tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-225343692024-03-07T19:09:42.554+11:00Press gallery reformRudd and Abbott were never good enough to become Prime Minister. Australians are badly informed by broadcast media. This blog searches for ways to get information on how we are governed, and how we might be governed.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.comBlogger961125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-56588363209948841102020-10-18T15:38:00.003+11:002020-10-18T15:38:39.022+11:00Need to know<blockquote><i>I don't need to know about that bit.</i>
- Gladys Berejiklian to Daryl Maguire</blockquote>
An earlier version of this post focused on the fact that the budget was announced last week, and right now there are compromises and horse-trading underway to get it passed into law, and that any member of the federal parliamentary press gallery worth their salt should be onto this and what it might mean for our country in these uncertain times. <p>
</p><p>
Scott Morrison went to Cairns and made two claims that could be perceived as slanders against the armed forces. First, that his RAAF aircraft had broken down (RAAF Townsville is just down the road and, if there was a serious issue, another RAAF aircraft would be dispatched within minutes), and then his cancellation of a national cabinet meeting with heads of government because he could find no secure place to run it from (HMAS Cairns, and any naval vessel currently in port there, would suffice). The press gallery simply relayed this nonsense. Only social media yielded people with actual milcoms and other government experience did the journalistic task of showing nonsense for what it is.</p><p>
</p><p>
Instead, the press gallery are as one focused on state politics. Geez, they all agreed (for they are all shrewd and diverse and competitive and feisty, just ask them) - it doesn't look good for Gladys, does it?</p><p>
</p><p>
So, let's talk about Gladys. I'm not interested in pre-empting the findings of ICAC, nor in talking about The Gladys I Knew. The behavour of journalists covering NSW state politics (both longterm members of the NSW parliamentary press gallery, and blow-ins from Canberra) is the issue here.</p><p>
</p><p>
There is no good reason why the press gallery didn't reveal the Berejiklian-Maguire relationship before now. It had been going on for years, and the whole idea of Insider Savvy Journalism is to get information and context that can't be had simply by taking press releases at face value. The contradiction of Savvy Insider Journalism is that, if you're close enough to get insider gossip then you protect your position by not reporting it, which for the public is the same as not having that information at all.
</p><p>
Publicly manifested aspects of it (e.g. overruling ministers to approve matters that went against policy, appointing as parliamentary secretary a man known for his mediocrity) were already on the record, and had been for years. If experience counts for anything in covering politics, it should include the ability to:</p><ul>
<li>piece together information from disparate sources, and</li>
<li>draw conclusions other those fed to them, and</li>
<li>test those conclusions against reality</li>
</ul>
Nobody who covers NSW politics has this ability, it would seem. They have been employed for years by large media organisations offering stable employment, accumulating the kind of journalistic experience that journalists and editors respect, and then put into a complex environment where any skills in gathering, processing and disseminating information might have come in handy. <p>
</p><p>
The benefits of this experience go both to journalists' careers and to better public information and debate. In the absence of analytical skill and courage to press conclusions, there is no compelling reason to consume traditional media. In the absence of analytical skill and courage to press conclusions, it becomes necessary to wait for tribunals to gather the sorts of information that journalists used to be able to gather themselves. What value does a journalist offer in appending ICAC transcripts?</p><p>
</p><p>
It is up to voters, not journalists or editors, to decide whether or not a government has done a good job. Traditional media needs to focus more on gathering verifiable information and less on the hall-of-mirrors of whether this is good for that politician, bad for this one. That stuff belongs on social media, and traditional media is wasting resources and credibility on this. Letting journalists and editors have their heads leads to economic unsustainability and bad public debate, signs of clear failure in an information age.</p><p>
</p><p>
Yes, yes, I hear you cry, you've said all that before, and - what about Gladys? How can she not resign in the face of such serious allegations?!?! What about all those senior ministers professing their support, surely the proper journalistic response is simply to pass on their prepared statements without comment, like every traditional media outlet accredited to the NSW parliamentary press gallery has?!?!?!</p><p>
</p><p>
Experienced political observers will recall Berejiklian's predecessor, Nick Greiner, undergoing an ICAC inquiry in 1992. Serious allegations came out of that, and there was a great deal of chatter about whether Greiner's position was untenable. Greiner put on an impression of toughness for the sake of the party, and then behind the scenes paved the way for his preferred candidate, John Fahey, to succeed him as Liberal leader and Premier.</p><p>
</p><p>
In 1992 Gladys Berejiklian and I were Young Liberals. She is nothing if not a party loyalist. I spent the whole time from then until last Monday not having to think about her private life, assuming she was the kind of dedicated public servant most people who met her assumed her to be. After years of being told how good she was, perhaps she had her head turned and developed a blind spot; she wouldn't be the first to be in that position, and if you accept that then you have no excuses for pretending things might turn out differently for her.</p><p>
</p><p>
She is emulating Greiner: toughing it out to keep the ratbags at bay while easing her preferred successor, Rob Stokes, into the job. Constance is a burnt-out volcano; Perrottet is still stained by icare and is a poncy, remote man who scares marginal-seat holders; and the task of any successful NSW Liberal leader is to hold at bay the Christianist right rather than indulge them with the leadership itself. This leaves Stokes, who gives the impression of being both amiable and capable while not overly burdened by your standard vices. When the ICAC hands down its findings - and not a day before or later - Berejiklian will resign and be replaced by Rob Stokes.</p><p>
</p><p>
The journalistic task, then, is to recognise that NSW politics is essentially a constellation of fixes. Right now, as with the federal budget, discussions are underway to shape the NSW government going forward, and those discussions are newsworthy in themselves. You bums in the federal press gallery, get back to work as you are clearly out of your depth in NSW politics.</p><p>
</p><p>
Over the past five (six? Seven?) years, we have learned that people should be told in real time what is going on. Traditional media look stupid when they fall about in shock proclaiming they didn't know:</p><ul>
<li>NSW press gallery members Andrew Clenell (SkyFoxNewsCorp) and Chris O'Keefe (Channel 9) claimed they only found out about the Berejiklian-Maguire relationship on Monday. If this is true, it doesn't speak to their Insidery Insiderness, does it? Apart from reciting press releases, what have they been doing?</li>
<li>If they did know, and kept it quiet to maintain Insidery Insiderness relationships, then what is in those relationships for us? People feel stupid for having voted without full possession of the facts. Is it the job of journalists to withhold information from us?</li>
<li>Cheryl Kernot, Ross Cameron, Julia Gillard, Barnaby Joyce, and Emma Husar can all attest to the fact that something has changed this century with regard to the private lives of prominent politicians, and the old "smirk but don't tell" rule of the press gallery simply doesn't apply any more. It reinforces low perceptions of journalists as well as the idea that the real news is somewhere other than in traditional media, which is why you needn't make it a daily habit any more, or at all.</li>
<li>If you look at news reports from 2018, when Daryl Maguire resigned as MP for Wagga Wagga, there are references to him being "very close" etc to the then newly elected Premier, Gladys Berejiklian (hurr hurr!). They knew. They compound their incompetence by lying to us. But please, renew your subscription so they can lie to you again!</li>
</ul>
If the journalism was better, the politics would be better. The journalism is easier to fix than the politics, which is firewalled with legislation and deft political maneuvering. Journalism is not subject to its own legislation and its operators aren't all that deft. The press gallery was one of the first experiments in outsourcing an essential government service (information to the public on decisions made by government), and I suggest that as a business model it has run its race. We still need information about how we are governed but both the federal and NSW parliamentary press galleries are telling us all clearly, in real time: can't help ya, can't help ourselves.<p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-79742564439916698612020-09-08T19:56:00.002+10:002020-09-08T20:18:53.830+10:00The three-body problemWhen one major party is in government in Australia, the most significant figure of the opposing party is usually the opposition leader. <br>
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If that's not the case, the most significant figure in the opposing party (and hence the biggest threat to the prime minister and the incumbent government) is almost always another member of the opposition in federal parliament: there's a challenge, the most powerful member of the opposition becomes opposition leader and takes on the prime minister. This is what happened with Labor when Kevin Rudd knocked off Kim Beazley in 2006, and to the Liberals in opposition when first Turnbull knocked off Brendan Nelson, then Abbott Turnbull. <br>
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Over the past ten years or so, the most potent threat to the incumbent prime minister has been another member of the government. Rudd and Gillard knocked one another off, Turnbull had his revenge on Abbott and Morrison knocked off Turnbull. Even now, it's most likely that Morrison's prime ministership will end at the hands of Dutton, Frydenberg, or another Liberal rather than being defeated at the ballot box by the ALP.<br>
<br>
In the last couple of months we've seen the re-emergence of a different dynamic in politics, one not seen since the late 1970s and hard for observers to fully describe then as now.<br>
<h2>NEGligible</h2>
It was 9Fairfax who got off on the wrong foot at the end of last month, with <a href="https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/federal/josh-frydenberg-and-the-monumental-task-that-will-define-him-20200825-p55p4r.html">Rob (Another Win For The Government) Harris</a> and <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/frydenberg-is-right-not-to-trust-sukkar-20200827-p55pu4.html">David Crowe</a> falling over themselves to pump up Josh Frydenberg. In the tradition of media diversity in this country, both tried to present Frydenberg as the kind of titanic political figure who could soar high o'er the landscape of squabbling party branches and Sort Them Out, in ways not really understood by those who can only see politics as something that happens in Canberra. <br>
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Frydenberg debunked this almost immediately, not with the usual kabuki of downplaying his ambitions and reiterating his fealty to the leader, but by lowering himself to the standard set by the Victorian state opposition. State Liberal MPs have criticised Victoria's Labor Premier, Daniel Andrews, as being both too hard and too soft in response to COVID19, but always criticising, following rather than leading content in NewsCorp coverage. When Frydenberg followed suit, he lost any authority that might have come from his position as Treasurer or as Victoria's most senior Liberal in federal politics. He joined their yappy daily chorus that calls to mind those that follow a postie dutifully delivering letters along a street, irritating the resident dogs but getting the job done regardless.<br>
<br>
Before he entered parliament, Josh Frydenberg had a regular column in <i>The Age</i> about The Great Issues Of Our Day which were, it must be said, bereft of vision and fresh thinking. The early days of this blog cut its teeth on the staleness of his prose and thinking. Frydenberg has taken these qualities forward into government: his handling of the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) was so bad that nobody knows what it is or what it guarantees. Such a balls-up should have ended his career, not that of the Prime Minister.<br>
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For almost forty years the Treasurer has not been some titanic figure crafting he economy in his bare hands. Keating pretended he was just as he was dismantling his own power to do so, with privatisations and outsourcings. The role has not quite been dumbed down to the point where Frydenberg can take it on. There are moments when he looks out of his depth, moments the press gallery might find humanising, but where he never quite takes us into his confidence in rebuilding the economy together. As a politican he is someone else's delivery unit, not a man of the people, and the press gallery should stop trying to package him for our delectation.<br>
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Frydenberg's bleats about Reagan and Thatcher revealed his shortcomings rather than buttressing his strengths. Reagan and Thatcher reinvented conservatism and harnessed it to neoliberalism. Conservatism needs to be anchored to its time in order to succeed politically; neither Frydenberg himself, nor Morrison, nor Reagan and Thatcher's successors in Trump and Johnson, have succeeded in crafting conservative answers to the challenges of this time. Only Angela Merkel gives a hint of what might be possible, but if you're an ambitious young Liberal are you going to go to Berlin or strike out for the suburbs and become a sub-factional playa?<br>
<br>
I get that Frydenberg keeps in constant contact with the press gallery and makes them feel less lonely. Surely they can see through him as yet another smarmy git who isn't particularly fast on his feet, who is getting outplayed by Michael Sukkar (never mind Jim Chalmers or Albanese or Andrews). Frydenberg might be a foil for Dutton if Morrison really starts to tank, but he is mostly the kind of healer that the Liberals tend to elect as opposition leader following a loss. <br>
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The faith-based press gallery coverage of Frydenberg is stupid, but you won't change them. <br>
<h2>Smirks and wedges</h2>
With a piecemeal economic strategy geared around corporate handouts (a strategy that would have prevailed regardless of COVID19, if we're to be honest here), Frydenberg has no alternative course to chart for the government than Morrison's game of smirks and wedges. Morrison ignored expert advice around the fires last summer and was caned for it; he hewed closely, if imperfectly, to expert advice on COVID19 early in the year and received the warm but fleeting rewards of mid-term political popularity. He couldn't keep it up, though. His disdain of experts on matters outside politics (he might jeer at a contract tracer's projections, and as Treasurer would not hesistate to trash unflattering economic forecasts - but he would never do likewise to, say, polling by Crosby|Textor) was too strong. <br>
<br>
If he could wedge Labor in parliament, Morrison assumed that he could do likewise to Andrews, Palaszczuk, and McGowan; all three reaped the political rewards in their home states, and Morrison lost his (even with strong media support from Murdoch and Stokes). Howard showed that it wasn't necessarily a bad thing to have Labor governments at state level, and Morrison has shown himself ambivalent to the fates of his state colleagues. This has done two things detrimental to Morrison and his government: it has created openings in those states for federal Labor, and it has created a substantial leader for Labor in Daniel Andrews.<br>
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Morrison has overestimated how clever he has been in shutting down Labor in federal parliament, moving that Albanese not be heard on major public debates (denying him the oxygen Abbott got after almost every Question Time). Morrison sits with his back to the Opposition, slumped like a bag of garbage too late for the council pickup. There will come a time when he will feel compelled to get voters excited about re-electing the Coalition to government: he will find this difficult, not because of any Albanese masterstroke, and not because of any fourth-term juju invented by the press gallery, but because he is showing us a man not rising to the occasion of national leadership but shrinking before it. <br>
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The "sports rorts" affair has all the makings of the slow, corrosive scandal that kills governments and stops people listening to new initiatives. The same has not yet happened with water trading and Angus Taylor, but this could change if significant independent candidates stand in Murray-Darling basin seats that ought not be marginal for the Coalition, and which could pose an existential threat to the Nationals. Morrison has stood by Richard Colbeck far longer than any PM in recent years would have tolerated system failure resulting in many Australians dying. Colbeck is a decent man utterly out of his depth in a life-and-death crisis, because among the other careerist hacks assembled behind him nobody is going to step up into a role that will end the political career of anyone who goes near it - possibly including Labor's Julie Collins, the putative minister in the next Labor government. <br>
<h2>Traditional media in an unconventional time</h2>
The NewsCorp response to the Morrison government's aged care failures has been interesting. They have tried to pin it on Andrews but this isn't even working in Victoria, let alone outside it. Simon Benson and his editors are not pretending that only politically-correct elites care about this. Janet al-Brechtsen and Timb Lair have uncharacteristically refrained from referring to frail elderly nursing home residents as 'bedwetters'. The government has been in office for seven years, for 18 of the past 24 years; it is not a new issue, and nor is it good enough to insist all normal checking and procedures have been followed. Labor's mild responses cannot be, and are not, framed as mad extravagant socialism. <br>
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The ABC's focus is also interesting. Hospitality is a big employer in Melbourne and in much of regional Victoria. For those of us beyond Victoria, hospitality and tourism are part of the lens through which we view and understand the place. The ABC's focus on devastated hospitality business owners helps the framing of COVID19 not as a life-threatening virus, but as a pretext for Dictator Dan to stomp on people's hopes and dreams. <br>
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Progressive projects have been scuttled when people are persuaded that the problem(s) they set out to solve aren't real, or aren't pressing. Progressives appalled at the wreckage of the policy agendas of Whitlam, Keating or Gillard acknowledge through clenched teeth that conservatives were effective in bringing them down. Only when those problems show themselves to be real and enduring, and when Labor has answers to those issues and the conservatives don't, does a once-in-a-generation political window open for progressives.<br>
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9Fairfax and 7West have largely offered watered-down versions of the Murdoch line, but where mawkish sympathy for victims of the disease does not translate to appreciation of public health efforts by anyone above frontline nurses. So much for 'go woke, go broke', or even media diversity.<br>
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People are stuck at home, and traditional media can't make money in this market. Maybe they're just no good.<br>
<h2>The kitchen sink</h2>
There are 151 seats in the House of Representatives, the Coalition have 77 and the ALP 68. Morrison has made the wrong calls and Labor the right ones in Victoria, WA and Queensland. In <i>The Australian</i> [$] <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/scott-morrison-vexed-by-states-in-a-crisis-loop/news-story/b1f8cd3562e53ff8f337ddb1b05cea2b">Simon Benson wrote</a> that polling shift was driven by the border wars, with the PM caught on the wrong side of the argument in states where continued closures remain popular. The trouble with that is state border closures are popular everywhere - you can't consider it an exception when it's the norm. <br>
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In the next federal parliament <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-03/northern-territory-west-australia-lose-federal-seat-vic-gain-one/12419986">there are expected to be 150 House seats</a>. It is entirely feasible that ten seats - and hence federal government - could change hands in those three states alone: <ul>
<li>The Liberals in Victoria have been enfeebled by thirty years of factional war, winning three of the nine state elections in that time.</li>
<li>In WA the departure of Matthias Cormann exposes the incapacity of Chilla Porter's boy and George Cash's girl to hold the show together and fend off the evangelical churches as loci of organising strength.</li>
<li>The LNP in Queensland was always a shitshow and the Murdoch media there embarass themselves by pretending otherwise. </li>
<li>In South Australia, <a href="https://indaily.com.au/news/analysis/2020/09/04/richardson-covid-cushion-keeps-marshall-above-the-political-rubble/">the Liberals are reverting to their mean</a> (in both the pejorative and statistical senses of that term), which make losses more likely than gains.</li>
<li>Liberals in NSW and Tasmania will be flat out holding the line rather than making up for losses elsewhere.</li>
</ul>
Labor should have strong and experienced operators in those states. Labor's factional problems and state government issues can be assuaged by expanding into federal politics, in fields previously denied them by effective Coalition campaigns organised from outside those states.<br>
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Daniel Andrews has simply hewed to the advice of experts, which gets him credit both for being right (what the experts said would happen has happened, and all he did was support them) and wrong (look, he just followed what the experts said, tough times etc). He has answered press gallery questions simply and in few words, which is what Abbott did in his ascendancy. He has kept calm and resisted the urge to be nasty, while also being firm in putting detractors in their place. Morrison has not done this consistently. Andrews has become a figure of national authority, a position Premiers rarely attain and which none of the other incumbents have.<br>
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The Murdoch press threw the kitchen sink at Andrews in 2018, hoping to beat him or at least force him into the bare-majority impotence that beset federal Labor in 2010-13. It is doing so again now. The criticism of him isn't consistent and doesn't have to be. The point of the criticism, from all sides (even washed-up footballers jonesing for one last media fix) and unrelenting, is to fix Andrews with the virus: to make it in him, and of him. The idea is to make Andrews the face of everything you hate about the virus - the horrible and lonely death of your <i>νόνα</i>, the closure of your local pub/coffee shop/nail salon, the footy matches in far provinces full of ingrates and unsophisticates - and when it is over, to consign it and him to history like the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/scapegoat">scapegoat</a> of old. <br>
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The Victorian Liberals have their opponents but can't make them a unifying force for their internal combatants. As with Abbott, the Victorian Liberals are happy for NewsCorp to dictate both strategy and tactics. Menzies distanced himself from Keith Murdoch, as he had seen how Hughes had come to rely on him too much, and he was polite but distant to Murdoch's lad when Sir Keith died. No such nous or confidence exists in Menzies' successors today. Victorian state political reporters say that Liberals admire Andrews' political skills, much as NSW Liberals begrudgingly admired Carr and Iemma; but in both cases in didn't take a genius to keep those Liberals in opposition.<br>
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The trouble with the pact between the Victorian Libs and NewsCorp for <i>Krieg ganz Krieg</i> against Andrews is that there is no fallback position for either party. If Andrews is vindicated and the lockdown results in a negligible COVID presence until the (swift) arrival of a vaccine, his opponents in both media and politics are exposed. NewsCorp's sales have declined to the point where their business model depends increasingly on handouts; an Andrews victory, cemented at the state election in 2022, will embolden those less disposed to reward this editorial line. The Liberals have lost Hawthorn and came close to losing Brighton to Labor - a concerted independent campaign by the sorts of people who are too good to run for Liberal preselection could finish the party in what was once its homeland.<br>
<h2>Dumbed down</h2>
The press gallery narrative dichotomy that people are either Dan Stans or Freedom Warriors is stupid, one of those media constructs that impedes public debate rather than facilitating it. The large majorities supporting lockdown reflect a sober-minded, mature populace recognising the strains on the health system and the desirability of sharply limiting the spread of the virus that has already ravaged so many, and so much. The people to which the media report is always better than the media that supposedly serve them/us: to invert that is to court career disaster. <br>
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You'll notice that Andrews is not exactly beating quiet public respect off with a stick. As political legacies go it is potentially much better than NewsCorp would have you believe. <br>
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It's also true that Andrews was Premier for five years before COVID19 struck, and before that was Health Minister under Brumby and Bracks. Any shortcomings the Victorian health system has, absolutely or in comparison to NSW/NZ/any other jurisdiction you think is valid, belong with Andrews as much as anyone else. Pandemics aren't a Liberal/Labor issue, so good old-fashioned ministerial responsibility will have to do. Andrews seems to appreciate this in ways that Frydenberg and Morrison do not.<br>
<h2>That was a cue?</h2>
But, I hear you cry, Labor already has a federal opposition leader; and indeed it does. <br>
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Around the turn of the century, when Anthony Albanese faced a concerted campaign in his seat against the Greens, the <i>Daily Telegraph</i> ran a front page lauding him: <b>Australia needs Albo</b> screeched the headline, without being clear what it/we needed him for. Anthony Albanese has spent his entire career in inner-western diffusing generations of near-revolutionary energy and zeal across the spectrum of the left and harnessing it to the lumpen ALP, facilitating urban development and gentrification while minimising other changes. I doubt whether any federal electorate but his has so many ABC employees and tertiary education workers. Labor was founded in the 1890s to represent the sorts of people who dwelled in Rozelle terrace houses and Marrickville workers' cottages, and Albanese has helped ensure it still does. <br>
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Like Joe Biden in the US, he has known tragedy and disappointment in life. Both men are backroom deal-makers rather than orators. Like Biden, Albanese comes to the leadership of his party where rather more is expected of the role than glad-handing the increasingly uncompromising right. Now is the time to demonstrate what Australia needs Albo to do, to say, to be, and not to yield.<br>
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Albanese's problem is that Daniel Andrews has demonstrated to a far greater extent what is needed for Labor leadership in these times. <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/today/paddy-manning/2020/27/2020/1598505816/albo-steps">Paddy Manning noted</a> that Albanese has stepped up, to a point, on aged care. Manning noted that Albanese has given more interviews recently - you bet he has. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/audio/2020/aug/15/anthony-albanese-i-know-we-will-win-the-next-election">Katharine Murphy gave Albanese an expansive interview</a>, which started badly for him (and which, sportingly, appears in <a href="https://anthonyalbanese.com.au/anthony-albanese-transcript-podcast-interview-the-guardian-podcast-with-katharine-murphy-friday-14-august-2020">the transcript on Albanese's own website</a> in all its glory):
<blockquote><i>KATHARINE MURPHY, HOST: Hello, lovely people of the podcast and welcome to the show. You are with Katharine Murphy and the show is Australian Politics Live. And with me in the pod cave is someone who has missed their cue.
