The ambulance at the bottom of the cliff

The ICAC investigation into the business dealings of the Obeid family and Ian Macdonald has been compelling and disturbing. Every day, TV runs the same footage: the witness of the hour waddling down that section of Castlereagh Street behind David Jones, then the day's revelations, cut to a bit of recreated back-and-forth between the Commissioner/Counsel Assisting and the witness, followed by a pack of journalists following the witness walking away and pursuing him with banalities like "Did you have a nice day?" or "Are you a crook?".

Inside the ICAC hearing room, there is an area set aside for journalists and an area set aside for members of the public to sit and watch proceedings. All the journalists have to do is listen to what is said, write it down, and then describe it in the format relevant to their employer. I wonder if any journalist attending that hearing scans the public gallery and realises that what they are doing is not beyond the competence of anyone else who walked in off the street to attend that hearing.

Ten years ago, Macdonald and Obeid were ministers in the Carr government. Ten years ago, there were plenty of journalists who were paid to cover NSW state politics. They all reported that the government was brilliant, capitalising on all those opportunities from the Olympics, chock-full of bright rising talent and so far ahead of the stumblebum opposition that they weren't even worth talking about. There was no sustained critical coverage of the Carr government by the media, not of Obeid or Macdonald or anyone else. Any criticism was occasional and jumped on with both feet by the then government; it was always the media who backed down whenever the government shrieked at them.

Where, I wonder, were all those top-notch Walkley-wining investigative journalists when the deeds under investigation were actually underway? What was stopping them putting all that stuff to air/on the front page when Macdonald and Obeid and all the hangers-on were up to whatever it was they were up to?

A quick trawl back to those days reveals exactly where they were: traipsing around north-western Sydney with Carl Scully. Twenty years ago, when the Coalition were last in government in NSW, there was a proposal to run a rail line between Parramatta and Chatswood via Epping, but nothing was done about it because a) Olympics and b) we don't do forward planning for infrastructure in Sydney, we do half-arsed compromises decades after the need becomes acute, if at all. Scully, who was Transport Minister and a Cabinet colleague of Obeid and Macdonald, announced and reannounced that proposal more than sixty times. Every time he did it, a bunch of journos would happily follow him and record their adventures. Some of the more daring ones would ask Scully if he wanted to be Premier.

Scully was a loyal member of the Terrigals, the Obeid sub-faction. He did a good job in dulling the senses of all those super-sleuths from the NSW Parliamentary Press Gallery. If you're going to get supposedly hard-headed and relentlessly questioning investigators away from a place where things are happening, a windswept vacant block of land by a dull but busy road in Carlingford is the place to do it.

Not one journalist from that era has realised just how badly they were duped by the formidable state government media machine of that time. Bob Carr, then Premier, used to ring state press gallery journalists and tell them where they got their stories "wrong", and what they should have done instead. You show me a NSW State politics journo who wasn't in tight with Macca and Eddie, and I'll show you someone who lacked the connections to get the sorts of stories the editors at the time considered good enough.

The then State political reporter from The Sydney Morning Herald was hopeless as state politics reporter, doing quick and unquestioning summaries of government press releases (well, I'm sure Bob Carr and other members of that government thought she was very good). Reading her articles showed me what a bludge journalism could be if you couldn't be bothered digging for stories. She was equally bad in Washington, doing quick and unquestioning summaries of The Washington Post and The New York Times, not realising that people who follow US politics read those papers too. She showed me that a poor journalist could not cruise into an important-sounding job but stay there, and then get promoted. I did a quick search for that journo, assuming she'd long since dropped out of journalism and/or been purged by rounds of Fairfax cost-cutting; imagine my surprise to find she is that masthead's Investigations Editor.

On discovering that I thought: the joke's on me, the journalistic ugly-duckling of Macquarie Street has transformed into this swan of investigative reporting. I remember the Bulldogs scandal (and would have read about it in the SMH) but had no idea Davies was involved in any way. If she and McClymont had devoted a fraction of the effort to Macdonald-Obeid that they devoted to the Bulldogs or the Bush Administration, who knows what they might have uncovered at the time? Who knows how things might have been different?

Let there be no nonsense about limited media resources or the dreaded social media. In 2003 the only facebooking going on was when people nodded off in the Parliamentary Library. Journalists could and did go about their jobs while ignoring media consumers, and their employers still surfed the 'rivers of gold'. Back then the Bylong Valley would have been full of small-t twittering, but it wouldn't have impeded Macdonald and the Obeids any more than the press gallery did.

I think about John Brogden, who was (along with Joe Hockey) the most promising Young Liberal of my generation; ten years ago he was Leader of the NSW Opposition. Imagine if he, or those he appointed to shadow Macdonald and Obeid, had dug for what has since come before ICAC. Imagine they had laid it all out in Question Time and called for their heads. How would Davies and the press gallery reported it - they would have waited for Carr's quip in response, something stale from Cactus Jack Garner or Boss Tweed perhaps, and run that. Brogden might have become Premier; Scully, Iemma, Rees and Keneally would still be promising and unsullied members of a viable alternative government. Maybe the Doggies would have fared better in the NRL.

When he was in student politics, Ian Macdonald stiff-armed the left. He entered NSW Parliament in 1988, forgiven and backed by the Labor left, in clear breach of one of the most binding laws in Labor politics: The If They'll Rat On You Once They'll Rat On You Twice Act. In his first speech he denounced the very idea of the ICAC when it was first proposed, without a scrap of irony. I still say he reached his parliamentary peak soon afterwards when he smuggled Kylie Minogue into a speech on superannuation, and made canine-related puns in a speech on the Dog Bill.

Labor Left people fancy themselves as salty, hard-to-impress types, utterly unmoved by NSW Right popinjays; yet Macdonald managed to herd them behind Obeid when required. The people who voted the way Macdonald told them to are the same people who think that the decline of the NSW Labor Right is good for Labor's left. I don't know how he persuaded left members like he did, and it probably won't come out in ICAC, so Walkley-winning investigative journalists and anyone else who was not a member of the ALP in NSW back then will never know how it was done.

Are Eddie Obeid and his scions more or less full of born-to-rule entitlement than, say, Tony Abbott? Does anyone doubt that Ian Macdonald, if challenged/asked nicely and pumped full of red wine, could stand on a chair and sing Solidarity Forever with the best of them? Do he and Obeid still bear the title "The Honourable"?

The media and what is now the main part of the government of NSW did nothing to stop the twists and turns of the Obeid-Macdonald juggernaut: no check, no balance, no investigation. Yet here they all are, providing the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff after it is all too late, and it has nowhere to take the damaged body politic anyway.

Enduring ideas

There was a time when conservatives had plenty of policy ideas: the late 1960s. From that time came a number of initiatives that have had an enduring impact on public debate. The Labor Party generally, and Whitlam in particular, snaffled all but two of them.

Ask anyone: who brought the troops home from Vietnam? Whitlam (actually, McMahon had done most of that work earlier in 1972). Who set up the Australia Council to foster Australian film, literature, theatre and culture more broadly? Whitlam (Gorton set up the initial, tentative and under-resourced version of this entity). Plenty of big ideas from the Liberals are owned by Labor.

Liberals get no credit for the 1967 referendum on counting Aborigines in the census, nor for the (accidental) career of Neville Bonner, and Malcolm Fraser achieved quite a lot in Aboriginal Affairs (with ministers like Fred Chaney and Ian Viner) - but it is all knocked into a cocked hat with that image of Gough Whitlam's white fist leaking red soil into Vincent Lingiari's outstretched black hand.

That's where big ideas gets the Liberals: nowhere, politically. Proponents of big ideas seeking bipartisan support are wasting their time because there's nothing in it for the Coalition. To understand this is to understand why their only big ideas are warmed-over and inconsistent exercises in frustration and disappointment.

In the 1980s the Liberals organised around ideas, wets and dries, and a fat lot of good that did them. "Incentivation" failed in 1987. Shack's great health plan and the questions needing to be answered failed in 1990. Fightback! failed in 1993. John Howard led the tendency in the Liberal Party to disdain big ideas, and by 1996 Liberals flinched when confronted with ideas. Howard won in 1996 by stirring up apathy to Keating's "big picture" ideas on Aboriginal reconciliation, the arts and the republic. The defeat of the republic confirmed and reinforced it: forget big ideas.

