more work than the journalists who simply pass it forward. Only when a government is fading in the polls, or when it has actively alienated its press gallery, is there any scrutiny worth the name.

Politicians spend a lot of time crafting their message, only to have journalists fail to grasp it or go off on some frolic of their own. That relationship has its frustrations; but parties to that relationship can only patch over its frustrations in both parties are actively convinced that dissolving the relationship would be worse than patching things up and getting on with it. Kirsten Lawson's initial article quotes Barr as actively looking for channels for engaging his constituency in the affairs of its government, in ways that go beyond the standard relationship with broadcast media - inadequate and consistently failing. Lawson was wrong to claim Barr has "set out his new plans to bypass traditional media", because later in the article she makes it clear no such plans exist.

The editorialist identified this lack of a coherent alternative to traditional media relations when it portrayed Barr's look to the future as some sort of mental problem. Opening the framing by comparing Barr to Trump, using terms like "pique", "lashed", and deploying straw men in such numbers and futility that it must surely be in breach of ACT environmental regulations, The Canberra Times draws on a record of competence hoping to create the impression that it has a future.

[the ACT government's] implicit push towards controlled messaging and social media ...

Which is it? The use of "implicit" shows this is a figment of the editorialist rather than the work of the Barr government. You can either have a controlled message or a social media engagement strategy; you can't really do both. You show me a tightly controlled social media account and I'll show you one that fails to engage. Lumping those terms together shows The Canberra Times doesn't understand either of these terms, which bodes ill for its future as a viable media organisation regardless of what Barr might or might not do.

This arrogance, combined with that of other Fairfax mastheads, leads the company to demand resources that might more usefully (and profitably) go to other ways of disseminating information to Canberra and the world. If you're serious about resources for good journalism, consider whether the resources might better be spent on sites like The Riot Act, arguably Canberra's ragless true local rag, rather than propping up The Canberra Times for old time's sake.

This arrogance sent ace reporters Daniel Burdon and Katie Burgess into a tizz:

ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr's comment that he "hates journalists" has been labelled a "brain snap" and likened to views once espoused by the disgraced former Queensland premier, the late Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

When someone in the public eye swears or laughs so hard that snot dribbles out their nose, that's a brain snap. Listen to Barr's speech again: you do your readers a disservice and discredit your own work when you mislabel events like that. As for Bjelke-Petersen: my dudes, he sure as hell wasn't trying to connect with Queenslanders under 30 using multi-channel strategies. Griffith University political analyst Professor Paul Williams, quoted in that article, has beclowned himself with that comparison.

The utter absence of media solidarity with Canberra's oldest broadcast outlet is notable, as is the speed with which Burgess dropped this existential threat to civic life in the nation's seventh-largest city and seat of government. But never mind such trifles. Here is the much-vaunted Uhlmann statement:

Here's where Uhlmann is right: broadcast media is dying. Here's where he's wrong:

• "And now [sic] we are gifted with politicians who can't be arsed being accountable". No jurisdiction in Australia is gifted with politicians. We elect them on the basis of information supplied by accredited broadcast media. A politician keen on multi-channel engagement ought not be confused with one who wants to shut down any and all scrutiny;
• "I have known Mr Barr since he was a youth" - oh please, condescension without superiority;
• "far greater political minds than his have grappled with the torture of dealing with the mainstream media and decided it was central to a healthy democracy" - those minds dated from periods where mainstream or broadcast media really was the only media, where both the politicians and the journalists were better than they are now. Barr is a provincial politician in a well-informed polity right now, and he can see the beginnings of a post-CT future, while all Uhlmann can see are Orwell's cavalry horses answering the bugle;
• "Given it is going hand in hand with the decline in trust with all political institutions ...". Here Uhlmann goes for a bit of tu quoque and comes up short. It is a fantasy of insider journos that politicians must go down with them, grappling and plunging like Holmes and Moriarty off the Reichenbach Falls. That isn't how politics works: if you're going down, pollies cut you loose and laugh at your descent. If Uhlmann doesn't know that much he clearly doesn't understand politics as much as his job titles over the years might suggest.
• "When the last, irritating, journalist is sacked and when the last masthead closes, does Mr Barr imagine his already underscrutinised government will be improved?". The question is: will Canberrans be better informed? Scrutiny is not exclusive (still less EXCLUSIVE) to journalists at outlets like The Canberra Times, and Barr deserves credit for trying to discern the dim outline of what is yet to come rather than that which has the reputation but no future to speak of;
• "does Mr Barr honestly believe that the social media alternative will be better?". Again, Uhlmann assumes social media is an alternative rather than a supplement to the emaciated and fading broadcasters. As he doesn't understand the state of the media today he has no business lecturing politicians, or anyone else, about it. He also overestimates the extent to which Barr can pick and choose his own media. Barr is not, as politicians are often accused, "picking winners"; he is picking losers, and his picks seem more astute than Uhlmann's throat-clearings and harrumphing;
• "will its wild winds create a storm that will have [Barr] longing for the smell of newsprint?". Why are you asking him? Even if he did sup the Kool-Aid of nostalgia as deeply as Uhlmann has, would he be able to save The Canberra Times from its fate by embracing it?

The above statement, purportedly by Channel 9's Political Editor, does not seem to appear on Channel 9's political news site. Perhaps [$]Bernard Keane was not entirely wrong when he claims this whole issue is a storm confined, if not to a teacup, then to that hill-edged basin surrounding Lake Burley Griffin ... but if so, why write about it at all? If he's spent so long in Canberra, is he the right person to judge hard news, or its absence? This was the best bit though, all the funnier for being so earnest:

Why can't a wealthy city of 300,000 people, the nation's capital, populated by people notionally engaged with public affairs and home of one of Australia's best universities, sustain a publication focused on what they do?

Like the beep of a reversing truck, that word "purportedly" shows Keane has it backwards. Canberrans *are* engaged with public policy and other matters that journalists might bundle up into "public affairs". The whole business model of journalism requires a market that is less well informed than the journalist, and content both to remain so after the journalist's output has been consumed and to come back for more. This is a hard ask in Canberra, where public servants in any given area must resent journalists' glib misrepresentations of their work and the misallocation of credit or blame to those blow-ins sent to town from elsewhere in the country.

