Dead fish

Regular readers can take comfort in my poor record of prognostication, but for the longest time I had assumed that the NSW election would have something for everyone: a nail-biter, with the Libs losing a few marginals, the Nats losing one or two seats to the Greens and/or ShooFiFa, but basically the government would be returned for its inevitable final term (because the tensions between Liberal moderates and conservatives, now relatively mild, will only intensify as the spoils of office contract), and new Opposition Leader Michael Daley would need only to hold steady and the 2023 election would be his.

Not so. The Coalition can't win the NSW election, and will probably be the first Australian government to lose office on account of climate change.

And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong

Stories like this followed a couple of guys posting on Facebook about algae and dead fish in the Menindee Lakes. The Menindee Lakes are part of the vast Murray-Darling river system that sustains farming in much of eastern Australia, toward the end of the long meander of the Darling River and its tributaries across NSW. Queensland bears some responsibility for the state of the river, but by this point the state should have more to show for any serious remediation efforts than it does today.

Remember this story when traditional media grizzle about Facebook: it wasn't intrepid journos who hunted down this story, people on social media handed it to them. Facebook can identify the existence of controversy, but not even the ABC (and no other supposedly professional traditional media outlet either) can determine who is responsible for what. The press gallery, so focused on The Big Issues and Liberal-Labor #balance, have missed this issue and its significance entirely. There will be more stories like this. Traditional media is already in symbiosis with social media, and you don't need those strangely ineffable qualities of journalism to re-up something you found on Facebook.

Stories like that stay in the mind far longer than the story-of-the-day hits that media people (both journalists and media strategists within political parties) consider good enough for the likes of us. There is genuinely something wrong with policy, with the government that produced it, that leads to such an outcome. There is something wrong when a whole town relies on charity to receive this life-or-death resource. This mining licence did not have to be renewed before March, or at all really.

The low flow that has led to the algal bloom and deoxygenation of the water across much of the river has disadvantaged not only large but small landholders in NSW, as well as country towns full of people indirectly linked to agriculture. This cannot be smoothed over, or propagandised away. A government that acts, through commission or omission, to bring about this state of affairs is not competent and can make no strong case for re-election.

It should go without saying that water underpins basic life in rural Australia. Government that has let infrastructure deteriorate, that has overestimated the extent normal flows are possible given lax inspection regimes and special deals to thirsty mates, is incompetent in ways that simply defeats any media/electoral strategy. Water is hardly a new issue in the politics of NSW, but this is the first election in a century where the Nationals (including their previous incarnations, Country Party etc.) simply aren't on it.

NSW Water Resources Minister Niall Blair has operated on water flow assumptions that take no account of climate change. He cannot claim to have been badly informed by clumsy bureaucrats, as the Coalition at both state and federal level: firstly, because he should have been (seen to be) across this issue well before now, and secondly because the Coalition at all levels of government has actively pretended climate change is a culture war front only, and not a factor in hands-on operations of government. Whimpering about lack of water simply isn't good enough because the water that was available has been squandered; this would continue even if rains doubled, or halved. His decision not to meet with Menindee locals who had waited to see him was dumb, and I will fight any media strategist who quibbles with that assessment. Blair deserves all the respect due to a man who has painted himself into a corner and who will soon be replaced.

Consider this map. It not only shows the state electorates of non-metropolitan NSW, it shows all the seats currently held by the Nationals. It also shows the state's natural watercourses. None of those seats is safe for the Nationals. None of those seats which they do not hold today (e.g. Orange, Wagga Wagga, Goulburn, even Ballina) is realistically within their grasp on 23 March.

The state director of the Nationals, Ross Cadell, is one of the best campaigners in Australian politics. He is down to earth but also highly sophisticated in all the dark arts of campaigning, and his dedication and skill in excising a Nazi cell from the Young Nationals is commendable. The fate of the NSW Nationals should be regarded as being despite his best efforts rather than because of them. If the Nationals hold half the NSW Legislative Assembly seats in 2019 that they won in 2015, it will be a massive success attributable largely to Cadell.

The Nationals are the weaker link in the NSW Coalition. Usually it's the Liberals who wax and wane with fickle urban seats, who get the big donations and have the more substantial ground game, who lead Coalition strategy overall and who therefore largely determine whether or not the Coalition governs the state, while the Nats simply hold their ground. Not this time, and it's why 2019 is different to your standard pendulum-swing job against the ALP.

The observer effect

The observer effect is a scientific theory that simply observing a situation or phenomenon changes the thing being observed.

In politics, media coverage can change a political situation, and the perceived need to respond to that coverage expands and even alters the political response to that situation. This section applies to both the coming NSW election, and for the coming federal election in regional NSW and beyond.

To be slightly fair to the press gallery (don't worry, I'll pass quickly over this) it is understandable that they should simply focus on overall polls and poo-pooh the idea that the Nationals are in trouble, given their strong vote at the last election. The decline of local journalism means there are no readily available means of judging whether or not a particular seat will not be the standard Nationals-Labor two-party-preferred runoff with the former trouncing the latter. If there is some local insurgency here or there, where's the proof? Show me the data! Give me some names!

When big, urban media companies took over small regional operations there were assurances that local issues would still be covered; those assurances are largely void. The lack of local media now means that national media are largely flying blind on local issues, and relying on their contacts in major parties who have every incentive to draw attention away from unfavourable results. It will mean, once again, that journalists using traditional methods will report on the election in ways that don't prepare voters for what is to happen after the election.

Local communities still have stalwart members involved for many years in local business, sporting, landcare and other community organisations. Those people will have been approached by the major parties because of their high reputations and name recognition, and for those same reasons the stalwarts will knock them back. The Nationals are so on the nose that such people will be under intense pressure to stand as independents, or as candidates for parties other than the Nationals, or even (where they are particularly desperate) by the Nationals themselves. The time is drawing near for such people to make up their minds.

Stalwart members of local communities have much to lose from a tilt at parliament. Being seen to reach beyond your grasp is seen as commendable among seasoned political operatives (our current PM is prominent, but far from the only, proof of this). In regional communities it can lead to loss of reputation: where the business community is intertwined with the Nationals, this can damage people economically and socially. Getting ahead of oneself is poison in regional Australia. While there are those who jeer at the taxpayer-funded sexual incontinence of Barnaby Joyce or Andrew Broad, there are others who feel sorry for them and despise piling-on.

The time is fast approaching for candidates to declare themselves, raise money, and execute a successful election strategy. Political journalists used to dealing with established political machines underestimate how hard it is to build one from scratch. Just as you don't quickly knock up a fully-functioning hospital if you become seriously ill, so too you don't just build a political operation just because you turned the tap one day and nothing came out. Part of the process these people are taking toward making up their mind to run involves not engaging the media until they have a declaration to make. Journalists and pollsters understandably omit those they do not know to be candidates. Both place undue emphasis on the results of the (very different) last election, so when they look for what's different now, they start from a long way behind.

After everything that's happened, there are still hard-working, well-regarded Nationals MPs. The trick for those to oppose them will be to prise their hands off the levers of parliamentary representation firmly, gently, and with sympathy. Note how Cathy McGowan went after Sophie Mirabella in 2013: McGowan could have gone in harder against the widely disliked Mirabella, but it would almost certainly have rebounded on her. Some of the duller journalists assigned to rural seats in the NSW and Federal election will be hunting for argy-bargy, but the smarter candidates won't give it to them and so the journalists concerned will miss the story.

Journalists will absolutely suck at covering the shift away from the Nationals in regional seats. Honourable exception to Gabrielle Chan, but she can't cover every corner of regional NSW or Australia and shouldn't be expected to.

The ingredients of a good message

In the standard narrative of political swings, the Coalition had a massive swing in 2011, then a more modest victory in 2015, and now Gladys Berejiklian should lead the Coalition to a technical win in 2019. I've already said why that won't happen, but I think the people surrounding the Premier aren't doing her - or themselves - any favours.

Labor's Luke Foley showed himself to be a weak leader, long before his sexual incontinence came to light. Berejiklian was entitled to believe she had his measure. By contrast, new Opposition Leader Michael Daley is tough and succinct in putting Labor's case, invoking long-serving former NSW Premier Neville Wran.

In this piece, Deborah Snow and Alexandra Smith cut to the quick:

Berejiklian does have the ingredients of a good message to craft for voters, her closest supporters insist. The state’s budget is in enviable good health, there is $80 billion of infrastructure being built, and NSW has the lowest jobless rate at 4.4 per cent.