Conservatives don't do big ideas. When in power conservatives see themselves as guarding the Treasury and the common weal generally, forming a gauntlet through which ideas that are costly, faddish, socialistic, or otherwise undesirable are filtered out. Any initiatives that survive such a rigorous process must truly be the Unstoppable March of Progress. Because any initiatives that survive conservative governments are considered inevitable, conservatives get no credit for them. Meteorologists get no credit for good weather nor any blame for bad.

Conservatives are disappointed that major policy initiatives in Australian politics come from outside their ranks. Independence for East Timor was a far-left irrelevance until John Howard seized the opportunity to realise it; apart from Jose Ramos Horta, nobody gives Howard much credit for that. Kevin Donnelly is trying his best in pushing for a return to classical education, but too few Liberals enjoyed such an education themselves and Donnelly has failed at persuasion/doing the numbers; they can't and won't sell it.

Howard's one enduring initiative, the gun buyback, occurred on the fly from within his office and not from the grass roots of the Coalition parties. It is being undone by conservative state governments fostering hunting in national parks and lifting restrictions on ammunition (the current government had a case to answer with lax customs detection of weapons imports, but Jason Clare appears to be limiting scope for criticism and will have made his reputation if he can render it a non-issue by September).

They can't have it both ways, acting as the scourge of new initiatives and wondering why none come from within - but yet they still wish it were otherwise. The central weakness of conservatism is that it can't distinguish between a structural shift and a passing fad, which is why structural shifts have to assert themselves politically in a way that passing fads can't. Conservatives were kept out of office until they embraced Medicare, and were not allowed in until they accepted warnings not to dismantle it. Gay marriage still looks like a passing fad to conservatives; but it isn't, and future conservatives will claim to be upset that doubt will be cast on their not-yet-evident support for this initiative.

In his youth, Tony Abbott learned the Big Ideas of Santamaria and the DLP: nuclear families made from wedded straight couples; opposition to abortion and euthanasia; and that the Church is never wrong and owes no compensation to anyone. From Howard he learned to disdain Big Ideas, and he generally does: but he is conflicted. He can't be trusted in his claims to support the NDIS; statements that the Coalition would only support an NDIS at some future time when the land is flowing with milk and honey is far more credible, however disappointing that might be for supporters.

He can't be trusted in his claims to support a comprehensive Asian language/cultural exchange program between Australian and Asian education systems (he calls this a "new Colombo Plan" for those seeking certainty in old ideas, but his proposal is nothing like that limited and outdated program). His dismissal of Big Ideas can be put down to 1 Corinthians 13:11 when it suits him, but when it doesn't his rhetoric keens for Big Ideas and the credit that attaches to them.

The two ideas from the late 1960s which Labor have been happy to leave to the conservatives are nuclear energy and northern development.

There was a serious proposal by the Gorton government to develop a nuclear energy industry. Within the current term of Parliament Josh Frydenberg attempted to revive the idea in his intellectually and politically timid way - to "call for a debate" without leading one, to ignore the developments in this area (including environmental knowledge) over the past forty years, and to generally overestimate the importance of Josh in making things happen. In Liberal terms, however, Frydenberg has revived a trusty Liberal issue that has sat in the bottom drawer awaiting its hour and its champion, and the opponents of the issue are almost all lefties so don't underestimate the frisson of political correctness that attaches to even talking about an Australian nuclear industry.

An Australian nuclear industry would be expensive to set up and maintain, and would take a long time to do so even with an unequivocally supportive government. It would, however, make a few people a lot of money. It follows, therefore, that those who stand to reap the rewards can bear the risk involved in getting the idea up. The fact that they have preferred for government to bear this risk leaves proponents looking politically exposed, attracting criticism without any compensating reward.

Northern development is like that, too:

• If you want to pay less tax, then forget about government building you free dams, rail lines and roads.
• Landholdings in southeastern and southwestern Australia tend to be small and numerous, so when you build dams there the economic benefit is widely spread through surrounding communities. Landholdings in northern Australia tend to be large and few, so a government that builds them a dam it will basically be donating public money to a small group of people who don't pay tax and aren't even Australian.
• The Co-Chairman of ANDEV, Gina Rinehart, lives far to the south of the Tropic of Capricorn, in Perth. Dominic Talimanidis, Director of the North Australia Project at the Institute of Public Affairs, also lives far to the south of the Tropic of Capricorn - in Melbourne, as does the Shadow Minister responsible for confusing this with a policy idea, Andrew Robb. All three are incurring vastly inflated labour costs. If these people won't live their own proposals there is no reason why anyone else should.
• As to 'immigration' magically solving labour-shortage issues in northern Australia, I'd suggest that Gina Rinehart saw the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory at an impressionable age and won't be told there's no such place as Oompa-Loompa Land from which sufficient numbers of willing and underpaid workers can be drawn.
• Forget about setting up some sort of Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine because it already exists and has done for a hundred years. If you were in a position to do so, you'd write them a huge cheque to encourage them to keep up the good work and challenge the government (the incumbents and/or the opp-pose-ition) to match it - this would have far more credibility than sitting around in Perth or Melbourne dreaming up ways of spending taxpayer money by people who would rather avoid contributing, and proposing entities that exist already.
• Alternative to previous point: set up the Lang Hancock Centre for Tropical Medicine (motto: "Get out of bed and do some bloody work!") and see how you go attracting serious research talent.
• Speaking of health, if government was serious about this proposal it would be building hospitals, schools and other social infrastructure in northern Australia. It would be costing that infrastructure and preparing detailed assessments about labour needs. In the absence of such planning, with attendant budget estimates and opportunity costs etc.
• The government has avoided deploying ADF personnel to northwestern WA for very good reasons. ADF personnel are well-trained, fit, work in teams, follow instructions, and are underpaid compared to mining industry norms. If you wanted to cut the Defence budget and our operational readiness, you'd send them to areas where they earn a fraction of their neighbours.
• If you expect government to build all this infrastructure up north, proposals like this and this and that - and donations to the vehicle industry on which they run - will need to be revised (at the very least, journalists should question them). Think about what we could have done with all that money flushed down the Ord. It's either-or in this budget climate, not all-this-and-more.
• Where is the Australian FMCG company that could actually ramp up exports to Asia if required (because only then do we even get to the idea of a "northern foodbowl")?
• Given the shelving of Olympic Dam (south of the Tropic of Capricorn) and Ravensthorpe (likewise), what problem is this 'solution' trying to solve? Engineering types working in mining and construction should have a simple and firm answer to this question: what problem is this 'solution' trying to solve?
• The Northern Development plan is pretty much limited to farming and mining, as it was in the 1960s. No Karratha Google, no Ayr Apple, nothing that takes away from those who would take more than they contribute.
• Why aren't Aboriginal communities leading, or at least involved in, this push? Normally voluble people like Noel Pearson, Alison Anderson, and Bess Price seem very, very quiet on this arrangement.

Where the Coalition's push for northern development moves from merely being silly to being fraudulent and hypocritical comes when you look at recent political history in, of all places, South Australia:

• In the 1970s the SA government proposed to build Monarto to alleviate overpopulation in Adelaide. The Liberal Opposition regarded it as an ill-conceived and expensive extravagance;
• In the 1980s the SA government proposed to build a Multi-Function Polis to boost hi-tech employment in (not-necessarily overpopulated) Adelaide. The Liberal Opposition regarded it as an ill-conceived and expensive extravagance;
• In the last decade the SA government sought to facilitate a mine at Olympic Dam that would consume more power than the city of Adelaide. Who knows what the Liberal Opposition thought of that? Do you think such a power-hungry entity, mining uranium amongst other things, would have set up a nuclear power station at its own expense to show how it's done?