The coverage of public service affairs rarely extends to sloppy press gallery journalism causing problems for politicians, who in turn cause problems for public servant heads, who in turn impose career-ending limitations on lower-ranked public servants who have done what they were asked, let alone drives improvement in reporting to a well-educated population demonstrable capable of appreciating nuance and disdaining hype and bullshit. The idea that the people of Canberra are unworthy of the newspaper foisted upon them rather than the reverse is not just a self-own on Keane's part, it shows why journalists will never be able to solve their career problems in an information age.

Part of the problem is that not much actually happens in Canberra ...

How does he know this? Even committed readers find The Canberra Times thin gruel. And so the downward spiral continues.

... beyond the Raiders and the Brumbies in winter.

Both kinds of football: rugby league and rugby union. But I digress.

Of course Barr has backed down, to an extent. Julia Gillard also flirted with female bloggers as a way of getting her message through to people, and the traditional media outlets that make up the press gallery (then as now) went berserk. Barr has to run a government today, and gauzy visions of the future have to take a back seat to realities here and now. The Canberra Times has to deal with the ACT government, and it is both good and bad news that its coverage has returned to the same old pattern; I'm sure readers are delighted and new readers flock in to see what the fuss is about. Another reality is that the ACT government does have to deal with The Canberra Times, but what future either have - in cahoots or at daggers drawn - remains to be seen.

Desperate needs

... the crazy lefties at the ABC, Guardian, the Huffington Post ... [who] draw mean cartoons about me ... They don’t realise how completely dead they are to me.

- Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, 22 March 2018

This is not a man who is trying to engage with people using multi-channel strategies. He would be flattered by the comparison with Bjelke-Petersen, which may be why Professor Williams of Griffith University hasn't made it. This is a man who makes decisions and does not expect to have to answer for them to people who aren't already fully supportive of them, as 2GB's Ray Hadley is. He is one of the few ministers in this government who does not own the ABC's Leigh Sales, whether through smarm (as Turnbull does) or bamboozling her with bullshit (as Morrison, Hunt, or Frydenberg do). The only time he regularly accounts for himself is in parliament, where he flaps and squawks like a panicked goose; his criticisms never land like well-considered, well-turned phrasing sometimes can. Lacking the power to haul Labor MPs down to the station for questioning, he seems rather lost and impresses nobody but the anti-Turnbull right on the Liberal backbench.

Jacqueline Maley tried to call out Dutton's tactics, but only drew attention to how easy it is for a galoot like him to play the broadcast media:

But far from being dead to him, Dutton’s critics are actually an essential part of his political tactics.

Without critics, you can’t have controversy, and controversy is the oxygen politicians like Dutton need in order to breathe and grow.

Consider his feat last week - with no warning, he came out with a left-field proposal to help an obscure sub-group of the world’s persecuted population, a group whose suffering, such as it is, is so niche it has escaped global attention for several decades, and is beneath the mention of the United Nations, which appears focused (however ineptly) on the persecution of Syrians, Rohingas [sic] and Christians in the Middle East.

No one in mainstream political discourse has talked about South African farmers in decades. They are a '90s throwback.

It wasn't a proposal, it was a brain-fart, and should have been reported as such. If journalistic experience in covering politics has any value, it should be to know the difference between a major policy shift and a bit of kite-flying designed to distract journos who can't and won't focus on actual policy.

[Dutton] said “independents can scream from the sidelines” but they only thrive on disruption and are not serious parties of government.

And yet, when the government tries to get their legislation through parliament, they go cap-in-hand to those same independents. Again, experienced journalists know this and avoid getting wound up; yet, Male thinks you have to be devilishly clever to fool not just one journalist, but absolutely all of them, en bloc:

Dutton’s trick is to co-opt the disruption and sideline-screaming of the right-fringe and bring it into mainstream political debate. To civilise it. That way, voters don’t have to turn to independents, because their grievances (anxiety over reverse racism, nerves about how far political correctness will alter social values) are embedded in the main party of government.

If they stayed on fringe outlets like 2GB, right-fringe issues wouldn't enter political debate. People like Jacqueline Maley, the sorts of dills who employ people like her and Mark Kenny and the rest of Fairfax's appalling politics team, they are the ones who bring right-fringe issues into political debate.

Maley refers to Trump: but much of the US media, their readers, and others such as academic journalism schools, are engaged in deep reflection and debate about how they were played in 2016 and what they can do to improve the way they work. They are aware of their need to contribute to a healthier body politic, that the freedoms of the press are joined to responsibilities about sound public information and debate.

It's rights-only-no-responsibilities for Jacqueline Maley and her frantically silly colleagues at The Canberra Times; when the next bit of political tinsel catches their eye, whether from Dutton or the ACT Opposition or anyone else, they'll charge after it and leave more pressing and serious issues in the dust. Then they have the gall to complain about resources! If journalists had any pride, they wouldn't be played so hard and so often by Peter fucking Dutton. Dumb journalists are the reason why he's being positioned as a potential Prime Minister, rather than as a bollard or some potentially useful piece of civic infrastructure.

Dutton, like Andrew Barr, is a politician today. There are lessons those guys can learn from Pericles or one of the Plinys or Churchill or [insert your favourite dead politician here], but for a lot of it - including how to deal with today's media - they have to make it up as they go along. Some of it involves getting journos on side, some involves ignoring them, and for all this pas de deux large sections of the public will be left cold. This disenchantment has different effects on politics and media: politics can and does survive public disenchantment (to a point), media can't and doesn't.

Every time a journalist complains about resources, call out an example of a self-own like Maley or Keane (they do it all the time) to demonstrate that the problem with Australian journalism today isn't a stubbornly ungrateful readership, but a lack of sense in allocating the resources they have, which discourages giving them still more resources to squander in yet-undreamed-of ways. Resource misallocation is also what bad governments do, and yes the two are directly related. Symbiotically. There's nothing more Aussie than facing the future and flinching.

Trumped part I: America's gimp

Australian foreign policy has changed profoundly in the past few weeks, more so than at any time since 1942 - but with the important difference that the current Commonwealth government seems at a loss for how to deal with it.