But there is a counter narrative building as well: congestion, overdevelopment and the rising cost of living, a perceived tone-deafness on the part of a government too driven by a quest for deals with the private sector, and a lack of coherence around strategy and vision.

The toxic state of the federal party is not helping and Labor’s exploitation of the state government’s commitment to spending $1.5 billion on demolishing and rebuilding Sydney Football Stadium at Moore Park and refurbishing Sydney Olympic Park at Homebush feeds the narrative that Macquarie Street is out of touch with the everyday concerns of ordinary people.

The conventional electoral pendulum for NSW is here. You may as well take the Coalition's most marginal half-dozen seats and give them away, as I said at the top of this post (happy to swap out Monaro for a Liberal bolter higher up the pendulum). Any perception that development policy is driven by developers will endanger Liberal seats like Drummoyne, Ryde, or Parramatta. The Coalition might limit its losses if it can articulate a vision for people involving increased density, but I bet it can't. Nowhere is such a vision in evidence in any particularly high-density community.

This is just poor journalism:

Her latest foray into population policy, suggesting the state should halve its migration intake, is also an “attempt to change gears” a senior Liberal admits. “If there is one person who can say we need less immigration and not look a racist, it has to be Gladys.”

Not just because of the anonymous quote, but this notion deserved more than just transcription and transmission. Gladys Berejiklian could not speak English when she started school. She resisted calls from senior Liberals to change her five-syllable surname. She is the classic immigrant success story, but this policy is an exercise in self-abnegation on her part.

Malcolm Turnbull's public persona was built on two policy areas: climate change mitigation and technology as a force for economic and social good. The Liberal right saddled him with policies that were anti-climate and an NBN policy that impeded technological advancement; they later denied him credit for marriage equality by forcing him through the cumbersome and damaging postal ballot. By abnegating him politically the right made it easier to get rid of Turnbull, and they are doing the same to Berejiklian now. If the Liberals have a leader who vindicates Australia's immigration program, that's an electoral and policy strength rather than something to be traded away for, um, what exactly?

But again, seasoned hands worry about the scatter-gun approach to messaging . “They are focusing on too much,” says one veteran. “Instead of your 20-point plan, just pick five, or six. They do need a game-changer on transport.”

Again with the anonymous quotes. Longterm governments expand their reach across government but often lose sight of the need to constantly justify their own existence against alternatives, particularly when their lived experience of their political opponents and rivals is as partners in compromise.

The way to have changed the game was to have done a ministerial cleanout before Christmas: ministers retiring at this election should have gone, the hapless Andrew Constance should have been punted (and a strong party would have made him justify his future with a suicide mission in Gilmore), replaced by fresh ministers hungry for a fresh go in their own right. This is how longterm governments like Labor in Queensland and South Australia, and the Liberals in WA under Colin Barnett, worked.

But how late it is, too late, for all of that. There are regional Liberals but the Nationals earn their place in the Coalition by keeping across regional issues like water rights. Daryl Maguire failed as MP for Wagga and wasn't replaced by another Liberal because he wasn't focused on anyone in the local area who wasn't a property developer, and now Niall Blair shows that nobody in the Coalition is holding the line on regional issues. The Berejiklian-Barilaro government is exposed in country and city as a government that can't make a case for its re-election, much as happened with the Howard-Vaile government in 2007 and the Fahey-Armstrong state government in 1995.

With the systematic failure of the Nationals though, mere disadvantage and defeat will be manifested as a rout. The Coalition will learn the wrong lessons, and teach them by repetition to the press gallery: never elect moderates, never extol high immigration and multiculturalism, never invest in infrastructure, and jack up the rhetoric on Laura Norder. This will condemn NSW to the political model we see in Queensland, with Labor at the centre and various ratbags (Hanson, Katter et al) orbiting them like space junk. Labor partisans would hope that it returns NSW to Labor's postwar dominance (1941-65), but without the postwar state-building imperative it just seems like some extended you-scratch-my-back exercise.

Mind you, I've been wrong before. The stale pas-de-deux of political campaigning and reporting might throw up something incredible. Maybe it will rain in February such to wash away not only the forecasts of meteorologists but any shortcomings in water management besides.

More likely though is that the NSW government had decided that climate change doesn't affect practical matters like the water supply. When Howard lost in 2007 climate change was still a talking point, and the political system and traditional media of the day allowed for "skepticism" or "agnosticism" on whether it even existed: climate denialism survives in federal politics today, a dozen years after Howard. In 2019 there are consequences for denial, and they include electoral oblivion.


Disclosure: I knew earlier versions of Ross Cadell, Gladys Berejiklian, and Andrew Constance as Young Liberals in the 1990s.

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.

With all due respect

Occasionally, press gallery journalists will show that they are even more dumb and/or sneaky in avoiding their central responsibility of telling us how we are governed.

Soon after taking office, Tony Abbott hired a TV cameraman so he could shoot his own flattering footage and have it sent directly to newsrooms, bypassing the press gallery. Now he has hired a stills cameraman, and Stephanie Peatling acts all surprised and sad.

It was not uncommon for the weekend television news to have only Mr Abbott's weekly video message, recorded by his staff and distributed on a Sunday, to use in bulletins.

They have plenty of options for the use of images, and of stories, other than those provided to them by the PM's office. They use those images because they're lazy. They don't check what Abbott says against sources of actual truth, which is a pretty good definition of journalistic failure. TV news ratings reflect this failure as, just because dopey news editors want to show the pap pumped at them from Canberra, viewers aren't obliged to watch it. Peatling's attempt to drum up sympathy for poor news editors just emphasises their failures rather than excusing them.

Peatling refers to a staged black-and-white picture of NSW Premier Mike Baird and his wife, which is similar to the staged pictures that former US President John F. Kennedy and his wife half a century ago. There have been many developments that have buffeted the Australian (and US) media and politics in recent years, and people like Peatling and those who employ her can be forgiven to some extent for not reacting quickly and deftly to all of these. For Baird to use a media-management technique from more than fifty years ago, and to have such a technique stump the Australian media, is laughable.

This, however, is the clincher:

Previously, media photographers were relied upon to take the pictures, which would then be selected by editors and placed in newspapers according to what a range of people judged to be the best image to illustrate a story.

Whenever journalists lapse into the passive voice they are up to no good, and this is another example. By "a range of people", Peatling means groupthink victims in an editorial team.

To give one recent example: a few days before the government introduced legislation that would imprison investigative journalists and their sources, "a range of people" decided that the image that best illustrated "the story" was one of the Prime Minister eating an onion. These people still control vast media resources and can direct journalists cover any number of stories - but they all decided the onion-eater image was the one that best prepared us for the coming of that legislation.

The sorts of people who make decisions like that are the sorts of people who hire Stephanie Peatling - people like Peter Hartcher. Now they're being ambushed by political media strategies that are half a century old. This is beyond risible, like being run over by a glacier.

Now, politicians can readily bypass that filter.

Really, was there ever a filter there? Whose interests did it serve? Was it just a make-work scheme for "a range of people"?

"It's one thing to go down the United States president path," Mr Kelly said. "But you have to ask yourself where it ends."

Every modern election campaign is 'presidential' and borrows to different degrees from techniques used in the US. This is hardly the novel, unexpected development Peatling and her source trying to make it out to be.

Tony Abbott has been a media operative since leaving the priesthood, and has worked out how to play the press gallery better than almost anyone who has occupied the Prime Ministership. He pulls stunts, he stonewalls, and they can't get enough. Now he's replacing them, sending audio, video and script direct into newsrooms.

He's doing it slowly enough - if he got called on it he'd backtrack and get the gallery to forgive him, and then when they were all busy he'd do it again. This is how Abbott works. The very people who should see this coming most clearly are completely surprised. And the beautiful thing - for Abbott - is that they don't even blame him.

Mr Abbott's office was contacted for comment but did not respond.

Bloody staffers!

Traditional media organisations want the government to send its competitors to prison. The government is happy to oblige, in return for not being criticised. And they are engaging in this dirty little arrangement in the name of freedom.

Successive governments have moved to restrict our freedoms over recent years. Occasionally journalists notice, after a while. Often they regard opposition to such measures as the work of hysterics and cranks. The restriction of freedoms under the Abbott government has been noticeable for how long it took the press gallery to notice them, and appreciate their severity. They still believe that internet users are a tiny minority of the population and a greater threat to traditional media than the laws themselves.

Only now, elements of the media from beyond the press gallery - media head offices, the MEAA, universities, and non-press-gallery journalists - have started to become involved. They realise the gravity of these laws was not conveyed by those on the ground, at the scene, the ones with all that Canberra savvy, whose job it is to tell us how we are governed.