The Coalition is basically proposing a dozen Monartos in northern Australia. They'd be dual-function polises (farming and mining). The main argument against the "northern development" proposal is that those proposing it are refusing to face up to the electorate and economic situation that exists and seeking to socially-engineer a society that is more amenable to keeping them in office:

... Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

- Bertolt Brecht The Solution

There is something to Craig Emerson's quip that Abbott can't even be positive about own policies. Suspicion immediately falls upon Peta Credlin, who loathes Robb and probably thought such a leak would not rebound upon the leader to the extent that it has. Why does anyone think there's a scrap of electoral kudos in a 40-year-old idea that is so obviously doomed? What's the alternative?

With education and health - always big issues in Australian elections no matter what pollsters say - there are signs that the old ways won't do and that people are more open than some might imagine to trying new ways of doing things. Chris Pyne's insistence that the status quo of school funding is ridiculous. Peter Dutton's pronouncements would be just as silly if there were any. Neither man can maintain the assertion that local boards will fix more problems than they cause, or make worse. They simply aren't offering solutions to actual problems facing this country.

With his backdown on supporting people and communities with alcohol problems, and a couple of leaks, we would describe him and his team as in disarray if only these events had happened to the government. Abbott's problems run far deeper than that. This is the last election when the Liberals can dig their heels in and demand a return to all things Howard (well, except Howard himself, and Costello, and the heady pre-GFC economy ...).

Abbott suppressed initiative and centralised policy development in his own office, which he stuffed full of control-freak message numpties. Journalists should not be forming mutually-beneficial relationships with such people but going around them. Moderates of old would have bucked centralisation in the leader's office, but the hollow shells that remain have happily gone along with Abbott because they see no other alternative.

In order to cement his own position, Abbott has leached the Liberal Party of its capacity to articulate how the country could be governed differently and what it might look like if it so chose. That capacity will not return soon, either. Warmed-over ideas from the 1960s accrue no interest in the vault and get overtaken by new ideas, the development of which the Coalition play no part. They need to expire, and be seen to expire, publicly and unavoidably. New, big ideas from the Liberals will need a track record of success that they currently lack before they can take their forfeited place among those who help this country grow and prosper.

The impact of Michelle Grattan

Long-serving press gallery journalist Michelle Grattan announced yesterday that she would be leaving Fairfax to work in a couple of other roles (one of which puts her under a former Fairfax editor). I've long thought she was an irrelevant anachronism but the journosphere as one disagrees: what does it mean to be a significant journalist?

The journosphere loves Grattan because she's stuck around for forty years in an industry that is increasingly uncertain. In an industry led mostly by clueless and arrogant dickheads, Grattan is mostly nice to her colleagues and takes pains to show newbie journos the ropes around Parliament. Female journalists in particular speak highly of her, in an industry with few female role models. She meets the journalistic imperative of being able to churn out 600 words on demand. She reports on things that journalists think are important.

She checked and re-checked facts with politicians before they became part of her stories. This doggedness impresses journalists, politicians, and others in the politico-media complex no end, because they tend to be people in pursuit of the snappy line or the knockout blow and resent having to do the sort of slow, hard grind that was a feature of Grattan's work.

Michelle Grattan joined the Federal Parliamentary press gallery in 1971. In that time she has covered 16 Federal elections, and seen government change political complexion five times, with dozens of changes to the leadership of both government and opposition over that period. She has a wealth of experience to draw upon, and she clearly put it to use for the benefit of grateful journalistic colleagues. She may even use it for the benefit of students at the University of Canberra.

The people left out of the Grattan value equation were the public at large, readers of the various publications which employed her.

For people who don't follow politics closely, but who felt a duty to keep up from time to time, a Grattan article was easily digestible. It reported petty, mundane activities and then linked them to the careers of political participants, as though the fate of those individuals - if not those of their parties, or even the nation! - rose or fell on the basis of those activities.

They rarely did, of course. For Grattan, politics was something that took place within one of two buildings in Canberra. Outside the building was a continent, several excluded-for-immigration-purposes islands and a world that acted as passive recipients of whatever came out of the particular building in use at the time. From inside that building came announcements, largely unconnected to policy developments in that area or to self-interested lobbying efforts, and almost never followed up as to their effect in the country beyond. Wash, rinse, repeat, for four decades.

For people who do follow politics closely - and who are avid readers of Fairfax publications - Grattan's offerings were thin fare. It may be true that if Tony Abbott does not succeed he runs the risk of failure, but there is more to it than that. She had a wealth of experience to draw upon, yet she set it aside in favour of formulaic reporting of the same old same-old, trying to make it sound fresh and exciting and mostly failing. Her daily journalism is an odd combination of grind and hype: each article stands like a bowl of tepid porridge with a lit sparkler stuck into it.

When Grattan wanted to provide context, she wrote a book. Her first book, Can Ministers Cope? (co-authored with Patrick Weller), dealt with the relationships between politicians and the public service. It was written in 1981 and remains a key work in that field, despite developments in both public sector accountability and political behaviour since that time. Her next book, Reformers (again co-authored, with Margaret Bowman) presented interesting people in a dull way. Her next book, which she edited, provided useful introductions to the first 25 Australian Prime Ministers.

Grattan never attempted the High Road of Big Themes, like Paul Kelly and Peter Hartcher. She did not attempt to collect wacky anecdotes (books which are, in effect, the author's Greatest Hits reel) like Laurie Oakes. She reported what was in front of her and was incurious about how taxes brought into the capital were expended in the delivery of public services, and how the delivery of those services framed how politicians were perceived, and how politicians thus perceived went about the communities that they supposedly represented. Her pronouncements and predictions on Fran Kelly's Radio National show had no value at all.

A prime example of the failure of this approach is the figure of Eddie Obeid as revealed by the NSW ICAC investigation. From a journo perspective, the demarcation is simple: Obeid was a member of the NSW Parliament, and therefore federal politics reporters can be forgiven for not having heard of him let alone reporting on his impact in federal politics. There is no reason why someone reporting on federal politics could not have examined Obeid's impact on their field: it's lazy journalism to sit in your office under a hill and be incurious about the factors that influence politicians. This isn't limited to who did or didn't stay at a ski lodge; a journalist needn't have to wait for an announcement.

Another is the repeated attempts of President Obama to schedule a visit to Canberra. Each time he scheduled and postponed, Grattan commented on it. When he eventually came and spoke, Grattan commented on that too. The fact that Obama's speech promised far-reaching change to Australia's foreign policy - and yes, its politics - has simply passed Grattan by. She has treated Obama like a blow-in to Federal politics (which seat does he represent?).

What was important to Grattan was who was making the announcement. What was important to those making the announcement was that Michelle Grattan noticed and passed it forward to the then-large readership of The Age. And so the politico-media circle went around: Grattan noticed those who were important, and those who were important were those whom Grattan noticed, and what those people did was important because Grattan noticed what they did, etc. It must have been fun while it lasted.

Male politicians knew to butter Grattan up, and they did. Women politicians, a minority for most of Grattan's day, found The Doyenne would ignore them if a man of equal stature was making an announcement of equal import. As recently as 2006 she found it hard to believe that Kevin Rudd depended on Julia Gillard to get the numbers to roll Kim Beazley, preferring to believe - and pretend to her readers - that Rudd was a force of nature in himself.

Julia Gillard is the first Prime Minister in Grattan's long experience who did not engage in a concerted campaign of buttering her up before taking the job. Gillard appears less frequently in Grattan's articles 2007-10 than she did elsewhere in the media; since then Grattan has given her substantially less than an even break, and not just because Abbott plays her to get a good run.

Gillard had the effrontery, the sheer gall, to go for the Prime Ministership without even pitching the idea to The Doyenne. By the time Grattan discovered that Rudd was in trouble, he was finished. It was the biggest political story of 2010 and she, with her ear to the ground and her finger on the pulse and savvy as billy-o, missed it. Since then, Gillard hasn't been able to do a single thing right according to Grattan. Her straight-journalist reporting would set out logical reasons why the PM did or did not do something, but the bruised ego would follow up with an insistence that it was not a good look.

Take, for example, today's serving-out-notice effort:

The Prime Minister's frustration that everything she does is seen in a bad light is obvious.