ANTHONY ALBANESE, LEADER OF THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY: Oh, that was a cue?</i></blockquote>
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Listen to that for yourself, but Albanese tries to make the case that as Opposition Leader, he isn't the hapless Kim Beazley and nor a boofhead like that other veteran of Sydney Uni student politics named Anthony - nor does he make a compelling case for removing him from opposition altogether and putting him into government. <br>
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Maybe that wasn't the idea of that interview. The trouble is that all successful opposition leaders are aggressive and push the government out. The old saw that "oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them" is dead wrong - the opposite is true. Abbott, Rudd, Howard, Hawke and Fraser all knew that time is short and life is cruel, and each pushed hard until they could afford to be gracious on election night. Unsuccessful opposition leaders, from Sir John Latham to Mark Latham, all played The Long Game and fat lot of good it did them.<br>
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Albanese seems to lead a united team in Canberra. Plibersek, Burke, and Bowen are all from NSW and all have similar strengths and weaknesses to himself. Non-NSW contenders like Jim Chalmers can't yet make the case that Albanese has failed, and that they have what he lacks. Shorten is an exhausted volcano, like Simon Crean proof that Hawke shut the union-to-PM door behind him. <br>
<h2>The three-body problem</h2>
The federal government, the Victorian opposition and commercial media have combined to present Daniel Andrews, not Anthony Albanese, as the most significant Labor figure and the most potent external threat to the government. Andrews is not a member of federal parliament and isn't subject to either the argy or the bargy of that arena. He does not confront Morrison and Frydenberg across the dispach box, and nor is he hunting Albanese in the caucus room.<br>
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The last time Australian politics had this predicament was in the late 1970s. Malcolm Fraser had crushed Gough Whitlam with what are still the two biggest electoral majorities in Australian federal politics. The Opposition Leader in federal politics was Bill Hayden, but he wasn't Labor's most potent threat to Fraser. That title belonged to Bob Hawke, President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. The Canberra press gallery rarely grilled Hawke (at a time when they had more journalists who hunted out their own stories and were offended by the pre-digested pap that passes for reporting these days) but they knew all about him. Polls consistently showed Hawke as much more popular than Hayden or Fraser or anyone.<br>
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In 1979 Hawke entered parliament and Fraser began monstering him straight away. He went from running his own show to the very different arena of federal parliament, where he had to at least pay lip service to Hayden. By 1982 Fraser had seen off a challenge from Andrew Peacock and was playng Hayden and Hawke off against the other. He was the master of the House, and if you believe in that Annabel Crabb theatre-of-parliament guff then Fraser looked unassailable (which is precisely why it's garbage political analysis).<br>
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Morrison has seen off one opposition leader already and may well see off another - so what?<br>
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Last year there was talk that Mark Dreyfus, federal member for Isaacs (Vic), would resign to take a state judicial position; but in this time of COVID19 and Some You Wreck all that has gone quiet. Nobody in the press gallery has followed up on it, of course.<br>
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If you accept that the Snap Back isn't going to happen, you need a vision for how we go forward through and out of the COVID19 predicament. The idea of a Roadmap Out Of Lockdown is absurd in the absence of a vaccine. It works only as a conversation topic amongst idle people and also as a stick with which to beat Daniel Andrews. It will not sell newspapers and offers little of value in terms of economic and business planning. Perhaps Andrews is the man of the hour without our political media being able to fully explain why.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-49649215769503544632019-05-10T16:49:00.001+10:002019-05-10T18:13:50.007+10:00Shadows on the wallOne of the most important pieces on media criticism in recent times is Richard Cooke's <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2019/may/1556632800/richard-cooke/news-corp-democracy-s-greatest-threat"><i>NewsCorp: Democracy's greatest threat</i></a>. Read it if you haven't, see you when you get back.<br />
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<h2>Pearls before swine</h2>As someone who has been critical of journalists myself, I applaud the line about the gravitron (rather than the gravitas) of The Good Murdoch Journalist. However, such an image is worse than unfair: it's inaccurate.<br />
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The better parallel would be those committed Christians who follow the teachings of their faith in service to the poor, the sick, the wretched of the earth. Church organisations refer to these people, frequently overlooked and underresourced, with the clear threat that a dollar spent on defending abuse cases or making reparation is a dollar not spent on good and holy works.<br />
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In his attacks on Facebook and Google, Murdoch invokes his Good Hard-Working Journalists as though they were all like that. He did the same during the Leveson inquiry in the UK. They are the cuttlefish's ink, the scent of the skunk.<br />
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All media organisations complain about being Under Attack, blending their own acts of omission or commission with unfair criticism or personal attacks into a kind of miasma through which all of their staff trudge doggedly each day. The reality of NewsCorp is that if you doubled the resources available to its newsrooms, or if you halved them, the ratio of good:bad:ugly journalism would remain about the same. <br />
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Mind you, this is much the same for the ABC or for any other media organisation.<br />
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Go back to those times when newsrooms were better resourced than they are, to see both the hack work and the insightful stuff. The bylines are interesting: some of today's hacks were once capable journalists, while some who have since rehabilitated themselves were clearly Just Following Orders back in the day.<br />
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<h2>NewsCorp as propaganda</h2>This is not to say that Cooke's central thesis - that NewsCorp is a propaganda outlet more than a news organisation - isn't correct. The fact that Australia has no language even to hold a public debate on the Christchurch shooting shows how comprehensively Murdoch has shifted the Australian media since he came to dominate it in the 1980s. <br />
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It is also a symptom of having conservative governments for 17 of the past 23 years. Go back to periods in the past where long-term conservative governments came to their end: first people had to develop a language for talking about issues, and only then could they develop and advocate for policies that addressed such issues as military failure or structural disadvantage. <br />
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NewsCorp learned this in its DNA. Keith Murdoch wrote the narrative on Gallipoli and not only imposed it on the Hughes Government, but treats each Anzac Day as a franchised product that it owns. It even mints coins for the occasion, the only organisation outside the federal government that does so. The Twitter debate "who was Australia's worst PM, Turnbull or Abbott?" properly belongs with Hughes: he cut a Faustian bargain with Murdoch and conducted not one, but two, deeply divisive sectarian referendums during a world war with Murdoch's enthusiastic support. <br />
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Say what you will about any Prime Minister in my lifetime, none of them plumbed Hughes' depths. He was a maggot, and NewsCorp own him. He shows how deep their roots go. Had Bill Shorten gone to New York in response to Rupert Murdoch's summons, it would not have surprised me if the old bastard brought out a glass jar with Hughes' wrinkly old scrotum floating in glycerine.<br />
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The Queen has met every Australian Prime Minister since Menzies, and has more direct experience of Australian administrative government than anyone in this country. Rupert Murdoch has met every PM since Hughes, because his father Keith had them to dine with him at their family home in Melbourne. Murdoch follows Australian politics more closely because his business model depends on Australian politics more than hers does.<br />
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There are two examples that prove the propaganda-over-news thesis which are not scientific, but could have been, so well do they make the case.<br />
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Jessica Irvine was an economics writer who started at Fairfax. She drew together statistics with pronouncements by politicians and other analysts, drawing conclusions carefully and building trust. Her articles were always worth reading and she was a breath of fresh air promising a future that Ross Gittins - once a fearless advocate for economic reform, now a stale and fearful both-sides theatre-reviewer - could never deliver.<br />
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When Irvine went to NewsCorp, Fairfax's fate as a journomuseum seem sealed. When News started running her pieces, the first third of them were culture-war garbage that didn't relate to the topic of her piece. The rest of those pieces seemed compressed, as though the point derived from her analysis were somehow secondary.<br />
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Irvine returned to Fairfax and her pieces are still among the best produced by its former mastheads. Economics pieces contain a lot of political content and are important in evaluating whether or not a government is doing its job, far more so than breathless press gallery inanities.<br />
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By contrast, Greg Sheridan was education writer for <i>The Bulletin</i> before he joined NewsCorp. He was obsessed by leftwing control of the National Union of Students (NUS), and missed entirely the shift taking place in higher education to becoming one of Australia's major export industries and soft-power exports, as well as the changing role of technical and further education in a de-industrialising economy. <br />
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In the time Sheridan has been Foreign Editor of <i>The Australian</i>, the foreign policy of this country has changed profoundly. He has not covered the decline of the US and the rise of China (particularly its interference in Australian technology systems) at all well. He does not understand the EU except through the most tawdry of British reporting (though, to be fair, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/european-press-corps-eu-fails/587083/">no journalist does</a>). He has not addressed to any significant extent the decline in our relationships with Papua New Guinea and countries in Melanesia and Polynesia - and no, his equation of support for the current government of Israel with support for that country's existence really does not make up for it. <br />
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Sheridan is at his best covering shenanigans at Young Liberal branches. Given his failure at his titular job there are very real questions whether he ought to have any job at all in the media, but if he does he should be his paper's Shenanigans Editor. Cooke's gravitrons have no hope of making up for Sheridan's professional shortcomings with earnest but hastily constructed pieces on, say, recent elections in Indonesia or India (and why they may be more significant for Australia than, say, republishing US pieces on polling non-college educated white female voters in Tennessee).<br />
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Murdoch press set up their own commentators as experts over those outside the organisation. This has happened in climate change, as Cooke points out, and also in electoral politics. Recently we have seen SkyNews organise a joint press conference (outrageously designated The People's Forum), where most of the hand-picked attendees agreed Shorten had made the more compelling case to become Prime Minister over Morrison. This was immediately followed by NewsCorp's "experts" making the contrary case. Andrew Bolt followed this by blaming voters, rather than misinformation from traditional media, for both the reality of and potential for bad government. <br />
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The idea that the people are sovereign in a democracy is against NewsCorp's business model. It is an inconvenience that the company truckles to when it cannot manipulate it with blatant misinformation.<br />
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<h2>Shocked, shocked I tell you</h2>Part of the decline of any organisation is when bits fall off it and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/09/for-30-years-i-worked-for-news-corp-papers-now-all-i-see-is-shameful-bias">once-loyal retainers make telling criticisms</a>:<br />
<blockquote>No editor I worked for would have put up with the biased anti-Labor rubbish that, shamefully, the papers now produce on a daily basis.</blockquote>Really? Paul Kelly seems happy to go along with <i>The Australian</i> on its downward slide, having been editor at its peak in the early 1990s. <br />
<blockquote>The journalists are not to blame. Many have been friends of mine for decades and they share my disgust. Probably the most blatant example of bias and low-grade coverage is the employment of most of the columnists who appear weekly. Their observations are, in the main, predictable, weak, unresearched and juvenile.</blockquote>Yes they are, as Cooke points out. They take the paycheque and carry all those columnists, dead weight who will drag down the organisation once it reaches its tipping point. <br />
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Being friends with those journos gives you less of a perspective on their culpability, notwithstanding umpty-ump years as a journo and all the trinkets (bucket o'Walkleys, Mrs Joyful Prize for Raffia Work, etc). You'd have to be thick not to notice the rightwing drift of NewsCorp or to think this is a recent invention... and yet, on page 20 of <i>The Australian</i> today, there is a profile on the leftwing US folk musician Pete Seeger that is more sympathetic than you might expect (did you know Seeger attended Harvard with John F. Kennedy?). If you were a journo, you'd fall on that as proof that #balance is not completely dead. Me, I'd use it as further proof that you only understand Australian journalism when you separate coverage of politics and government from coverage of anything else (because this is clearly what NewsCorp editors do, and it's key to understanding everything else about them and the Australian media more broadly).<br />
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<h2>The Israel Folau of Australian journalism</h2><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/may/10/news-corp-rick-morton-australian">This piece</a> proves yet again that journalists who lapse into the passive voice are up to no good:<br />
<blockquote>"Am I lending credibility to a horrible machine? I don’t know?"</blockquote>Oh, please. <br />
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<h2>The sceptre and the isle</h2>Cooke rightly points out that there have been several in-depth studies of Murdoch from people helpless in the face of the juggernaut. He also points out in passing that circulation of media is in decline. And again, he notes recent pictures of Rupert Murdoch looking frail, and his son Lachlan taking on ever greater responsibilities within the company.<br />
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In the preceding paragraph, the latter two notions make the first unsustainable. <br />
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Any empire becomes vulnerable at the point of succession. When Sir Keith Murdoch died in 1952, his son Rupert was 21 and did not have the reputation for turning big companies into little ones that Lachlan has (you'll tell your friends about One.Tel). Part of the reason why Rupert set up News Limited in the first place was because his father's estate was a shambles: Sir Keith was more a propagandist than a businessman. Lachlan Murdoch may well be as right-wing as his father, or less so; he may be equally determined to fight Google and Facebook, or his laid-back nature and financial vulnerability may incline him to avoid fights he cannot win. <br />
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Lachlan Murdoch is unlikely to have the same influence over politicians than his father and grandfather had. The last great editor in the Murdoch stable was Paul Kelly (editor of <i>The Australian</i> 1991-95), well before the advent of social media and the odd conflation of the NewsCorp editorial line with libertarianism and ultramontane Catholicism. Part of the drawback of an organisation that is firmly under your control is that it is inevitably top-heavy with supine idiots. While Cooke is all over this, and notes that it has persisted and gotten worse for decades, it is simply not sustainable. Loyal idiots who lose the focus of and reciprocity for their loyalty rarely fare well. Such people cannot be part of its future, nor that of Australia's other traditional media outlets going forward.<br />
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The entire Australian media will melt down when Rupert Murdoch dies. Even those who have never worked for NewsCorp will be unable to function when he is not merely o'er the seas, but permanently an ex-person. Some will do things they dared not do when he was alive, as <i>The Herald Sun</i> made a racehorse Sportswoman of the Year soon after Dame Elisabeth was no longer alive to complain. This is a far more significant risk (both in impact and likelihood) for Australia's traditional media than broadband internet. Lachlan Murdoch will not be able to impose himself to quell uprisings and maintain order to the same extent. He might avoid the Icarus-like plunge of James Packer, but may not avoid becoming Australia's <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Cromwell">Richard Cromwell</a>.<br />
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NewsCorp is an odious organisation, and as it declines it will likely become more nasty than less. This will particularly be the case if Tony Abbott and other rightwing bonnet ornaments are ejected from federal parliament on the 18th and foist themselves upon NewsCorp demanding payment and profile, because the imagined political-class progression has eluded them too. While such an organisation might poison the national discourse, it cannot also be said to control it.<br />
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<h2>Unpopular populism</h2>Bill Shorten took a calculated risk in not flying to New York to meet with Murdoch, and they have treated his campaign for the Prime Ministership with disregard bordering on contempt. NewsCorp has generally preferred to support popular groundswells, providing at least tepid support to Labor in their victorious campaigns of 1972, 1983, and 2007. <br />
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It is taking a risk in not supporting Shorten and Labor this time. The risk is compounded by the backfired hatchet job on Shorten's mother (no I won't link to it) which underestimated the power both of her dreams and their deferrals, their impact on her son, and the extent to which her story resonated with people - including loyal <i>Daily Telegraph</i> readers. Shorten's risk is paying off; Murdoch has no experience of an Australia where he is not at least respected, preferably feared. <br />
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It has taken a risk in backing a long-term government whose internal contradictions have snookered it. Scott Morrison was the answer to a question nobody outside the Liberal Party or NewsCorp was asking. Having a bland, do-nothing record will assist the Murdoch press in its attempts to whitewash the Coalition and present it as superior to an incoming government that will inevitably stumble in its early days. However, as with the 1980s Liberals, those who survive the next fortnight might not be capable of presenting themselves as a strong alternative independent of Murdoch coverage, and thus both further embarrass NewsCorp for being unworthy of its support and be unable to deliver as a realistic prospective government. <br />
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<i>The Herald Sun</i> both protests feebly against the Andrews state government, and keens at being ignored. Anastacia Palaszczuk owes nothing to <i>The Courier-Mail</i>. In Sydney, Adelaide, and even Hobart the support by the Murdoch press of the incumbent state governments is nice-to-have but those governments would survive an old-school concerted campaign from the Murdoch tabloids. In WA the most potent Murdoch outlet is <i>The Australian</i>; it echoes the voice of the discredited Liberal opposition and neither does the other any favours. <br />
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Murdoch and his team might prepare for a battle with the imminent Labor government, inflicting minor damage (expect Shorten to lose a minister or two in his first year). Nothing in its corporate experience, particularly that of Rupert Murdoch personally, prepares it for a future where its populist campaigns leave people cold. <br />
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Murdoch and his team gearing up for battle need not inspire the fear they once might: look at him tilting at the windmills of Facebook and Google. Say what you will about those organisations, at least Facebook and Google know that they are in the information business. Rather than rise to their challenge NewsCorp wallows in the bullshit business, and its decreasing returns for doing so are nobody else's fault.<br />
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As a politician, Gough Whitlam said that he had to "crash through or crash". Shorten acknowledged that this election is his last chance to become Prime Minister. All politicians win some, lose some. Big businesses in Australia get kickbacks or just get kicked by various governments, but they survive on commercial merits; NewsCorp is now up against the prospect that its non-political pretences are withering, and that like the politicians it favours and/or attacks, it too lives and dies at the ballot box. <br />
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Politicians go where the people are. Traditional media had power because of the assumption that it had a reach and a connectedness with the public that politicians, and their parties as community organisations, lacked. The absence of reach and connectedness has been laid bare for years now, and now we have a major party testing its luck in that breach. <br />
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There is not a constituency in this country for banning media organisations, particularly well-established ones that often resist narrow definitions. There is, however, a recognition of the relationship between media and politicians, and a recognition that the media are actors rather than passive transmitters of information: someone like Alan Reid could operate in the shadows in his time but Laurie Oakes or Simon Benson cannot and do not. <br />
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There is a contempt for politicians who are hamstrung by fear of media disapproval. The popular wish for action on climate change includes the recognition that NewsCorp oppose such action, and that some politicians toe the NewsCorp line while others do not. NewsCorp denizens must know that, for the first time, shirking responsibility for their work by claiming they were just doing their jobs simply will not do. <br />
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NewsCorp has lived by its political nous. It is dying both for lack of it, and through exhaustion in offering a service to politicians (community reach and engagement) which it cannot deliver. You don't have to storm the citadel and kill the king, still less slap his face or put fetters on him, because Murdoch is a corporate rather than a political leader. What's best is also what's most likely: watch him fade. <br />
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It would be dumb to have a royal commission or a Senate inquiry into media ownership. In the early 1990s Kerry Packer appeared before a parliamentary inquiry similar to that being proposed for Murdoch: he sailed through the feeble questioning. Watch the delight on then newly-elected Liberal MP Peter Costello, who thinks he has supplanted Packer in today's media landscape. Murdoch has been playing politics since before Morrison and Shorten were born. It simply would not work, the stupidest idea since a debates commission. Ownership is not the problem with lack of media diversity: it is rendered impossible by cross-promotion and other mental fetters (e.g. There Can Be Only One story about politics each day, which doesn't apply to sport or road crashes) by timid, dim-witted editors.<br />
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Call to mind that pathetic picture of Rupert Murdoch in the surf with Jerry Hall. We live in an age of precarious employment, so what sort of fool would hitch their wagon to this family, or to the clowns who encrust the upper reaches of their organisation? Those who have done so for decades must, for all their bluster, feel time's winged chariot drawing near. You can watch individual journos' careers go the way of Murray cod in Menindee Lakes, and either laugh or cry (check if they have written any articles about the need to upskill and be flexible in our modern economy). You can look at the political candidates before us, and see which are scarred or warped by having to deal with Murdoch. <br />
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The choice starts with voters, and will inevitably flow through to politicians and media executives. The power of Murdoch and NewsCorp is the <a href="https://web.stanford.edu/class/ihum40/cave.pdf">shadows on the cave wall</a> in our national life. The future, as always, does not belong to the fearful. It does not belong to the sick-and-tired. Whether it belongs to those who make us fearful, sick, and tired, remains an open question.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-78198317413278771572019-01-13T19:38:00.000+11:002019-01-13T19:38:42.193+11:00Dead fishRegular 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.<br />
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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. <br />
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<h2>And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong</h2>Stories like <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-09/menindee-mass-fish-deaths-spark-blame-game/10699734">this</a> 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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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 href="https://www.dailyliberal.com.au/story/5839535/gifts-of-water-for-dry-walgett/">a whole town relies on charity</a> to receive this life-or-death resource. <a href="https://www.northerndailyleader.com.au/story/5539927/shenhua-set-two-year-deadline-to-dig-liverpool-plains-coal-mine/">This mining licence</a> did not have to be renewed before March, or at all really. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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Consider <a href="https://www.elections.nsw.gov.au/NSWEC/media/NSWEC/Maps/index-maps/index_state_SED.pdf">this map</a>. 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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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<h2>The observer effect</h2>The observer effect is a scientific theory that simply observing a situation or phenomenon changes the thing being observed.<br />
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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. <br />
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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!<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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Journalists will absolutely suck at covering the shift away from the Nationals in regional seats. Honourable exception to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/profile/gabrielle-chan">Gabrielle Chan</a>, but she can't cover every corner of regional NSW or Australia and shouldn't be expected to. <br />
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<h2>The ingredients of a good message</h2>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.<br />
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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.<br />
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In <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/petrified-lack-of-direction-libs-say-berejiklian-is-just-not-selling-it-20181214-p50mcj.html">this piece</a>, Deborah Snow and Alexandra Smith cut to the quick:<br />
<blockquote>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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.</blockquote>The <a href="http://www.tallyroom.com.au/nsw2019/pendulumnsw2019">conventional electoral pendulum for NSW is here</a>. 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.<br />