What Laurie Oakes is doing here is not standing up for freedom, and rallying his readership. He is admitting to colossal professional failure. Restrictive legislation passed through parliament under his very nose and he just watched it go by. Now, he's doing a deal with the government to protect his EXCLUSIVEs but which does nothing to protect - let alone inform - anyone outside the parliament or the press gallery. This is a sneaky, ridiculous commercial deal at the expense of the rights and freedoms of all Australians.

... the Government has been alarmed by the strength of criticism from media of the Data Retention Bill it wants passed before Parliament rises in a fortnight. Bosses, journalists, even the Press Council, are up in arms, not only over this measure, but also over aspects of two earlier pieces of national security legislation that interfere with the ability of the media to hold government to account.

That legislation has passed, and as Oakes pointed out two other pieces of legislation also passed; journalists in the press gallery, employed for the sole purpose of monitoring what politicians are up to, missed its significance (see the onion-eater example above). There might have been a time when a united, concentrated effort might have stopped legislation like that in its tracks. That time has passed. Oakes is chronicling, and embodying, its decline.

In the decade following World War II, Australian governments tried drastic measures to impose order on issues that were too big for them. The Chifley government tried to nationalise the banks and the Menzies government tried to ban the Communist Party. Both measures were opposed by the media and thrown out by the courts. It remains to be seen whether this mass surveillance legislation is unconstitutional, but the response from the media hasn't been as ferocious as Oakes pretends.

The Press Council is concerned the laws would crush investigative journalism.

Stephen Conroy suggested the Press Council had more power over journalists and their employers than it does. He was portrayed as Stalin for suggesting measures that are trifling by comparison to actual legislation passed by the Abbott government. The media outlet that did that is the one that employed Oakes when Conroy was a minister, and which employs him still.

“These legitimate concerns cannot be addressed effectively short of exempting journalists and media organisations,” says president David Weisbrot.

The media union is adamant journalists’ metadata must be exempted from the law. That’s what media bosses want, too, though they have a fallback position based on new safeguards being implemented in Britain.

That would prevent access to the metadata of journalists or media organisations without a judicial warrant. There would be a code including — according to the explanatory notes of the British Bill — “provision to protect the public interest in the confidentiality of journalistic sources”.

There are two things to be said here.

First: the journalists' union, the MEAA, represents not only investigative journalists but also non-investigative journalists in the press gallery. The failure of the press gallery to raise the alarm, to explain to the public why an attack on their interests is an attack upon us all (as the banks did to their staff and customers in the 1940s) has put their investigative colleagues in the firing line, which is against the interests of media consumers, citizens and taxpayers. They need unity and discipline, but eventually they will need to acknowledge that the whole thing has become necessary only because the press gallery were asleep on the job.

Second: all Australians deserve freedom, not just those employed by the organisations that employ members of the press gallery.

Oakes and all those people on committees with him stand ready to sell everyone down the river so long as he and his get a little more wriggle-room, at the hands of "public interest guardians" who are hired and fired by the Prime Minister just like Peatling's photographer buddy.

In their meetings this week, the government team boasted of concessions in the new Data Retention Bill ... whenever an authorisation is issued for access to information about a journalist’s sources, the Ombudsman (or, where ASIO is involved, the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security) will receive a copy.

So?

Memories of the grief Conroy brought down on his head would undoubtedly make Abbott sit up and take notice.

Is that your considered judgment, Laurie, the fruit of a half-century of intimate knowledge of this country's politics and media? Pffft.

It has been said that Malcolm Turnbull began his working life in service to Kerry Packer and ends it in service to Murdoch; the same can be said of Oakes, who has not been a trusted source of political news for at least half a decade.

As a student, Kevin Rudd cleaned Oakes' house, and when Rudd was Prime Minister Oakes used all his gravitas and media pull to insist Rudd's government was fine, when it was tanking. The downfall of Kevin Rudd in 2010 undid the old media model whereby journos gave favourable coverage to preferred politicians; that preferred coverage meant the public were bewildered when Rudd failed so publicly, and when people like Oakes could neither predict it nor explain why it happened.

When [$] Chris Wallace insisted "Oakes goes where the story takes him, however it affects friend or foe", she wrote falsely and must assume that we have been paying as little attention to twenty-first century political journalism as she has.

With all due respect, the government is playing a wider game with regard to the information it releases to those it governs, and the role of the traditional media within that. Those who work in the traditional media, particularly those who observe politicians and legislative procedures up close, have no excuse for not being awake to that, and to do more than they did to head off this predicament.

What media offered politicians was a relationship with the community that machine politicians lacked; now the absence of that relationship, that conduit, has been exposed. Laurie Oakes and Stephanie Peatling both do the more-in-sorrow-than-anger pantomime, but their surprise and lack of preparation is pathetic.

The press gallery can no longer tell us much about how we are governed, or even very much about by whom. The press gallery, by its own admission, is worthless. It seems better to preserve the empty charade than to work toward something better.

Bad reporting, bad decisions

If you believe that Anna Bligh led Labor to defeat with a huge swing in 2012 over asset sales, then you must also believe that Campbell Newman led the LNP to defeat last night for the same reason.

Policy matters in political analysis. Only the analysis about what state government is actually for, the focus on schools and hospitals and law-and-order, makes any sense of why Queenslanders voted as they did.

The people of Queensland have permanent interests, rather than permanent friends or enemies in politics. Once you understand that - if you can understand it - you can get past the idea that it is the political class that is fickle and obtuse, and not the electorate.

Queensland's optional preferential system, combined with the significance of parties outside the LNP and ALP, makes a mockery of polling in other jurisdictions. On the ABC election coverage Antony Green once again fought a brave but losing battle with his own software. I was half expecting it to rise up, like Frankenstein's monster, and proclaim Aidan McLindon the next Premier. Green's on-screen troubles pointed to a wider problem in the quasi-profession of political punditry.

Polls predicting Queensland elections have always been crap. Nobody predicted Goss would lose in 1996 (and nobody looked at Kevin Rudd's role in that government to assess how he'd go as Prime Minister, but don't even get me started on that). Nobody predicted Beattie would scrape back in so soon afterward, and everybody was astonished when he was re-elected in successive landslides. They were amazed by 2012, and amazed last night, and the same people will be amazed in 2018 (whatever the result then) too.

Queensland should be the place were political punditry goes to die. Yet there are actually members of the federal parliamentary press gallery who actually tout their experience from one of the worst black holes in Australian journalism. Go here, download the Fitzgerald Commission report and go to section 3.9, and understand why I expect more of political journalism than press gallery denizens can deliver. Those people are as guilty as anyone of treating political game-changing phenomena coming out of that state - Rudd, Palmer to name but two - as a freak show, rather than a predictable phenomenon with strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

All the poll-jockey journalism about Queensland was bullshit. All of it. This is not the worst example of it, but it will stand in for the rest:

Naive people with way too much hope and way too little knowledge of politics looked on in awe as their Great Leader gave his interviews. One of those interviews was conducted by me ...

Richardson has always believed members of his own party to be mugs, and he has the backroom boy's contempt for the public mouthpiece. That said, Bob Katter is basically offering economic protectionism without the nasty racist edge of Hanson, and that has no future - but nobody expects yer man Richardson to go into policy detail. He's engaging in after-the-event wisdom against Katter, which is why I have no compunction about doing so here.

Katter’s bad luck didn’t end there. At the last federal election the Palmer United Party appeared out of nowhere and dashed his chances of picking up a Senate spot.

The limelight shifted to the new Saviour when, once again, it seemed that many voters were looking for an alternative to the major parties.

Palmer was more successful than Katter because Palmer seemed to have a better understanding of the economic factors shaping Queensland than Katter, who even wears three-piece suits in homage to Ted Theodore and T J Ryan. When Palmer referred to the Chinese as "bastards" on Q and A, the veneer of the sophisticated businessman disappeared, and he became another populist clown. His accommodations with Abbott government policy made it look as though there were no ideas other than the deeply unpopular and half-baked ones put up by the government. Palmer looked like Abbott's dupe, even though Abbott was supposed to be led by the nose by wealthy people like Palmer ... which made the whole show seem like a bit of a circle-jerk really.

Within a few years the PUP will be little more than an unpleasant memory as this Queensland state election campaign is showing.