She feels herself, and indeed is, victim of a media storm but she knows those in her own ranks have fanned the winds.

The PM is the victim of a media storm, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. A small bunch of backbenchers can beat up the story and everyone else, Prime Ministers or Doyennes or whomever, is powerless to report on any other issue than this. This Is The Narrative, baby, and readers looking for more than The Narrative are wasting their time.

Grattan reported on the departure of Nicola Roxon and Chris Evans in the same way every other journalist did: disaster for a shambolic government.

JULIA Gillard's problems with her reshuffle will be how it is perceived.

What Grattan means here is: how it will be perceived by the press gallery, including Grattan. This is an insistence that the press gallery had the primacy that it had last century. It's wounded-ego stuff, the idea that how a policy plays (among journalists for a day or two) is more important than how it works (on people in the community, whose lives and livelihoods and other social amenity depends upon the policy under discussion). She mentions that Evans has been in the departure lounge for the past year, but it didn't seem to colour her coverage of his portfolio or of the Senate over that time.

It took a blogger, Paula Matthewson, to point out that governments lose a couple of senior ministers just before elections as a matter of course. All of those names Matthewson rattles off - Tanner, Reith, McLachlan - are people Grattan knew. There are journalists in the press gallery who were at school when Peter Reith was in his pomp, but Grattan has no such excuse. Grattan could and should have used her years of experience as a counterpoint of calm against the Narrative that this government is shedding ministers willy-nilly. Grattan herself, and all those journos who venerate her, have been shown up by a blogger.

The only reason to read Grattan was to find out what The Narrative is, so that you don't have to wade through all the other Narrative-surfers clogging up the old media's space and time. Grattan had the stature to make The Narrative about more than petty ephemera, but she chose to be one of the gang.

The articles on Australian politics in The Conversation were refreshingly free of The Narrative, but Grattan is likely to kill that; denying the very diversity she has called for at The Age. The site's editor is Andrew Jaspan, a former editor of The Age, so while this might be nice for both these old mates the reader has less incentive to check The Conversation for political articles in this election year. This is what 'new media' apparently means in this country: The Conversation becomes like The Age's A2 section from about ten years ago, while The Global Mail is basically SMH Spectrum from five years before that.

With the advent of ABC24, people can see and hear how the press gallery operates: Grattan had a knack for asking questions in her distinctive March-fly drone that were obtuse, or (when speaking to the current Prime Minister) rude, and so general that any experienced politician could simply bat them away. Her question to Tony Abbott at the National Pikers' Club last week was stupid, a wasted opportunity. She had little to show newbie journalists in how to extract value from a press conference and make attending them worthwhile; to make those who called them both scared to pick you for a question, and scared not to pick you.

A rarely-mentioned aspect of Grattan's career was that she had been appointed editor of The Canberra Times, one of the first women to be appointed to such a role. She was tasked with making that paper more like The Washington Post, with both excellent coverage of politics and the business of government more broadly, as well as relevance on a small-c civic level to people who live in that city.

Grattan had been a Canberra resident herself for more than two decades by then, but clearly had nothing in common with those of her neighbours who bristle at "Canberra" being used as shorthand for the actions of the federal government. She pinched a few politics journos from other Fairfax publications but failed at both tasks. She took newspapers for granted rather than seriously questioning what they were for, what they could do, and how they might have been saved from their current predicament.

The worst thing of all about Grattan was that she was and is a dull writer. No phrase, no sentence, no article of hers sticks in the mind or helps you understand a complex situation. Think about any major development in Australian politics 1971-2013, then go to her article on the matter the following day: marvel at her reverse-alchemy of rendering the interesting dull.

People who don't follow politics closely think it has to be dull, so they don't understand what the problem is. Her role in turning people off politics, in convincing them that it is about anything other than their hopes and concerns for the type of country we live in, cannot be underestimated.

For readers, the news is that just another journo has shifted jobs. Don't make your daughter a doyenne, Mrs Worthington. This is an attitude that will probably appal journos who regard her as the epitome of their craft, but so what?

But enough about you, let's talk about Tony

Tony Abbott's brochure and speech show one thing clearly: he's had quite enough of talking about you. He wants to talk about himself. He wants you to think well of him, and hope this will be the same thing as thinking that he can adjust policy settings to get whatever you want (it isn't, but still). So long as he talks about what you want, Abbott gets what he wants, and everyone's happy: that, in a nutshell, is pretty much the Coalition strategy for government of this country.

The brochure has the word "plan" on the cover. Its purpose is for Liberals to say that Tony Abbott has a plan and that Julia Gillard doesn't. A plan contains a detailed proposal for a course of action: Real Solutions is no more a 'plan' than it is a 'sausage', or a 'grenade'. It's a statement of aspirations, not a plan, in the same way that buying a lottery ticket is not an investment strategy.

Unlike many public speakers Abbott didn't, of course, start with a "welcome to country" (an acknowledgement of Aboriginal custodianship of the particular part of the country the speaker is in): nobody would expect him to. He began with an acknowledgement that the country can be randomly terrifying and destructive and can take from you all that you have.

He started with a bit of disaster porn in an attempt to give his speech a gravity and a topicality that it turned out not to have. I had expected him to talk about his experiences with those communities, but he didn't have any. To turn up to a picfac and then go again doesn't make for a lot of human contact, nor any scope to shift a pre-defined agenda. Instead, he followed with a homily that is hard to hear, coming from him:

Here in Canberra, we must never forget that our task is to serve the Australian people.

The political battles we have to fight are but a means to that end.

It's the voters who decide what service they want and who best is able to provide it. Why anyone would decide, as Abbott and Pyne have, that hooting like apes through Question Time constitutes service to the Australian people was not made clear by Abbott. So, what do voters want?

It’s clear to us what you, our fellow Australians, want:

• you want less pressure on your cost of living;
• you want more job security;
• you want our borders under control;
• you want stability and certainty returned to decision-making; and
• you want leaders you can trust.

Our plans for a better Australia are our response to you.

The carbon tax will be gone – so power prices will fall.

The mining tax will be gone – so investment and jobs will increase.

The boats will be stopped – because what’s been done before can be done again.

And the budget will be back in the black – so government has the resources to deliver the services that are really needed.

Our vision for Australia is about you.

That focus-group excreta is the policy core of the speech - so many begged questions, a journalist could spend every day between now and September exploring them. You want more job security, but are you going to get it under an Abbott government? Does the mining tax depress jobs and investment? Do you think any journalist asked any questions about those matters at all?

The begged questions are also present in the brochure. Just because the budget is in deficit during a recession, it does not mean that it is "out of control". You'd have to write off John Howard's entire time as Treasurer if you believed that.

As Australians, each of you has a right to elected leaders who are straight with you and who don’t waste your money ... So my pledge to you is that I won’t say one thing before an election and do the opposite afterwards because fibbing your way into office is what’s brought our public life into disrepute.

You would probably get thrown out of the National Press Club for laughing at that. For all its self-importance as an institution, the National Press Club would be poorer for such a policy; but then it allows Steve Lewis to walk in through the front door and chair its big events, so obviously this is the kind of club where you wouldn't want to be a member.

The Coalition understands that every dollar that government spends is a dollar taken from you in taxes today or two dollars taken from our children in a few years’ time when the debt has to be repaid.

This is as clear an example as you can get that the Coalition is living down to Oscar Wilde's definition of a cynic: who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. If you can spend a dollar today that yields you and your family five dollars down the track, you'd spend the money - but Abbott won't. That much-needed infrastructure and the shimmering promise of education he talks about is the much-needed infrastructure Howard didn't build.

The defeat of the Howard government showed that people don't necessarily want the buck back or are grateful to those who do so. On day one of the 2007 election campaign the Coalition promised $34b worth of tax cuts, but (especially when you consider their claim that they left Labor a $20b budget surplus) so what?

The Coalition’s last eleven budgets delivered ten surpluses.

This year’s deficit will be Labor’s eleventh in a row.