Our information about what was important to US voters, and how they might use that information to choose their President and Congress, was poor. The government has sources of information that go beyond the traditional media, such as an Ambassador who was a recent member of the Cabinet, and a golf course designer who has done business with the President-Elect. The rest of us, however, are left with this sinking feeling that we've all been had in assuming US voters would head off Trump, and this will get worse as media both deny any culpability and assert an exclusive and indefinite right to misinform us under the guise of reliable, factual, and relevant information.

First, let's go around the media and work out how Australia's relationship with the US and other countries is likely to be changed. Then, let's aim squarely at those Australian media dipsticks trying to crawl from the wreckage of their credibility, and remind them of the conditions under which they are to go forward, if at all. Finally, I want to explore the media's obsession with this idea of the "alt-right", while at the same time failing to examine the idea in any depth.

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Since US troops were first committed to the battlefields of World War I in 1918, Australians have fought beside them. In World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and other operations besides, Australia has joined US combat aims and suffered losses of blood and treasure. This relationship has shaped the foreign policy behaviour of both countries.

In Australia, it has bred a political monoculture across the governing parties that the US is the guarantor of Australia's political and economic success (and that of other countries, such as Japan or the Philippines) in the Asia-Pacific region. This is supported by a range of institutions, such as the Australia-America Leadership Dialogue or Fulbright Scholarships, which reinforce this relationship. Australians seeking a career in foreign policy, whether partisan (by becoming a member of a political party) or not (by eschewing party politics and following a career in academia or diplomacy), looked to US foreign policy as the star by which all vessels steered.

There is no way of regarding Australia's relationship with the US as anything other than closely intertwined with the broader aims of US foreign policy: outlooks and proposals that might have seen Australia break with the US altogether, or diminished the relationship (e.g. by closing Pine Gap or banning nuclear warship visits) were cast to the fringes of Australian politics and not entertained by serious careerist pragmatic people.

In the US, we have seen a bifurcation between official rhetoric warmly praising our alliance and a sub rosa commentary taking Australian support for granted, verging on contempt. "We think you're an easy lay", recalled Jack Waterford in outlining occasional Australian disagreements within a generally close relationship.

Yesterday we saw the Prime Minister admit that he tried and failed to secure a meeting with Trump, along the lines of Trump's meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Abe. One missed meeting need not have much long-term significance - but it hints at something more foreboding for the relationship, certainly as far as Australia's political monoculture is concerned.

Donald Trump's method of campaigning collapsed the difference between official high-sounding rhetoric and sub rosa contempt in almost every area of policy. While other conservatives were happy to mouth platitudes about freedom and equality while courting bigots through 'dog whistling', Trump was openly racist, sexist, and dismissive of people with disabilities - including veterans. Let's not pretend Trump is different to what he is. Let's have no truck with the fatuous media make-work scheme that is 'the walkback', and apply this pattern - seen throughout this campaign and beforehand - to US-Australian relations into the foreseeable future.

Trump will be openly dismissive of the Turnbull government and of Australia. Trump will openly state that Australia needs the US more than the reverse, and will make demands not even the most craven Washington-phile Australian could support, or even entertain. He and his Administration will be dismissive of the women who are Ministers for Foreign Affairs and Defence in this government, and of their shadows. Political opponents of the current government will titter at this new scope of failure, but the sheer effrontery will transcend partisanship and go to the regard in which our nation is held.

Nothing transforms a relationship (any sort of relationship) like stripping back the honeyed words and seeing it for what it is. It will be a massive break from the norms of the Australia-US alliance.

US Presidents have hung Australian PMs out to dry from time to time, as collateral damage for broader geostrategic reasons. In 1956, President Eisenhower refused PM Menzies' request to intervene in the Suez Canal crisis because of the US's wider interests in western Asia at the time. In 1972, PM McMahon condemned his political opponent Gough Whitlam for visiting and recognising the People's Republic of China - unaware President Nixon was about to do so, again playing a wider game.

Trump will wrongfoot Turnbull. He will do the same to any other putative Australian PM you might name. This is how the man does deals.

The best way to catch Trump out will be to catch him when he's distracted, as we've seen from his hasty and inadequate settlement of Trump University lawsuits. The current government may well be canny enough to do this - or not.

In his address to the Australian parliament in 2011, President Obama said that the US would be less inclined to unilaterally enforce international rules and norms and called upon allies in the region to do more to support shared aims, and expected allies to step up and share more of the burden. Australia is building warships at a rate never seen before because the US has indicated that it's in our best interest to do so.

Some commentators noted Trump's remarks along similar lines of making allies shoulder more of the military burden that had fallen to the US, and compared his approach to mafia shakedowns - but he was, in his crude way, aligning with bipartisan US policy. None of the Republican candidates Trump defeated in the primaries, certainly not Hillary Clinton and still less Bernie Sanders, were arguing for a Pax Americana where a rules-based global system is set up and enforced by the US military commanded by its President.

Criticism of Trump's rhetoric on this issue is just hype, snobbery, and bullshit: the central flaws of all his opponents' unsuccessful campaigns.

This isn't to normalise Trump. It's to do what the Australian media should have done, but failed to do: take his record and project it forward onto how a Trump administration might treat Australia within its view of the world. Australian journalists observing US politics, whether from Australia or on assignment in the US, tend to avoid original sources of information: they read The New York Times and The Washington Post and other established media outlets, not realising the audience in Australia for US politics can and does access those same sites - and more.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation covered the US election by sending reporters to Washington and having them relay banalities from CNN and Politico, which they could have done from Ultimo or Canberra. Shipping those people all that way gave no additional insight at all (except that ABC News thinks their audience are mugs, and should stop gibbering about resource constraints).

Most of the reasons why this deeply weird man was elected have nothing to do with us. The political class in Australia will hunker down and wait for him to pass, assuming the Democrats can and will come up with a candidate in 2020 that can beat Trump. The hunkering down will mean Australia both misses real opportunities in Trump-led US, and underestimates benefits awaiting us after he goes. They will underestimate the extent to which Trump has and will change the landscape, rendering "back to normal" impossible: there is no normal, there is no back.