OK, so PUP didn't win any seats - not even serial loser John Bjelke-Petersen, who has been running unsuccessfully for three decades, has been in more parties than Paris Hilton (one of the few hackneyed old jokes about politics that's actually funny), who always gets a welter of free publicity - and whose community just does not want him to represent them. At all. Ever.

PUP did win about 8% of the vote in their enfeebled state. There are Labor MPs heading to George St to replace LNP members as a result of that vote, which is Palmer's main motivation and the main thing most reporting on Queensland missed. The whole idea of creating the LNP was to focus the right-of-centre vote in Queensland. Far from being united, the anti-Labor vote fragmented under Newman - even Pauline Hanson got in for her chop. By contrast Labor's vote did not fragment; there was no big stoush like Farrell-Weatherill in South Australia, nor the bitter warfare that often takes hold in Victoria.

As Mark Bahnisch points out, Queensland has a different political history. The Liberal-National Coalition might unite liberals and conservatives closely but not too tightly in other states, but in Queensland the two-party thing just looked muddled. Goss and Beattie brought a generation of educated people who might normally have been small-l Liberals into the ALP. Now that the unity thing hasn't worked and the LNP brand is essentially one of mendacity, and it complicates things in Canberra, what even is the point of keeping it going?

But Richo isn't on to deal with the big questions. Eventually, he gets over how wacky Queensland politics is. Sort of.

Meanwhile the Labor leader, Annastacia Palaszczuk has an enormous task to restore electoral credibility to her party. Aided by the arrogance of and immense dislike for Premier Campbell Newman, she has had some by-election wins and has several times reached 50/50 in the two party preferred category in Newspoll.

Talk about being damned with faint praise, more than half way down the article. At least he resisted the temptation that other commentators often lapse into when discussing Palaszczuk:

• raking over her marital and pregnancy history
• treating her like a placeholder for male alternatives who weren't in the last parliament, or
• whoa, isn't her surname hard to spell!

Before the LNP was formed there were eight Liberals in an earlier Queensland parliament, and they split 4-4 in a leadership ballot. Visiting comedian Eric Idle offered himself as a candidate. It was not beyond possibility for Palaszczuk's small band to suffer a similar fate, and be mucked about by extra-parliamentary players.

Labor dropped two or three points the moment Newman announced this snap poll and this was to be expected. Even with two by-election wins, Labor holds only nine of the 89 seats in the Queensland parliament. With a uniform swing of 11 per cent, a result which is well nigh impossible, Labor would win 31 seats and Newman would still be Premier.

The idea of a political pendulum was an attempt to order a process that can resist easy definitions, and usually works best when swings are small. The higher the swing, and the greater the fragmentation of the vote beyond two parties (big swings and fragmentation being key features of Queensland politics), the less useful the whole 'uniform swing' construct is. Richo is clearly not the guy to ask about Queensland politics.

Palaszczuk has to climb Everest and then some.

Hundreds of people have summited [sic] Mt Everest since an Auckland apiarist first did it in 1953. It's time for another metaphor to describe the impossible.

Imagine the advantages of incumbency the LNP has. In 74 electorates across the state they have staff to burn. Every ministerial office has even more and none of them are doing constituency duties right now — they are all flat out on the election.

The LNP stuffed their parliamentary ranks with numpties. If you're going to do that your staff need to be very sharp: a hundred Credlins. Anyone with half a brain went to Canberra in September 2013 or made it to a ministerial office - and even they are having second thoughts by now, and overestimating how valuable their skills are in a flatlining economy.

The LNP coffers are full and Labor’s are near empty. Not too many businessmen will donate to a Labor Party which has no hope of victory with a vindictive Newman ready to pounce on them post the election.

Newman can be as vindictive as he likes, if you're running a business in Queensland which relies on state government (in terms of contracts, compliance, or both) and you have no ties to or contacts in the new government, more fool you.

If Labor can achieve a 7 per cent swing they can win eighteen seats. That would do real credit to Palaszczuk and any more would be a tremendous result.

Not being in Queensland last night, I watched the coverage from ABC24. Successful Labor candidates like Kate Jones, Jennifer Howard, and Palaszczuk herself talked about low-cost community campaigns rather than the big-money and smart-staffer assaults Richo is used to. Political journos can't imagine elections any other way. They got the standard big-politics treatment of being flown around the state in Newman's jet or transcribing Tim Nicholls' paeans to the economy. They patronised Labor candidates in shopping centres and public parks, forgetting that lo-fi grass-roots campaigns won key seats for Labor in Victoria, too.

Piping Shrike is right in saying that both parties have lost their social base. However thin it might be, Labor are (re)building one, which will make for a patronising and risk-averse politics to replace the fits-and-starts that the Coalition are playing out.

Labor will have its renaissance, but I suspect it is a few years off yet.

Yairs.

Much has been made of Jane Prentice's comments on Abbott for their federal implications, and while that angle is more than fair the contrast with state Labor is important, and could not have been more stark. Prentice talked messaging and swings and other political-class abstractions; Kate Jones talked about being approached about politics while walking her dog, or Palaszczuk discussing issues with her father. The contrast was telling and will remain so.

If Shorten starts running campaigns like that the federal press gallery won't be able to use its small array of blunt tools to describe his campaign either. The traditional media will run the whole of the next federal election campaign like this particular example of political journalism failure, where they simply will not be able to describe political events, or what they mean.

Brisbane has one major newspaper, The Courier-Mail, a Murdoch tabloid which went as hard for Newman as it had for Abbott. Its credibility is trashed. Since colonial times, newspaper proprietors have swayed elections and politicians have had to manage them: no more. After Victoria, where both The Age and The Herald-Sun supported the re-election of the Napthine Coalition government, we can now declare the age of the influential newspaper proprietor - and the press gallery doyen - over. Political careers stunted by fear of Murdoch are a thing of the past, there is no excuse for that now.

Grass-roots campaigns like Labor ran in Victoria, and now Queensland, only work against incumbent conservative governments. Volunteers are fired up and can wax lyrical about how things will be better under Labor. Once the Andrews and Palaszczuk governments have become a little shopsoiled, making some hard decisions/blunders, volunteer numbers will dry up and they will have fewer answers to growing concerns.

There are other limits to this approach as well, in terms of the utility of unions. Volunteers descended on Bundaberg and won for Labor a seat that - you guessed it - the pundits hadn't anticipated falling to Labor (even though Leanne Donaldson had been a strong and active campaigner for years and the seat had a long Labor history. One out of the box. Who would have guessed. Back to you in the studio, Richo). Bundaberg is a manual-labour town and union volunteers seemed to receive warmer welcomes than those most Queenslanders extend to blow-ins. In the lightly-unionised Gold Coast there was no grass-roots campaign of this type, against much weaker opposition, so five seats went begging for Labor.

Maybe the grass-roots union campaigns are overstated. The only other conclusion you can draw from traditional media is that there are more bikies in Queensland than one might imagine. See how bad political reporting in this country is? Bad reporting leads to bad political decisions, by politicians and voters alike.

What looks like a good result for the LNP on the Gold Coast, and an overall result where a majority is tantalisingly close, has to be weighed against the fact that their potential front bench is neither that clever nor that cohesive. They have no idea where or how they went wrong. What were the LNP thinking when they complained about unionists backing the ALP? That relationship has been established for over 120 years; while it hasn't always been smooth or even constructive, whinging about it makes you look like you don't understand politics.

With all due respect to everyone sweating on the wording and presentation as I write, so what if Tony Abbott pulls off a ripper speech tomorrow? The only truly great speech he ever made was at his preselection more than twenty years ago, when he beat off people like Kevin McCann and Concetta Fierravanti-Wells. Gillard's speech three years ago was quite good, but the press gallery couldn't get past her glasses or her nomination of an election date. Admit it, he's finished. Admit it, he never was any good - at speechmaking or anything else. Liberals like Prentice are, like the press gallery, thrashing about for a plausible reason why they overestimated someone they observed so closely but examined so little.

What the Liberals want is someone with the appeal of Turnbull but who won't do anything to interfere with the policy settings. The policies aren't just unpopular, they haven't been thought through, and those who point this out aren't just patsies to be dismissed lightly. If you think Tony Abbott is high-handed and doesn't consult, wait until you let Turnbull off the leash. But, more on that in the next post.

Leadership as distraction

I don't care how many prima donnas there are so long as I am prima donna assoluta.

- Gough Whitlam (1916-2014)

The press gallery bristles at any idea that it is biased for or against either Labor or the Coalition. The bristling becomes positively furious when you back it up with solid examples. Journalists lash out at social media with the same accusations others level at them: lazy, formulaic, ill-informed, stupid, biased etc.