Why does he get away with refusing to link Australia's economic position to that of the global economy? Why hasn't the smart-alec Catch-22 of the budgetary position (surplus = sucking money out of the economy and driving up unemployment, deficit = broken promise and uncertainty) been quashed? There are two basic reasons why the Australian media give Abbott such an easy ride on big issues and tough questions, both of which benefit the Coalition.

The first is that the Murdoch media openly, unabashedly back the Coalition. Their presence in the Australian media and the virulence of their fervour is such that it skews any question of balance. Strangely, it is proud of its EXCLUSIVEs but occasionally it will upbraid other media outlets for not taking its EXCLUSIVEs as seriously as they do - and worse, the other outlets quail before this and run warmed-over imitations of Murdoch pieces.

Second, the non-Murdoch outlets want a contest, even though there is no contest of ideas. The government has policies and the opposition has modifications. Same asylum-seeker policy, but TPVs. Same defence policy, but - um, any change would involve new money, so let's leave that. The non-Murdoch media did this with last year's US election, framing it as a close contest when in fact President Obama won resoundingly.

Regardless of the agendas of their proprietors, for press gallery journos, it's personal. Gillard is right to disdain the press gallery given that her speech was given over to her glasses and the election date, and the fact that the press gallery like Abbott and they're going to give him an easy ride and there's nothing you can do about it.

It was about this point that Abbott began reading his speech in the same tone that one uses when reading to children, not the way one talks to adults about the problems and opportunity facing the nation. The audience before him were journalists and Coalition MPs, but to the unseen audience far beyond it looked like he was patronising us.

Let’s be clear.

The coming election will be a referendum on the carbon tax.

After all the evidence that this scare campaign hasn't worked, he is still plugging away at it. If you were an experienced journalist you would wonder if this obtuse quality would have any bearing on the sort of Prime Minister he'd be, but if you're a press gallery dill you'd just accept that is Tony being Tony.

Here at the Press Club 12 months ago, I outlined the Coalition’s plan for a stronger and more prosperous economy, and a safe and secure Australia.

No you didn't. There is a reason why that blogpost is the second-most viewed post on this blog, and that is because no journalist examined that speech as closely as I did.

So far, the Coalition has made literally dozens of big policy commitments:

No it hasn't. It's done a bit of trimming. It doesn't really have a fundamental problem with the Gillard government but it wants to look like it's offering a real alternative, so it offers desultory efforts like these:

We’ll abolish the carbon tax – because it’s the quickest way to reduce power prices.

After years of underinvestment in power generation, and misinvestment in the wrong technologies, "quickest" is not what we're after here.

We’ll abolish the mining tax – because it’s the quickest way to boost investment and jobs.

Think of all the investment and jobs that could be created if all the $0 that has been paid in mining tax was redirected. They think we're mugs, don't they.

And we’ll cut red tape costs by at least $1 billion a year – to give small business a much-needed break.

No you won't.

By restoring the jobs growth of the Howard government, there’ll be two million more jobs over a decade.

To achieve that, we'd need a global economy to be overheating as it very much isn't now. I guess you're just not made for these times.

There’ll be border protection policies that have been proven to stop the boats.

Got those already, and they are not proving much at all.

There’ll be a swift start on Melbourne’s East-West link, on Sydney’s WestConnex and on Brisbane’s Gateway motorway upgrade.

And the Pacific Highway will finally be duplicated well within this decade.

No there won't.

We’ll reduce emissions by planting more trees ...

... which will burn down or get washed away by increasing extreme weather events. Not good enough.

There’ll be a one-stop-shop for faster environmental approvals.

No, there'll be an eight-stop-shop because you're going to shunt environmental assessments back to the states and territories, remember?

There’ll be the same penalties for union officials and company officers who commit the same offence.

What, none? When David Coe died the death of a reckless fool last month at a high-end US ski resort, the MSM business pages were full of clowns recounting what a great guy he was. Mind you, Abbott has nothing but good to say about Kathy Jackson.

There’ll be schools and hospitals run by community leaders, not by distant bureaucrats, so they’re more responsive to the parents and patients they serve.

This is not a recipe for improving schools or fundamentally changing in response to needs of the 21st century. Community leaders in areas where schools underperform are looking for guidance, and you're admitting that guidance won't be forthcoming. Hospital boards add nothing to governance and Abbott will stack them with busybodies seeking to frustrate abortions and euthanasia by measures beyond the law.

The brochure claims that bureaucrats are "unaccountable", which demonstrates such a lack of understanding of how government works that it may as well have been written by one of those fringe parties that never comes close to getting any of its members up. You can imagine the "school boards" Abbott would set up, teaching creationism and wasting government-funded medical research by claiming Gardasil is a poison.

The brochure claims:

We will establish a bi-partisan parliamentary committee jointly chaired by both sides of the Parliament, with Members and Senators with a strong personal interest in making the NDIS happen.

Bullshit. This will be political trench warfare, blocking and obfuscating with no regard for disabled people and their carers, a gravy-train for NGOs that have little involvement with disabled people currently and a tough time for smaller organisations strong enough in expertise to call the Coalition out.

We will restore transparency, certainty and confidence to the process by which medicines are listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) – ensuring medicines are listed on the basis of advice from the independent Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee, not on the whim of
the government.

Remember Abbott on RU486? I do. That's why this is bullshit.

We will support our veterans by properly indexing the Defence Force Retirement Benefits and Defence Force Retirement and Death Benefit military superannuation pensions and we will deliver this in our first Budget.

That's all very well if you assume that veterans are mainly elderly people past retirement age, as was the case under Howard and previous governments. Increased military commitments over the past decade meant that there are more veterans - including those with longterm care needs - who are of working age. This means a whole new way of thinking about veterans' affairs, including greater expenditure. No sign of that kind of thinking here - the reference to veterans was stuck under "Older Australians".

There’ll be a new Colombo Plan that’s a two way street between Australia and our region sending our best and brightest to study in the region and bringing their best here.

Stop referring to it as 'Colombo Plan'. This will require more and better diplomacy than the Coalition has shown themselves to be capable of. Reminds me of a Politically Homeless proposal of long ago, actually.

There’ll be a comprehensive review of childcare so it’s more responsive to the 24/7 needs of today’s working families.

That's it? You're going to hit the ground reviewing? Is Margie Abbott the only Liberal with any expertise in this area?

There will be no unexpected changes that are detrimental to people’s superannuation.

Unexpected by whom? You're already cutting assistance to low-income earners.

There will be no further reductions in defence spending – that’s already fallen to the lowest level, as a percentage of GDP, since 1938.

Where's the money coming from? More importantly - where's it going to (in terms of new defence initiatives) and where's the bloat?

And we will protect spending on medical research where Australia’s talented scientists give us such a comparative advantage.

Unless it's research into reproduction or stem-cells, of course. Besides, don't we want a government that will increase spending on medical research? Maybe it's just me.

Between now and polling day, we will be constantly developing our policy commitments so that you know exactly what will happen should the government change.

That's the point at which any self-respecting journalist should have gotten up and left. The same old same-old.

Our fibre-to-the-node plan will deliver superfast broadband for a fraction of the price and in a fraction of the time required to deliver fibre to the front door.

And Malcolm Turnbull is the right person to give Australians a 21st Century network because he is one of Australia’s internet pioneers.

Turnbull's scrappy policy has been hammered by the tech press to the point where he is no longer able to defend it; Abbott will have Buckley's. ICT is one area (health is another) where people defer to experts; the Coalition has learned nothing from their debacle at the last election.

And when this government claims that it’s attacking “middle class welfare”, it’s just attacking the middle class – because the family tax benefit and the private health insurance rebate are tax justice for families, not handouts.

Really? Surely "tax justice" means cutting expenditure overall and lowering taxes, rather than handouts - right Joe? This split between paternalism and small government is a fundamental one within the Liberals and one would hope it had been better worked out by now. Once you start loading policies on top of it the cracks will open up, and no amount of stunt-work can save it.

Along the way, though, I’ve been a concrete plant manager as well as a Rhodes Scholar; a footy coach as well as a journalist; a nipper parent as well as a political adviser.

This guy has been a dilettante. As soon as things have gotten hard, he's flitted away and left problems for others to clean up.