Our leaders will not, however, do the hard but necessary work of rethinking the Australia-US relationship from first principles. The information isn't available; the very act of doing so is way outside our Overton Window.

Foreign policy wonks have said for a long time that we are moving from a world where the US calls the shots to a multipolar world, where other powers (e.g. Russia, China, India - maybe the EU if they can hold it together) play an important but not final role, along with the US playing a similar, diminished role. The trick, as they saw it, was to manage the transition peacefully. Part of this managerial assumption was that the people of the US would go along peaceably with their country's diminished role, diminished expectations thing. What else are they wrong about?

Australia will have to operate across a much broader front than they have; there will be fewer (expected, positive) options from Washington and more options from Beijing, Jakarta, Delhi, Lima, Nairobi, Berlin, etc. Politicians can't do this. Big corporates can't do this. "Pragmatic people" will blame everyone but themselves. There will be opportunities through sport or other means that are not directly linked to politics or trade, but which will open opportunities in those areas, which Australian politicians and corporates will miss and whinge about when their passing becomes clear. You won't need an app to disrupt foreign policy. Australians are heading into a time of missed opportunities. Coal and hobbled broadband will hold us back. Traditional media will barely notice.

For all its longueurs and ponderousness, foreign policy moves quickly when needs must. In 1910 Britain was indisputably the world's mightiest power: ten years later it was a whimpering basket-case of debt and pain, and Australian foreign policy (such as it was) didn't cope well then either. In 1941 John Curtin reached out to the USSR as the pre-eminent military power of the time; ten years later Australia's postwar consensus had hardened against the Soviets and the government sought to ban the Communist Party. We are again in such a moment of transition.

Nobody has any grounds for believing that our current ministers or their shadows have what it takes to set the nation on a new course in terms of foreign policy, defence, trade, or anything else involving the US; only hacks will pretend, only fools will believe them.

Under the gun

Tony Abbott is niggling at Malcolm Turnbull again, and much of the press gallery have reported this in terms of its impact on the Turnbull government's agenda. There are three things to consider here, and all of them go to the question of the very point of political reporting and a press gallery.

Firstly, the press gallery seems to value process over product. It likes calm, orderly passage of legislation through both houses, with banal and brief set-piece debates and preferably bipartisanship among the majors; if not, a minimum of mystifying horse-trading in the Senate might be tolerable. It would rather describe how legislation passes rather than what might be in it - even when legislation limits journalists in doing their jobs, it will be actual journalists far beyond the gallery who raise the alarums.

When you discuss policy, and potential changes to the law that affect real people's lives and work, you run the risk of engaging readers/ listeners/ viewers and having them engage in political debate, and maybe work with others to make changes to deals that have already been done in Canberra. Far better to just sit by and describe the passage of legislation in purely functional terms, the way you might sit beside the Molonglo and observe the trickling water, the bird calls, the wriggling and wafting of nature taking its inexorable course.

Note how the press gallery covered the Gillard government. There were more journalists in the press gallery than members of parliament, and yet every one of them agreed that the prevalence of horse-trading in both houses and relative absence of Bipartisanship was Chaotic and the very sort of thing that must not happen again. By contrast, the Abbott government passed very little legislation, but so orderly - when that government's budgets were stymied in the Senate, and passed in the barest terms only to avoid a repeat of 1975, the press gallery couldn't cope with the idea that concerns from outside parliament had somehow made their way in to affect votes in parliament. Instead, they cried chaos, disaster and hoped it would all go away.

Government is only either calm or argy-bargy, according to the press gallery, and in the latter state they overestimate their ability to both describe the situation accurately and engage their public. To give one example - when Katharine Murphy gets excited she loses herself in mixed metaphors, as you can see here (a game of chicken in Gethsemane?).

Secondly, no government has ever been good at managing internecine conflict. The chaos narrative of the Gillard government was fed by Rudd scowling at the backs of ministers speaking to legislation and answering Question Time questions, not how well or badly those ministers performed. There was no real equivalent to that in the Howard government, but there was in the latter half of 1991 when Paul Keating was a backbencher in the Hawke government, and apparently the last twelve months of Fraser, Whitlam, and McMahon were less than stellar.

Press gallery journalists should be able to draw on that history: is the government paralysed? Only Laura Tingle (no link, paywalled) appears to be making the case that it isn't, that in administrative terms (see above) it is starting to hit its straps. Can the government build an administrative exoskeleton to compensate for its obvious weaknesses with personnel and interpersonal issues (if Chris Pyne and Marise Payne are treading on each other's toes, this government truly is finished)? Tingle wisely avoids projection this far out from the likely next election, and my forecasting record speaks for itself.

When it comes to Abbott, though, calm and orderly government (or the appearance thereof) leads us to the third issue with recent coverage.

Have we forgotten what Abbott was like as Prime Minister? Look at that negotiation with Leyonhjelm (if you can hack through the tangled thickets of Murphy's mixed metaphors above, it's as good an account as any). For starters, Abbott was being sneaky, holding out a promise he had no intention of honouring. Then there's the issue of him implying a staffer in Michael Keenan's office acted independently of Abbott's office; the sheer degree of control exercised from the PM's Office by Peta Credlin should have made anyone with any recollection of the Abbott government (i.e. pretty much the entire press gallery) laugh that notion off the public record.

Abbott is overestimating how clever he is by dumping on a staffer, showing the gutlessness and dishonesty that made him unfit to ever be Prime Minister in the first place. The Liberal Party failed itself and the nation by electing such a manifestly unsuitable leader. His behaviour here is consistent with his performance as leader, and believe him when he says (however implicitly) that he will do that again if he were to be brought back up like a bad pizza.

Tony Abbott is not some sort of intelligent, reflective person who adapts his ideas of political leadership to prevailing circumstances. Churchill was Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer when the Depression hit in 1929, and saw the age-old economic law of tying the value of currency to gold crumble under him. He spent the 1930s studying Hitler and the Nazis in far more depth than his Daily Mail-reading conservative colleagues, or the pacifist left of the time. Franklin D. Roosevelt had spent the late 1920s in political furlough, considering what government was for and what it might be, before lunging for the Governorship of New York and the Presidency of the United States. Abbott might have some patter about having been humbled, but there is nothing to back it up - and any journalist who merely quotes him is a patsy.