This coming week, you will see the proof of their sheer utter lack of bias. This week, no matter what the government announces - in defence, health, sport, you name it - press gallery journalists will try and frame it through leadership manoeuvring. There will be talk of 'the Bishop camp' here or 'an unnamed Abbott supporter' there. Talk of Bishop looking fresh and energetic will be contrasted against the current Prime Minister being described as 'beleaguered'.

This is not to suggest that a leadership change is afoot.

Oh, poppycock Peter Hartcher, and what would you know anyway?

• Hartcher, like the rest of the press gallery, failed to pick the transition from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard in 2010.
• Every week for the following three years, Hartcher predicted that Rudd would return to lead the ALP. The fact that he was proven right eventually should be balanced against the idea that a stopped clock shows the right time once every twelve hours, or thousands of times in a three-year period.
• To be fair to Hartcher, he correctly identified the second change to Labor's leadership in 2013. This was because Rudd vacated the leadership by means beyond an EXCLUSIVE interview with Peter Hartcher, and the ALP openly publicised the fact that Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese were running for the leadership over an extended period.

Imagine the shrieking from the press gallery if Malcolm Turnbull had changed the way he dressed and lined up slavering puff-pieces like Bishop has. Contrast Bishop's free pass with the savaging Joe Hockey received over Madonna King's biography.

Bishop emphatically resists any suggestion she wants the leadership, or even the treasurership.

She would say that, wouldn't she. Full support for Abbott too, no doubt.

She's found her meter [sic], and she's loving it, she says.

Word to Fairfax subs: you left a key letter out of 'metier', and if the word is new to you look it up; assume that every word Hartcher writes contains 'I'.

If you look at Bishop's Twitter feed it is the Twitter feed you see from inoffensive but ubiquitous celebrities, put on for show, but without the gnawing insecurity that comes from someone who puts their heart and soul on the line each day: this is someone secure in the fact that they are never going to be seriously questioned. Prime example:

One wonders by what means the tweet was sent if the iPhone had actually been wrested away from her, if the Foreign Minister does not have some secret stash of device(s) to tweet beyond the control of advisors. This and other recent tweets are both playful and nerdy, like Kevin Rudd's were. She's all about the work - but she doesn't worry too much about looking cool, oh good heavens no.

Solid doses of hoke and disingenuousness form the basis for Bishop's affinity with Rudd. It is hard to see what other basis there is in this for such a comparison:

• Rudd is not some sort of titan in foreign affairs, like Metternich or Kissinger or even Percy Spender;
• In a policy area that is fairly intangible, Rudd has few achievements in foreign policy and many other areas of government, owing to a dithery and chaotic administrative style that careened across other areas of policy. Bourke saw that at close quarters but chose not to mention it;
• No mention is made of any foreign-policy basis on which Rudd or Bishop (or Plibersek, or anyone else) might be judged in the role of Minister for Foreign Affairs;
• Rudd's friendship with Bishop is significant in the context of the last government - Kerry-Anne Walsh calls it out in her book The Stalking of Julia Gillard, but Bourke lets it slide;
• The Labor government of 2007-13 had three Foreign Ministers: Stephen Smith, Kevin Rudd, and Bob Carr. None of those men are in Parliament now. Nobody in the Labor caucus has a strong foreign policy record. This means Labor's foreign affairs spokesperson, whether Plibersek or anyone else, must necessarily be a foreign affairs neophyte. This doesn't occur to Bourke either; so
• It isn't clear what Bishop and Bourke mean when they say Plibersek is no Kevin Rudd; other than in the simple sense that neither of them are Kevin Rudd, I'm definitely not Kevin Rudd and you almost certainly aren't either, dear reader.

An article that obscures understanding rather than facilitating it has failed as journalism. An article on how we are and might be governed that obscures understanding is undemocratic. Journalism is valuable when it seeks to go beyond set-piece events and manipulative one-on-ones, whereas someone like Bourke (and before her, Annabel Crabb) reckon the tinsel and bluster is not a distraction but the essence of government itself.

But Ms Bishop hit back at Ms Plibersek and said her opponent was only interested in playing politics with foreign policy rather than taking a bipartisan approach where appropriate.

"She doesn't seek briefings from me whereas I actually sought them from the foreign minister, both Kevin Rudd and Bob Carr," she said.

"I have invited her to a couple of briefings to hear from me and I've also suggested other briefings, security and intelligence briefings and the like," she said.

A spokesman for Ms Plibersek said she is "regularly briefed by the heads of our intelligence and security agencies directly".

It is understood Labor requests most briefings through the Prime Minister's office not the Foreign Minister's.

Think about that: why would the opposition spokesperson on foreign affairs subject herself to lectures from her political opponent? What exactly did Bishop get out of cosy chats briefings from Rudd and Carr? Rudd didn't seek much from Alexander Downer, and didn't need to. Plibersek would be derelict in not going to agency heads, observing all the protocols etc., rather than accepting morsels doled out by Bishop.

Usually, Latika Bourke is the leading example of a journalist who is fully replaceable with an algorithm:

[start]
[insert]dinkus_lbourke[/insert]

Tony Abbott said today "[insert]*Coalition_press_release*[/insert]".
[end]

She really thinks her job begins and ends at press conferences, never doubting the utility of merely quoting a government that says one thing one day and something contradictory the next. Failure to replace her with an algorithm looks increasingly like negligence on the part of those who employ her. She is not an honest trier having a go, but the world's most expensive microphone stand.

This is typical of Bourke, and it's utter shit:

[Bishop] chats the entire jog and doesn't puff once while updating me about her week's three priorities – foreign fighters, UN peacekeeping and Ebola.

She's not chatting with you for the sake of chatting, she's a public figure communicating through a journalist to the public. The minister's priorities on policy, the three dot points, would be the story for a more capable journalist. Instead, Bourke goes the handbag story, the female equivalent of blokes talking sport as a way of bonding, and a desperate attempt to equate star power with foreign policy gravitas: some random barflies, and a Hollywood reporter who makes Bourke look like Bob Woodward.

Then again, it's a neat trick to brief a journalist under circumstances when she can't function as a microphone stand. That article shows Bishop playing Bourke like a trout. Quite why Fairfax needs to smooth the Liberals' leadership transition in this way, and diminish an expensive employee in the process, is unclear. When you buy the mastheads in which Bourke is printed, you encourage her and her employers in this drivel.

The structural weakness of conservatism is that they can't distinguish between an emerging trend and a passing fad. A party that thinks it is boxing clever on climate change will totally underestimate the growing impact of asbestos, and will overestimate its ability to spin Bishop's defence of Wittenoom against its victims.

Bishop demonstrated the sort of coldness that Liberals tried to foist onto Gillard with her empty fruitbowl and "deliberately barren"; they overestimate their ability to spin Bishop away from that stuff, too. Bishop will drop a clanger that reveals her lack of understanding about raising children and it will come to define her.

As a senior lawyer in Perth, Bishop learned how to schmooze: whom to suck up to, whom to elbow aside, dealing with larger-than-life characters such as Noel Crichton-Browne. She became Minister for Ageing in 2003, injecting a professional approach to the aged care sector missing under her two provider-focused predecessors, Bronwyn Bishop and Kevin Andrews. When Brendan Nelson left the Education portfolio for Defence in 2006 she replaced him, achieving little until losing office the following year.

She became Deputy Leader because she wasn't threatening. The Liberals had an unfortunate habit of putting the leader's most potent threat as deputy, who would use the office to undermine the leader. Costello wasn't strong enough to knock Howard off and win the victory Howard couldn't, but could not play loyal deputy indefinitely. Bishop had no ideas above her station and no clue how to protect the leaders under which she served.

Soon after she became Deputy Leader, Perth-based variety-show host Peter van Onselen asked Bishop to write a book chapter on Liberal philosophy. She got a staffer to write it. Why van Onselen sought her to do a task that was manifestly outside her capabilities is unclear. Van Onselen still keens for Bishop to become Prime Minister, which shows you her ability to put one over people like him and Latika Bourke.

The nearest thing the Coalition got to a coherent policy position when in opposition was the "new Colombo Plan", a hazy but promising scheme where students from Australia would work and study in Asian countries, and vice versa. It is hard to find any particular passion for such a policy in her output before 2007. It isn't as though she's imposing her will on government now to make it happen, like Keating did under the Hawke government.