I cherish my time on patrol with the Queenscliff surf club and with the local brigade – not just for the community service – but because working with people without a political agenda helps to keep politicians grounded in the real world.

This man does nothing to foster voluntary community organisations. This man has spent his career sneering at "do-gooders", the very people who hold those organisations - indeed, the very country - together. If experience as a journalist means anything, it should mean calling Abbott out on this crap. Abbott regards "people without a political agenda" as mugs, and treats them accordingly.

It’s why I’ve tried to be useful in remote communities as a teacher’s aide and builder’s assistant rather than just a glorified tourist from Canberra.

So hammering in some nails for the camera makes you a poser "builder's assistant"? There are people who do those jobs for a living and you have no insight into how or why or what they need to do their jobs better. We're expected to vote for a man in his fifties to do work experience (while unemployed people of that age can't even - oh, what's the use)?

And that's what we're meant to buy here: the Tony Abbott Action Figure, with accessories sold separately. Sluggos Tony, Firey Tony (about whom, more later), Handyman Tony, Bicycle Tony; a man trying to match it not with Julia Gillard, but with Barbie. No wonder it was such an insubstantial speech, from such an insubstantial man.

I’m ready for the election.

The Coalition is ready.

Oh no you're not.

Abbott is the most vain Liberal leader since Andrew Peacock, further demonstrated by his plastic face at this appearance. This does not reinforce an image of youthful vigour; it reinforces the image of a man who will not grow up, and who will block out reality with quick fixes rather than deal responsibly with what is really happening.

Good on Lenore Taylor and Laura Tingle for asking Abbott about Ashby-Slipper. Michelle Grattan's effort is the sort of thing that homeless people mutter as they push shopping trolleys around; junior journalists with real questions to ask Abbott must have chafed at Grattan's seniority without anything to learn from it.

The most telling moment was where he promised "hand on heart" that no member of the Coalition was involved in a conspiracy to use Ashby as a catspaw against Slipper - and then he placed his hand somewhere near his pancreas. From this we can conclude his promise is hollow - and that a man who has supposedly led a full life, and who aspires to high office, is not in touch with his own heart.

The arrest of Craig Thomson saw political partisans shelter behind either of two conspiracies:

• the PM knew Thomson's arrest was imminent, so she called the election date early to lock the ALP in behind her and draw out Abbott on policy detail; or
• the NSW government was in cahoots with Abbott to schedule Thomson's arrest so that Abbott looked like he has a real policy win.

As David Donovan points out, police go in heavy-handed when they have genuine fear (e.g. against violent criminals like Malcolm Naden) or when they are putting on a show. It looks like the verdict on Thomson will not be clear before the election, which is a pity overall and may not represent the triumph Liberals would hope.

Abbott is wildly praised by the press gallery for his speechcraft, but up and down the country there are high school prefects who are far more confident and capable speakers. He wants the press gallery to think he's a nice guy, which is how they regarded Kim Beazley. He really has put all his eggs into the MSM basket, while the Prime Minister hasn't. Maybe there's nothing we can do about it and the press gallery just like him and so there; we've just got to eat shit badly though-out Liberal talking points until after the Gillard government is re-elected in September. Finkelstein will be the least of their worries.

Hiding and seeking the real Tony

When the journosphere announced that Tony Abbott was going to engage in a pre-election campaign, going around the country with stunts for the media but offering no specific knowledge about how we would be governed by the Coalition, I thought: how would this be different to what he's been doing for the past three years?

In the recent bushfires affecting the south-east of the country, Abbott purloined a truck and a uniform from the Davidson Rural Fire Service brigade (which was not on active service nor on stand-by), drove it several hundred kilometres and held a press conference for a Liberal MP who isn't seeking re-election.

It was stupid for Abbott to put himself in a position where he was using public emergency resources for a self-serving stunt. He has put the NSW Government in an invidious position too; one that might come back to bite them at a time not of their choosing.

Even if you write all of that off because hey, that's politics, Abbott just looks like a poser. This undercuts the whole action-man persona Abbott and people like Credlin have been carefully building for over three years. Having Abbott fly to Brisbane, spend two minutes filling a sandbag and flying out again - you have to wonder how serious the Coalition really are (as long as you're not a press gallery journalist, who do not dare ask even mild questions like that).

These are proper questions for the alternative government to ask (so long as it doesn't get in the way of actual emergency relief efforts as required right now):

• Are there any lessons for the Federal Government to have learned from recent emergencies (e.g. the Victorian fires of 2010 2009, the Queensland floods 2011; it may be too early for lessons from more recent events like the Tasmanian fires) which are not being applied here?
• Is there anything that the Federal government should do besides passively offering assistance and consolation, keeping the Bureau of Meteorology going, and sending out the Army?

Do you think Abbott and the Coalition - anyone at all, even some anonymous backbencher or staffer - is thinking about those issues?

Drag0nista has made the Abbott-Latham link almost ten years after Michael Duffy's Hot for Boofheads. What she and Grattan regard as "the likeliness that he will be in the PM’s office by the end of the year" is nothing more than the conventional wisdom of the press gallery, a meme in which they are trapped and out of which they cannot credibly break no matter what happens. They both rely heavily on the 'they would say that, wouldn't they' of senior Liberal frontbenchers talking up the Liberal leader and talking down his weaknesses.

The point about both Latham and Abbott that it was necessary for each to hide their real selves from the public, in order for the public to hold them at the same regard they hold themselves (and at which Duffy held them). Latham failed in that endeavour and Abbott is starting to do so now, despite Grattan and others in the journosphere having been more than happy to help out with his smoke-and-mirrors routines.

Karen Middleton is a former Chair of the Press Gallery and reports for SBS. Her reports never waver from presenting press gallery groupthink as though it's what is important about how we are governed. People who craft political messages, like Textor, love that predictability and Middleton loves an easy-to-get story. That explains the kissy-kissy insider intimacy here, the disdain for the barbaric "some" (we are millions, Karen, millions. You can't see us from Canberra even if you stand on tip-toes on Capital Hill, and nor can you see us in the crap Textor shows you in the name of "inside information")?

To give another example (if you're a Crikey subscriber), Bernard Keane thinks that Abbott's inconsistency is just part of his charm, and that you gotta let Tony be Tony if you're going to make it in the press gallery; never mind information-gathering for the reader/voter.

On Australia Day we had this, which generated a lot of outrage from people who'd never vote Liberal anyway. If you chopped the last two paragraphs those remarks would have been perfectly apposite, the sort of thing people who like Abbott mean when they speak well of him.

The fact that he didn't is the sort of thing that should worry Liberal partisans more than it does their opponents. The convict thing was a stupid thing to say in SA, a state where people - particularly Liberal voters - bristle at the very idea of "the convict stain". The fact that it leaves Aborigines out of any place in modern Australia is more than merely unfortunate phrasing. It undercuts a lot of the outreach work that Abbott has done with Aboriginal communities such as Noel Pearson's operation in Cape York, and then there's Noel Pearson's operation in Cape York, and of course not forgetting Noel Pearson's operation in Cape York.

The reason why leaders use historical references in speeches is to reinforce their position: to demonstrate an understanding of the past helps reinforce how we came to the present with the leadership that we have; and to command the present is to command the future. To demonstrate a ropey and facile understanding of the past, and one that irritates the audience, can only make people wonder about Abbott's present position and can't help him seek advancement later in the year.

May God bless you and may God bless our country on this important day.

A lot of people got upset at that little injection of religiosity into a secular occasion: I didn't. It was well meant and sincere, and should be accepted as such. His real mistake was to depart sunny Glenelg to throw himself into a pre-election campaign.

The pre-election campaign is a Liberal Party ploy foisted on weak leaders. Nick Greiner submitted to it in the late 1980s, leaving nothing to chance at a time when it was a new and exciting idea from the US. Of all people, Andrew Peacock succumbed to it in the lead-up to the 1990 election, and a fat lot of good it did him. Jeff Kennett and Barry O'Farrell disdained the very suggestion, and so have other confident and electorally-successful Liberals since. You show me a Liberal leader who gets sucked in to a pre-election campaign, and I'll show you someone who's electorally doomed and who gets pushed around by backroom operators. The last Liberal leaders to fall for it were, if I recall correctly, Peter Debnam and Robert Doyle. If Isobel Redmond survives she will almost certainly be subject to this indignity too.