If you're going to cover Abbott's niggles, don't simper like Leigh Sales did while Abbott talks over you Trump-like, lying and fudging without challenge. Sales, and every other journalist covering this, should have called him out on his inability to delegate and his blithe disregard for those trying to do the basic transactional work that makes complex government possible. Setting broad parameters for ministers, their staff, and other underlings is the essence of leadership. Its absence with Abbott as Prime Minister meant the country was misgoverned. If Abbott returns as Prime Minister, we will be misgoverned again.

Turnbull was right to call him out, wrong to imply such a sound and well-supported policy might be watered down. Shorten is right to finger the dissent within the government, wrong to imply Labor might be above making concessions to gunlosers in pursuit of regional votes. Merely quoting both argy and bargy (which is how the press gallery sees its role) is simply not good enough given the important broader issues of community safety far beyond locked-down Parliament House.

The press gallery is obliged to frame its reporting of Abbott in the sickly light of experience - not to lose themselves in slathering at the prospect of argy-bargy, or thinking that his actual record constitutes 'bias'. Start telling the truth, draw upon experience and apply it, and some of your credibility issues might recede. Hopping excitedly from argy to bargy and back again, projecting your own short attention span onto your your audience, can only confirm the decline of journalism from which notions like "24 hour news cycle" never fully detract - let alone fix.

We have a right not to be misgoverned, which is more important than any press gallery wish to return to a time and place where they felt more comfortable.

Yesterday's social media today

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

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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

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

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

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

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

That said, there are four issues here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking the cake

In 2013 I was so convinced that Tony Abbott would screw up so badly that he wouldn't become Prime Minister at all. How I laughed at the polls. How I jeered at the press gallery groupthink that sought to convert that pig's ear of a man into a silk purse of a PM. I still remember how it felt, to be proven so wrong, so irrefutably, so publicly.

That's why I have some sympathy for political journalists who did in 2016 what I'd done in 2013: ignored the polls, ignored people with less exposure to traditional and social media than me (that is, pretty much everyone) who actually engaged with political issues and personalities from first principles, and insisted on having access to some secret cache of political knowledge inaccessible to mere mortals.

Some, but not much - most political journalists are simply reeling forward, claiming that a campaign which had them fooled and gibbering with excitement had somehow become 'lacklustre', assuming that their credibility remains intact. These people might think they're getting on with it, but they are trashing their credibility and that of their employers.

It was strange to see, of all people, Matthew Knott start to realise that he and his compadres had done the country a disservice simply by doing what they'd always done:

Those political reporters not too hubristic to engage in self doubt are asking: did we get it wrong? Did we, as a collective, miss the story?

Yes, you did. That subclause "as a collective" is the operative one here, because that stampede always leads the press gallery into bad and dumb stories, and always convinces them that if they all do it then it must somehow be less wrong.

Pretty much all political journalists in 2016 were covering the parliament of 2010-13. They should have told us what we could expect from such a parliament, which is the kind of parliament we are heading into now.

In 2010-13, the then government was spending so much time with crossbenchers in both houses that it didn't have time to coddle journalists, to drop self-serving little tidbits in their laps; they had a lot to do and focused on the doing, assuming (wrongly) that tough and clever journalists could work it out for themselves. It turns out that journalism doesn't cope well with nuance and compromise; most jobs involving nuance and compromise take place well away from journalists. The then opposition spent no time with crossbenchers but spent all the time coddling journalists, to the point where the journalists all said the government was hopeless while the opposition was the Best Opposition Evah.

Again, the "as a collective" was the problem. Nobody considered the well-flagged possibility that Tony Abbott might be a bull in the china shop of government, and not in a good way. He got fairer media headwinds before coming to government than John Howard had in 1995-96, and he still blew it. The press gallery were of one mind that Gillard and Rudd could do nothing right, and that Abbott could do nothing wrong. When Abbott screwed up the press gallery played it down, or made things up for 'balance', but the reality was irreconcilable with their Best Opposition Evah narrative. Today, the actual result of the election is irreconcilable with a tangle of narratives: that Turnbull is cruising to victory while Shorten is battling to hold his job, that everybody's home and hosed in Canberra under the second term of the Turnbull government and it's your shout mate.

The consensus, speaking to colleagues in the Canberra press gallery, is a reluctant yes.

Why even ask them? Does journalism exist for its own sake?

Some insist they got it spot on.

Fuck all of those people. All of them. Any responsible organisation confronted with egregious professional failure by their staff would make them show cause why they should not be dismissed.

Imagine if AFL journalists insisted at this stage of the season that Carlton, Collingwood, and Essendon were the teams to beat this year because they had been back in the day, and the journos couldn't imagine how things might change. Imagine the currency traders who went long on sterling before Brexit. This is the degree of professional failure involved with dickheads who misreported the national mood a week before an election, and who insisted their failure not be called out. Something beyond mere dismissal is warranted here: chucking them into the most algae-infested bit of Lake Burley Griffin, for a start.

But many admit they expected a more decisive Coalition victory than occurred.

Or not occurred, as the case may be.

And they concede this influenced the way the media covered the campaign.

Every time a journalist lapses into the passive voice they are up to no good, and here's yet another example. 'They' (journalists who cover politics) concede that 'the way the media covered the campaign' was somehow affected by their herd mentality and how it differed from the clear pattern indicating the election could go either way. This might be someone's idea of a big concession: it isn't mine.

This election campaign rained polls. Week after week, media outlets published national polls showing a 50-50 tie or at best a 51-49 Coalition lead.

The results barely shifted from week one to eight. Yet, as the campaign progressed, a view solidified that the Coalition was on track for a relatively comfortable victory.

So "a view solidified", "on track", "relatively comfortable victory" - what weasel words, what worthless piffle that all is. The solidification of pure wind was bad enough - but the fact that it was so all-pervasive is just so stupid, and unforgivably so among people their defenders still insist are competitive, diverse, and intelligent people. The numbing collective aspect is what's so stupid, and Knott is trying to use it to hide what's wrong with political reporting and build a future for it.