<br />
This is just poor journalism:<br />
<blockquote>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.”</blockquote>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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<blockquote>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.”</blockquote>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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
Mind you, I've been wrong before. The stale <i>pas-de-deux</i> 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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Disclosure: I knew earlier versions of Ross Cadell, Gladys Berejiklian, and Andrew Constance as Young Liberals in the 1990s</i>.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-13301564057583684192018-12-16T10:07:00.000+11:002018-12-16T16:06:23.945+11:00Trust in God and man<blockquote><i>It's not really work<br />
It's just the power to charm<br />
I'm still standing in the wind<br />
But I never wave bye bye<br />
But I try, I try ...</i><br />
<br />
- David Bowie <i>Modern love</i></blockquote>Having blown his precious first Hundred Days to define himself and his government, Scott Morrison has finally found an issue to make his own. <br />
<br />
Conservatism needs religion, and vice versa. Conservatism is the default form of government in overtly pious countries. In postwar Australia, the Coalition consistently won government when people felt obliged to put bums on pews; this was particularly true in Victoria, South Australia, and Queensland, the states with highest church attendance; it was less true in the other states where church attendance was traditionally lower.<br />
<br />
The last time a conservative government in Australia put its relationship with religion to the test was in 1961. Before then, marriage legislation basically ratified weddings consecrated in what were then the three major Christian denominations: the Anglican, Catholic, and Presbyterian churches. The changing demographics of postwar Australia saw increased numbers of marriages in Orthodox churches and synagogues; the <i>Marriage Act 1961</i> removed the primacy of churches and even allowed for civil ceremonies facilitated by public servants or registered celebrants. It allowed for adults to be married despite church rules limiting marriage, such as where one party was not of the same denomination as the celebrant.<br />
<br />
Churches were livid at what they saw as the intrusion of the secular state into their core business. Prime Minister Menzies, a church-going Presbyterian, felt the full force of ecclesiastical displeasure. His government had a one-seat majority in the House thanks to a misjudged economic policy that resulted in a credit squeeze; nervous backbenchers fretted at the government being denounced from the pulpits to a significant proportion of voters. <br />
<br />
The following year, Catholic schools in the Goulburn diocese near Canberra locked students out and sent children to the local overstretched state schools. Church schools had been able to employ ordained clergy or devout loyalists as teachers, but the growing professionalism of teaching combined with the increased importance of science meant church schools could not compete with public schools for quality of education. Menzies found a way to mollify the churches without backing down: he lavished money on church-run schools so they could expand at the same rate as government schools did at the time, in response to the postwar baby boom. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/image/6595182-3x2-940x627.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="534" data-original-width="800" height="214" src="https://www.abc.net.au/news/image/6595182-3x2-940x627.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><center>Science teachers at Riverview have a lot to answer for. <br />
Image (c) ABC</center><br />
The Menzies government was returned handsomely at the following election, and the enduring lessons learned by the Liberal Party were:<br />
<ul><li>Never, ever piss off the churches;</li>
<li>Throwing money at church schools means Liberals win elections;</li>
<li>(go back to the first point above, and repeat until you forget why you even suggested taking on the churches in the first place)</li>
</ul>Liberals have noticed declining church attendance as well as anyone, but for fifty years it had no discernible political impact. After the downfall of former Anglican Archbishop Peter Hollingworth as Governor General(!) in 2003, Prime Minister Howard explored the possibility of a royal commission into church neglect and abuse of children; then Catholic Archbishop of Sydney George Pell warned Howard off the idea, comparing the very idea to the church schism under Henry VIII. Prime Minister Rudd often gave press statements outside his Brisbane church on Sunday mornings. As recently as 2013, incoming Prime Minister Abbott proposed a parallel form of marriage with more obedience and less recourse to no-fault divorce, in line with church teachings. <br />
<br />
All that changed last year.<br />
<blockquote><i>Never gonna fall for<br />
(Modern love) walks beside me<br />
(Modern love) walks on by ...</i></blockquote>The postal ballot on same-sex marriage remains an unmitigated defeat for conservatives. They deployed all the tricks that had worked in previous campaigns - water-muddying, slippery slopes, scare campaigns against "our children" - and they lost two-to-three-against. Only 17 of the 150 electorates in Australia voted against same-sex marriage, many in electorates which the Liberals have no realistic chance of winning. <br />
<br />
When she resigned from the Turnbull government, <a href="https://twitter.com/senator_cfw/status/1031846001429032960?lang=en">Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells cited the same-sex marriage debate as a grievance for conservatives</a> without any indication of how better the government might have handled it. This helps those of us who were never impressed with her explain to those who didn't know her well (including the notoriously obtuse press gallery) why she should never have been appointed a minister in the first place.<br />
<br />
That sense of failure was compounded by the rise of Scott Morrison instead of Dutton to replace Malcolm Turnbull in August. Once the polls hardened against Morrison, it was the conservatives - not nervous Nellies in marginal seats - who came out publicly against Morrison. Even after dumping her from the ministry, he had to answer the question that Fierravanti-Wells posed but could not answer: what do conservatives expect the government to do?<br />
<br />
The British model of conservatism, centred on the Crown, died with Abbott's conferral of a knighthood upon Prince Phillip. Australian conservatives never really defended the move, initially passing it off as A Distraction From The Main Issues, then as Tony Being Tony, watching with horror as the most conservative Prime Minister ever began tanking before their eyes. The American model of conservatism, interspersing Christianism with big business <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/how-did-republican-party-get-so-corrupt/578095/">as described by George Packer</a>, persists as a potent role model for Australian conservatives, despite its inapplicability:<br />
<blockquote>Taking away democratic rights — extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters — is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.</blockquote>None of those remedies are available to Australian conservatives. US conservatives in the 21st century have consistently won elections by rallying their base against a broadly apathetic electorate, which doesn't work with compulsory voting in Australia. And yet, conservatives will go on SAD (Sky After Dark) virtue-signalling about The Base.<br />
<br />
Morrison said that 70% of Australians are, however nominally, religious. The same people who maximise the reach of Australian religiosity when it suits them can constrict it: if you've ever heard the pejorative term "cafeteria Catholics", or if you've been jeered at for attending religious services at high holidays or for religious events surrounding birth, death, or marriage, you know not to trust this blithely proffered statistic. Religious freedom must be ecumenical: those most insistent on the sanctity of the confessional when crimes are confessed are most insistent that imams refer their parishioners to police at the merest hint of wrongdoing.<br />
<blockquote><i>(Modern love) gets me to the church on time<br />
(Church on time) terrifies me<br />
(Church on time) makes me party<br />
(Church on time) puts my trust in God and man ...</i></blockquote>Politics is the art of the possible. So, in the context of contemporary Australian politics, and following the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse and Neglect, what is politically possible for the government to help religious organisations?<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGDwfv7HqREzwauQyezaRPqsYviCXa_AOtWhgUqlQd4wewhavLjG5W9ofGPvE8WE5COyXHPFzfDmSy-VCrlKrfH9C2pPtJOIuUWE-yO91lrUmGZ05245nPxnBawg2KvfxhasIl/s1600/possible.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="304" data-original-width="474" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGDwfv7HqREzwauQyezaRPqsYviCXa_AOtWhgUqlQd4wewhavLjG5W9ofGPvE8WE5COyXHPFzfDmSy-VCrlKrfH9C2pPtJOIuUWE-yO91lrUmGZ05245nPxnBawg2KvfxhasIl/s320/possible.PNG" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Never mind the Jewish voters of Wentworth. By process of elimination, we see that the recognition of "West Jerusalem" as the capital of Israel as the only feasible sop to Australian conservatives, who believe the decision will yield huge donations and other support from Australian conservatives as it has in the US. There is no large constituency that will punish the government for what might seem like a foreign policy technicality. Once again, we see Morrison as the answer to questions that simply never occur to anyone outside the Liberal Party.<br />
<br />
People who understand foreign policy warned this government against its increasingly close ties with the current government of Israel. Now we see these ties have cost us closer relationships with Indonesia, a priority for successive governments since the 1960s. It has threatened Australia's relationships with other Muslim nations, who may use this country to express dissatisfaction with US policies at no cost to that country. Morrison has ignored the experts yet again. He ignored them for years over refugee conventions, and <a href="http://andrewelder.blogspot.com/2018/12/enough-enough-enough.html">as I said earlier</a> he has built his career on contempt for foreign policy. <br />
<br />
The decision not to relocate the embassy "at this stage" is gutless, given the decision. Why would technocratic concerns about cost or propriety matter now that the decision has been taken? It might make sense as a sop to the Foreign Minister, Senator Marise Payne, who has never seemed comfortable with this decision - but only the press gallery have access to find this out, and they just aren't awake to the possibility of the Foreign Minister having a position that hasn't been announced.<br />
<br />
Morrison has the gall to warn Australians overseas to watch out for reprisals. Part of the idea of Australian foreign policy is to safeguard Australians abroad. A government that knowingly makes a decision that imperils Australians abroad is failing a core duty to the nation and its citizens. Scott Morrison is personally liable for any Australian who cops so much as a slapped face over this decision.<br />
<blockquote><i>(God and man) no confessions<br />
(God and man) no religion<br />
(God and man) don't believe in modern love</i></blockquote>So, you just don't believe that Morrison is really that religious, or that a person's religion is a private matter that has no bearing on their public life. This is the position of the press gallery, which is so solicitous of politicians' private lives that when they burst out into the open like this they simply cannot cope. Morrison's religion is impeding his performance as Prime Minister, and disadvantaging the country, but they can't report on it because they dare not admit it. <br />
<br />
But honestly, I hear you cry, the Liberals are just catspaws of the Business Council of Australia, and they are using this Jerusalem hoo-ha to detract from economic issues. Look to the past ten years or so and see how this relationship has broken down. <br />
<br />
In 2004, when the Howard government secured both houses of parliament, the BCA pushed for changes to the workplace relations system that came to be known as WorkChoices. It dovetailed neatly with one of Howard's longterm obsessions, that working people could be pried away from the union movement to become independent contractors. As Howard's government fell apart, as policies failed and ministers failed and voters fell away, he doubled down on WorkChoices even as it became a rallying point for the wider labour movement.<br />
<br />
The BCA continued to back the Liberals in pushing their policy agenda. In early 2010, as Abbott realised that he needed an economic policy platform to supplement his culture war and press gallery stunts, he went cap in hand to the BCA and they gave him their agenda, which the press gallery noted but failed to scrutinise. The 2014 budget was the result, where Liberal politicians were forced to sell the unsellable. Turnbull continued the industrial relations agenda and cut taxes, but Morrison has less flexibility and less goodwill than Turnbull had. <br />
<br />
The BCA has an essentially unsellable policy agenda, and Labor will give them scraps off their table; this is more than they can expect from the hapless Morrison government. The more Morrison's government unravels, the more he will double down on Jerusalem. It will become his <a href="https://study.com/academy/lesson/white-whale-in-moby-dick-symbolism-meaning-metaphor.html">white whale</a>, as WorkChoices was for Howard. If you want a politician to Stand For Things, to Show Us What He's Made Of - if you see politics as a performance art, like the press gallery do - then you have to allow for some individual politicians to be weird or irrelevant. The Morrison government is weird and irrelevant, hemmed in by its limitations on economic and climate policy (and energy policy, the point where these two imperatives intersect), by the US model of conservatism, and a general lack of both verve and imagination. <br />
<br />
Morrison looked like going out dithering, putting out spot fires while having the whole show collapses around him. That's one model for losing government; this is what happened to Labor federally in 2013, to NSW Labor in 2011 and in South Australia earlier this year, and to the last (ever?) Liberal-Nationals government in Victoria four years ago. Now he's going down in what none but Liberals regard as a blaze of glory. Note that those who share both his fixation and his limitations won't thank him once the hurlyburly's done.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-68588431793872474852018-12-02T10:26:00.002+11:002018-12-02T22:11:18.378+11:00Enough, enough, enoughOur Prime Minister knows the big challenges facing the country in our time are beyond him. <br />
<br />
The vital early period of his term is over: he is not asking what you can do for your country, nor proclaiming excitement and disruption, nor bringing together unelected stakeholders for summits. The first hundred days is the same as the next hundred days, and the hundred days after that: culture war stuff, picking on transgender kids, visiting drought-stricken country while bagging environmentalists, proclaiming his faith - headline-grabbing but insubstantial. He will demonstrate once and for all the electoral futility of focusing on culture war while big and significant issues go begging.<br />
<br />
When you ask people what they remember about the Whitlam government, they usually rattle off something from the duumvirate of December 1972: recognising the People's Republic of China, say, or ending prosecution of draft resisters, or sanctions against apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia. Whitlam and his deputy, Lance Barnard, achieved a lot without putting legislation to parliament. The House of Representatives had been elected on 2 December but had not been convened while these administrative arrangements were put in place. This then set the context for Labor's caucus to convene and elect ministers, who would then put legislation for more substantial reforms through parliament.<br />
<br />
Morrison is in the opposite position. The failure of tax cuts, the strange idea that a Liberal government would punish energy companies for making profits, and the outcome of the Wentworth byelection demonstrate that the legislative agenda of this government is over. A government needs to be able to negotiate with the formal opposition, but the Abbott-Dutton tendency are paranoid about catching Labor germs. The minor parties offer small achievements that go against the government's agenda (e.g. banning live animal exports or ending mandatory detention), a time-suck for a government running out of time. The agenda of his government, insofar as it has one, is administrative and petty: toying with asylum-seekers, a 'pub test' for academic research, outsourcing Centrelink. <br />
<br />
<h2>The party man</h2>Morrison did not attempt to be the big man on campus at UNSW, like Turnbull or Abbott had at Sydney University. Instead, he sought out Bruce Baird as a mentor: Baird was then the NSW Transport and Tourism Minister, and on his staff at the time were Barry O'Farrell, Mitch Fifield, and Ross Cameron. Morrison was found a policy role at the Property Council, where he would have learned how to lobby and how to do just enough research to make your proposal look plausible. <br />
<br />
He later became NSW State Director of the Liberal Party. At a time when the moderates and the right were starting to carve up the party between them, he shut down a rich ecosystem of members beholden to neither faction, and thus regarded as troublemakers by both. Both factions worked with him but neither fully trusted him. <br />
<br />
Morrison then went onto tourism jobs in New Zealand and Australia. When Bruce Baird went to Canberra as Member for Cook, he believed Howard would promote him to ministerial rank. Instead, Howard appointed as ministers other backbenchers he had been deliberately ignoring, but who became leading lights in the successive Coalition government: Pyne, Brandis, Dutton. Had Baird joined their ranks, Australian political history might have been slightly different. Certainly, Morrison might have enjoyed more support in Canberra than he did when Fran Bailey sacked him.<br />
<br />
Morrison is entirely a creature of the Liberal Party but has no capacity to shape it. John Howard had been a party activist since he was 17, but when he became leader in 1995 he was able to reshape the entire party in his image. None of those who followed him had either that depth of understanding, nor the clout to make the party pivot around him. Nelson didn't. Abbott lacks Turnbull's wealth and breadth but is shaped more profoundly by sixth-century Catholicism than by the Liberal Party. Morrison, like Rudd, is only there until the factions unite and cast him off.<br />
<br />
Morrison has lived the narrow political life Turnbull studiously avoided, which may explain some of the disdain the former prime minister shows toward the incumbent. If Simon Crean or Alexander Downer had become PM, they might have been like Morrison is now: transactional, cliche-ridden to the point of being a cliche himself. <br />
<br />
<h2>Towke</h2><blockquote><i>If ever there was a clear example that Lebanese males in their vast numbers not only hate our country and our heritage, this was it. They simply rape, pillage and plunder a nation that's taken them in.</i> <br />
- Alan Jones, 2GB, 28 April 2005</blockquote>Michel Taouk wanted to exercise political power. His politics were to the right of Australian politics' main right-of-centre party, but several active members of that party assured him they could help him. <br />
<br />
The NSW Liberal right at the time was led by David Clarke, who was appalled at swarthy types and demanded they Anglicise or "de-wog" to meet his approval: Concetta Fierravanti-Wells smothered herself in pancake makeup and insisted on being called Mrs Connie Wells. Michel Taouk became Michael Towke, and stuffed Liberal branches in the Sutherland Shire with goons who couldn't sign their own membership forms or pay party dues. <br />
<br />
Morrison shored up the outgoing member for the area, his old mentor Bruce Baird (much he same as he had with Turnbull in August), then set about undoing Towke's work on local branches. When Towke beat Morrison, Morrison worked to have the result reversed with far-right stackers weeded out. Reversing a branch-stack is highly complicated work and requires a high degree of political sophistication, cleverness and toughness. It is unlikely that the Liberal Party today could hold off a right-wing insurgency like that. It is a proven fact that <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-23/nsw-nationals-identify-18-people-in-alt-right-probe/10419628">the Nationals couldn't</a>. <br />
<br />
Morrison deserves credit for outmaneuvering Towke. Firstly, the end of outmaneuvering a right-winger almost always justifies the means. Second, political success involves beating <br />
<br />
Had Towke's victory been allowed to stand he would now be a minister in the Dutton government, or he would have gone the way of <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/expelled-lnp-mp-michael-johnson-eyes-comeback-in-ryan/news-story/ebce67798b43f8c9cbf1309ac389f7a3">former Queensland MP Michael Johnson</a>. People who use Towke as a stick to beat Morrison do so on the following assumptions:<ul><li>Nobody could be a nastier, further-right politician than Scott Morrison, and</li>
<li><a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/nasty-saga-you-nearly-missed-20091025-hem5.html">This article</a> can and should be taken at face value.</li>
</ul>Firstly, Morrison is a vicious right-wing thug or he's an ineffective duffer: he can't be both. Second, the journalist who wrote that article, Paul Sheehan, is what happens when you give traditional media more resources than they enjoy today. He wrote a number of apocalyptic if-blood-should-stain-the-wattle books predicting and tacitly endorsing right-wing violence in Australian politics. All I can say to those people taken in by the Sheehan article is, have a swig of <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-original-story-paul-sheehan-on-the-effect-of-the-water-20020408-gdf6je.html">Magic Water</a> and be careful about believing articles that you wish were true. <br />
<br />
<h2>Secrecy</h2>Morrison started his career as a lobbyist. Being a lobbyist relies very little on media exposure to be effective. Lobbyists walk straight past press gallery journalists day after day on their way to meet with politicians to make significant decisions that affect us all: if press gallery actually contained journalists, they would intercept the lobbyists and ask them questions, refusing to be fobbed of by non-answers in pursuit of the public's right to know. In reality, press gallery just sit there waiting to be approached. <br />
<br />
Everyone who has ever become Prime Minister has courted the media to some extent. Deakin, Scullin, Curtin, Abbott, and Turnbull had been journalists and learned the tricks from inside that trade. Morrison has actively courted the media less than any of them, except for those that only ever sought to act as caretakers (Forde, and Country Party PMs Fadden, Page, and McEwen). He has worked his way up and through the Liberal Party, with no media exposure beyond <i>The St George and Sutherland Shire Leader</i> or the odd, quickly passed story in national media on his tourism shenanigans. <br />
<br />
For all those comparing Morrison's evasive interview answers to Trump, look at his performances as Shadow Immigration Minister. Morrison developed a line and plugged it, and plugged it and plugged it. In opposition he could (and did) dodge questions about his own position, or that of the Coalition. In the same way that journalists love capturing an unscripted remark and make the departure from scripted lines the story, so too those who are interviewed often relish pumping their lines out and avoiding unscripted questions. He simply talked over Leigh Sales until she learned not to push him for information. By renting a house he smashed the whole concept of, and conceits behind, Annabel Crabb's <i>Kitchen Cabinet</i>. Morrison has made an art form of dodging answers. He did this before Trump, dodging answers has got him where he is today, and he isn't changing.<br />
<br />
The only time that mask slipped was when he admitted to David Speers that putting children into offshore detention caused him to weep and pray. This had the capacity to fracture the whole self-image he had built up, as both a tough guy and fair at the same time (after all, mandatory offshore detention is bipartisan, and the press gallery thinks the ship of state is bipartisan-ship). Advocates of offshore detention thought he showed weakness of resolve. Supporters of ending mandatory detention hoped to use his humanity to confront the idea of ending the practice. No journalist pressed him on this: he put up the facade by resolving to cut immigration, playing along with Matthew Guy's doomed law-and-order strategy, and even if he were pressed he would dodge the issue. <br />
<br />
<h2>Right Ho, Fink</h2>Before there was South Park, there was Yaron Finkelstein. As a student at UNSW he saw people throw themselves passionately into various pursuits, and he thought they were risible. I only saw him care to the point of stone-faced seriousness on two occasions: when performing volunteer labour for Keith Windschuttle, who had schooled him in the arts of copywriting, and on the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the former Israeli Prime Minister whose death effectively ended the two-state solution and gave rise to Binyamin Netanyahu. <br />
<br />
Imagine my surprise to see Finkelstein photographed in a shadowy way and described accordingly by <a href="https://www.michaelwest.com.au/scomo-defender-of-the-faiths/">Michael Sainsbury</a>:<br />
<blockquote>“An avid practitioner of the edict that political operatives should be rarely seen and never heard, Finkelstein has flown under the radar in politics for some time. This, however, has not impeded him in becoming one of the top campaign operatives in the country,” according to a bio on the website of lobbying firm Advoc8.</blockquote>It is a false dichotomy that one cannot pursue a career in politics without the media quoting your every word and putting your name to it; Morrison knows that and so does Finkelstein. The only people who don't know are the press gallery and others who don't understand politics.<br />
<br />
Yaron Finkelstein has spent his entire life in Wentworth, and if you don't understand the politics of your own backyard then how good are you really? It is nonsense that the <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/phelps-will-be-good-for-wentworth-but-it-does-not-represent-us-20181026-p50c3n.html">Liberals are shrugging off the loss of Wentworth</a>, because when a party fails in relatively safe seat then it fails all round. Whether it's the byelections in Bass in 1975, Flinders in 1982, or Canberra in 1995, this is a byelection that clangs like impending doom.<br />
<blockquote>Dave Sharma was an excellent candidate, almost certain to be a future cabinet minister, but he did not have a high profile. A high profile is not only useful in terms of name recognition by voters, it necessarily makes the candidate more likely to get national news coverage, which feeds back into the campaign.</blockquote>Here we see the sheer poverty of a life spent in politics and media: nobody will vote for you if they don't know who you are. Sharma was kept away from public engagement because the Liberals feared unscripted encounters, and the more they double down on this the more they will shun votes. A dedication to the base is an exercise in seeing who exactly will keep voting Liberal in the face of this highly scripted crap. <br />
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It is snide to blame Finkelstein for the policy brainfart of moving the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Finkelstein could argue either side of that debate equally convincingly, as he might any position really. There is no sign of any policy nerds making up for Morrison's absence of policy, and if they did Finkelstein would snuff it out before Morrison got any ideas. This is a screensaver government. All sorts of stuff is going on behind the facade, but so long as there's a daily press conference the press gallery will never dig for them.<br />
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John Howard employed staff who compensated for abilities he didn't have. The triumvirate of Arthur Sinodinos, Tony Nutt and Graham Morris were different to each other and to Howard, but together they complemented Howard and made a formidable team. By employing Finkelstein, Morrison has entrenched his worst aspects (flippancy, disdain for policy detail) and failed to compensate for his manifold shortcomings.<br />
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<h2>Very foreign policy</h2>Scott Morrison does not give any sort of fuck about foreign policy, and you can't make him. His political career began in earnest trashing various international protocols on refugees. Denunciations from foreign media and multinational organisations made not a whit of difference or were flung into the culture-war mill. <br />