Abbott's pre-election campaign launch in a Lidcombe shed did nothing for party morale. Active Liberals, keen Abbott fans, knew that they were engaging in an empty exercise - and it shows on and undermines the all-important TV optics. The fact that news programs shunted their coverage of it after the flooding in Queensland and northern NSW reinforces the image of Abbott as poser. That event did nothing for the part of Australia which doesn't regard western Sydney as any sort of heartland, i.e. most of it. For those who do it yielded nothing beyond those images. The only real trace of it is this shower of nothing in particular.

The picture on the front page is significant. If it was true that people respond well to Abbott as Alpha Male, they would have stayed with this, which basically says the same things but which appears to have been superseded. On the Real Solutions document, the team are arrayed to prop up a weak leader - similar to the way Labor propped up Bill Hayden in 1980 with the more popular Neville Wran and Bob Hawke.

In that picture the Coalition front bench resembles a public service recruitment panel. It is as though they are to recruit us to their cause, rather than we selecting them as our government. What are they looking at? They remind me of David Moore's picture of migrants regarding Australia for the first time, hopeful but wary; a mix of emotions on their faces as to what lies in store for them. Have Hockey and Turnbull just come from a funeral, or are they at one?

It is heartening to see that Tony Abbott, and by extension the Coalition, believe in Australia and its future. After all that consultation it's a start, but hardly a solution as such. The document really doesn't contain any solutions at all. It reads like the findings of focus group research, transcribed from butchers-paper scribblings with some basic graphic design slapped on top.

Note in particular the recurring logos featuring a white Australia, girt by sea and disconnected from everywhere else: a visual dogwhistle.

I will go into that document in greater detail later in the week, bringing it together with his impending Pikers' Club speech and the various bits of jetsam that have emerged from Team Abbott is recent weeks. The fact that Abbott has been asked more questions about Tim Mathieson's prostate exam comments than about Ashby-Slipper shows what you can expect from the National Pikers' Club.

For the moment, though, Team Abbott are learning the lesson that Team Latham only learned after it was too late. The real lesson of Latham for Abbott is not that the press gallery will suddenly turn into gaffe-hounds like they did with Latham - they won't, not for the Stunt Man who has served them so well. The real lesson of Latham for Abbott is that if you let the public in on the real person that is the leader, people will be repelled and flee before you.

In part, this election campaign will be a race between those who want to discover what an Abbott government will be like and those who want to hide it. This will be a most interesting part of the campaign and the mainstream media will not cover this at all well (and nor will they do "the big issues" either; you know how they roll, devil-is-in-the-detail, are-you-frustrated-you-can't-get-your-message-out and all that).

Is Gay Alcorn kidding herself?

In this article, Gay Alcorn proposes a whole new way of reporting election-year politics, kind of. I know, I'm being harsh and she's trying to do something worthwhile, but what she proposes simply doesn't ring true.

The first thing to be said for Alcorn's piece is that it would, for all its shortcomings, have been a revelation had she written it as an editor at The Age - but she isn't one, she's a freelancer. There's a real lack of buy-in from the masthead, for which this is just another wacky idea lobbed out there to fill up column-inches.

As a journalist for more than 20 years, and an editor for seven, I'm surprised at how much I'm dreading it. Already, press gallery journalists have pronounced that politics will be more bitter, more personal, more toxic this year and that - groan - the election will be about "trust and character".

The solution is clear: sack the press gallery journalists. Yes, I'm serious: Grattan, Hartcher, pretty much all of them. They have shown that they do not - and cannot - tell us what we need to know. What's more useless than a journalist who won't tell you what you need to know? Like a Rechabite bartender, they undermine their own position to the point where it's easiest and best just to get rid of them.

Yes, the 2010 election was dire, and it's great that the coverage is starting to become part of that - albeit in that heavily qualified, excruciating and strangely usually facile way that journalists use when talking about one another, even though theirs is the industry they know better than any other. But (forgive the cliche here, but you know how journos love 'em) it's an ill wind that blows no good. Alcorn quotes from Greg Jericho's The Rise of the Fifth Estate, but she missed the most telling story that should give hope to editors who think that journalism is worthwhile.

Jericho tells the story of how, on the same day in the 2010 campaign, the Coalition released two policies in different locations. Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison launched the immigration policy in Sydney while Tony Smith (then Shadow Communications Minister) and Andrew Robb launched the ICT policy. The political journos mostly went to Sydney, where they all learned nothing new and all wrote the same story (because learning nothing new makes you want to buy the paper every day). Very few press gallery journos went to see Smith and Robb, and more fool them because they missed the bigger story.

Most of the journalists who went to the ICT policy launch were ICT journalists, people who know the difference between bandwidth and throughput speeds. They listened politely to the introductory remarks, and they read the policy. They did not address Robb or Smith by their given names, nor pry into their private lives, nor did they talk over them as they answered questions. They politely asked them fair questions germane to the subject-matter before them, questions which Smith and Robb were unable to answer because they had not done their homework.

Not since 1990, when then Shadow Health Minister Peter Shack admitted that the policy he had developed in his portfolio area for his party didn't actually add up, has there been a bigger policy debacle (not a gaffe: a policy debacle). When questioned about this policy area afterwards, Tony Abbott complained "I'm not a tech head", as though that would excuse him from not having an operative policy in this area.

No tech journalist won a Walkley (the journalists' self-awarded prizes for excellence), but Laurie Oakes won one for being the recipient of a leak.

It might surprise Jericho to know that many in the established media, where most Australians still get their political news, agree with him. We limped to the end exhausted and chastened. Why didn't those journos ask about policy? Because their head offices weren't much interested. Because the assumption is that policies - apart from a few the parties want to talk about - are dull compared with personalities.

This is bullshit.

Journos were not at all chastened, they picked themselves up and continued on as though nothing had happened. Business as usual for journalists meant decline as usual for their employers, in circulation and influence. This is why so many of them (including Alcorn) lost their jobs. The people who made the decision about what was dull and what wasn't were the same people who wept crocodile tears while handing out pink slips.

It's also true that the urge to produce the same stuff that everyone else does is irresistible for journalists. The Murdoch press are big on EXCLUSIVE this and SPECIAL REPORT that, but when they feel they have a really big story they scold the ABC and Fairfax for not running it - and rather than laughing, Fairfax and the ABC fall into line.

And because once it starts, a campaign has one big narrative: who's going to win? The polls are the story, and how they go week to week dictates whether the leaders are judged harshly or kindly.

This too, is bullshit. It's dear to the hearts of journos and editors, but it's just not true.

Who's going to win is determined by policy. The Coalition's momentum in the 2010 election stopped short of victory because Tony Abbott could not give straightforward answers to questions about workplace relations. He couldn't give straight forward answers because he didn't think it was that important: he thought a few glib one-liners would suffice. He had been a minister for that portfolio, he was in Cabinet when WorkChoices was approved, and witnessed how it became a decisive factor for the Coalition losing government in 2007. He could not move on from WorkChoices without it being an implicit rebuke to his mentor, John Howard; yet he couldn't develop a post-WorkChoices Coalition workplace relations policy because he hadn't really thought about it. Still hasn't. Still can't.

As for the government, they released policy after policy and weren't asked about them at all. Instead, Prime Minister Gillard and other ministers were asked did they feel frustrated at not getting their message across, by the very people whose job it was to tell us what those policies were. The minister who did the best job at getting their message across was the uncredited one who leaked that damaging material to Laurie Oakes.

The polls are always the story (and in the absence of a fixed and proximate election date, as US analyst Nate Silver showed, they are almost always bullshit). Regardless of what this government has done, regardless of how we are taxed and what those taxes are spent upon, the journosphere has been all about the polls. This term of parliament has shown anyone, other than the idiots who run mainstream media outlets, that viewing policy and even politics through the prism of polls is stupid: all of the worst journalism from Canberra in the past three years or so has been framed by polls, and the best flew in the face of them.