Go back to that quote from Knott above - a quote that is not intended to make him look foolish, but which would have succeeded had that intention been there. Let's take out that indictment of a last sentence and run the sentence before it into the one that followed:

The results barely shifted from week one to eight ... Yet the Coalition suffered a sizeable swing against it on election night and is struggling to hit the 76 seats needed to govern in its own right.

It follows that consistent polls indicated a hung parliament, and this is exactly the result that was foretold. That "yet" is jarring - it shows that the jibber-jabber of campaign commentary had absolutely no effect on the result at all. It shows that the media would have been better served simply by printing poll results and filling pages/airwaves with almost anything but the hectares of blather chuntered forth by Knott and his disgraced colleagues.

"The commentariat fell into a bubble and were reflecting what each other thought.

"A narrative caught hold and everyone started reporting it."

With hindsight, there's much to support this.

There was much to support that conclusion at the time, but the only support available to journalists was in delusion, and in reporting the wrong stories. Knott was too haughty to realise it, too wrapped up in his and others' bullshit and lacking the tools and wit to snap out of a collective delusion that impeded understanding.

Knott began his career covering inside-media gossip for Crikey. A young fogey, Knott disdained social media (despite Crikey being more like a blog than established traditional media) and Fairfax decided that personalities and gossip provided the necessary depth of skills to cover federal politics in all its complexities. Despite being one of over two hundred press gallery journalists, there was no way Knott had any sort of ability to work things out from first principles and chart his own course through the nation's public life. Those who wrangle journos for a living from the major parties were dead right in assuming Knott could be stuffed with junk food and shuffled off to picfacs and would love every minute of it, offering nary a challenge to the desired narrative nor any departure from the collective.

Several ideas took hold quickly in the gallery's collective brain. That Australians don't kick out a first term government (despite this happening recently at a state level). And that Malcolm Turnbull's personal popularity was a decisive advantage against the less prime ministerial Shorten.

During the campaign, several events became seen as "turning points" for the Coalition despite the polls never really budging. Labor's admission it would increase the budget deficit over the next four years was one. So was the UK's departure from the European Union.

It's one thing for some to hold to conventional wisdom. But for all of them, without exception, to stick to an opinion that could be trumpeted but not justified can barely be believed, let alone respected.

Many had picked up a "vibe" in the community that voters were disappointed in Turnbull, but not sufficiently angry to remove him. There was also the confidence exuded by Turnbull and his advisers.

Many of us even convinced ourselves that the low-energy, small-target campaign was a clever way of "boring" voters into backing the Coalition.

"You got the impression they were confident and confident for a reason," former Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes says of the coverage. "There was very little scepticism of what was behind that".

Very little scepticism by whom - hardbitten, can't-fool-me journalists, trusted experts in the hall of mirrors that is politics.

Confident Labor - delusional. All journos agreed.

Confident Libs - confident for a reason. Again, all journos agreed (baa!).

Who's best place to judge why these people have failed? Why, the noddies themselves. They'd know. You can trust them - well, our hero does.

But if the media were wrong they were hardly alone. Two days before election day the bookmakers - often hailed as more accurate than pollsters ...

Often hailed by whom - hardbitten, can't-fool-me journalists, trusted etc ... you can see where this is going. First you fool people, then you snuggle down with those you've fooled so that you can be wrong together. The difference is that bookmakers incur real and direct penalties for getting their odds wrong - not so journalists.

So, as Insiders host Barrie Cassidy asked, were journalists shown to be "gullible"? Or were they being lied to?

False dichotomy there. Being lied to is a given in politics. If you're experienced and credible, you can pick your way through the lies and show us what's going on. If you're not, then you're no better than Knott and his arse-covering mates. Right toward the end, and doubtless under duress, Knott dove into social media:

In preparing this piece, I asked readers on Twitter and on Facebook for their views of the coverage.

Some dominant criticisms emerged ...

And excellent criticisms they were, too good for our protagonist it seems. Most journalists use social media to follow other journalists, and get all upset when randoms barge into their carefully curated circle-jerks; I imagine Knott's is no better, but he has blocked me. I have given deeper thought to political journalism than he has; Knott wakes up every day and does the same thing over and over, waiting for drops or chewing over press releases, assuming that he's vindicated by following the herd. Knott flinches before criticism and can't evaluate it, spluttering instead from the ill-considered perspective that only journalists can judge journalists:

Journalists may quibble with some points.

So?

If the campaign is light on policy, blame the politicians' and not us.

No. Politicians bear their own penalties from a disengaged electorate, penalties no journalist bears (not even those made redundant, and too few of those come from the press gallery/campaign trail). Political campaign staffers know what journos like: they like it lite, brite and trite. In my previous post I gave two solid examples of political journalism from the small beer and weak tea that was this campaign. Journos and editors are responsible for what journos write/say. If you'd been right, you'd want credit; you aren't, so cop this.

Others might argue that, despite what readers say they want to read, many more will click on a story about a "fake" tradie than a plan to save the Murray Darling Basin.

The declining fortunes of the media demonstrate that they have no clue what people do or don't want to read. That fatuous and ill-considered quote assumes erroneously that any piece on a substantive policy issue is as good as any other, and that a piece that is both badly written and badly received should discourage any attempt at better journalism.

Still, that doesn't mean those in the media shouldn't listen - and reflect.

It does, if you're simply going to dismiss some very good feedback out of hand, or cast those pearls before the swine of the campaign bus/press gallery.

Six years ago, Greg Jericho expressed frustration that he couldn't find any reporting on disability policy because the press gallery were busy making the very mistakes to which Knott referred and tried so feebly to dismiss. Journos at the time were less dismissive than Knott and some expressed a wish to do better. Millions of news cycles later we know that none did, of course. Knott could have studied that and become a better journalist. As Margaret Simons didn't say, but I will: Matthew Knott has much to be humble about, with no inclination or ability to lift his game.