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Treasurers get an appreciation of the wider world - we saw this in Keating and Swan, but not Morrison. Turnbull had planned to go to the South Pacific Leaders' Forum at the end of August, and when Morrison took over he simply didn't go. Japan's Prime Minister Abe gave Morrison a lesson in tact at the commemorations in Darwin, which Morrison has almost certainly missed (watch Morrison at the next wreath-laying speech-giving ceremony to honour The Fallen, and see if he doesn't behave like an oaf trying to accept Best & Fairest at footy club trophy night). At the APEC summit Morrison sat there without headphones: leaders of mighty nations tuned into translators to hear from other leaders, but not our current Prime Minister. They must know he won't be at the next one, he does too and doesn't give a damn, so how many opportunities go begging for the nation as a result is hard to quantify - but it is probably more than the bugger-all assessed by the Prime Minister. At the G20 he is a tourist, not building in any way on recent low-profile work by Julie Bishop and DFAT in improving relations with Latin America.<br />
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Say what you will about Turnbull, but he could play a Prime Minister on television. That stuff matters less than Julie Bishop thinks it did, but more than Morrison and Finkelstein ("Merkel? How many points in Newspoll is she good for?") can imagine. All Morrison has done is lower the bar for Shorten to scale on his way to press gallery endorsement as Prime Ministerial.<br />
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<h2>Jakarta, Jerusalem and junk analysis</h2>Toward the end of World War Two Australian troops were shunted off to clear Japanese forces out of the Dutch East Indies while US forces powered toward Japan. Australians regarded themselves as sidelined. In 1945 striking dockworkers in Melbourne inhibited the restoration of Dutch colonial rule, helping the Indonesian nation come into being and in turn compelling the Chifley government to recognise the new nation of Indonesia. In the 1960s Australian policymakers came to recognise Indonesia was a growing power economically and militarily; despite fifty years of appalling corruption that commitment to dialogue and ever closer relationships continued, with military and currency agreements already in place, and had begun to bear fruit as a limited but promising free trade agreement.<br />
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All Morrison has to do to make that agreement happen is to junk a symbolic commitment to moving the Australian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He can't though, because the Liberal right need a win. The Liberal right were denied Dutton as leader, and are facing a rollback of their beloved mandatory detention position. They failed utterly, and publicly, on marriage equality. The Liberal right hobbled Turnbull on climate change; Morrison is so happy to nobble himself on this policy that the right can't assert their influence by making him adopt a position with which he doesn't disagree. <br />
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Moving the embassy to Jerusalem is the ankle bracelet that the Liberal right have clapped on Morrison. They expect him to scupper a deal over fifty years in the making to deliver a victory that the Liberal right can claim as their own. Pentacostal churches hold the Liberal Party together in WA and in parts of Queensland. In Victoria, Marcus Bastiaan mobilised fundamentalist Christian sects into joining the Liberal Party there, and even without him the party there is reaping the rewards for appealing to a base that is already within the party membership but scarcely evident beyond it. <br />
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I doubt that Morrison is particularly torn by the pentacostalist belief in bringing on the Rapture by fomenting divisions between the Israeli Jewish state and their Muslim neighbours. Moving an embassy to Jerusalem, recognising Israel as one state and not two with Palestine, is deliberately provocative and successive Australian governments have left the issue well alone. If you can accept that Tony Abbott is a committed Catholic, and yet after several years as Health Minister and PM abortion is practiced lawfully in public hospitals, then you can accept that this matter is relevant but not pressing for Morrison.<br />
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Even so, he lacks the wit and the clout to simply draw a line under this issue. Both the power dynamics within the Liberal Party (the right must be seen to have a win over the new Prime Minister) and Morrison's own professed faith (pentacostalist churches in the US strongly support Trump's relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem) explain why this seemingly unimportant issue cannot simply be shut down by the Prime Minister.<br />
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The reason why this experienced political journalist cannot fathom Morrison's position is because of press gallery niceties around political coverage: that Morrison's faith is a private matter (clearly it isn't), that everything is just grist to the mill of winning momentary advantage (er, not true either), and so the Liberal right must logically be in pursuit of votes not otherwise available to the Liberal Party (not true either, but telling an obvious truth means you miss out on juicy juicy drops).<br />
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In other words, the niceties of the press gallery are preventing the story from being communicated to the public. <br />
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As always, the press gallery move as a pack. Gone is the Annabelle Crabb notion where every lumbering manoeuvre and dull quip is fascinating, and everyone in Canberra is lovely once you get to know them (so <i>please</i> don't vote out my friends!). Now the pervasive mood is adolescent truculence, where everything and everyone is, like, soooo lame. The press gallery are trying to cultivate the impression that they're above this, that if there were some serious policy happening they would absolutely prefer to cover that than, uh, whatever it was Josh Frydenberg said about the thing.<br />
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The press gallery were a docile bunch when Keating fed them policy on a daily basis, and they are worse now. They have not become high-minded policy wonks and are not judging what politicians say against what people who know about policy say. The idea that they chafe against this government's backbiting and dithering and yearn for the broad expanses of, say, energy policy is obviously nonsense. When Shorten makes policy announcements they are roundly ignored in the gallery, so that when they are repeated at election time they can be covered in a thick layer of hype, and when rolled out as government policy the gallery will treat them with incredulity and rely on the new opposition to frame them.<br />
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There will be more on this later (soon, soon), but we are heading into a transitional moment where Labor occupies the centre of politics, doing the worthy work of government with limited room/imagination to innovate much, while various bits of jetsam orbit them to no or limited effect. The model here is Queensland, where Her Majesty's Official Opposition is indistinguishable from chancers and freaks like Hanson or Katter. The political system can adapt to deal with this. <br />
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The press gallery can't. It is built around balance and he-said-she-said, where every disagreement is argy-bargy and all water is muddied. There will be lots of colour-and-movement, which will be enough for the press gallery; but as ever they will offer little enlightenment about how we are governed and what the options are. Combined with the inherent weakness of media organisation management, and their insistence on elevating the non-stories of the press gallery in place of news, this means the press gallery is doomed in its current form. They will tell you this means democracy is doomed too, because democracy is a thing they own; this is crap too. We need information and we need to go around the press gallery to get it. If the political system can adapt so too can the population at large, and the press gallery can mark time until relieved.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-66770500043858278632018-08-21T21:21:00.001+10:002018-08-21T21:21:23.968+10:00Burn out, fade awayThe Coalition has two choices going forward, and both depend on the Labor Party. This means that the leader of the Labor Party, Bill Shorten, is more powerful than the current Prime Minister and more powerful than any Liberal who might replace him (Dutton, Abbott, Bishop, Morrison, take your pick).<br />
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<h2>Shorten's first option</h2>Turnbull could reach out to Labor to pass a bipartisan NEG. It is possible that Shorten would play a cat-and-mouse game with him, and send Turnbull back to his party room with a deal he cannot sell, but this is not consistent with our experience of him. Shorten's behaviour as a union leader and as a minister under Rudd-Gillard-Rudd suggests that he will surprise observers not by demanding his opponents meet him halfway, but by offering the other side pretty much everything they want and then getting his side to back the eventual compromise. If you accept the idea that a Labor victory at the next election enables Shorten to reshape or abolish the NEG, then he loses almost nothing by giving Turnbull what he said he wanted last week. He even looks like the guy putting some steel into the spine of a weak leader, buttressing his claim to be a Hawke-like healer and uniter, and diminishing Liberal framing of him being a schemer and wrecker (certainly in contrast to Abbott). Whatever triumph Turnbull puts forward will never fully be his own, because Shorten will own it too.<br />
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Abbott, Dutton, and the para-Liberal right (e.g. Joyce, Bernardi, Hanson, Sky News, 2GB) will frame this compromise as selling out. As the Liberals start preselecting candidates for the coming election, the party at its grassroots will debate negotiating tactics in its deliberations over who they choose to participate in these negotiations. This debate will override any dictate from the leader's office or from a party-room vote. Turnbull has not done the work at the party's grassroots to make this debate work in his favour: he is not a grassroots politician even among Liberals, he is a politician who gets the lead players into a small room and hammers out a deal, the very outcome that will not work here. The wider Liberal Party will look like chaos, it will not be able to be contained by the party's gatekeepers, and Abbott is the Liberal Party's lord of misrule.<br />
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Turnbull cannot claim that any Liberal who supported the no-policy status quo is finished politically. The evolution of the Nationals away from being a farmers' party toward being a general non-metropolitan conservative party demonstrates this. The shadowy political support mechanisms provided by Gina Rinehart toward failed politicians Sophie Mirabella and Adam Giles, not to mention Cory Bernardi and Pauline Hanson, negate the idea that political aspirations end once the major parties are done with you. <br />
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Remember how big business groups like the BCA and Ai Group lobbied Liberal MPs to agree to something over nothing? Those people lobbied Shorten too. In times past, some leading CEO - the head of BHP, or AMP, or one of the banks - would have angrily demanded the ninnies in Canberra pull their fingers out and get on with it, and Liberals fearful of a fundraising drought would comply. Nobody in the corporate world today has that kind of political clout. <br />
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<h2>Shorten's second option</h2>The other option is that Turnbull continues not to reach out to Labor, fearful of being seen to be too close to them and unable to differentiate the Liberal Party from them in the coming election. This means he will continue to achieve nothing rather than something, and negates his advantage as the incumbent: any opposition can develop plans and talk them up, but they suffer from not being tangible. A contest between Shorten's castles in the air and Turnbull's may see the opposition - the major party without Tony Abbott - given the benefit of the doubt.<br />
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If Shorten reaches out to Turnbull and Turnbull won't engage, they both look weak and like they're not achieving anything. The both-sides argy-bargy narrative of the press gallery will diminish them both. Even if Labor wins more than 76 seats in the next House of Representatives, both-sidesism will mean he will have to deal with an unpredictable Senate. To secure a decisive Labor win, with Labor having to deal with as few non-Labor Senators as possible to get legislation through, Shorten will have to take charge of the current political situation to an extent that neither Turnbull, nor anyone else outside Labor, can. <br />
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Having held out the olive branch, it's within his gift to drop it and move no confidence in Turnbull as Prime Minister. He needs a majority of members present to win the vote, which would make Turnbull's position untenable. There are 69 Labor MPs in the House of Representatives. It is possible that pairing arrangements will be dropped. It is possible that independents such as Rebekha Sharkie and Cathy McGowan will decline to support such a nakedly partisan motion. Even so, as I said in the previous post below, Abbott, Dutton, Joyce and Kevin Andrews may find it too tempting to finish Turnbull; with Dutton before the High Court, the Liberal Party could face a run-off between Abbott and non-Abbott (probably Morrison), and the temptation to hold a election before the Victorian election on 24 November (but outside the football season in September).<br />
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These two options show that, regardless of what Turnbull or any other Liberal may do, the government is not master of its own fate and thus cannot long be considered a viable government. No such handicap appears to beset the ALP.<br />
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<h2>Problems with Dutton</h2>If, as <a href="https://tendaily.com.au/news/politics/a180820xwi/constitutional-cloud-emerges-over-peter-duttons-business-interests-20180820">this excellent journalism from Hugh Riminton and Kate Doak</a> (why does the best political journalism come from outside the press gallery?) indicates, Peter Dutton will have to be referred to the High Court for his eligibility to sit in parliament under <a href="http://www8.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s44.html">section 44(v) of the Constitution</a>. Such a reference might preclude him from running for Dickson or any other seat. The prospect of a challenge may have dissuaded some Liberals from voting for him in the party room spill this morning, or they may not given that Nationals MP David Gillespie survived a similar challenge earlier this year. You will know that Turnbull is going for the death-or-glory option if he refers Dutton and puts his wife's business under public scrutiny: the right will hate him, but they hate him anyway.<br />
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Free and diverse societies benefit from relatively light governance. It is not true that light-touch governing can be done by the insouciant and the incapable, as Malcolm Turnbull has demonstrated. Surveillance technologies can give heavy-handed government the appearance of light-touch, unobtrusive government, which is made easier if you look the other way when certain people's rights are abused. Peter Dutton was on the cusp of power as an authoritarian, and press gallery journalism has played little role in describing his growing power (which tends to rebound on journalists eventually, far more than the figurative "the ABC and Guardian are dead to me"). Doing journalism on monitorial government is the hardest journalism of all, made harder by <strike>constrained</strike> misallocated resources and a defeatist idea that the public doesn't care and cannot be made to care even with committed journalism. <br />
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Now the right-wing ministers in the government are resigning, one by one, just like they did from Turnbull's opposition front bench in 2009 (naturally, nobody from the press gallery is awake to this, even the ones who actually covered those resignations then). Zed Seselja was a waste of space as Science Minister, Mukka Sukka is a waste of skin at any time, and quite why Concetta Fierravanti-Wells sought to catalogue <a href="https://twitter.com/Senator_CFW/status/1031846001429032960">the reasons why Turnbull should never have appointed her in the first place</a> is one of those puzzles only she can answer. When conservatives talk about "the base", these are their champions: very base indeed.<br />
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<h2>Two parties one narrative</h2>It is almost unfair for the country to go to an election with one side of the two-party idea so manifestly inadequate, but to insist that the election is a tight race between two equally (in)capable sides is a form of bias far less grounded in reality, more destructive and far less useful, than simple partisanship. The Liberal Party does not have a leadership problem, it has a systematic problem that goes to its very roots. Malcolm Turnbull can't solve it, nor can any other member of the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party, nor can their staff, nor can old stagers from the organisational wing like Michael Kroger or Gary Spence. Those people can barely articulate what the problem is.<br />
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Other countries don't have binary two-party systems as Australia, the US or the UK have. In 2010 the Australian electorate came close to instituting such a political system: Labor and other politicians worked with the parliament the voters gave them, while conservatives and the press gallery screamed for three years until what looked like a conventional conservative government was conjured into being. That vision has since dissipated, and the press gallery still cannot cover politicians from outside the major parties except as freaks. Other countries that might once have been showcases for multi-party democracy (e.g. Italy, India) show instead that the far right of politics have the capacity to distinguish themselves in inchoate environments, and develop an influence that goes beyond both their support base and their capacities to govern free and diverse societies. <br />
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When you have a two-party system, and one side pretty much collapses, coverage of the slightly-less-crap side collapses as journalists ingratiate themselves with the incoming government. The flaws that brought Kevin Rudd undone as Prime Minister in 2010 were well known by press gallery and Labor insiders well before 2007, but they chose not to let voters in on it until it was too late. <br />
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Institutions that cover up diminish themselves. It is no good complaining about diminishing respect for institutions after the fact of a cover-up. It is no use complaining about constrained resources after having publicly squandered them.<br />
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<h2>Both sides not</h2>The Coalition is, with Labor, one of two major political groupings capable of forming government. It is part of standard political debate as to which of these may offer the best deal at any given election, but the following points are now beyond all but diehard partisan quibbling:<ul><li>Electricity supply is one of the key infrastructure challenges facing Australia, given changing technologies and costs associated with delivering these; and</li>
<li>People of goodwill and good sense may have different opinions on the best way of ensuring both reliability of electrical supply at an affordable rate, and innovation in generating and delivering electricity; and</li>
<li>The Coalition is not capable of having that debate, let alone delivering any sort of solution on this crucial issue.</li>
</ul>It would take both-sidesism to its most ridiculous extent to claim that Labor is also incapable of delivering a coherent policy capable of benefitting suppliers, distributors and consumers of electricity. Maybe they will botch it: for now, they deserve the benefit of the doubt whereas the government does not. Governments lose office when the debates of the day are considered too hard for them to solve. Consider Rudd in 2013, Howard in 2007, Keating in 1996, or any of the recently departed state premiers: it was more in sorrow than in anger that they were put out of office, but put out they were. They tended to depart office with a kind of pained dignity, leaving only partisans to gloat at their demise. <br />
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The same problem exists with the increasing push for Indigenous sovereignty. It is fair to assume this won't be a major issue at the coming election, but it will be increasingly important going forward. Again, Labor do not have all the answers, but the Coalition's default position is intransigence and bad faith. <br />
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The issue of asylum-seekers has maddeningly resisted firm assessments of its electoral significance, but it is increasingly clear that the detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru are entering their endgame (and that there has been all too little scrutiny of Christmas Island, showing how dependent political journalism is upon what has been announced). There will have to be a change of policy over the next term of government, but what might it be? Partisans can't answer this, so journalists can't and don't bother finding out what our options are.<br />
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Experienced press gallery journalists think they know how to cover election campaigns. They offer feeble, cliched critiques of supply/control mechanisms like campaign buses, food, and wi-fi, and report statements with no information other than that handed to them by the party making the announcement. They work their contacts, who tell them less and less, and therefore give us less and worse information about what's going on. Few of the big issues of our time are used to measure competing candidates and their claims.<br />
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To report accurately and fairly on the coming election would require different skills: deep knowledge of complex policies and communities, which would render the campaign/press buses as ridiculous as they are. Political journalists aren't going to do that, but other journalists and knowledge workers might. They are going to rely on quotes from people with no idea what's going on. Business-as-usual leads to a badly-informed population, which both increasingly disdains the traditional media represented in the press gallery as a reliable source of information, and makes ever worse choices from increasingly dreadful options on the ballot. Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-50356741091543635992018-08-16T22:19:00.000+10:002018-08-20T20:46:06.110+10:00Dead in the middle<blockquote><i>Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky ... Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.</i><br />
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- Ernest Hemingway <i>For whom the bell tolls</i></blockquote>Turnbull is giving his all for a shemozzle of a compromise which will benefit nobody but him and Josh Frydenberg, and not very much even then. His predicament reminds me of the final days of centrist former NSW Labor Premier Morris Iemma a decade ago. Sillier press gallery observers claim that the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) puts Turnbull's fate in his own hands once more, but the opposite is true. <br />
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<h2>Why the NEG is a shemozzle</h2>People who study this sort of thing agree that it is designed to give the appearance of solidity to a desperately unstable status quo. <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-09/what-does-the-neg-mean-for-real-cases,-real-people/10089046">A national plan for a national problem</a> that pleases nobody. The end result of a long and stupid process that put the one thing government can't deliver - <a href="https://ketanjoshi.co/2017/06/24/electricity-bills-have-become-the-centre-of-the-energy-discourse-galaxy-in-australia/">lower power bills - at the centre of the debate</a>. It will have <a href="https://www.energymatters.com.au/renewable-news/neg-carbon-emissions-national-energy/">no impact on carbon emissions</a>. It is not worth doing, except as a political exercise, and the very emptiness of the political exercise has experienced commentators slavering when they should be sneering.<br />
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<h2>Iemma then ...</h2>Morris Iemma succeeded Bob Carr as NSW Premier in 2005. He saw off two internal challengers in Craig Knowles and Carl Scully, and led Labor to victory in the 2007 election over a Liberal Party convulsed by a Christianist insurgency. Then it all went wrong, first gradually and then suddenly. <br />
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Iemma made the politically fatal error of departing from Carr's proven model for success: manage the daily spin cycle and forget big, long-term issues. <br />
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Increased public patronage of public transport strained aging infrastructure. You might think Labor would be good at public transport, and maybe in other jurisdictions they are, but not in NSW:<ul><li>Jack Lang built one fucking bridge, and that was initiated by the conservatives (see below).</li>
<li>All those Labor Premiers from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s who look like they're sculpted from mashed potato bought some buses but did little else infrastructure-wise. One of them, Joe Cahill, actually used to work at the Eveleigh rail yards but is better known for his expressway and opera house.</li>
<li>Wran put colleagues he hated into that portfolio. He took credit for the risibly inadequate eastern suburbs rail line (including spiking the Woollahra station near his home) and blamed the Liberals for the Granville disaster. Even Bramstonian Labor history sucks admit transport was never a strong issue for him.</li>
<li>Carr excused his lack of action on transport on immigration. Insofar as laborism is a thing, anti-immigration is one of its worst aspects. Sydney-based journalists treat Carr as something of a sage, but on immigration and infrastructure he is pretty much Fraser Anning with some Proust shoved up his arse.</li>
<li>Right now, the NSW Opposition is furtively engaged in balancing its two historic imperatives in this area: doing absolutely nothing about what has not been done, and fucking up what has. It has a third, constant imperative, namely fooling the state's particularly dreadful press gallery (worse than the feds!). Whatever Labor takes to the March 2019 election in this area, it will be worse than what the Coalition is doing and offering. Labor voters will have to hold their noses when it comes to public transport; they have no right to hope for anything more than the completion of projects initiated by the incumbents.</li>
</ul>Iemma, bless him, wanted to depart from all that. This put him offside with public transport unions, generally more militant than the state's right-wing, accommodationist union tradition. <br />
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He thought he could fund public transport upgrades by selling the state's electricity network. This had become a long-festering sore in NSW Labor: Carr had repeatedly made tentative moves in this area, only to realise that he couldn't solve it quickly, backed off, then repeated the whole thing a few news-cycles later. The state president of the Electrical Trades Union was also the party's state president, who with the secretary of the NSW Labor Council (now Unions NSW), John Robertson, led internal opposition to electricity privatisation. By the time Iemma faced the issue he could only either eschew it for all time or make it happen. <br />
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Following their loss in 2007 Barry O'Farrell had become leader of the Liberal Party, managing the implosion of the Christianists and uniting the party on the state level as the Howard government declined and fell. O'Farrell had, as previous Liberal leaders had, pledged to privatise the electricity network; Iemma saw in him a man with whom he could do business. In April 2008, the world economy melted down but Morris Iemma was still seen as a man who could cut a big and complex deal in NSW.<br />
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When O'Farrell declined to support Iemma's privatisation proposals, the premier was exposed and so was his party. Iemma could not deliver on that issue nor unite it on any other. On 3 May the NSW ALP voted seven to one against electricity privatisation, a personal triumph for Robertson. Two days later Iemma was gone, and so were his electricity privatisation proposals. Later that year Robertson replaced Iemma's (and Carr's) Treasurer, Michael Egan, in state parliament: <a href="http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/07/i-am-ashamed-to-share-membership-of.html">Paul Keating's letter of non-congratulation</a> rings through the ages both as a summary of the politics of the time and as prescience for Robertson's career (and, potentially, that of current NSW Opposition Leader Luke Foley).<br />
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<h2>… and Turnbull now</h2>Those who ignore the lessons of history seem to have quite a nice time of it, breezing through life's ups and downs in all their apparent novelty. Those of us who have studied history become exasperated and the ignorance and lack of preparation, and whether we gently disagree or screech in protest we become part of the scenery past which the blithe and ignorant insouciantly glide.<br />