If policy is so boring, why cover it at all? Go back through The Age and other major newspapers since the last election and you'll find lots of articles (some of them quite good) on complex areas of policy - defence, NDIS, carbon pricing, you name it. You'll find plenty of good articles on those topics and more in social media too, but I'll get to that in a moment.

The journalists who write those pieces between elections are the ones who should be quizzing policy during election campaigns. These are the people who are fobbed off by politicians who insist they'll announce their policies "at the appropriate time", but when that time comes the press gallery take over and determinedly miss the point.

Leigh Sales was rightly praised for interviewing Tony Abbott and other senior politicians where she asked them pointed questions, and indeed was Walkleyed for it. Mostly, however, Sales and other politics-focused journalists show their lack of policy smarts when they ask how an issue will play (i.e. how journalists will cover it) rather than how it will work (i.e. after the media have lost interest, will the policy meet its stated aims, and will those responsible for executing it have the resources they need to do so).

As recently as the final sitting week of parliament before Christmas, veteran press gallery reporter Malcolm Farr noted idly that there were 11 substantive bills that had gone through parliament. Did Farr cover any of those bills in any detail? He did not, because he was writing the same stuff that everyone else was writing - the non-story about Gillard and the AWU, a story from back in the day when, if there had been a story there, it would have been covered.

Alcorn's employer Fairfax Media could and should get by with 3-5 permanent press gallery journalists at the most, supplemented as required by writers with specialist knowledge who might be monitoring a committee hearing, a bill passing through the parliament, or some other political event that warrants their presence in Canberra.

For those concerned about departures from traditional journalistic practice, the above is similar to what happens in court cases. When a crime occurs, or when some other event happens that ends up going to court, the journalist does the fieldwork and sees it through the court case. The journalist who does the fieldwork does not hand over to a court-reporting specialist who reports every wink and smirk of the defence barrister, who speculates whether the assistant registrar will take over from the registrar. and ignore the case before the court.

But little has changed in the way politics is covered ...

Gotcha! So much for being 'chastened'.

... except that it's harder. Newsrooms have shed staff, and there is now such a relentless demand to feed the beast 24 hours a day that there is less time to dig, less time to think independently.

To use a phrase that psychologists put to people engaged in self-defeating behaviour: how's that working for you?

What is this "feed the beast" shit? Who or what is this beast, and how do we kill it? Don't you dare accuse me, an avid consumer of this country's news media, of demanding to know every word that dribbles out of some fool's face. To borrow a phrase from Tony Abbott and use it against the media, this goes to the question of judgment and character. The nation's editors and news directors are not fair dinkum. The fact that they (including people like Alcorn) assume this beast does in fact exist and can be sustained on the output of the mainstream media shows Alcorn and others are not as committed to reform as they might fancy themselves to be.

The Age does not have the in-house resources to change the way politics is covered; in-house resources will not drink Alcorn's Kool-Aid and will continue churning out the same old same-old. At the same time, there will not be (and to be fair, Alcorn does not explicitly state this) The Age is unlikely to make effective use of bloggers. They may link to blog posts that deal with forthcoming issues as effectively as this dealt with issues in the recent past, but even that would require pitch battles with management and the conceited culture of journalism to come about.

Even if they were serious, it is hard to see what they would do differently from ABC's The Drum website. It is impossible to imagine them shirtfronting The Narrative to the extent that Peter Wicks did on the HSU, and using a non-employee to do that: look at their failure to get anything of value from Mark Baker over Gillard-AWU. Journalists may feel they lack the time to be reflective and critical; what they also lack is the guts to criticise their Narrative-spouting, Kool-Aid-drinking colleagues.

The ABC says it has listened to the "public weariness" and will shake it up this year, concentrating much more on digging into issues that matter to its audience.

What this means is that focus group shall speak unto focus group: crafted messages from the major parties will be filtered through the crafted message of the ABC's News Director and such focus groups that he/she chooses to heed at any given point. The uncritical acceptance of an Abbott quote against the JuLIAR rubbishing of anything the Prime Minister says will continue. Alcorn has taken the ABC at their word and passed on some PR shite without consideration, analysis, or any value-add on her part - a harbinger of what's to come.

Remember the snide tone of Canberra denizens wrenched from their communities and thrust into ours, condescendingly describing their fellow citizens (and those who read their output) as they went about their business in the shopping centre or school or wherever they happened to be. The journos thought they knew people from polls and news-conference banter, but the election result showed the journos had no clue. The journos followed that result by berating us for electing a hung parliament. Fuck press gallery journos. Chastened, be damned.

Editors and press gallery journalists might fret that non-press-gallery journalists might miss the big political stories during the campaign. Here's a cut-out-and-keep guide for journalists, voters, and anyone else who might be interested on what's news and what isn't:

Traditional news	Actual news
Joe Hockey says Wayne Swan is a dreadful Treasurer	Joe Hockey can’t really explain why Wayne Swan is a dreadful Treasurer, or why he’d be a better one given the economic conditions before us
Opposition criticises government over budget cuts	Opposition specifies where money should and should not be spent, and why - and if not, they miss out on that day's coverage
Separate policy releases, separate stories	Examine how different policy areas work, eg ·         if one party wants to increase numbers in the ADF but they’re cutting entitlements to personnel, how serious are they really? ·         Is cutting entitlements to single parents the best way to a) increase their workforce participation and/or b) cut expenditure?
Nicola Roxon/ Stephen Conroy argue that restricting information makes us all safer	Journalist avoids talking to press secretaries on bus, reads policy document, applies experience in gathering information to what is said in policy document, explains whether and why gap exists between politicians’ words and actual policy
Opposition oppose govt measures on information freedom, word “liberal” in Liberal Party has literal meaning here	Tony Abbott, a control freak over information who plays journalists like trouts, is the champion of information freedom. Riiiight.
[Policy measure] makes life better for families, because proponents of it say so	Is this just more middle-class welfare? Is it? If that worked so well for Howard why isn’t he still PM?
Anyone who will give you a quote that fills the empty space is your friend	If quote fails the “he/she would say that, wouldn’t he/she” test, discard it. Kill your darlings! A commitment to this principle may mean that Paul Howes disappears from the Australian media altogether, but consider whether that would be a bad thing

(Yes, it's all top of the head stuff - but it's free. Mainstream media organisations are right now engaging consultants not very different to or better than the young Mark Scott and paying absurd amounts of money for work of far less quality than that table above.)

This year, what if the media, or at least parts of it, decided they were as bored as the public with it all, and tried something radical? The horse race would be covered, but what if the big story, the main narrative, became: What do voters need to know in order for them to make up their mind which party would be best to lead the country?

An election is a snapshot of a country's challenges, fears and hopes at a given moment. What if we did the work to make them relevant, lively, and revealing? It would be harder than an election framed around reading opinion polls, but my hunch is that it would be far more interesting.

The reference to the horse-race called to mind the racetrack scene from My Fair Lady where our heroine calls on her favoured nag to "move your bloomin' arse!". More applicable to this situation, though, is the wistful song "Wouldn't it be luvverly", where she muses over things that sound nice but aren't realistically attainable.

Look at Gay Alcorn's record as journalist and editor and consider how much of her work (under her byline and those of her subordinates) fits into the left column in the above table, and how much in the right. You don't get out of a cadetship unless you swallow certain fundamental beliefs about journalism that cannot really ever be questioned. Then consider whether she's serious about being 'chastened': never mind if the leopard has changed its spots, how sleek and supple is it really?

Now consider how committed The Age really is to all this: that her employer got rid of her and has brought her back on a very tentative arrangement, which is not necessarily resourced well and not at all integrated into the formal reporting structure of the masthead. If Alcorn's opinions come to blows with those of somebody who likes their news Traditional, and who has a place in the formal reporting structure of Fairfax Media, would you bet on Alcorn's view (such as it is) prevailing?

The hope expressed in her final sentence dies right there. Much of what she believes and promulgates rests heavily on bullshit. Trust me, she says, I'm a recidivist.