Her mismanagement of this country's relationship with Indonesia is appalling. An irrelevance like Francois Hollande received better treatment than the newly elected Joko Widodo. Yet again, the distorted prism of refugee policy defines what should be a broad-ranging and increasingly deep relationship. There is no sign Labor are doing much better but it is doubtful they could be worse.

Her mismanagement of this country's relationship with the United States is weird. Truckling to Murdoch is one thing, but Bishop and others in the national and Queensland governments are pathetic. No Australian politician is regarded so highly as Obama is here, and one who declares - as though expecting to be taken seriously - that the Great Barrier Reef is fine only opens up the kind of dissonance that cracks open promising careers in politics.

This piece fails to account for the Coalition's close relationship with the US Democrat administrations of Kennedy and Johnson (and Nixon's dastardly treatment of Gorton and McMahon), but otherwise its point is well made - and it's on Bishop's head. She wouldn't improve much as leader, either.

There are 226 members of federal parliament: name one who could write a more thoughtful and well written critique of trade and foreign policy - including Julie Bishop (and her staff) - than this.

The qualities Bishop offers the Liberal leadership are essentially those Abbott had: physical stamina and a capacity to talk obvious, provable nonsense with a straight face. She brings little to fill the void Tim Dunlop describes; again, like Rudd in that regard. Bishop would be less overbearing and abrasive than Abbott - but really, so what?

The whole idea of leadership is to show us the way forward, to engage with the issues of the day and to have us engage too, to show what our future might look like if only we would trust in something bigger than ourselves.

Journalists describe the major issues of our time but they can't engage with them, because the people they cover don't engage with them. They have no ability to engage with big issues either, which is why their coverage is miniaturised and personalised (e.g. the ill person who can't get hospital treatment, the ADF personnel who are abused but not the culture of abuse, the farmer facing drought yet again) but not rendered powerful enough to compel resolution.

The press gallery brought Senator Lambie under what they thought was intense scrutiny. You'd think such scrutiny would have picked up her role in reversing financial planning regulation - but sadly, no. We're all supposed to gnash our teeth and wail when journalists get sacked, but hey.

People like Latika Bourke and Peter van Onselen regard leadership not as engagement with, but distractions from, the issues of the day - gaffes, handbags, Labor-blaming, pic-facs. Julie Bishop can do that stuff standing on her head. That's why a silly press gallery brings out silly politics, and vice versa, and the cycle can only be broken one way. We will always need politicians but we will not always need a press gallery.

Politicians will go around the press gallery to establish a relationship with the public when they are elected with a connection that does not depend on the press gallery. The utter absence of value in and from the press gallery will then be exposed. We can get distraction from anywhere these days; neither oligopoly politics nor oligopoly media are that appealing. Engagement with the challenges of our time is the thing, and again oligopoly politics and oligopoly media aren't cutting it there, either.

Where the press gallery beef hooked

The Parliament of New Zealand has its own press gallery, and it falls prey to the failings of all press galleries. It has its doyens (Colin James), its pack mentality (there's only ever one story and we're all going to write it no matter what) and the unshakeable conviction that the way it is must also be the way it has to be. The way the gallery reports on politics is, even now apparently, the only way to report on politics.

Insofar as it matters any more, the press gallery narrative on the coming election (due on 20 September) can be summarised as follows:

• John Key, the incumbent PM and leader of the National Party, looks confident and has presided over a united team and economic growth.
• David Cunliffe has presided over a divided Labour Party, even though he apparently beat Key in a set-piece 'debate'.
• There are other parties but they are just political tinsel. Therefore,
• It's Key in a canter, so let's make a National victory inevitable and any other outcome a disaster.

This is the politics of tidiness: the political party that presents the most couth, affable and easily summarised front to journalists wins. Their reward is to have their statements reported without serious challenge, while their competitors are either not reported or framed such that their words are to be mistrusted. Incumbent governments tend to win the tidy politics prize, with their extra resources and the higher stakes involved in decisions taken, but occasionally oppositions make a convincing case when incumbents let things slide.

Press galleries shrug off accusations of partisan bias - usually levelled by partisans - but they are wrong to defend themselves as unbiased. Their only agenda is to set the agenda, and that agenda is the politics of tidiness.

This is why political journos are constantly alert for gaffes: a gaffe is verbal untidiness. If you're the shadow treasurer and you speak of "eleventy" like it's a number, gaffe! - or maybe you're the shadow foreign minister and you refer to Africa as one country, gaffe! - then, having made a career from piling on gaffes, you can then write a thoughtful column about how our politicians are under such scrutiny and how trivial gaffes are. Other journos will retweet links to your column praising both your thoughtful bravery and brave thoughtfulness, and will go after bloggers who jeer at you.

Political reporting in NZ and Australia has been hostage to the press gallery and its politics of tidiness. In Australia it still is, but you'd be a fool to bet (let alone stake your career) that it will stay that way. In NZ the election narrative has been hijacked by Cameron Slater, an active member of the NZ Nationals, who runs the blog Whale Oil.

Whale Oil is scabrous and nasty and funny and untidy and partisan, in contrast to the bland offerings of the politics-of-tidiness press gallery. It won Best Blog in NZ's premier publishing industry awards, and it is only a matter of time before a focused site like that beats an all-things-to-everyone pablum like Stuff. Whale Oil isn't focused on policy or outcomes but then neither is the press gallery.

Political parties also succumb to the Politics of Tidiness. This used to mean that they and the journalists understood one another and worked by the same rules. With the rise of social media, where any site is no more or less accessible online than traditional media sites, there is no reason why a politician would take their chances with a capricious media when a trusted partisan will both get the message out and frame it in the way they would like.

In the absence of a comprehensive social media strategy (including a budget), a political party relies on committed amateurs with the purple-squirrel rarity of commitment to a political party and facility with social media. A person with long-standing commitment to a political party will not have a commitment to the party as a whole, but will have opinions about aspects (and personalities) within the party that they like better than others. A political party using a committed amateur in social media runs the risk that it will be presented unevenly, that members of the team who fall foul of the house blogger will not receive the same coverage as those in favour.

This is what happened with the NZ Nationals when they started leaking to Whale Oil rather than to the press gallery. One of Key's staffers was accused of leaking to the blogger, and briefing against a sitting minister. Judith Collins, NZ's answer to George Brandis (if she's the answer, etc), resigned after being found out briefing Slater against the Serious Fraud Office.

Nicky Hager had written about the NZ Nationals in his earlier book Hollow Men (which contains a clearer account of how CrosbyTextor works than anyone in Australia has managed), and apparently he's done it again with Dirty Politics, according to Richard Shaw. When Shaw details Slater's nemesis (known as Rawshark or Whaledump) we get into the hall of mirrors that is political shit-sheeting, turbo-charged by the internet, and screw that.

The whole business has destroyed the Nationals' image as Tidiest Party (and thus deserving the prize of government). Having been sucked in to Slater's drip feed, the press gallery lost what cool detachment it had. Both the government and the press gallery who report on it have lost the benefit of the doubt. Whether the Key government is re-elected, and whether or not NZ's press gallery keep on giving one another awards for excellence or whatever, the gig is up. Beef hooked, indeed.

Whale Oil is the bastard son of the UK's Guido Fawkes, which has had as significant an impact on UK politics today as the 17th century coffee-shop scandal sheets that grew into venerable titles such as Tatler or The Spectator. Fawkes, the brainchild of Paul Staines, exposed Labour spinner Damian McBride and NewsCorp's illegal requests for information on its targets. As with Whale Oil, and Woodward and Bernstein or Amy Corderoy's exposure of Alistair Furneval for that matter, it's instructive that the big political exposes come not from within but beyond the press gallery.

Recently in Australia, we have seen the Labor Party get the rough end of the press gallery for their wanton untidiness. Rudd even looked so meticulous, and as for That Woman with the empty fruitbowl ... people like Michelle Grattan run their fingers along the sideboards of the major parties, looking for smudges. Grattan's befuddlement at how Abbott's tidy opposition became an untidy government is understandable only if you excuse her from having to analyse policy and how it might work, rather than merely how it will play.

It is as though tidiness monitoring is what political journalism is, and all it could ever be:

• In Victoria, the ALP is much tidier than the Coalition. The Coalition used to be all about tidiness when they were run by well-bred Collins Street types, but this too has passed.
• In NSW, the Coalition are getting very untidy, but still less than the post-cyclone shambles that is the ALP.
• Labor won in SA because it was tidy but active; the Coalition could only be tidy through inertia, creating doubts as to what might happen if they had to do something.
• In WA, the Coalition government is starting to get untidy, even after it and the press gallery have stopped making excuses for Troy Being Troy. Same with the NT CLP (chock-full of Troys) and Queensland's Newman government trying to rough up the state's fastidious legal community. In all cases, Labor is yet to make their case for comparative tidiness.
• In Tasmania, Labor spent two decades getting untidy, while Will Hodgman got tidier and tidier. He can only get less so with the demands of governing.
• In the ACT, Katy Gallagher has kept Labor tidy while Jeremy Hansen has made no progress on The Road To Tidiness that all successful oppositions must take.