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Turnbull faces a united opposition under Bill Shorten, the significance of which is underestimated by a press gallery acutely alert to its absence. Turnbull's main internal opponent, Tony Abbott, has both the swashbuckling daring and sooky resentment of John Robertson, a potential leader who comes pre-tainted with strengths vastly overestimated by only the keenest partisans. <br />
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NEG has no significance as a policy. Nobody will invest a single dollar on the basis of its flimsy assumptions and unsustainable conclusions. It doesn't matter, and those in the press gallery who confused its passage through the party room with a real achievement should know better, and ought not be in the press gallery in the first place. It can safely be cut down or amended beyond recognition, with no loss to anyone but Turnbull and Frydenberg (and the latter will more likely survive than the former). It makes sense only as a talisman for Turnbull. <br />
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Shorten's support for the NEG is lukewarm and conditional, as we have seen from Labor leaders in other jurisdictions. He may have Labor vote to pass it now and amend it later. It is entirely possible that he would vote against NEG at the last minute - a protest if nobody from the Coalition votes with him, but a game-changer if they do.<br />
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At the 2016 election, the Liberal right actively undermined Turnbull. A decisive victory would have set them back and redefined what a Liberal government meant, departing from the template established by Howard. It could have forced old stagers like Abbott, Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews from the parliament. Abetz masterminded a duff campaign in Tasmania that lost the Liberals a senator and three seats in the House. In the 2015 NSW election, former MP Jackie Kelly split the Liberal vote in the marginal seat of Penrith (within Lindsay) and preferenced Labor's Emma Husar. If Abbott and his Sancho Panza, Craig Kelly, were to cross the floor against NEG and meet a jubilant Labor caucus on the other side, it would represent a massive escalation of Liberal internal tensions for years to come. Labor has an anti-mythology for those who betrayed their party to the point where it lost office, those for whom "rat" is inadequate, but the Liberals don't.<br />
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Such a move would leave Turnbull stranded without being able to deliver on electricity policy and without much time to craft a new and credible alternative. It would leave him exposed as a leader who couldn't unite the party on anything else either, just as he is about to hit the median term of service as Prime Minister (15th out of 29), with few policy achievements to show for it. <br />
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Tony Abbott had three choices after he lost the Prime Ministership in 2015. He could have:<ul><li>Retired; or</li>
<li>Shut up and joined the team, like Turnbull had during the 2010-13 term; Turnbull's loyalty helped cement the unity that was absent in Labor at the time, which in turn helped make the case for Coalition victory in 2013; or</li>
<li>Challenged Turnbull.</li>
</ul>He hasn't taken the first two options: it's death-or-glory time. He invokes 2013 as though everyone but him hasn't moved on from there. If he starts referring to NEG as "a bad policy" the likely demise of this government becomes a certainty, regardless of the leadership.<br />
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One Coalition MP who has threatened to vote against Coalition policy is George Christensen. He has never done so, but has threatened to do so regularly. Abbott has been slightly more careful with his words but acted similarly with Christensen. If Abbott and Kelly are to vote down a signature Coalition policy, they will need at least some allies; it will be interesting to see how Christensen chooses.<br />
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If Shorten tried to split the Liberal Party in this fashion (particularly after the made-for-Ellinghausen moment of Frydenberg embracing Ed Husic), he would be seen as "playing politics" and a man whose word could not be trusted, particularly by stuffed shirts like Peter Hartcher. The retort to that is obvious: not only the example of Barry O'Farrell cited above, but also that of Malcolm Fraser, who had initially promised to help pass the 1975-76 budget and, six months after changing his mind, was in the Lodge with the biggest majority at any federal election.<br />
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It is possible that the Turnbull government will end in a pincer movement between Labor and Abbott-led insurgents. How likely it is takes you into a hall of mirrors and double-talk such that nobody really knows, and if the did they wouldn't tell you until after it happened.<br />
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<h2>A broken right wing</h2>What's also at stake here is the future of the Liberal Party, which (as we have seen in right-wing meltdowns in South Africa, the US and UK) has broader implications for the operation of democratic systems. Some of you reading this might be Liberal partisans but most won't, so let me spell out why it matters from a perspective across Australia's political system.<br />
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The Liberal Party presents two potential futures, both to its members and supporters, and to those equally active political opponents who have to work around it.<br />
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One model for the Liberal Party is that it either bumbles along in government (unlikely), or goes into opposition hoping to form a credible alternative government (more likely but not certain). They might undergo the odd bit of relevance deprivation syndrome, even a bit of leadership ruction, but basically a Liberal-led opposition keeps a Labor government on its toes before eventually replacing it. This is the assumption underpinning the two-party system, and is based on much of our political history. <br />
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The other model is that it becomes an insurgency, sniping both at Labor governments and those Liberals looking for a calm, <strike>centrist</strike>bipartisan return to office. This is the preferred model of Abbott, Dutton, Craig Kelly, George Christensen, Andrew Hastie and a few others, roaming across the landscape and striking real and imagined foes much like the partisan described in the Hemingway quote at the top of this article. The government says black, they say white. The government says yes, they say no. Right-wing rather than conservative. They ignore yearning for bipartisanship and figure every gripe with the new government can be turned to their advantage.<br />
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The Victorian division of the Liberal Party used to be a bulwark of the former model of the Liberal future, now it is firmly in favour of the latter. Reportage of that organisation, even by experienced commentators, is inadequate because they can only understand it as a departure from the Victorian tradition. Rarely if ever to they draw the dots to Liberal politics in NSW, Queensland or even Western Australia, from which the developments in Victoria make much more sense.<br />
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Consider the senior Victorian Liberals in the federal government, in no particular order: Kelly O'Dwyer, Josh Frydenberg, Dan Tehan, Alan Tudge. All of those people (some more conservative than others) will adhere to the idea that there's a responsible way to behave in government, and that getting (back) into government is something the Liberals should aim to do. All of them will be targeted by Abbott and his gang of lost boys, and what remains of the press gallery will love it. They will be puzzled that a party wishing only to become an insurgency will skew the country's politics, but they'll go galumphing helplessly after every partisan snipe the way a dog chases a rabbit, and then insist we listen to their sober analysis of, ah, whatever is next. Unless it is released late on Friday afternoon.<br />
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I used to wonder why the gallery loved Abbott's goofy stunts and hated Rudd and Gillard's wonkiness: now I realise, it's because Abbott is a moment-to-moment, no consequences operator, and so are they. Michelle Grattan was piling on Emma Husar as hard as anyone, and she's been in the gallery since before Husar was born. They are going to keep giving him fresh air and he's going to turn it into farts, those farts will puff the dandelions of their stories, he can't help it and neither can they.<br />
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Malcolm Turnbull does not have what it takes to knock Abbott out of Warringah: getting Craig Kelly out of Hughes will be hard enough, he'll run as an independent and preference Labor. By contrast, Shorten has already settled Labor preselections in Victoria, where the Liberals are refusing to preselect candidates until after their state election. If the Liberals were forced to a federal election by a Shorten-Abbott no-confidence motion, they would be forced into a hasty, unconvincing campaign with few resources: what Sir John Carrick called trying to fatten the pig on market day.<br />
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There should be more Queenslanders commenting on politics. Kevin Rudd, Clive Palmer, Bob Katter, Peter Dutton, and now this shithead Anning; all the seismic shocks that bamboozle federal politics come from there, and we need to hear from those who have seen these jokers coming rather than yet another theatre reviewer expressing their amazement. <br />
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Politics isn't just what happens in Canberra. That's why the press gallery can't understand the significance of party preselections and their impacts on decisions made in Canberra (the assumption behind the press gallery model is that decisions made in Canberra need to be explained to those beyond it, and they don't even do that well). They have focused on the non-story of the NEG in the hope that it might pump up the non-politician who occupies the highest political position in the land. Why they do that isn't clear. I don't know why they think it constitutes compelling content, but whatever their reason it must be really (and unintentionally) funny.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-82996050835389454512018-08-02T00:47:00.000+10:002018-08-02T00:47:33.148+10:00How the press gallery killed Fairfax The press gallery killed Fairfax and it will kill other traditional media organisations too. Traditional media organisations and major political parties will have to change the way they work in order to change the way politics and policy are covered, because neither will or can survive if you're content to let the press gallery keep on being the press gallery.<br />
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New readers might find the above alarmist and sensational. Regular readers will recognise it as a consistent theme of this blog. I am not trying to pour the old wine of press gallery inadequacy into the new bottles of the Fairfax takeover, and the recent coverage of federal politics and policy (well, I am, kind of, but if you read on the results more strongly support that than the idea that press gallery are just regular journos doing their best in a fast-moving world).<br />
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<h2>A reduction in diversity</h2>In recent years there has been a trend away from diversity as a priority for media. This wasn't a result of last year's legislative changes; parliament mostly follows rather than leads public debate (and this pretty much discredits the "theatre critic" model of political coverage, but I digress). <br />
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The press gallery has led this with its governing principle that there can only ever be one story, and one narrative for reporting that story. John Howard couldn't be beaten, until the day he couldn't win. Kim Beazley was tomorrow's man, until he was yesterday's man. Barnaby Joyce was a top bloke, until he was a cad and an incompetent minister. They even boast about <a href="http://pressgallery.net.au/about-us/">the conditions that create the samey-sameness of political coverage</a>, and the inability to snap out of it; a magic land of sharing and caring, where what they think of as competition is the narcissism of minor differences. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMCB9YegWNHVbgo35veDcABuhe_CEUjDJz3eqKTrP2PJQWoMtdMEp0Jp9Y9giui9GwKFzb2bB9TkwlQJj6W0iCVbqjLoSmzGCY73iR5g6ZyKiUTYBTn3kkpvNK4wCU8vkC_gpo/s1600/slice_smurfs_hanna_barbera_cartoon_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMCB9YegWNHVbgo35veDcABuhe_CEUjDJz3eqKTrP2PJQWoMtdMEp0Jp9Y9giui9GwKFzb2bB9TkwlQJj6W0iCVbqjLoSmzGCY73iR5g6ZyKiUTYBTn3kkpvNK4wCU8vkC_gpo/s320/slice_smurfs_hanna_barbera_cartoon_01.jpg" width="320" height="107" data-original-width="600" data-original-height="200" /></a></div><center>(c) Hanna-Barbera</center><center>"Great yarn, mate! Top yarn!"</center><br />
Press gallery output leads news bulletins, websites, and newspaper front pages. It mostly presents politicians' quotes without the context that might make their proposals work, or otherwise meaningful. It does not challenge their assertions, and represents any and all disagreement as "argy-bargy". <br />
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When the Walkley Awards for Australian journalism were inaugurated, there was no special category for he press gallery. Press gallery rely heavily on press releases for their stories; breaking stories about politics or policy issues, with in-depth investigation from original sources, tends to come from outside the gallery. Photographers and camera operators are more likely to hold their own in industry-nominated awards than press gallery are with <strike>proper</strike> other journalists. As a result, press gallery journalists <strike>really lifted their game</strike> lobbied for a special category only open to press gallery journalists. <br />
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While there have been reductions in press gallery numbers, they have been fewer and proportionally less than in the newsrooms. Press gallery tend to get paid better than other journalists. Now consider that these reductions have been compensated by new entrants to the press gallery, who have mostly hired press gallery veterans anyway, and the privilege of the press gallery is clear to all not within its walls. When journalists back in the newsrooms are downsized, Canberra press gallery send their thoughts and prayers in much the same way that Washington's NRA-funded legislators do with US mass shooting victims. <br />
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To get to the journalism practiced by Australia's traditional media, you have to push past press gallery output. Those who investigated dodgy financial advice practices made a real difference, and won awards too, but strangely they forgot to interview Senator Cormann who lobbied so hard for the legislative changes (among the first legislation passed by the Abbott government) that made those practices lawful. Those who investigated institutionalised child abuse and covering-up didn't bother chewing the cud of poll results. Newsroom journalists cop jeers from their peers and sneers from <i>Media Watch</i> for writing up product-launch press releases as news, while press gallery get away with it every day. Journalists who complained about government proposals to restrict information from government about its activities were not those who witnessed the legislation being debated and who rubbed, ah, shoulders with the perpetrators. <br />
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If traditional media outlets really believed that excellent journalism is what makes their outfit great, they would lead with it. If an editor pulling together the daily rushes finds that the single best gobbet of journalism before them is a piece about a football match, or the shoes that an actress wore to an awards ceremony, then that should go on the front page/top of the bulletin. The obscurity of inside pages should be the place for hackery: the accident blocking the busy road, the treasurer who declares opposition policy to be economically disastrous, etc. <br />
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They don't do that because they don't believe in journalism, not really. There's a formula and bad press gallery coverage is baked in. It's not news that the prime minister is criticised, but journalists can't tell whether or not the criticism is valid. They say that they'll let the reader/viewer decide, but the readers/viewers have increasingly turned off and I've decided press gallery is killing journalism.<br />
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When you talk about journalistic excellence at Fairfax, I talk about Kate McClymont, Schneiders/ McKenzie/ Baker, Michael Bachelard and Jewel Topsfield from Jakarta, Adele Ferguson or Neil Chenoweth or Michael West from the business pages, Caroline Wilson and Jacqueline Magnay from sport, and perishingly few others. None of those people are/were press gallery. Their press gallery contingent isn't worth their own weight in press releases. Whether it's the blowhard Peter Hartcher, the Owned Boys Phil Coorey, Mark Kenny or (admit it) Michael Gordon, or the <a href="http://andrewelder.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-impact-of-michelle-grattan.html">prim process-over-outcome focus of Michelle Grattan</a>, it's time to admit that Fairfax didn't put their best into the press gallery, and that the nongs they did put there have done the business no favours. <br />
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For all the fretting about Nine diminishing Fairfax journalism, the fact is Lane Calcutt's just-the-facts approach runs rings around the entire Fairfax contingent. When press gallery veteran Greg Hywood was appointed Fairfax CEO in 2011 his appointment was universally praised within the media: hooray, a real journalist, they cried as one, when his greatest investigative skill was getting on the dripfeed from Keating's office. Hiding their journalistic light under the bushel of press gallery output was one of Fairfax's biggest mistakes. NewsCorp do the same thing, with inane press gallery compounded by a further layer of cold grey drizzle of culture warriors that ward off all but the most intrepid seekers after journalism who might venture there. They will face a similar reckoning once the old man dies. <br />
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<h2>The choices we make</h2>The press gallery, through its easily gamed One Story One Narrative policy, decided in Fairfax's final week that there would be two stories:<ul><li>the byelections of 28 July, of which Our Malcolm would win at least one because #balance, and</li>
<li>Emma Husar</li>
</ul>Taking the second first: I've worked for some crap bosses and I'm glad I never worked for Emma Husar. That said, in the great annals of graft and bludging in Australian politics, Husar's dog-walking and child-minding simply do not rate. And the more experience you have observing politics, the less excuse you have for slavering over every twist-and-turn in this non-story, the less credibility you have when you claim you'd love to do Serious Journalism, oh my goodness did you see what Emma Husar just did ...? Press gallery who disdained going after Barnaby Joyce (and who still regard his story as a sex scandal rather than rorting or policy incompetence) are hogwild for all things Husar.<br />
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Emma Husar's domestic incompetence recalls Queensland Labor MP Leanne Donaldson. Another unmarried mother who became a Labor MP, Donaldson hit the headlines for antics like driving a car while unregistered and not paying council rates. Anastacia Palaszczuk sacked her from the ministry and at the last state election, Donaldson lost her seat. Donaldson has spoken of her struggle with depression, and Husar may yet do likewise; but while two anecdotes do not form a pattern, it might be worth investigating whether political parties could do more to support women in politics, and that such support might be the necessary price for all that easy talk about attracting more women to public office.<br />
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In the Coalition, unmarried women are all but excluded by dint of sexism. What those parties lose in crushing the aspirations of capable young women and appealing to a broader constituency, they save themselves the embarrassment of a Husar or a Donaldson. Those women who break that rule (e.g. Marise Payne, Gladys Berejiklian, Julie Bishop) spent decades studying the factional tectonics of the party and leveraged it with overwhelming support, overriding any objections about their domestic circumstances. Bronwyn Bishop only ran for preselection after her children were adults and her marriage ended: her far-right constituency would never have backed her if her husband and children were an issue, or had she never married at all. The key is to attract candidates who aren't fixtures of the party landscape and to give them an inkling that they just might have a chance, but that key turns no lock in the Coalition. They'll endorse a man at face value but won't consider a woman they don't know intimately.<br />
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Husar isn't a member of the government. In two of the four byelections on 28 July (the two seats where the main competition came from strong Liberal candidates), the Labor candidates were women. The clear implication of the Murdoch jihad against Husar is that those candidates are just like her: a vote for the Labor woman is a vote for Gillard/Jordan Peterson chaos. As it happens, those two women are headed back to Canberra, and it is entirely possible that Husar won't. She might become another victim of a brutal system, she might lash out at her entire party and the journalists. She hasn't entered Lindy Chamberlain territory for weird and prurient media coverage, but you can see it from here. <br />
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<h2>Protesting too much</h2><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/paul-keating-slams-nines-takeover-of-fairfax/10041072">Paul Keating called Nine a lowbrow outfit</a>. While it's hard to disagree, and hard not to welcome back an original voice into the mealy-mouthed dialogue of today, he protests too much.<br />
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When Keating was at the top of Australian politics, Nine's <i>Sunday</i> program was consistently excellent journalism, of a standard unknown in Australia's traditional media today. Its investigative pieces with Ross Coulthart gave <i>Four Corners</i> a run for its money. While Keating had the measure of most in the press gallery at the time, if anyone was going to knock him off his game it would be Laurie Oakes. In 1993, when Kerry Packer realised what Hewson's GST proposal would do to his profit margins, he sooled Nine onto the Liberals and helped Keating to his only victory as Labor leader. <br />
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Keating is the second-last Labor leader (excepting the brief summer of Rudd in 2007-8) to get anything like a fair run in the Murdoch press. Murdoch's voice was consistent throughout his organisation but that voice did not set the news agenda like it does today, thanks to Keating allowing Murdoch to take over the Herald and Weekly Times in 1987. NewsCorp definitely is a lowbrow outfit, proudly so, and don't get me started on 10 or 7 (though again, Mark Riley > the entire Fairfax press gallery contingent). Keating was wrong to play up the mote in Nine's eye to the extent that he did. <br />
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That said, Nine will quash the delicate flower of Fairfax journalism through dumbness ("what do you need <i>that</i> for?") rather than spite.<br />
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<h2>How late it was, how late</h2>Both <i>The Sydney Morning Herald</i> and <i>The Age</i> were founding members of the press gallery. Before it existed, both papers led debates about whether a federal parliament should even exist, and in what form; but all parliamentary buildings in this country were built with a press gallery pre-installed, including all three that housed the federal parliament. Press gallery do not have to forage for stories like real journalists do; how this must gall sacked journalists who have to forage for an income once the traditional media paycheque is, despite their best efforts, yanked away.<br />
<blockquote><i>Here’s a point I’m absolutely willing to concede. We spend too much time with theatre criticism … and not enough time burrowing down into the issues on which voters make their choices.</i><br />
- Katharine Murphy, Political Editor, <i>Guardian Australia</i><br />
on ABC <i>Insiders</i> 29 July 2018</blockquote>Murphy did not arrive at that concession by herself. On this blog and in my Twitter feed, I and many, many others hammered Murphy for years until all her other options fell away. Murphy does not operate from any sort of elevated place from which addressing actual policy issues might be considered a descent. Her recent work on electricity has been impressive, and the constraints on journalist numbers is worth mentioning, but it's still too much to expect this Fairfax veteran of the press gallery to become a full journalist. Press gallery play at journalism from time to time - now it's electricity, now foreign policy, now school funding - but soon enough it slumps back into the One Story One Narrative of polls and intrigues, real and imagined. Apart from the equally hopeless Barrie Cassidy, nobody else in the press gallery is even awake to the sheer enormity of the problem they have caused their fellow journalists. <br />
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I laughed when <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/brace-for-the-class-war-election-it-s-going-to-be-taxing-20180626-p4znu1.html">Tony Wright threatened to cover the coming election with the same dreary template</a> the traditional media applies to all election coverage: more readers looking for answers and finding only cliches, more media executives wondering why punters aren't lapping up the argy-bargy and bleating about disenchantment. The joke's on you, fella. We can't vote you out, and the choices we make at elections are not foretold by polls, but by layers of yarns and narratives from the press gallery. <br />
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We are badly informed about politics and policy, and a people in that predicament can never be well governed. Press gallery overestimate their own cleverness by dumbing down debate to a level that makes them comfortable. They see journalists depart from the home offices and never accept their own role in creating a media environment that makes acts of journalism more random, and as far as possible from wherever they are. You'll note that among the journalist positions whittled away were the actual arts critics - theatre, film, and music critics, book critics - and yet press gallery cannot be dissuaded or deterred from covering parliament like Australia's best subsidised and lamest theatre complex. <br />
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Bad political journalism makes the country governed badly and kills good jobs in journalism. Despite all the evidence, I'm still not convinced that bad political journalism is the only coverage of policy and public affairs possible - but I've been wrong before.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-28258527431812388522018-06-19T22:47:00.000+10:002018-06-19T22:47:09.511+10:00Arsey: Seven weaknesses of the Ramsay CentreThe <a href="https://www.ramsaycentre.org.au/">Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation</a> aims to educate Australians not only in the facts of Western Civilisation, but also in its beauties and wonders and its enduring relevance to Australian life going forward. Can it succeed in those aims? No. The directors of that organisation are wasting the benefactor's money, however much they <a href="http://tonyabbott.com.au/2018/04/paul-ramsays-vision-australia/">wax lyrical about him</a>, and they should either desist, or start getting on with it, rather than continue mucking about.<br />
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<h2>Hosting</h2>In reporting the fallout between the Ramsay Centre and the Australian National University over their proposed Western Civilisation degree course, traditional media outlets focused on the kerfuffle and the he-said-she-said and the SHOCK CONTROVERSY SHOCK which they (mistakenly) believe sells papers. This is consistent with the unenlightening and tedious way they cover politics and associated culture war issues. <br />
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What they did not do, and perhaps could never have done, is examine why the Ramsay Centre might want to partner with a university in the first place. University bureaucracies are large, slow-moving beasts, much criticised over many years by Ramsay Centre board members John Howard and Tony Abbott. Surely the institutions that caused the problem that the Ramsay Centre is seeking to solve (that Western Civilisation is denigrated or underappreciated by university-educated people today) are of limited use in solving it. Surely, the <a href="http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/vcs-update-partnerships-and-donations"> outcome delivered by the ANU</a> was foreseeable by anyone with experience in high-level negotiations of this type.<br />