James Jeffrey doesn't pretend to be anything but a writer of colour pieces. Unlike the more precious and dismissive Knott or Annabel Crabb, he doesn't claim his gentle vignettes have a serious journalistic purpose, and he gets upset when others think they should. This is fair enough (and this writer may well have taken easy shots in the past at pieces of this sort), but the bit where his piece doesn't quite work is the bit where his larky tone turns to snark:

For some, I suspect it stems from the disappointment that the paper isn’t, say, wall to wall Paul Kelly — an understandable disappointment. But Kelly isn’t stingy with his words and there’s plenty to go around.

Following my latest “And this passes for journalism?”, I’ll confess to feeling a bit fed up. I thanked my commenter for checking in, but suggested such a comment was a bit like going to a cake shop and getting grumpy because you can’t get a steak.

Kelly mightn't be stingy with words, but since about the mid-'90s he has sacrificed quality for quantity. And this leaves lighter pieces bearing more weight than they were designed for, like ivy straining to hold together a crumbling wall. Or, to return to Jeffrey's analogy, if someone's sold you disappointing steak after disappointing steak, they can never appreciate cakes for what they are.

I’m still in love with the idea of a newspaper being a banquet with plenty of courses. Hard news, breaking news, solid analysis — all of that is important. But it’s not the only reason readers turn up.

For a start, I only read that story because Jeffrey's employer placed it outside their firewall. Like a potplant outside a toilet block, it leavens the overall effect but does not make me any more likely to go in.

Jeffrey might be holding up his side of things with his personable arrangements of bons mots, but his assumptions about the heavier lifting done by others simply do not hold. If you're an urban denizen, as Jeffrey is, where are you most likely to find a delicious cake: in some hole-in-the-wall patisserie, or in some tacky run-down supermarket full of verbose but customer-unfriendly staff and a reputation for crap steak?

Knott's attempt to raise journalistic failure and then dismiss it without proper examination calls to mind the heartfelt but ultimately misdirected lamentations for journalism by Paul Barry earlier this year, and by Jonathan Holmes late last year in The Age. We live in an information age, and information providers should be making out like bandits. Limiting yourself to mere journalism seems to be its own reward. Yes, proper information costs money, but if you don't take a chance on it then you can never make money anyway. Those who are neither informative nor engaging while taking up space once occupied by those committed to being both waste everyone's time and resources. We needed to be told the truth about how we are being governed, and (at a time of election) what other options we have. At a time where the election was so boring that doing some policy-based research actually made the coverage less boring, rather than more so as Knott and his dull-witted herd did, the fortunes of our struggling media could have turned around. A bit of independent thought might have snapped Knott and some others out of the mass exercise of professional self-harm he and his colleagues perpetrated upon us all. It would have helped us form better judgments about how we are governed (and on what Knott and Jeffrey report), because that matters more than the combined delusions of journalists.

Update 8/7: Different/better takes on Knott from:

• Russell Marks
• Mr Denmore
• Preston Towers

The credibility gap

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

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

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

Abbott and Indigenous people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turnbull and Indigenous people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turnbull made an impressive start ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not ready

Not ready for a ministry

For years, Little Jimmy Briggs was touted as a rising star in the Liberal Party - particularly by journalists who've been around the press gallery long enough to know better. Just because the Liberal Party holds someone in high regard it doesn't mean they're much good: Ross Cameron, Tony Abbott, and Peter Shack, among others, got the Rising Star treatment. They, and we, are all poorer for it.

The press gallery must have known what he was like on the grog - the fractured leg and now the sexual harassment allegations couldn't be hushed up or buried on some inside page.

Firstly, there are no inside pages to hide in any more: it's all surface with mastheads these days.

Secondly, the strict demarcation between "official duties" and "personal activities" maintained by the press gallery was always bullshit. The personal always, for good or ill, intrudes into the official. To go back into history (but within the direct personal experience of some members of the press gallery), John Gorton's performance as Prime Minister is inseparable from from his personal predilections toward women and alcohol.

The onus is on the gallery to defend this pointless and destructive demarcation. We're all flawed in various ways, but where is the philanderer, the pisshead, the fraud, the broken person who is nonetheless particularly good in the execution of public duties (I don't mean someone who can hold it together so long as the media goes easy on them; I mean someone who can beat all comers from all other parties in a public contest where voters are aware of the facts).

More than a month elapsed between the incident in Hong Kong and Briggs' resignation. Canberra must have been abuzz with rumours, yet the press gallery either a) missed them, or b) knew all about it and hid it from us. How many media cycles are there in a month? There are more than two hundred "journalists" in the press gallery' every one of them has been derelict in their duties, and now that Christmas is behind us all now should show cause why they should not be dismissed.

When a scandal erupts it isn't good enough for the press gallery to say: we knew he was like that. Whenever there is any discrepancy between insider knowledge and the general awareness of the public, journalism has failed. You have to tell us, show us what they're like - and none of this Annabel Crabb confected shit either. We can handle the truth, the press gallery's job is to tell it.

This means journalists can't reasonably spend fifty years steadfast hung aloft in the press gallery, but that's OK because longevity there is drastically overrated. They still fall over surprised at things that should be foreseeable. The press gallery is not some politico-media protection racket, and it is not the media's job to protect politicians against the populace they serve.

It is not, as Terry Barnes seems to imply, the role of the public service to cover up for inadequate representatives like Briggs:

... the public servant should not have been placed in that situation, not only by Briggs and his chief of staff, but by her own managers and supervisors. From Briggs's explanation, it appears that she was a locally-based officer: her bosses should have ensured that she was not put into a position that risked compromising her. They failed her.

Note the passive voice ("she was not put into a position"), and the way Barnes relies on Briggs' word. Jennifer Wilson's piece on Briggs is particularly good at calling out excuse-makers and smoothing-over incidents like this.

Turnbull could have stood up for ol' mate Briggsy, and for the next one, and the one after that, as Abbott would have done. To squander his political capital in this way would not enable Turnbull to solve the Liberal Party's short-term problems with women voters, let alone its long-term problems in being able not only to represent women, but to be comprised of and embodied by them. Turnbull seems genuine about seeking to address structural disadvantages faced by women within the Liberal Party, and he is certainly better placed to do so than any other leader in its history.