Some organisations are setting up their own media operations, including social media, to outflank moribund traditional media. The AFL is most advanced at that, relying on Channel 7 while preparing to screw them in a few years. If the major political parties were smart they'd do likewise, replacing press releases with their own pre-prepared grabs. You might say the press gallery would never cop that, but what choice would they have? This would be the only valid explanation for the major parties' insatiable lust for fundraising.

The major parties are not doing this because they are run by dills. They are spending and raising money with the same wit and judgment they apply to taxation. The Federal President of the Liberal Party is a former Communications Minister, and because we are talking Richard Alston here he never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity when it comes to constructive policy on media and communications. They are blowing all that money on ads that prop up faltering traditional media, on mailouts through the faltering postal service, on Mark Textor, stuff like that.

A decade or so ago my NSW Young Liberal contemporary David Miles set up a blog called Capital C. It could have been as big in Australia as Fawkes or Whale Oil are in their jurisdictions, but Howard was in power then and Miles was unwilling to rock that boat - even (especially!) as it began to founder. Miles could have become the Liberal Party's 21st century media guru. Instead, he's just another lobbyist, simpering away on ABC TV's The Drum, defending Coalition positions without the clout involved in having input, or even the dignity of being an official spokesperson. Like Maurice Newman, Miles is just a red herring in a suit. Both he and  The Drum diminish one another.

I'm surprised that disgruntled Labor rank-and-filers, rolled and humiliated time and again in their party's forums, haven't taken to social media more than they have. There will be a social media site that will have the juiciest gossip from within a major Australian political party, and journos won't be able to keep away from it. Too late, they will realise that social media has taken the initiative in political coverage, but will arrogantly insist that the press gallery remains the only crucible in which political reporting and agenda-setting context are forged.

The press gallery in Canberra is already having the narrative gradually taken from it, what with "on water matters" and its union unsure about censorship. The decline of the press gallery is like Hemingway's description of a slide into bankruptcy: first gradually, then suddenly. By the next election, it will have the narrative taken from it so comprehensively that it starts asking those long-overdue questions of what its purpose is, why should we give them any credence or privilege, etc.

The future of political coverage is unfolding in Wellington. Next year the city will host the Global Political Marketing and Management Conference. You could sit around in Canberra and act all shocked when political reporting goes around and past the press gallery, or you could keep ahead of the game so that the important stuff (accountability in a democracy, one's own job, etc.) survives fast and far-reaching change.

Catch-up journalism

The Federal Department of Health and Ageing put up a website that ranked processed food products for their nutritional, sugar, and other health-related properties, and took it down soon afterwards. The journalist who noticed this was Amy Corderoy, Health Editor at The Sydney Morning Herald. It was she who investigated the chain or events up to the office of Assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash; and to the person of her then Chief of Staff, Alistair Furnival, bawling out the mid-level public servant responsible for the site. As recently as Thursday she was doing the heavy lifting required to get the story out and explain why it mattered.

Health journalism has become a specialty that started with the repackaging of press releases (e.g. wine industry findings that modest consumption of their product was good for you, or silly quests for 'balance' between drug companies and anti-vaxxers). As it developed a base of industry sources it developed a culture of celebrating research successes (new pharmaceuticals or treatment practices that improved health, e.g. Gardasil), or finger-wagging (get some exercise! Stop smoking!).

In their downsizing programs, old media companies have let go of specialists and kept generalists, rather than the other way around. Corderoy's predecessor Melissa Sweet was the victim of such a round of cuts and set up her own health journalism site, Croakey, within Private Media. It is a good example of the many strengths, and few of the weaknesses, of Australian health journalism today.

Health journalism has tended to avoid in-depth examinations of government health policies. Health policy can be mind-bogglingly complex and it can be hard to get your own head around it, let alone communicate it to others. Going in hard against one aspect of health policy can make life hard for government-funded researchers, which in turn makes them reluctant to talk to journalists. Occasionally health journalists will lend some nuance to politically-sensitive and complex issues such as disparities in health care/outcomes for Aborigines, or the social impacts of alcohol/drug consumption. Gotcha stories, like women in labour sent away from public hospitals to give birth in cars or toilets, tend not to be written by health journalists. The current government came to office with no health policies to speak of, which must have made it hard to analyse them. Generally, it's fair to say that health journalists regard political reporting as separate to their field, a complicating factor to be avoided.

Corderoy is not a press gallery journalist, yet she has uncovered a story that is one of the central political stories right now. There are precedents for this: the journalists who uncovered heedlessness to environmental issues on the part of successive environment ministers when approving massive development applications tended to be environment journalists, not in the press gallery. Emma Macdonald was a junior journalist with The Canberra Times when she reported that Peter Reith's son had misused a ministerial phone card for his own juvenile purposes. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein worked for the Washington Post but they weren't assigned to the White House or Capitol Hill; they initially reported on the Watergate break-in as a local crime story.

This article is catch-up journalism on the part of the press gallery. Mark Kenny isn't just the bunny of this blog, but the "chief political correspondent" of The Sydney Morning Herald, and he has sought to insert himself into this story long after the brief life of the food website passed without him noticing. There are several inside-Canberra additions to this story, and as readers of this blog might expect, they are pretty worthless:

But Fairfax has found documents lodged with the corporate regulator show more than simply having a "shareholding", Alastair Furnival in fact owns the company in a 50-50 share with his wife, Tracey Cain.

Yep, and it's important to note that such information came not from well-cultivated parliamentary contacts, nor from a ministerial press release, but from publicly available ASIC records that can be accessed from anywhere.

Fairfax Media understands that the Prime Minister's office was aware of Mr Furnival's connection with Australian Public Affairs but had expected him to divest himself of the shareholding.

It is also understood that Mr Furnival's proposed appointment was held up by the Prime Minister's chief of staff, Peta Credlin, due to concerns over his background and commercial interests. A source revealed there was a level of frustration within the Prime Minister's inner circle over Mr Furnival, which had led to his initial appointment being temporary and subject to adequate performance. However, his appointment was eventually confirmed without any attempt to ensure he had cut his ties to the lobbying firm.

This is horseshit.

Peta Credlin and Alistair Furnival were both staffers in the Howard government. I make no comment on how close they may or may not have been at various points, but it is flatly untrue that Furnival's was just another CV to her. The fact that Furnival was a loyalist and a known quantity is why the normal checks and balances weren't done.

Furnival is a long-term lobbyist with occasional bouts of staffer work, to keep his gamekeeper skills sharp when he returns to poaching. He's a headkicker first and foremost. I first met him when he was working for Senator Michael Baume in Wollongong, one of the few pockets of Australia with a critical mass of actual socialists for a university conservative to hate. Even Baume found him a bit rebarbative. Labor people like Gareth Evans might 'love humanity but hate people', but Furnival hated everyone equally except for those who paid him. He is the guy you want to bulldoze others out of your way, if that's what you need to have done. Furnival wouldn't have much business nous and prolonged exposure to the man would irritate even loyal staff and clients.

The fact that there was no follow-up check is what's significant here. It's all very well to be an all-powerful control freak, but the converse is you have to be right about absolutely everything all the time. Credlin could be forgiven for taking her pal Al on trust if she was a trusting, hands-off manager, but she isn't.

Kenny has no excuse not to be awake up to this - other than the fact that getting Credlin offside might make his 'job' a bit harder. Are there any other Coalition staffers still on a kind of temporary arrangement (and if there are, put them on death-watch)? Who are they? Given the Howard government's difficulties with shareholdings in 1996-97, and given Furnival's direct experience with Santo Santoro's conflicts of interest in 2006 - not to mention the Abbott government's lapses over entitlements - why have these lessons not been learned? Kenny has let not only Nash and Furnival, but Credlin and Abbott, off the hook.

Lobbyists walk past journos every day in Parliament House. By the time a policy has been announced via a press release, it has often been the subject of months or years of lobbying. Journalists report on stories without any mention of the lobbying, which impoverishes their coverage and diminishes the job they are there to do. Nobody votes for lobbyists, but former Coalition staffers Andrew Parker and Olivia Wirth at Qantas are having more of an impact on public policy than most backbenchers - or even Bill Shorten.