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In recent years, vocational education providers have developed syllabi and offline/online training courses in IT, business, WHS, and other areas using minimal bureaucracy, real estate, or other overheads of large established institutions like ANU. There is no good reason why the Ramsay Centre should not have a complete suite of online/offline courses ready to go, right now, to show ANU and whomever else what they're missing and setting the standard for others to follow. Leave the grizzling to wasters like Nick Cater. Let's be having you, if you're good enough.<br />
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One possible indication of the Ramsay Centre's motives can be seen in Chris Berg, an IPA shill who no longer identifies himself as such. He got a PhD from RMIT's economics department, stacked as it is with IPA alumni such as Sinclair Davidson and Steven Kates, and now uses RMIT to sell the cuckoo's egg of IPA policy.<br />
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Another is in the image of Ramsay given by Abbott above, someone who liked the idea of a well-stocked mind but who couldn't do it himself. The inaction in Ramsay's name stands in contrast to the more hands-on <a href="https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-globalist/">George Soros</a> (h/t @liamvhogan):<br />
<blockquote>Unlike most of the members of the billionaire class who speak in platitudes and remain withdrawn from serious engagement with civic life - Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg [or perhaps Paul Ramsay] come to mind - Soros is an intellectual. The person who emerges from his popular books and many articles is not an out of touch plutocrat, but a provocative and consistent thinker unambiguously committed to pushing the world in a cosmopolitan direction in which racism, income inequality, American empire, and the alienations of contemporary capitalism would be things of the past. Soros is as comfortable with Wittgenstein as he is with Warren Buffett, which makes him a sui generis figure in American life, someone whose likes we will not see again for quite a while. He is extremely perceptive about the limits of markets and US power in both domestic and international contexts. He is, in short, among the best the meritocracy has produced …<br />
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Throughout his career, he has committed himself to writing systematically about social, economic, and political ideas. In particular, he has highlighted Popper’s 1945 classic <i>The Open Society and Its Enemies</i> as key to his worldview.</blockquote>When Popper wrote about the enemies of the open society, he was referring to people like Tony Abbott. I can't believe they have won.<br />
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As an Arts graduate myself, I'm used to the jibes like "airy fairy" and "arty farty" surrounding education in the humanities (not least, it must be said, from people like Howard and Abbott). Richard Denniss must surely have been tongue-in-cheek when writing <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/education/what-doors-would-a-western-civilisation-degree-open-20180615-p4zlrz.html">this article</a> about the utility of Western Civilisation studies. This brings us, however, to another important point. <br />
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<h2>Science</h2>Public debate, in Australia and elsewhere, is impoverished by a lack of general understanding of science. People who cross the gamut of economics, law, business or other matters come to a crunching halt when confronted with scientific and technical matters: "I'm not a climate scientist", they whimper, "I'm not a tech head", "I'm not a doctor", "I'm not an engineer", etc.<br />
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The whole idea of state aid to non-state schools in the 1960s was to forestall this impoverishment of public debate: not simply to head off a shortage of skilled workers in science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM). The great challenges of our age - climate change, the affordances and threats facilitated by ICT and bioengineering - require some understanding of and respect for science. The case for a generalist understanding of the humanities, regardless of the paucity of jobs in the area, has been well made (including by Denniss in his fourth paragraph), but the case for a generalist understanding of STEM issues has been made less well. <br />
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If you can draw up a treasury of Western Civilisation that includes (for example) Aristotle, Shakespeare, or Kant, then the same case can be made for Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein. These thinkers influence the way we think and act today. The very demarcation between science and the humanities, much lamented by <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/cultural-capital/2013/01/c-p-snow-two-cultures">C P Snow</a> and others, would have puzzled many of the thinkers the Ramsay Centre would have in their canon. Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of helicopters weren't just cutely inventive, they were part of serious work on how to move heavier-than-air objects through the air. His studies of fossilised seashells in the Apennines arose from a resistance to the flippant thinking about their placement by the Great Flood. Rene Descartes came up with the idea of plotting data against two variables on X and Y axes: I'd suggest that is at least as important to Western Civilisation as the aphorism most often attributed to him, <i>cogito ergo sum</i>.<br />
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The reason why Western Civ advocates can't and don't include science is because the history of science involves challenges to authority, knocking off one set of certainties and finding a way forward until other certainties coalesce around what is known. Contemporary conservatives are jealous of the authority scientists have in developed societies. They must know how feeble they sound when they simply pooh-pooh lifetimes of study, and underestimate the detriment to their own power in doing so. Creationist science is no more reliable than the Lysenkoism of the Soviet Union. Conservatives assume falsely that their work cannot be brought within the Western canon, as 20th century musicologists couldn't find a place in their discipline for jazz. <br />
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It is a weakness of the Ramsay Centre, built on a fortune made possible by <strike>Paul Ramsay's father the property developer</strike> medical science, that it cannot and will not engage with Western scientific methods and discoveries. The division that frustrated C P Snow looks like a restrictive work practice and a cop-out. This brings us to another important point.<br />
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<h2>Laziness</h2>Young conservatives, growing up in an environment hostile to academia, aren't in a rush to become academics. Even so, they still react with puzzlement (as this guy does at 48:55 in <a href="https://iview.abc.net.au/show/qanda">the latest episode</a>) that there are so few conservative academics, and hence the deficiency that the Ramsay Centre seeks to address exists and is not their fault but others'. <br />
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I've read some of the texts which leftist academics rely upon for their critiques - Foucault, Dworkin (Ronald and Andrea), Zizek, Baudrillard, to name a few - and they're hard work. It's slow boring through hard boards a lot of the time, and I sympathise with those who reject it as not worth doing. I don't blame young conservatives for treating an undergraduate degree as a means toward the end of a job, and that earning money is to be preferred over the vow of poverty that would seem to correlate with academia. The rollicking works of Niall Ferguson or the gentle rambles of Roger Scruton are much easier than the spiky, careening stuff translated from French into stodgy, dense English. <br />
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When I was a Young Liberal at uni it shat me no end that the people who were most learned in what I'd been led to believe was the canon of Liberalism - James and John Stuart Mill, Locke, Bentham, Oakeshott - those who knew them best were committed lefties. The academic who has probably studied the Liberal Party in greater depth than any other, Judith Brett, is a committed Labor voter, as was Menzies' biographer Allan Martin. Yet, those are the people who have done the work, and that work is to be respected. <br />
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The lack of conservative academics ready to develop and teach Ramsay Centre courses, or even to remedy the defect the Ramsay Centre aims to, can't be simply explained by discriminatory hiring practices across this country's universities. <a href="https://ipa.org.au/people-ipa">The IPA has a number of Research Fellows</a> sitting around not doing or achieving very much. Conservatives have done this to themselves, and if they really think this is a serious issue they must change their ways. Not only is there no Ramsay Centre canon to work on, there are no scholarships or other means of encouragement for young conservatives to clamber up the sheer north face of the Great Books into the sunlit uplands that conservatives have in mind. <br />
<br />
If you want to talk about systematic discrimination and unconscious bias, it takes to the place where feminists and other intersectional sociologists have been operating for years. Where is the conservative who really wants to go there?<br />
<br />
<h2>Consistency</h2><blockquote><i>But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.</i><br />
<br />
- Martin Luther King: speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC, 28 August 1963</blockquote>If you're going to not only study, but exult in, the glories of Western Civilisation - and wonder why not everyone is as enthusiastic about them as you are - then you're only being intellectually honest when you look into why women, dark-skinned people, Freemasons, LGBTIQ and others failed to appreciate and enjoy the freedoms and riches that the Ramsay Centre sees as the rightful inheritance of those who study Western Civ. <br />
<br />
I had no idea (well, it's possible I was told by some left-wing student back in the 1990s and have forgotten it) that John Locke was a colonial administrator in British America who was perfectly fine with slavery, and that his famous injunction against "slavery" was really a wish to limit the powers of the King over his Caucasian male subjects. <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/06/taking-the-enlightenment-seriously-requires-talking-about-race.html">Jamelle Bouie's recent essay on liberty and racism</a> highlights what is, for the Ramsay Centre, and other proponents of Western Civilisation, an unresolved blind spot and an intellectual weakness. <br />
<br />
In the article linked earlier, Tony Abbott referred to his own education in history as a narrative of progress, "where 'freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent'". Abbott led a government, and as a backbencher nominally supports a continuation of that government, where freedoms were sacrificed to scaremongering about terrorism. The result of his own education has been to turn on it. Explain that, Ramsay Centre.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://johnquiggin.com/2018/06/17/maybe-we-need-a-degree-in-western-civilization-after-all/">John Quiggin's point here</a> is well made: if you believe Western Civilisation is a club anyone can join, it falls to you to be honest about why many haven't, why many shun it, and why only struggle can explain why they have any share in it at all. They can't all be stupid and ungrateful, can they?<br />
<br />
<h2>Marx</h2><blockquote><i>A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism. </i> <br />
<br />
- Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto </blockquote>Karl Marx is a thinker steeped in the Western tradition. Yes he is. His intellectual antecedents include Hegel, Lycurgus, and (believe it or not) Adam Smith and David Ricardo.<br />
<br />
Marx wrote and published prolifically around the middle of the nineteenth century. Much of the history of the past 150 years - particularly in Western societies, but also in non-Western societies colonised by Western Civilisation like China and Vietnam - is incomprehensible without reference to Marx, marxism and Marxists. <br />
<br />
Marx is a significant thinker in and on Western Civilisation. Yes, he is.<br />
<br />
The Ramsay Centre should take Marx seriously as a writer and have its students study his work in detail, and engage with what's there rather than continue wrestling with the spectre Marx himself identified. It won't, though. It can't. Conservatives have looked on in dismay as generations of students have discovered Marx and, if not becoming devotees, then taken him and his works seriously. Like travellers to Solaris in Stanislaw Lem's novel, they are helpless to prevent this and don't really understand why anyone would want to go there. A Ramsay Centre course on Marxism would be like a Rechabite wine-tasting: there'd be nothing there, and nobody would enjoy it.<br />
<br />
As for Cultural Marxists, wouldn't it be best to Know The Enemy? Initially, the term "cultural marxism" might have referred to writers like Habermas, Adorno, Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School, but it has come to apply to basically any matter that the Murdoch press does not like (and on which those writers referred to in this paragraph, and Marx himself, paid scant attention to), such as women in Liberal Party preselections, critics of the current President of the United States, those who believe Britain should remain in the European Union, the impact of tax cuts on economic activity, or even transgender people using the loo. Good luck finding intellectual consistency in that mess of potage, and teaching it.<br />
<br />
<h2>Governance</h2>The board of the Ramsay Centre is itself a problem. They are timid people frittering away the money over which they are responsible, for the reasons described above: if Paul Ramsay had squealed like a stuck pig every time a deal fell through, he wouldn't have gotten anywhere. The Ramsay Centre has not backed itself, and it has not demonstrated any faith in the richness and appeal of the inheritances of Western Civilisation. They would display artefacts of Western Civilisation like Royal Doulton china (collect the set, get a Bachelor's degree!) rather than put them to work.<br />
<br />
Tony Abbott has stuffed up everything he has ever been put in charge of, from the Federal Budget to the expenses of his own office. If you honestly believe this man should remain in any position of governance then you can make no case against Catherine Brenner.<br />
<br />
<h2>Nipples</h2>This last point isn't a big deal, but it is indicative that the Ramsay Centre isn't really serious about its stated mission.<br />
<br />
Here is an image from the homepage of the Ramsay Centre's website:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR_RsppFLCTn2_3xOoVN7YnPHWNSerAXbjnrQtsl3Rs5M1JLNJYjP_JphiQs31LNqg2tcj9qADjBuBpGGLvBQoJ2lXhm1CaEkhDvQzTtZ2sUNllvEiIxqhCTLuJmtQmyy3wAtc/s1600/liberte_rc.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="606" data-original-width="1600" height="121" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR_RsppFLCTn2_3xOoVN7YnPHWNSerAXbjnrQtsl3Rs5M1JLNJYjP_JphiQs31LNqg2tcj9qADjBuBpGGLvBQoJ2lXhm1CaEkhDvQzTtZ2sUNllvEiIxqhCTLuJmtQmyy3wAtc/s320/liberte_rc.PNG" width="320" /></a></div><center>(c) The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation</center><br />
Here is an image of that same painting, <i>28 July, Liberty Leading the People</i> by Eugène Delacroix, from the website of the Louvre:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt7WxG1f3rWZco9fT5Tls5OJiMJyyFd1enpzi7Q3lFAOqlRfyQvniEG-2UPl3LrLOzFkReEh64PUF6GmUWanchEH2467zGs8k_Qi5V7sTyBlmS4e_KeuTtfR3_Taaqn29CmO5O/s1600/liberte_louvre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="189" data-original-width="235" height="257" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt7WxG1f3rWZco9fT5Tls5OJiMJyyFd1enpzi7Q3lFAOqlRfyQvniEG-2UPl3LrLOzFkReEh64PUF6GmUWanchEH2467zGs8k_Qi5V7sTyBlmS4e_KeuTtfR3_Taaqn29CmO5O/s320/liberte_louvre.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><center>(c) Musée du Louvre</center><br />
Back when France issued its own currency, they printed the Delacroix image onto banknotes:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwmsrDhV7mDuWfzUDPJhpQJKpSbNyk_O-oaLfSRra_kacvI5rQK1c7N02wZ3eQFGLCXv3-27KrdLvLj1sTabF2xMP6OTunJ48nHkbIBE4omC5fe0lgRsKRnj4G8oHOwhMrtPPk/s1600/liberte_f100.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="434" data-original-width="800" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwmsrDhV7mDuWfzUDPJhpQJKpSbNyk_O-oaLfSRra_kacvI5rQK1c7N02wZ3eQFGLCXv3-27KrdLvLj1sTabF2xMP6OTunJ48nHkbIBE4omC5fe0lgRsKRnj4G8oHOwhMrtPPk/s320/liberte_f100.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><center>(c) Banque du France</center><br />
Maybe it's just me, but I have noticed that the Ramsay Centre have edited out the nipples on Lady Liberty. When I went to Paris and visited the Louvre and saw that painting, you could say I was paying homage to Western Civilisation. Given that the Ramsay Centre people also love Western Civilisation, why would they do that? Admittedly, it isn't only Western women, or women at all, that have nipples - but even so, is such an impulse consistent, or even compatible, with all that's good about Western Civilisation? As we move into an information age, an age of abundant and easy access to cultural and other inheritances of the Western tradition, is bowdlerisation something to be encouraged? Is it necessary to maintaining and advancing Western Civilisation? Honestly?Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-180414423486671032018-04-02T22:25:00.000+10:002018-04-02T22:25:48.286+10:00Flinching at the future<blockquote><i>I look to the future it makes me cry<br />
But it seems too real to tell you why<br />
<br />
Freed from the century<br />
With nothing but memory, memory<br />
<br />
And I just hope that you can forgive us<br />
But everything must go<br />
<br />
And if you need an explanation<br />
Then everything must go</i><br />
<br />
- Manic Street Preachers <i>Everything must go</i></blockquote>In 2018, traditional broadcast media is dying and politicians are starting to look for alternatives to standard media management. Two recent incidents from two current politicians, and the responses from the media covering them, show that the place of the media in the future of politics is clear: there isn't one.<br />
<br />
<h2>Disintermediation</h2>There are those who govern, and those who are governed. For the past two hundred or so years in western democracies, the entirety of Australia's post-settlement political history, that relationship has been mediated by accredited media. Accredited media was supplied with details about government decisions that had been taken, and it also took to reporting both reactions to those decisions, and proposals for government decisions not yet taken. In that gap, between the government and the governed, Australia developed political systems and cultures developed and are developing still. <br />
<br />
For much of Australian political history it was possible for a politician to build a career through close, physical contact with the community they represented. Since the 1960s politicians had to deal with broadcast media as the most efficient way to reach a mass audience: one of the reasons why Gough Whitlam was so lionised by journalists in the late 1960s/early '70s is because he took broadcast media journalists more seriously than his Coalition opponents at the time. For a generation, it was largely only possible to get into politics through a major party; and the major parties outsourced their public outreach function to broadcast media, which operated on a similarly clubby and oligopolistic basis as the major parties themselves.<br />
<br />
Today, political parties have their media relationship down to a pretty fine art, bound by conventions (such as 'off the record', or observing publishing deadlines) and imposing tight rules to govern the press gallery within Parliament House. However, the environment has changed around them to the point where this fine art actually works against the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed. That relationship is paramount, and it prevails over secondary, failing relationships with the broadcast media. <br />
<br />
<h2>Over the mainstream media</h2><blockquote><i>I hate journalists. I'm over dealing with the mainstream media as a form of communication with the people of Canberra. What passes for a daily newspaper in this city is a joke and it will be only a matter of years before it closes down.</i> </blockquote><blockquote>- ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr, 8 March 2018</blockquote>When <i>The Canberra Times</i> (the daily newspaper referred to above) discovered Barr had said this, it initially couldn't believe it, reduced first to <a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/i-hate-journalists-and-im-over-the-mainstream-media-act-chief-minister-andrew-barr-20180309-h0x9xk.html">dumb and incredulous reporting of his words</a>; then it went <a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/ct-editorial/barrs-hatred-of-media-is-driving-a-dangerous-message-20180311-h0xbdj.html">officially berserk</a>. No calm and measured reflection on changes to technology and reader information needs. For years, senior management at Fairfax Media has sought to assure investors that it has a strategy for transition to digital: the hysteria from <i>The Canberra Times</i> shows either no such strategy exists, or it is so tightly guarded a secret that head office will have to do the whole lot by itself.<br />
<br />
Instead, <i>The Canberra Times</i> carried one unsourced assertion from Barr and another from its editorialist about readership figures, and then insisted that its coverage of <strike>municipal</strike> Territory affairs is equal to detailed scrutiny of government. Of course, most of its coverage is merely relaying press releases; as with the federal parliamentary press gallery, the person who drafts the press release does much more work than the journalists who simply pass it forward. Only when a government is fading in the polls, or when it has actively alienated its press gallery, is there any scrutiny worth the name. <br />
<br />
Politicians spend a lot of time crafting their message, only to have journalists fail to grasp it or go off on some frolic of their own. That relationship has its frustrations; but parties to that relationship can only patch over its frustrations in both parties are actively convinced that dissolving the relationship would be worse than patching things up and getting on with it. <a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/i-hate-journalists-and-im-over-the-mainstream-media-act-chief-minister-andrew-barr-20180309-h0x9xk.html">Kirsten Lawson's initial article</a> quotes Barr as actively looking for channels for engaging his constituency in the affairs of its government, in ways that go beyond the standard relationship with broadcast media - inadequate and consistently failing. Lawson was wrong to claim Barr has "set out his new plans to bypass traditional media", because later in the article she makes it clear no such plans exist. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/ct-editorial/barrs-hatred-of-media-is-driving-a-dangerous-message-20180311-h0xbdj.html">The editorialist</a> identified this lack of a coherent alternative to traditional media relations when it portrayed Barr's look to the future as some sort of mental problem. Opening the framing by comparing Barr to Trump, using terms like "pique", "lashed", and deploying straw men in such numbers and futility that it must surely be in breach of ACT environmental regulations, <i>The Canberra Times</i> draws on a record of competence hoping to create the impression that it has a future. <br />
<blockquote>[the ACT government's] implicit push towards controlled messaging and social media ...</blockquote>Which is it? The use of "implicit" shows this is a figment of the editorialist rather than the work of the Barr government. You can either have a controlled message or a social media engagement strategy; you can't really do both. You show me a tightly controlled social media account and I'll show you one that fails to engage. Lumping those terms together shows <i>The Canberra Times</i> doesn't understand either of these terms, which bodes ill for its future as a viable media organisation regardless of what Barr might or might not do. <br />
<br />
This arrogance, combined with that of other Fairfax mastheads, leads the company to demand resources that might more usefully (and profitably) go to other ways of disseminating information to Canberra and the world. If you're serious about resources for good journalism, consider whether the resources might better be spent on sites like <a href="https://the-riotact.com/">The Riot Act</a>, arguably Canberra's ragless true local rag, rather than propping up <i>The Canberra Times</i> for old time's sake. <br />
<br />
This arrogance sent ace reporters <a href="https://www.blogger.com/www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/barrs-brain-snap-on-media-hatred-likened-to-views-espoused-by-joh-bjelkepetersen-20180312-h0xcig.html">Daniel Burdon and Katie Burgess</a> into a tizz:<br />
<blockquote>ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr's comment that he "hates journalists" has been labelled a "brain snap" and likened to views once espoused by the disgraced former Queensland premier, the late Joh Bjelke-Petersen.</blockquote>When someone in the public eye swears or laughs so hard that snot dribbles out their nose, that's a brain snap. Listen to Barr's speech again: you do your readers a disservice and discredit your own work when you mislabel events like that. As for Bjelke-Petersen: my dudes, he sure as hell wasn't trying to connect with Queenslanders under 30 using multi-channel strategies. Griffith University political analyst Professor Paul Williams, quoted in that article, has beclowned himself with that comparison.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYoEKeIMIOU4_Py6OdVG-dETy-oLCggy7WCUHgzeilp6nZCuNCzKbT5hxzmUFBVxUmv-POo5HnR0xe4maECJFDZCgY7INylimNcWmXbBFUPWyt-TjQj_Di8ozl6VutbPEm9SgC/s1600/Burgess1.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="491" data-original-width="953" height="165" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYoEKeIMIOU4_Py6OdVG-dETy-oLCggy7WCUHgzeilp6nZCuNCzKbT5hxzmUFBVxUmv-POo5HnR0xe4maECJFDZCgY7INylimNcWmXbBFUPWyt-TjQj_Di8ozl6VutbPEm9SgC/s320/Burgess1.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>The utter absence of media solidarity with Canberra's oldest broadcast outlet is notable, as is the speed with which Burgess dropped this existential threat to civic life in the nation's seventh-largest city and seat of government. But never mind such trifles. Here is the much-vaunted Uhlmann statement:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTj2KmqaFC8nYbpWV7VMFzqH1h0Xf-NhmhebID8xFzec0ON95GqvA5cOM-i4BJD3HEqy8pUKu7a7SkSJCXjSk7xGgWH0SEtjVfQFbBw4qstE1Rx_1w1uTc6lJEml7xq82htSm3/s1600/uhlmann-barr.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="731" data-original-width="482" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTj2KmqaFC8nYbpWV7VMFzqH1h0Xf-NhmhebID8xFzec0ON95GqvA5cOM-i4BJD3HEqy8pUKu7a7SkSJCXjSk7xGgWH0SEtjVfQFbBw4qstE1Rx_1w1uTc6lJEml7xq82htSm3/s320/uhlmann-barr.PNG" width="211" /></a></div>Here's where Uhlmann is right: broadcast media is dying. Here's where he's wrong:<br />
<ul><li>"And now [sic] we are gifted with politicians who can't be arsed being accountable". No jurisdiction in Australia is gifted with politicians. We elect them on the basis of information supplied by accredited broadcast media. A politician keen on multi-channel engagement ought not be confused with one who wants to shut down any and all scrutiny;</li>
<li>"I have known Mr Barr since he was a youth" - oh please, condescension without superiority;</li>
<li>"far greater political minds than his have grappled with the torture of dealing with the mainstream media and decided it was central to a healthy democracy" - those minds dated from periods where mainstream or broadcast media really was the only media, where both the politicians and the journalists were better than they are now. Barr is a provincial politician in a well-informed polity right now, and he can see the beginnings of a post-CT future, while all Uhlmann can see are Orwell's cavalry horses answering the bugle;</li>
<li>"Given it is going hand in hand with the decline in trust with all political institutions ...". Here Uhlmann goes for a bit of <i>tu quoque</i> and comes up short. It is a fantasy of insider journos that politicians must go down with them, grappling and plunging like Holmes and Moriarty off the Reichenbach Falls. That isn't how politics works: if you're going down, pollies cut you loose and laugh at your descent. If Uhlmann doesn't know that much he clearly doesn't understand politics as much as his job titles over the years might suggest.</li>
<li>"When the last, irritating, journalist is sacked and when the last masthead closes, does Mr Barr imagine his already underscrutinised government will be improved?". The question is: will Canberrans be better informed? Scrutiny is not exclusive (still less EXCLUSIVE) to journalists at outlets like <i>The Canberra Times</i>, and Barr deserves credit for trying to discern the dim outline of what is yet to come rather than that which has the reputation but no future to speak of; </li>
<li>"does Mr Barr honestly believe that the social media alternative will be better?". Again, Uhlmann assumes social media is an alternative rather than a supplement to the emaciated and fading broadcasters. As he doesn't understand the state of the media today he has no business lecturing politicians, or anyone else, about it. He also overestimates the extent to which Barr can pick and choose his own media. Barr is not, as politicians are often accused, "picking winners"; he is picking losers, and his picks seem more astute than Uhlmann's throat-clearings and harrumphing;</li>