When boofheads like Cormann, and Ewen Jones, and this blog's favourite Josh Frydenberg, start insisting that Briggs will be back, they do him no favours. They did this for (to?) Sophie Mirabella in 2013; all that insistence, plus numerous petty snubs to Cathy McGowan since, have only strengthened McGowan and weakened Mirabella's case for re-election in Indi. Rebekha Sharkie has a strong story to tell about why she can do a better job than Briggs. If voters in Mayo are as receptive to change as those in Indi were before the last election, Briggs is finished.

Why should Briggs not be finished? The last politician caught doing something similar, Andrew Bartlett, certainly was.

Are we obliged, as Crabb insists, to maintain the political class in the manner to which it has become accustomed? Could the people of Mayo not do better if they tried, and were better informed than they have been? Will Briggs spend his future on The Drum or lolling about Adelaide in some consultant/ lobbyist/ slashie role - opening and closing his mouth without saying anything, like a fish out of water?

Is the press gallery entitled to be believed when it insists that only chaos can ensue when people elect politicians from beyond the major parties? Will the SA Liberals sandbag Mayo at the expense of marginal seats in Adelaide (including that of Chris Pyne), as the Victorian Libs did for Mirabella?

Not ready for the future

The reason why we are unlikely to have an early election is not because of Briggs - nor even because of the press gallery, which brays for an early election when it cannot handle policy. The reason is because the Nationals are broken.

Tony Windsor points out what the press gallery never could - that two old men (Warren Truss and Bruce Scott) are prolonging their political careers to block Barnaby Joyce, who will inevitably be elected Nationals leader - and hence Deputy Prime Minister - if Truss retires over coming weeks.

Joyce does not get along as well with Turnbull as he did with Abbott, and he is not a capable minister. His agriculture white paper failed to address national quality branding strategies, failed to link meaningfully with recent big free trade deals, and failed to address anything but drought handouts for family farms. It is a welfare policy, not a strategic, big-thinking, ambitious long-term strategy at all.

Where is the regional electorate not held by the Coalition that the Nats might win if Joyce were leading them? Where is the Nationals-held electorate on a knife-edge margin that they will retain if Joyce were leader? The NSW election last March showed the Nationals are the only Coalition partner at risk of losing seats to the Greens. Joyce has a profile all right, and the press gallery love him - but so what?

Barnaby Joyce is already a dead loss to the parliament and government of our country, but the press gallery can't imagine their "jobs" without him.

The decline of all media organs in regional Australia bar the ABC means that every National MP could well be on the skids, and nobody in the press gallery would even know. Look at how bad the reporting out of Indi was over 2010-13; it hasn't gotten any better. Imagine if an ABC reporter detected a shift against a sitting Nationals MP, and reported on it: Senator Canavan would bellyache as only a Nat can, but neither he nor anyone in his party would have the wit to shore up the vote or get a better candidate. Maybe they have no better candidates.

Joyce is the architect of his party's funding strategy, whereby mining companies fund the Nationals. This was fine so long as farming and mining were separate - but the Shenhua mine on the Liverpool Plains within Joyce's electorate shows how the boomerang can smack you in the back of the head. Small miners (the ones with ex-MPs on their boards) have less cash to splash about these days, while drought-stricken farmers have less still.

It's understandable that Joyce faces so much resistance within the Nationals, but that resistance is so feeble - Truss and Scott are too old to credibly present much of an alternate future, and if they could have crushed Joyce they would have done so by now. The next generation of Nationals, like Darren Chester or Bridget McKenzie, are not ready for the Deputy Prime Ministership or even the future of agriculture.

The Nationals are not ready for the future of their own party. The idea that, in a few weeks, they might be ready to present a vision of the future to voters at an early election is not merely inaccurate, but crazy. Add to that:

• the disarray within the Victorian Liberals;
• the outright chaos within the CLP in the Northern Territory (one HoR seat and one Senate seat, but still);
• the existential crisis within Queensland's LNP;
• the factional wars exacerbating decay in Tasmania and WA; and
• the fact that Tony Nutt, while a formidable campaigner, has only just gotten his feet under the desk as National Director of the Liberal Party.

Now consider all of that against the oeuvre of the press gallery journos' press gallery journo, Phillip Hudson:

• Is the government doing well in the polls? There must be an early election.
• Is the government not doing well in the polls? Early election.
• How should we respond in Syria? Early election.
• How do we balance the budget? Early election.
• Will an early election make Australia more innovative? Whatever, early election.
• What's your prediction for 2016? Early election.
• Was that your prediction for 2015? Yes.
• Is there any problem that can't be solved with an early election? No, or make one up.

Not ready for prognostication

There is something about a new year that leads one to forecast what is foreseeable but unknown, and to set aside a record of failure in doing this very thing.

This blog has often detected the decline of the Nationals, and prefers to be regarded as premature rather than flatly wrong after successive rebuttals at the hands of political reality. However, intelligence from the obviously self-interested Windsor, and the usual obtuse reporting from the press gallery, seem to indicate that this time (for sure!) the politics of the bush are in for their biggest upheaval since the Country Party was founded in 1919.

Can Labor take advantage of this chaos in Coalition ranks? Not really. Shorten has done an impressive job in stabilising his party and even tentatively generating some centrist ideas. The fact that he has gone from parity with Abbott to roadkill under Turnbull shows Shorten is not yet the master of his own fate and has not used the media to convey a strong sense of what he is about, as one expects of prospective Prime Ministers. Shorten will not be Prime Minister after the election later this year.

Maybe he was always set on a two-term strategy. Maybe it was unreasonable to expect him to win after one term - but even factoring out partisan bias, Abbott was always going to stuff up the Prime Ministership and the Libs were always going to be reluctant to blast him out.

Second-term governments often lose seats. The press gallery must know this, yet later this year it will engage in pantomime surprise that the public are rejecting Turnbull (with a disbelief that such a result endorses Shorten). It will be helpless before right-whinge Liberal claims that Abbott might have done better. Voters' rejection of the Nationals would not necessarily be a rebuttal to Turnbull, but the Liberal Party is not equipped to do anything but wring their hands at the Nationals' foreseeable shortcomings.

The press gallery will cover this year's election closely, and badly. This year's election coverage will, yet again, make a mockery of the press gallery's belief that it is better at the sizzle of elections than at the sausages of governing.