Mind you, if Credlin starts pole-axing Furnival-style loyalists, nobody will want to work for the Liberal Party at all.

Labor health spokeswoman Catherine King ... said Senator Nash had still not adequately explained why she had decided to intervene and pull down the health star website.

"She had no reason to do that, nor in fact any authority to do that, and she has failed the entire week to actually explain that," [King] said.

In a opposition that bet everything on Fuehrerprinzip, Nash was relatively high-profile. Her failures of explanation are the fault of an insufficiently attentive press gallery. Labor Senate leader Penny Wong followed the document trail and did the job on Nash; only Corderoy, far away in Sydney, seemed to have noticed. The Opposition did its job of scrutinising the goings-on in Nash's office; the press gallery did not.

Senator Nash has repeatedly claimed that Mr Furnival has no conflict of interest, as he distanced himself from the company he owns, receives no income from it, and his wife had committed not to undertake further lobbying in the health area after his appointment.

What does it mean for Furnival to have "distanced himself"? Nobody gets to be a career staffer these days, and like all the smarties in the Coalition Furnival has no interest in becoming an actual elected official. This means the guy is a career lobbyist, a member of an elite that can never be removed from office by voting or other means, a cat who always falls on his feet.

The National Party (back in the day) used to have all these staffers who were balding, obese guys who looked like they'd just come off the farm and squeezed into bad suits with dreadful ties. They just appeared in National staff jobs in new Coalition governments like mushrooms and croaking frogs after a rainstorm. They were affable rather than cold and dismissive like Liberal staffers, and would accordingly be patronised and underestimated by the big-city smart-alecs; but they were sharp and knew their stuff. They could get what they wanted before anyone else worked out what was going on. Nash needs one of those guys. It's a pity she's 20 years too late and all those guys are dead. Furnival was all she had. No wonder she believed his entreaties, and says that his decisions were hers, resignation received with regret, etc.

Nash was his only option, too. Peter Dutton is overwhelmed in the senior health portfolio but he was smart enough not to touch anyone contaminated with Santoro. None of the senior Libs would have wanted Furnival: he and Hockey would have been at uni around the same time, but anything less than the clear green light from Credlin would have seen them pursue options other than Furnival.

Senator Nash did not respond to Fairfax's questions.

There is no reason why she would have. There was nothing in it for her if she had. She will make decisions and announce them, and press gallery journalists from Fairfax and elsewhere will simply pass on those decisions without further comment, thinking they are just doing their jobs.

Some think that Nash should have resigned. If Scott Morrison can send warships into another nation's territory and then mug and girn his way through a non-press-conference, why should any minister resign for any reason at all? If a minister actually punched Bill Shorten in the face, on camera and in a marginal seat, Abbott might have a quiet word with them but that would be it. This government is so bad that it cannot be embarrassed.

Furnival is not finished in the way that a vehicle manufacturing employee might become unemployable. The idea that he would cut off his entire career for the sake of an 18-month sojourn is ludicrous. Laws about lobbying and conflicts of interest are designed to be petty and facile while leaving deeper and enduring issues untouched. When this government starts to die and staffers storm the exits, watch for Furnival to return as "a safe pair of hands", with nary a reference to this past week.

There are basically two types of journalism: access journalism and investigative journalism.

Press gallery journalism is access journalism. You have to get on well with politicians and staffers in order to do the job, and make compromises to maintain those contacts year after year, whoever is in government. If you go in too hard, your sources simply stop talking to you and you can end up stuffed. The narrative that comes from access journalism is based upon conversations and speeches; even the stories that come from access journalism are called 'yarns', a word that makes no claim for truth.

Investigative journalism need not require any relationship with the person or thing being investigated. When journalists talk about the glories of their profession, they talk about Four Corners, or foreign correspondents dispatching from war zones. Investigative journalism relies on documents and structures and narratives to be drawn from them. The nearest the press gallery comes to investigative journalism is the budget lockup; rather than read all those documents, and track them through the Parliament and onto to execution, they mostly just eat biscuits and interview one another.

It is access journalism that is coming under the greatest pressure today, partly but not entirely due to technology. In an era where the Prime Minister's office has its own camera operator to take flattering action shots of the PM, who even needs a press gallery? When the PM's office will supply that footage at no charge to all networks, those beleaguered outfits must wonder why they are spending millions maintaining a presence there. When the most visible event of federal politics is the monkey-house antics of Question Time, who wants to hear or read some commentator drone on about it? I keep saying: the press gallery has no future.

Investigative journalism has a future: it rings true and the journalists who practice it seem more highly respected. Press releases and video clips are available online. In some cases you can do an investigation and the target won't know about it until Kerry O'Brien mentions them it in his intro on Monday night.

Press gallery journalism is catch-up journalism. It reports what was decided and does not question what was decided, let alone hold out for more and better. Press gallery journalists think they're being investigative when they're piling on a beleaguered minister. Listen to the tone they used in addressing Julia Gillard, then listen to the wording of their questions and how inane they were, how easily Gillard brushed them off: that's why they hated her, she treated them like they were stupid while Abbott said "I'm stupid too, gutting fish and eating pies, so let's all be stupid together". And they were, Abbott and his pet journalists, confusing their output with the will and wants of the people.

Mark Kenny 'investigated' Gillard's AWU connections from a file that Abbott's office dropped in his lap, day after day for months; had he been an investigative journalist he would have realised the documents did not support a story. A good investigative journalist knows when they're being had; Kenny doesn't and neither does his boss. Kevin Rudd strung Peter Hartcher along for a decade. Hartcher thinks he's building credibility with the new government with soft bullshit like this; it's too late. Hartcher is finished. And if Hartcher is finished, what chance do any of them have (even those who are better journalists than he is)? Why hasn't Emma Macdonald replaced either/both of them?

Fairfax have compounded their lack of talent by hiring Matthew Knott. The media reporter at Crikey could have been in a privileged position to report on an evolving industry, but he showed no depth, no nuance, and reported media comings and goings in such a vapid way he made Richard Wilkins' disquisitions on Hollywood look like Chekhov. Fairfax has decided that such a person without context or knowledge or perspective is what they need in reporting on politics, and be it on their own heads.

Big media organisations protect investigative journalists with lawyers and other resources. They used to do this more than they do, or can. Big media organisations can and did, however, produce journalists with a quality that should be inimical to journalism: they were obtuse. When Tony Abbott promises 1 million jobs in five years, but Ian Macfarlane admits there will only be 630,000 if we're lucky, journalists playing the access game just lets the story go begging. There are other examples. Many, many examples.

The best health journalism does both access and investigative journalism, but access journalism is just PR until you start asking the hard questions, matching statements with proof. The standard of health journalism, in terms of interesting stories backed up by fact, is far better than press gallery journalism. I defer to nobody in terms of being a political junkie but if I had to read a profile, I'd rather read about someone who's devoted their life to researching childhood leukaemia rather than, say, Annabel Crabb's account of lunch with Mark Textor (imagine: "The way he eats with his hands is so charming!", "His rudeness to waiters shows he means business", etc.).

Tony Abbott has access journalism down pat. As Opposition Leader all he had to offer was access, and he gave it good and hard: the last Opposition Leader to do that was Whitlam, to similar effect. Now in government, Abbott controls the access and a press gallery that was never strong on investigation to begin with has nowhere to go. When his government doesn't feel like speaking for itself, why not wheel out a muppet like Maurice Newman or David Miles to excrete some content and stop the gallery asking questions?

The investigative bombshells that will wound this government will come from investigative journalists like Corderoy rather than the fixtures in the press gallery. This will make life hard for the press gallery: during Watergate, press gallery from the Washington Post at the White House and Capitol Hill were snarled at by their Republican contacts, who in turn snarled at Woodward and Bernstein for making life hard for them. Nobody remembers those guys anyway ("it's been a good week for McGovern"), so stuff press gallery journalists and their bogus attempts to bludge off the really important work of investigative journalists.

Update 17 Feb: When the Alcohol and other Drugs Council of Australia was defunded, the press gallery reported it. What they didn't report was Furnival's links to the alcohol industry. It took a real journalist to do that. The press gallery has hundreds of goobers just standing around while a real journalist actually does some investigation work from hundreds of miles away.

One of said goobers, Matthew Knott, got confused about Mark Baker and Mark Kenny and tried to hang it on this blog. It must be so confusing for him.