<li>"will its wild winds create a storm that will have [Barr] longing for the smell of newsprint?". Why are you asking him? Even if he did sup the Kool-Aid of nostalgia as deeply as Uhlmann has, would he be able to save <i>The Canberra Times</i> from its fate by embracing it?</li>
</ul>The above statement, purportedly by Channel 9's Political Editor, does not seem to appear on <a href="https://www.9news.com.au/politics">Channel 9's political news site</a>. Perhaps [$]<a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2018/03/16/the-terror-of-toy-town/">Bernard Keane was not entirely wrong</a> when he claims this whole issue is a storm confined, if not to a teacup, then to that hill-edged basin surrounding Lake Burley Griffin ... but if so, why write about it at all? If he's spent so long in Canberra, is he the right person to judge hard news, or its absence? This was the best bit though, all the funnier for being so earnest:<br />
<blockquote>Why can't a wealthy city of 300,000 people, the nation's capital, populated by people notionally engaged with public affairs and home of one of Australia's best universities, sustain a publication focused on what they do?</blockquote>Like the beep of a reversing truck, that word "purportedly" shows Keane has it backwards. Canberrans *are* engaged with public policy and other matters that journalists might bundle up into "public affairs". The whole business model of journalism requires a market that is less well informed than the journalist, and content both to remain so after the journalist's output has been consumed and to come back for more. This is a hard ask in Canberra, where public servants in any given area must resent journalists' glib misrepresentations of their work and the misallocation of credit or blame to those blow-ins sent to town from elsewhere in the country. <br />
<br />
The coverage of public service affairs rarely extends to sloppy press gallery journalism causing problems for politicians, who in turn cause problems for public servant heads, who in turn impose career-ending limitations on lower-ranked public servants who have done what they were asked, let alone drives improvement in reporting to a well-educated population demonstrable capable of appreciating nuance and disdaining hype and bullshit. The idea that the people of Canberra are unworthy of the newspaper foisted upon them rather than the reverse is not just a self-own on Keane's part, it shows why journalists will never be able to solve their career problems in an information age. <br />
<blockquote>Part of the problem is that not much actually happens in Canberra ...</blockquote>How does he know this? Even committed readers find <i>The Canberra Times</i> thin gruel. And so the downward spiral continues. <br />
<blockquote>... beyond the Raiders and the Brumbies in winter.</blockquote>Both kinds of football: rugby league <i>and</i> rugby union. But I digress.<br />
<br />
Of course Barr has backed down, to an extent. Julia Gillard also flirted with female bloggers as a way of getting her message through to people, and the traditional media outlets that make up the press gallery (then as now) went berserk. Barr has to run a government today, and gauzy visions of the future have to take a back seat to realities here and now. <i>The Canberra Times</i> has to deal with the ACT government, and it is both good and bad news that its coverage has returned to the same old pattern; I'm sure readers are delighted and new readers flock in to see what the fuss is about. Another reality is that the ACT government does have to deal with <i>The Canberra Times</i>, but what future either have - in cahoots or at daggers drawn - remains to be seen.<br />
<br />
<h2>Desperate needs</h2><blockquote><i>... the crazy lefties at the ABC, Guardian, the Huffington Post ... [who] draw mean cartoons about me ... They don’t realise how completely dead they are to me.</i><br />
<br />
- Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, 22 March 2018</blockquote>This is not a man who is trying to engage with people using multi-channel strategies. He would be flattered by the comparison with Bjelke-Petersen, which may be why Professor Williams of Griffith University hasn't made it. This is a man who makes decisions and does not expect to have to answer for them to people who aren't already fully supportive of them, as 2GB's Ray Hadley is. He is one of the few ministers in this government who does not own the ABC's Leigh Sales, whether through smarm (as Turnbull does) or bamboozling her with bullshit (as Morrison, Hunt, or Frydenberg do). The only time he regularly accounts for himself is in parliament, where he flaps and squawks like a panicked goose; his criticisms never land like well-considered, well-turned phrasing sometimes can. Lacking the power to haul Labor MPs down to the station for questioning, he seems rather lost and impresses nobody but the anti-Turnbull right on the Liberal backbench. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/dutton-says-his-critics-are-dead-to-him-but-actually-he-needs-them-desperately-20180322-p4z5pq.html">Jacqueline Maley tried to call out Dutton's tactics</a>, but only drew attention to how easy it is for a galoot like him to play the broadcast media:<br />
<blockquote>But far from being dead to him, Dutton’s critics are actually an essential part of his political tactics.<br />
<br />
Without critics, you can’t have controversy, and controversy is the oxygen politicians like Dutton need in order to breathe and grow.<br />
<br />
Consider his feat last week - with no warning, he came out with a left-field proposal to help an obscure sub-group of the world’s persecuted population, a group whose suffering, such as it is, is so niche it has escaped global attention for several decades, and is beneath the mention of the United Nations, which appears focused (however ineptly) on the persecution of Syrians, Rohingas [sic] and Christians in the Middle East.<br />
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No one in mainstream political discourse has talked about South African farmers in decades. They are a '90s throwback.</blockquote>It wasn't a proposal, it was a brain-fart, and should have been reported as such. If journalistic experience in covering politics has any value, it should be to know the difference between a major policy shift and a bit of kite-flying designed to distract journos who can't and won't focus on actual policy. <br />
<blockquote>[Dutton] said “independents can scream from the sidelines” but they only thrive on disruption and are not serious parties of government.</blockquote>And yet, when the government tries to get their legislation through parliament, they go cap-in-hand to those same independents. Again, experienced journalists know this and avoid getting wound up; yet, Male thinks you have to be devilishly clever to fool not just one journalist, but absolutely all of them, en bloc:<br />
<blockquote>Dutton’s trick is to co-opt the disruption and sideline-screaming of the right-fringe and bring it into mainstream political debate. To civilise it. That way, voters don’t have to turn to independents, because their grievances (anxiety over reverse racism, nerves about how far political correctness will alter social values) are embedded in the main party of government.</blockquote>If they stayed on fringe outlets like 2GB, right-fringe issues wouldn't enter political debate. People like Jacqueline Maley, the sorts of dills who employ people like her and Mark Kenny and the rest of Fairfax's appalling politics team, they are the ones who bring right-fringe issues into political debate. <br />
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Maley refers to Trump: but much of the US media, their readers, and others such as academic journalism schools, are engaged in deep reflection and debate about how they were played in 2016 and what they can do to improve the way they work. They are aware of their need to contribute to a healthier body politic, that the freedoms of the press are joined to responsibilities about sound public information and debate. <br />
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It's rights-only-no-responsibilities for Jacqueline Maley and her frantically silly colleagues at <i>The Canberra Times</i>; when the next bit of political tinsel catches their eye, whether from Dutton or the ACT Opposition or anyone else, they'll charge after it and leave more pressing and serious issues in the dust. Then they have the gall to complain about resources! If journalists had any pride, they wouldn't be played so hard and so often by Peter fucking Dutton. Dumb journalists are the reason why he's being positioned as a potential Prime Minister, rather than as a bollard or some potentially useful piece of civic infrastructure.<br />
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Dutton, like Andrew Barr, is a politician today. There are lessons those guys can learn from Pericles or one of the Plinys or Churchill or [insert your favourite dead politician here], but for a lot of it - including how to deal with today's media - they have to make it up as they go along. Some of it involves getting journos on side, some involves ignoring them, and for all this <i>pas de deux</i> large sections of the public will be left cold. This disenchantment has different effects on politics and media: politics can and does survive public disenchantment (to a point), media can't and doesn't.<br />
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Every time a journalist complains about resources, call out an example of a self-own like Maley or Keane (they do it all the time) to demonstrate that the problem with Australian journalism today isn't a stubbornly ungrateful readership, but a lack of sense in allocating the resources they have, which discourages giving them still more resources to squander in yet-undreamed-of ways. Resource misallocation is also what bad governments do, and yes the two are directly related. Symbiotically. There's nothing more Aussie than facing the future and flinching. Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-57876982252398253242018-03-04T08:36:00.000+11:002018-03-04T08:36:05.783+11:00McFailureMichaelia Cash has overreached herself in politics, and has nowhere to go but down. <br />
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After her comments about female staffers in Bill Shorten's office, <a href="https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2018/02/28/michaelia-cash-jane-caro/">Jane Caro</a> and <a href="www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/michaelia-cash-at-her-worst-threatening-over-rumours-about-staffers-during-estimates-20180228-h0wtn5.html">Jenna Price</a> and many others have written about her betrayal of women in the workplace, particularly in environments (like Parliament) where women find it hard enough to make a contribution and be rewarded for it. <a href="https://www.themonthly.com.au/today/paddy-manning/2018/01/2018/1519879275/enough-cash-already">Paddy Manning</a> and <a href="https://newmatilda.com/2017/11/02/cold-hard-michaelia-cash-lies-parliament-people/">Ben Eltham</a>, among others, have written about how she sets low and worsening standards in public office. I broadly agree with what they've said and don't propose to reiterate or quibble, but to observe that a mediocre politician has bitten off more than she can chew and is suffocating helplessly before our eyes.<br />
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<h2>Cash vs the political class</h2>Michaela Cash is unequivocally a creation of the political class. A lot of the anger directed at her has been from other members of that class amazed that anyone would shit in their own nest.<br />
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Cash's father was prominent WA state Liberal politician George Cash. Her entree to politics was in an unrelentingly blokey environment, one that would not tolerate quotas or adapt the environment even slightly to allow much space for women in non-traditional roles. She adapted to that environment and won a rare place in but also above Perth's elite, as a member of federal parliament.<br />
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Christian Porter is her brother-from-another-mother: his father was also a prominent WA state Liberal politician, they are about the same age, and in Perth's small elite they have fallen in and fallen out on their way to Canberra. He was spoken of in WA circles as a future Prime Minister, and she never was; part of that is sexism, but not all of it. <br />
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She entered the Senate in 2007 to replace Senator Ross Lightfoot, having worked on his staff and been his lover. It would be easy to write her off as some sort of kept woman, and both unfair and inaccurate; over more than a decade since entering the Senate in her own right, Cash has established a political career as significant as any who has made it to Cabinet. Yes, she's been stupid; but even a cursory look at Australian politics shows genius is hardly a prerequisite, and smarter people than her haven't gone nearly as far in politics. Yes, her behaviour has been appalling; but for all the piling-on she is still not the worst person to have entered politics. Yes, for all that we are still right to hope for better.<br />
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There will be political staffers, men and women, in Shorten's office and outside it (including in Cash's own office!), who take similar paths to hers toward high political office. Again, others have written what a betrayal Cash's snarl at Cameron was toward women, in a workplace that often assumes women take traditional roles or none at all. It is also a betrayal of Liberal women staffers, of women staffers outside the major parties, and other women who work in parliament (e.g. Hansard and press gallery journalists, cooks, cleaners, clerks, and security staff). Beyond that, it is a betrayal of the political class, people who have moved and who would move along a similar career path to her own: <i>who the hell is Michaelia Cash</i> to kick down the ladder up which they climbed/are climbing?<br />
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Long after this kerfuffle has blown off the front pages, there will be ministers and other high-level political-class operatives who burn with resentment that Michaelia Cash implied they were whores. Even those currently engaged in relationships not dissimilar to that between Cash and Lightfoot back in the day will resent that, and her.<br />
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<h2>Cash vs Shorten</h2>Bill Shorten has been Opposition Leader for a longer continuous term than anyone in that office since Whitlam. He has survived the Heydon Royal Commission and the nihilistic treacheries of Victorian Labor, and other tribulations besides. This isn't sufficient proof that he'd be a great Prime Minister, or even that he'll necessarily make it to that office at all: but even rusted-on Coalition voters have to concede he's a survivor and a tough operator. <br />
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All ministers in this government bag Shorten personally and the opposition generally, it's standard political theatre. Cash has gone beyond Question Time answers and set-piece statements in her pursuit of "kill Bill". No other minister - not Joyce, not Morrison, not Dutton - has gone as far trying to knock over the main external threat to the incumbent government. The raid on AWU offices to discover its - and Shorten's - role in establishing GetUp! was her initiative, and its shortcomings can be sheeted back to her. Her ill-fated response to Doug Cameron's questions about her staff is also her own doing. <br />
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Sport is designed to teach you that if you play hard within the rules and spirit of the game, then if you win you'll have earned it, and if you don't you can have the quiet satisfaction of having done your best. If you play dirty, there's a taint over your victory and if you lose, you've lost face and everything really. This is where we find Cash today, sat on her arse in Losertown, and the last plane out of Sydney's almost gone (harmonica solo). She played tough and took on a big opponent - but she didn't win. There are no consolation prizes. Cash might be the hard-arse that Jenna Price says she is, but Shorten is harder. <br />
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A successful Prime Minister strolls on as Opposition Leaders fall by the wayside. Since Menzies, the only Prime Ministers not to be presented with the severed head of an Opposition Leader have been those we regard as generally less successful, beleaguered: Gorton, McMahon, Gillard, Abbott, and now Turnbull*. Howard saw five changes of Labor leadership when he was PM, Hawke 4 of the Liberals, Keating and Rudd 3 each. There would have been massive political cudos for Cash had she succeeded in knocking off Shorten, using the powers of her office and some inherent guile to expose ... er, something that might have caused Shorten to fall on his sword, or Labor to roll him. She'd be a giant-killer, a Person Not To Be Messed With, something like Barnaby Joyce was back a month or so. It hasn't panned out that way. Cash went in hard, playing for the big stakes, and has come off second-best. If Cash is forced out, the political credit goes not to Turnbull but to Labor, while Cash goes into history with her own boomerang embedded in her face. <br />
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"Kill Bill" has to be the dumbest political strategy since the creepy "Bathurst strategy" of the late 1990s in NSW politics, or Kevin Rudd playing silly buggers with both the Greens and the Liberals over emissions trading only to lose his own job. It is a demonstrable failure but it will not end. If Shorten does become Prime Minister, you can bet the Coalition in Opposition will plug away with the "kill Bill" playbook, and the press gallery will marvel at their cunning.<br />
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<h2>Cash vs the Business Council</h2>The Business Council of Australia is not appropriately grateful for this government's policies in suppressing wages, and may even regard its triumph in this area as somewhat Pyrrhic. On becoming Liberal leader in 2009 Tony Abbott adopted their agenda wholesale, and both his successes and failures can be measured against this (rather than, say, any intrinsic beliefs he may have developed from his life experience, or the Vatican-line agenda on things like abortion and euthanasia). It has not reflected on either its successes or its failures, and has adopted the belligerence of its US counterparts in pushing for tax cuts and still more regulatory relaxation. <br />
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For all her bombast, Jennifer Westacott has less skin in the political game than the lowliest Coalition backbencher, who understandably flinches at the unrelenting pursuit of policies that do not appear to advance political or community interests. <br />
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Turnbull and Cash must mediate the relationship between the Coalition and the business community. The prime responsibility falls on Cash, and she isn't cutting it: she hasn't got the BCA to pull its horns in, and nor has she convinced the Coalition that promoting the BCA agenda will lead to political success (Morrison has done most of the heavy lifting in that area). A Liberal has to manage that relationship effectively: not being a doormat, but not standoffish either. Before 2009 political scientists could and did make the case that the Liberals were more than the puppets of big business, but Abbott had trashed that too and Turnbull hasn't got time to quibble.<br />
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Cash is the minister responsible for workplace relations and industry. These roles have not been combined since before World War II. It requires a vastly capable minister to be able to cover this field, especially as a Liberal: everyone in the Liberal Party fancies themselves as an expert on business-friendly policies (a bit like being Agriculture Minister in the Nationals, or workplace relations minister in a Labor government). As I said, Cash is no fool but she's not a vastly capable minister. Being snippy is simply not an adequate response to fair questions on her portfolio. <br />
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<h2>Cash vs the press gallery</h2>Chris Uhlmann is about as close to this government as it is reasonable for a press gallery member to get. The fact that he's in trouble for photographing Cash's phone is stupid, and shows that both the formal rules for press gallery engagement and the informal understandings and relationships serve to produce neither good journalism, compelling content, nor a public that is well-informed after having consumed that content. <br />
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Blocking media coverage of her entering a room in parliament was pathetic, the sort of thing an under-siege minister might scream for but which an experienced staff should realise was always counterproductive. Female journalists may well feel let down by Cash's recent efforts, if not some solidarity with Shorten's maligned female staff. The smarter ones can smell death on her too. All those press gallery members who've worked so hard to build relationships with her must wonder why they bothered, and what future those relationships may have.<br />
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The press gallery gave a free pass to Tony Abbott in his criticism of Cash. Be in no doubt that had Abbott remained as Prime Minister (and assuming he'd put Cash into Cabinet), he would have backed her more forcefully than Turnbull did. He'd have brought all of his renowned sensitivity toward women's issues that is now overlooked by experienced press gallery operators. I know Cash stuffed up, but she should <a href="juliagillard.com.au/articles/the-misogyny-speech/">not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man</a> either. It's like the gallery forgot all about Abbott, and yet again gave him the coverage he only ever wanted: to have his words taken at face value, on the day and in the context in which he said them.<br />
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<h2>The Cash-less society</h2>Nobody in the business community is impressed by someone who picked a death-match with a man who is clearly not dead. The business community has to do bipartisanship because its plans go beyond the news cycles or even the three-year electoral cycles, and Michaelia Cash is not a long-term player in frontbench politics. Her credibility is shot. She might make a useful lobbyist in a few years. The Prime Minister's pride is such that he will not pole-axe her straight away (she failed not by departing from his agenda, but by being zealous if imprudent in pursuing it). He isn't exactly overwhelmed with alternatives, or Cash would be gone by now. Sending her to an ambassadorial position so soon after Brandis would cement the idea that his government is on the way down, and that capable operators should not rally to its support but take to the lifeboats.<br />
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There will be no big initiatives developed, announced, and seen through by this minister, not in her current portfolio nor any other. If the Coalition loses the next election the next Liberal Opposition Leader might well call on former ministers to help return them to office, but Cash will not be one of them. Michaelia Cash is finished. <br />
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* I didn't count McEwen because his was a caretaker role while the leadership of the Liberal Party, not Labor, was being resolved. Parliament did not sit while he was PM, he cannot be said to have failed to knock off the Opposition Leader (Whitlam) when there was no proof he was trying to do so and when his limited term was so focused on other matters. As for Turnbull, it's true that his Prime Ministership hasn't ended but as of today that statement holds.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-53188654858712028662018-02-16T20:21:00.003+11:002018-02-17T10:28:21.842+11:00What conservative triumph looks likeConservatives within the Coalition should be enjoying their moment of triumph. They have negated a supposedly progressive Prime Minister and tethered him to the unpopular and disastrous policies of his conservative predecessor. They have cast off all but two of those pesky state governments, with their namby-pamby health and education and human services, and have command of the high ground of the federal government. They stand poised to deliver tax cuts, to hold forth against Aboriginal claims through the Uluru Statement, and for welfare crackdowns. <br />
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This is the moment Australia's conservatives worked so hard for so long to achieve. Why, then, is everything crumbling around them? Could it be that what Donald Horne called "second-rate people" are part of our defences against tyranny?<br />
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The press gallery started the year by trumpeting a 1% rise in polls as "a strong start to the year" for the government, and we now see why that was not merely wrong but fundamentally stupid. It simply had no basis in fact. It was wishful thinking masquerading as analysis.<br />
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<h2>There Can Be Only One</h2>Turnbull and Joyce have been at one another's throats for a week now, and today it came out into the open.<br />
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Malcolm Turnbull is the first Prime Minister since Gorton and McMahon whose parents were not married before and throughout his childhood. Keepers of the sacred flame of Leather Jacket Malcolm, closet liberal, overlook and cannot reconcile his absolutely fustilarian attitudes toward marriage and adultery. It may explain why his approach to the same-sex marriage debate convinced both sides he wasn't with either. The amendments to the ministerial code are in line with that aspect of the man: if you ever wanted an authentic response from Turnbull's heart to a public policy issue, that will have to do.<br />
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Barnaby Joyce has rallied his party around him (see below) and acts like he's invincible. In 2009, Joyce's lower-key predecessor Warren Truss helped sink Turnbull's first term as Liberal leader when he all but declared he wouldn't work with him. Joyce is trying to reprise that when he called Turnbull "inept", but the stakes in government are higher than they were back then. He has reached the stage where Nobody Tells Him What To Do, what the Greeks called <i>hubris</i> - and you don't need a classical education to know what comes next. <br />
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From time to time the Nationals have to stand up to the Liberals to protect their distinct identity, and to assert the interests of rural constituents. This is not one of those times. Any National who dies in a ditch defending Joyce - come to think of it, they seem awfully quiet at time of writing - gets nothing from this government. Even Christensen has retreated into the arms of his white supremacist buddies than defend the man who stuck his neck out for him. <br />
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Joyce is the minister in charge of national infrastructure. To do that job you need to operate effectively across government, and with the now-Opposition in order to give jittery financiers the bipartisan support they crave. If Joyce can't do that, they will ramp up their relationship with former minister and current shadow, Anthony Albanese, and wait out the fall of this government. A Coalition government will do absolutely anything to avoid this. Even if Turnbull backs down, the Nationals will need some way of pulling Joyce's head in now that they have forfeited the ability to do so themselves.<br />
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<h2>How am I supposed to live without you?</h2>Barnaby Joyce first rose to prominence as a Senate candidate for the Nationals in the 2004 election, by publicly taking positions contrary to his then-leader John Anderson. Joyce's term in the Senate began the following year. For over a decade, he has been a dominant personality in the Nationals. He has shaped the public image of that party. The fact is that if you want to be a Nationals MP, you are going to have to deal with Joyce.<br />
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There are 16 Nationals in the House of Representatives and five in the Senate. Only Luke Hartsuyker and Senator Nigel Scullion entered parliament before Joyce (both in 2001): all the rest of them have entered a parliamentary party which he has shaped. Barry O'Sullivan is only in the Senate because Joyce resigned from it. Matteo Canavan was a member of Joyce's staff. Joyce has promised publicly to get George Christensen into Cabinet. It could have been different - there are Nationals preselection candidates, dedicated members of their party, who were defeated or dissuaded from running because Joyce took against them. Those who are there are largely Barnaby's people. Apart from Hanson, no other federal political party leader has that degree of control over his caucus/party room. If you pardon the expression, Joyce has made his bed and is lying in it.<br />
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Nationals MPs know that Joyce has done everything necessary to be kicked out of a leadership role. They are sincere about marriage and families. Natalie Joyce and her daughters are not abstractions, as they are for journalists or bloggers; they are people they've all known well for years. It is telling that no Nationals other than Joyce and those in his retinue, Nash and Canavan, have been affected by section 44 and its questions over citizenship: while that's partly down to membership demography, it also shows the party doesn't have a culture of playing fast and loose over constitutional validity.<br />
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The Nationals can't get rid of Joyce because they can't imagine their party or life generally without him. Liberals can and do imagine a future without Turnbull; Shorten isn't the be-all-and-end-all of Labor, either. If you can't even imagine the Nationals without Barnaby Joyce, what are your grand visions for rural Australia worth? You can see how Joyce persuaded the party to use its scarce funds to tide him over during the byelection campaign: imagine Turnbull, Shorten, or di Natale asking the same of their respective parties. <br />
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Joyce might go within the next few days or he might not. Media assertions about him "surviving" or "weathering the storm" are stupid, because we have seen this man in his flaws. Joyce does not have nerves of steel and an unconquerable will (dare to quibble with that, press gallery drones who've known him for years). Joyce is a man who has been under extreme pressure for a long time now, and the idea that he will simply carry on as before is a fantasy.<br />
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What the Nationals are doing by dithering over his future is putting it into the hands of the unknown public. In other leadership challenges, MPs invoke the public being for this candidate or against that as reasons for voting as they do. Because the press gallery denied New Englanders the necessary input into their decision on 2 December, nobody with the Nationals party room has a real clue about what people think about what has now come to light about Joyce. <br />
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What is most likely to happen is that, at some point, the Nationals will be required to take a strong public position on an issue. Joyce will not be able to make that position, because the response will be derision. This is a basic aspect of leadership, and Barnaby Joyce is not up to it. He never was, and all the glowing profiles written about him from the front bars of dusty pubs somewhere are just so much <strike>award-winning content</strike> shit. O'Sullivan's rustic imagery about <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com.au/barry-osullivan-barnaby-joyce-2018-2">the horse that jumps the fence</a> doesn't work, because a horse can be put back on the right side of the fence and everything can carry on as before: not an option open to the Nationals. The Nationals may well decide to defer their decision, but they will be no clearer about their future than they are now. <br />
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Keep in mind that recent polling would see at least four Nationals MPs (Michelle Landry, Ken O'Dowd, Kevin Hogan and George Christensen) likely to lose their seats to Labor. O'Dowd might not be Joyce's favourite bloke right now, but their future requires them to work something out or hang separately: Joyce can't dispose of him like he did with previous party opponents. Others may come under threat from local heroes who don't think the incumbents are up to the job (e.g. in 2016 Rob Oakeshott went from a standing start to come within 5% of knocking off Luke Hartsuyker in Cowper). The Nationals have this in mind. Existential pressures such as these emphasise the need to make a decision, but do not necessarily improve the quality of the decision made.<br />
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<h2>The undead John Ruddick</h2>Once again, the NSW Liberals have expressed a wish to broaden their base beyond their existing membership and existing pool of candidates. Once again, John Ruddick pops up and claims The Members want people like him and Abbott to run the party. Once again, the NSW Liberals vote for something more than what they have, as befits an aspirational people. Once again, Ruddick convinces himself - and then some of the more gullible journalists - that an actual vote of party members represents a kind of false consciousness. <br />
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Tony Abbott disgraces himself further by lending his name to Ruddick's quixotic cause. He gets his just reward by being shown not to be The True Champion Of The Liberal Base, The King O'er Narrabeen Lake, to all but the most dull-witted observers. If Ruddick were elected to parliament, he'd give Turnbull some minor grief and then defect to the Cory Tories; NSW Liberals know this and consistently vote against him. Trent Zimmerman beat him for NSW Young Liberal President in 1991 and will beat him again if Ruddick runs for preselection in North Sydney. After a few months, journalists will again return to Ruddick as though he were A True Voice Of The Liberal Base, regardless of the accumulated evidence. <br />
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<h2>The hill to die on</h2>In Victoria and Queensland, the coalition has basically offered their agenda to that of the Murdoch papers. Teach Aussie values rather than fancy-pants foreign languages or computer code; but deride the teachers doing the teaching. Law and order, but no new prisons and run down lawyers and judges. <br />
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Their commitment is now total, but their success is far from assured. Matthew Guy should have resigned over the "lobster mobster" thing because he is now diminished, if not absurd. Deb Frecklington in Queensland is willing to lend her name to the daily story in <i>The Courier Mail</i> but in recent years success in Queensland politics has been more assured by turning away from that noisy and insubstantial publication. Could Guy and Frecklington be the last conservative leaders willing to die on the hill set for them by the Murdoch papers?<br />
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Peter Dutton's scare campaign against African gangs in Melbourne has done nothing for the conservative vote in Melbourne nor in Queensland. Could this utter lack of impact be a harbinger for his political future? Would it make any self-respecting journalist wonder if the real story was wherever Dutton wasn't? The answer to the latter question is no, of course, so that they can try to drum up interest in a dead contest ahead of, well, any other live but complex issue.<br />
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<h2>Matters of life and death</h2>Conservatives failed at blocking same-sex marriage, though they succeeded in blocking Malcolm Turnbull in claiming any credit for it. Welfare crackdowns like the debit card and robodebts are compensation for aggrieved conservatives. They won't win the euthanasia debate but they will win concessions like more palliative care and psychotropic drugs for the terminally ill. Offshore detention is a way of penalising some, but not all, non-Anglo migrants. Conservatives wan economic growth without economic disruption: this explains why education funding and the broadband network are so limited. They've given up altogether on Indigenous people. They are failing badly in invoking the authority of religion in any area beyond the strictly theological.<br />
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Conservatives can't win the big debates about our economic future but they are doubling down on the petty measures to which they find themselves confined. This is called the culture war, and you take up arms at your own peril. It is not designed to be won, it is designed to give nobodies something to do.<br />
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<h2>The Anglosphere</h2>Both Theresa May and Donald Trump have bitten off more than they can chew. Neither offer much help to conservatives in Australia. The NZ Nationals under Key and English provided solid examples for Australian conservatives, now both are gone. Boris Johnson is yet another British politician who seems well-disposed to Australians but offers nothing whatsoever in policy terms. Julie Bishop has been Shadow Foreign Minister and now Minister for a decade, and she seems utterly discombobulated by events in foreign policy; there is no evidence anyone else in the Coalition parties in thinking about the many moving parts in foreign policy right now. The foreign editor of <i>The Australian</i>, one of the great champions of the Anglosphere, is more at home with shenanigans at Young Liberal branches in northwestern Sydney than he is with actual foreigns, and his counterpart at Fairfax is obviously an algorithm that synthesises American magazines that the company hopes their readers have not read. There are no lessons CrosbyTextor can apply to Australian campaigns from the widely discredited 2017 UK election. No clues are offered, nor any picked up.<br />
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<h2>At the moment of triumph</h2>Strong, stable leadership is easy to talk about, hard to deliver. The moment has arrived for Australian conservatives but they have nothing to show for it. It's as though conservative triumph had no moment beyond the careers of empty vessels like Abbott or Abetz. Conservatives don't do steady any more, and shirk the responsibilities that come with paternalism and/or The White Man's Burden. <br />
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The consensus for what should replace them isn't clear, but it never is. We should be at a moment of conservative triumph, and see what that belief system looks like at its finest and most effective. Even for dedicated followers such triumph seems to ring hollow; and what to celebrate, what to cast away, is no clearer than it might be in a moment of conservative defeat. Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-16788101896397942532018-02-11T23:55:00.000+11:002018-02-12T00:29:40.747+11:00Out with the bathwater 2: a change of focusAfter writing the post below I had a good laugh at <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/feb/10/barnaby-joyce-i-didnt-report-the-story-because-i-couldnt-verify-it-katharine-murphy">Katharine Murphy's effort</a> and was reinforced in my respect for Asher Wolf when she posted <a href="https://twitter.com/Asher_Wolf/status/961965253981437952">this Twitter thread</a>, with a fraction of the resources available to Murphy and the press gallery. I watched James Massola, of all people, condemn the idea of journalists running unverified rumours - and then moments later, <a href="http://www.canberratimes.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/barnaby-joyce-s-career-hangs-in-the-balance-20180211-p4yzy8.html">another story under his byline consisting entirely of unverified rumours</a>, which has pretty much been his entire "career" so far.<br />
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I may be getting soft in my old age, but after all that I re-read the Murphy piece. I felt some sympathy for this position:<br />
<blockquote>So I don’t want to be the Canberra sex correspondent. </blockquote>Non-press-gallery journalists Woodward and Bernstein probably didn't want to cover each and every burglary in early 1970s Washington - and if we look at their career, they didn't. Non-press-gallery journalist Andrew McGarry covered a court case in Adelaide and ended up writing the definitive book on the Snowtown murders. Sometimes in journalism, the story chooses you. <br />
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Murphy took a strategic decision not to pursue a story that is having far-reaching implications that go to policy decisions, and the very political structure of the government - a story worthy of any self-respecting political journalist, let alone a Political Editor. Regardless of how she feels, she will have to play catch-up on this story. But because the story started in a place that was (to use Jacqueline Maley's technical term) <i>icky</i>, Murphy chose not to lead the story while rising above the <i>ick</i>. <br />
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A nurse who faints at the sight of blood or shit, or people who rail against the wickedness of John Barleycorn while somehow working in a licensed establishment, are not just fools or hypocrites. They are people with no future in those jobs. So it is with a journalist who stumbles upon a real story and, when it blows up in their face, disdains it:<br />
<blockquote>I’d rather think about energy policy, or whether any of us will ever get a wage rise, or whether our hospitals will be properly funded, not because I’m a buttoned up puritan, but because that’s why I think I’m here: to keep close eyes on those things for readers.</blockquote>Those stories are better covered by journalists who really understand those areas and can convey ideas being given visitors' passes to the parliamentary press gallery. If journalism is to survive, those journalists (often freelancers, or writing for niche outlets with little hope of employment in the sort of media outlet represented in the press gallery) must be given more assignments. Those assignments must come at the expense of perpetuating the palpably disappointing fantasy that a press gallery journalist can turn their hand to any subject. <br />
<br />
All of the worst stories written about these and other important issues are written by press gallery journalists whose hearts are not really in this subject matter, whose minds are simply not on the job, and who still cannot shake the herd instinct of the One Big Story that might be happening wherever they're not, and to which they contribute little if anything and thereby diminish the very idea of news.<br />
<br />
All of the worst takes about Joyce-Campion start and end with the label <i>sex scandal</i>. Like most journo cliches, it's alliterative and the very name almost tells you how to write the story - <i>slap and tickle, the distant missus keeping the home fires burning, the nu-media temptress, long lonely nights and the aphrodisiac of power</i> - but the story has moved way beyond <i>sex scandal</i>, and as a result catch-up journos are going to have to dig for the story rather than have it ladled out in press releases. See for example <a href="https://twitter.com/Asher_Wolf/status/961965253981437952">Asher Wolf's Twitter thread above</a> for prima facie questions arising from Joyce's post-marital accommodation, his landlord's other business interests, and how these appear to overlap with Joyce's portfolio responsibilities. Journalists who sniff about Twitter will be out of a job if they keep being shown up like this.<br />
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On 9 October 2012 Prime Minister Julia Gillard delivered her <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOPsxpMzYw4">speech against misogyny</a>. In the days that followed, press gallery journalists wrote increasingly silly pieces about why the speech did not matter, or how you got it wrong because you weren't here in the gallery with us. Nobody remembers those pieces, even though sadly many of the journalists who wrote them are still employed and unrepentant. I suspect the pieces by Murphy, Maley, and Overington will go the way of those earlier journosplain pieces - they are covering their inadequacies while overlooking more substantial and enduring issues, too much of which negates any value proposition journalism may have.<br />
<br />
But seriously though, what would I do if I were a press gallery journalist right now, thoroughly discredited and playing catch-up? Would I be shrieking about constrained resources (as though journalists were the only people with this problem? Isn't the whole idea of traditional media to pitch news at people too time-poor to dig for it themselves)? Would I be yammering about Facegoogle or whatever? No, I would be lapsing into old-school journo solutions:<ol><li>I would take a sheet of paper (well, start with one) and divide it into two columns.</li>
<li>In one column I would write down every Open Secret, every gobbet of scuttlebutt and innuendo and rumour that had reached my shell-like ears, no matter how icky.</li>
<li>I would cross out those matters that have already been done by traditional media. I would also cross out the ones that I could prove were false (e.g. <i>X and Y weren't even in the same country on the 29th, let alone the same bed, and here are the travel documents</i>).</li>
<li>Against each one, in the other column I would list the public policy implications: was public expenditure involved? Did the government choose Surprise Policy Outcome B over Expected Policy Outcome A, and could that be traced back to this? </li>
</ol>Starting with observable outcomes, you can then work out motivations, and reverse-engineer timelines and paper trails from there. Stained sheets and video of bags of cash being exchanged come later, or can be left to others once the substantive issues are dealt with. This is proper journalism, and the press gallery are better placed to do it than anybody else. Start tomorrow after the post-lunch lacuna sets in, and continue until quarter to five when those pesky press secretaries surprise you (as they do every other day) by releasing information they would prefer was buried. Repeat until it all comes out. This beats the hell out of disdaining the icky, and failing to imagine how something so prurient can only ever be so regardless of what else comes to light. It is the sort of thing proper journalists outside the press gallery do each day. <br />
<br />
You know what I really think of press gallery journalism? I think it would be a great idea, and it is not discredited for being tried so rarely.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-37945826466402863662018-02-08T09:30:00.001+11:002018-02-08T10:55:17.292+11:00Out with the bathwaterThe fact that Barnaby Joyce had impregnated a former staffer and NewsCorp journalist was widely known before the New England byelection on 2 December last year. It has been ridiculous, and a bit sad, watching traditional media justify itself in relation to this story.<br />
<br />
<h2>Fucking inconvenient</h2>Let's remind ourselves of the political situation in late 2017.<br />
<br />
The government needs a stable majority in the 150-member House of Representatives. It had 76 members, meaning that with the Speaker above the fray the Coalition fielded 75 members against 74 Labor and others outside the Coalition.<br />
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Barnaby Joyce, as Member for New England, was a NZ citizen by descent. John Alexander, Member for Bennelong, was a UK citizen by descent. Both renounced their non-Australian citizenships and were endorsed for the byelections. Each man, we now know, had left their wives and were living with another woman beyond the family home. Both men represented, and had sought to represent again, conservative electorates with above-average rates of married couples raising children.<br />
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Had either or both lost the byelections held last December, the Turnbull government would have been forced into minority status, propped up on a contingent basis by some of the MHRs outside both the Coalition and Labor. Almost every media outlet represented in the press gallery had editorialised before the 2016 election to return the Turnbull government. They still believe in <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/comment/turnbull-flies-the-flag-for-the-great-political-uturn-20180202-h0sv7k.html">Peter FitzSimons' Fantasy Malcolm</a>. The press gallery hated having to cover a multivariate parliament in 2010-13; they tailored their reporting to minimise the possibility that the Turnbull government would lose its majority (oh yes they did). Labor candidates in Bennelong and New England did not make their opponents' marital woes an issue, and journalists didn't either.<br />
<br />
<i>J'accuse:</i> political journalists deliberately held off reporting, or even confirming, stories about Joyce's infidelity in order to maximise his chances of winning, and by extension ensure the continuation of the Turnbull government. <br />
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<h2>Delayed gratification</h2>Yesterday's sheepish effort from Sharri Markson (no I won't link to it) was too little, too late, but the press gallery has finally given itself permission to start talking about the issue. Almost immediately, traditional media was forced by reader outrage to defend its decision to avoid the Joyce story. This is not a proud moment in Australian journalism. It is not a harbinger of a bright future, nor even one that might keep things much as they are for that beleaguered industry. <br />
<br />
Before we go through the traditional media's sorry-not-sorry piece, there are three precedents (in terms of pollies' actions and how the media responded to them) that are relevant here. Senior members of the press gallery, and the ninnies who now occupy the ranks of editors/news directors of traditional media organs, were directly involved in these incidents:<br />
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<h3>Gareth Evans and Cheryl Kernot</h3>Evans was Attorney General and Foreign Minister in the Hawke-Keating Labor governments, and a senior Labor frontbencher once his party went into opposition. Cheryl Kernot was a Senator and leader of the Australian Democrats. Both were married to other people when they began a sexual relationship, which (as with Joyce-Campion today) was widely known but not reported.<br />
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Laurie Oakes decided that the hypocrisy of Evans championing family values and Kernot failing to mention the affair was enough to put the story into the public domain. Then as now, the press gallery talked about the convention of private lives being private while slavering over the story. There was no social media back then.<br />
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<h3>Ross Cameron</h3>In 2004 Ross Cameron was an up-and-coming junior minister in the Howard government, a vocal proponent of heterosexual marriage and other traditional values. While his wife was pregnant in Sydney, Cameron began a sexual relationship with a woman in Canberra. The woman shared a flat with a press gallery journalist. <br />
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Traditional media covered Cameron's infidelity in the lead-up to the 2004 election. Cameron lost his seat (at that election, Barnaby Joyce was first elected to the Senate). Then as now, the press gallery talked about the convention of private lives being private while slavering over the story. There was no social media back then.<br />
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<h3>Julia Gillard</h3>Julia Gillard had never married but had a male partner. There were no allegations of infidelity but plenty of media speculation about her private life nonetheless; "private lives are private" be damned, and there was social media but the press gallery were only starting to become afraid of it.<br />
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<h2>I will not be lectured about media ethics by that journalist</h2>Fairfax ran a piece by Jacqueline Maley lecturing us about the media ethics around this story (*snort!*) and NewsCorp did the same from Caroline Overington (oh come off it). There's been enough accusations about hypocrisy over this matter, so fuck it, I am just not going to do Caroline bloody Overington lecturing anyone about anything. <a href="https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/federal/sins-of-the-father-why-not-publish-barnaby-joyce-s-baby-news-20180207-p4yzki.html">The Maley piece</a> is bad enough, and she has form for being a terrible journalist, but for now let it serve as the chew toy for journalistic ethics in covering political sex scandals.<br />
<blockquote>Why didn’t Fairfax Media publish the story? Why would we protect Barnaby Joyce?<br />
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The reasons were less conspiratorial than they were journalistic: we couldn’t stand it up.</blockquote>Oh no, they were conspiratorial all right: the press gallery believes people shouldn't judge politicians on the basis of their private lives, and have been horrified to see political careers end at the hands of voters who take a different view (see Kernot, Cameron above). <br />
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As to stand-up journalism, this can be very selective. Let's look at some of the other stories on politics Maley's colleagues have seen fit to publish:<ul><li><a href="https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/federal/malcolm-turnbull-s-white-house-visit-elevated-to-status-not-seen-since-john-howard-20180207-p4yzlh.html">This article</a> speculating about the US Ambassador to Australia is terribly weak. First, Admiral Harris' name has been floated earlier, and the appointment has neither been officially confirmed nor denied, so it isn't really news. Any compelling force it may have is negated with tenuous links like "Fairfax Media has been told [by whom?] ...", "Mr Turnbull is also expected ...", "It is widely expected ...", "Fairfax Media understands ...", and "[Turnbull] is expected also to discuss the economy and trade with Mr Trump [no shit, really?]". How did this slip through Fairfax's iron ethical grip?</li>
<li>The idea that Anthony Albanese might challenge Bill Shorten for leadership of the ALP is one of the longest-running non-stories in Australian politics. It is no closer today than it was <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/good-weekend/anthony-albaneses-waiting-game-20150817-gj0i66.html">three years ago</a> or at any other point since Shorten became leader, but it helps dispel the fantasy that Fairfax never runs speculative political stories.</li>
</ul>The entire oeuvre of James Massola and half that of Kate McClymont would have to be binned if Fairfax seriously applied the put-up-or-shut-up standard Maley is trumpeting here. Apparently, as with their counterparts in North Korea, the Canberra press gallery can only report what has been formally announced.<br />
<blockquote>Within our newsroom, there was debate over what resources, if any, should be devoted to confirm the rumours.<br />
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In a newsroom that is hollowed out by cost-cutting, every reporter who is assigned to cover a love child expose, is a reporter who cannot write about national energy policy (which affects far more of our readers), or about the latest factional dispute in the Labor Party, or about the citizenship crisis.</blockquote>Energy policy is better covered by dedicated and knowledgeable writers (who often spend little time lounging about the newsroom) rather than gallery hacks splicing a press release to a Google search. The Labor Party aren't in government, and if you can't tie a factional spat to a policy outcome (and you can't), then forget that. Perhaps framing Joyce's family issues with the journalistic cliche of the "love child expose" is the problem here? <br />
<blockquote>At the same time, we knew it would probably be broken, sooner or later, by the News Corp tabloids.</blockquote>Before the New England byelection Joyce's daughters had toured Tamworth with a loudhailer, warning that if he could breach trust with his family then none of his political promises could be trusted either. Independent Australia put out not <a href="https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/why-barnaby-joyces-private-life-is-a-matter-of-public-interest,10854">one</a> but <a href="https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/exclusive-barnaby-joyce-peeling-back-the-rumours,10942">two</a> articles to this effect. So did <a href="https://truecrimenewsweekly.com/2017/10/24/exclusive-marriage-hypocrite-deputy-pm-barnaby-joyce-cheats-on-wife-with-long-sexual-affair-with-staffer-while-lecturing-public-on-gays-ruining-marriage/">True Crime News Weekly</a>. There is a long tradition in the Australian media of "respectable papers" waiting for "the yellow press" to break an unsavoury story, and then appear to pick it up reluctantly: any of these events would have given traditional media the impetus to run the story, on 3 December if not earlier. <br />
<br />
The ABC is doing this hold-your-nose-and-report-the-story thing tonight too, and it's risible. Joyce would normally retreat to the conservative redoubt of Sky, but nobody watches that crap outside of what bushies call the SCAM triangle (Sydney, Canberra And Melbourne). Leigh Sales has, like Joyce, undergone a recent marriage breakdown, which may explain why she has gone so easy on him and is treating him like the victim <a href="www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-07/barnaby-joyce-says-marriage-split-one-of-greatest-failures/9406460">here</a>.<br />
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You'll always have an excuse not to do your job. And when it comes to political journalism, you can count on Jacqueline Maley to not do it well at all.<br />
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Maley exceeds herself by lapsing into what-if:<br />
<blockquote>If it had been published in full, could the story have changed the crucial byelection result in New England?<br />
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During the campaign it was reported the Deputy Prime Minister had broken up with his wife and was living with his sister. Rumours about an extra-marital affair and a pregnant “mistress” (terrible word!) were widely known throughout the electorate. His long-time nemesis, former New England MP Tony Windsor, frequently tweeted about it. At one point Joyce was hounded by a man who harangued him about his family situation in a pub.<br />
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None of it affected his popularity. Joyce won the byelection with a huge swing to him of 7.21 per cent.</blockquote>For starters, the candidates at the byelection were different to those at the general election. Here's what would have happened if traditional media brought their imprimatur to this story:<ul><li>Candidates who might not have stood against Joyce may well have done so, affecting the result;</li>
<li>The local gossips might have borne less of the burden for the story, and so too those stout defenders of the Deputy Prime Minister ("what a terrible thing to say! I know Barnaby and his family! That would never happen!") might have looked a lot less silly. The authority of trusted media helps clarify matters both for those who want to believe the news, and those who don't.</li>
<li>The idea that journalists at major outlets call it as they see it without fear or favour would be reinforced, and not diminished as it has been. When Jacqueline Maley calls on you to subscribe to Fairfax and to help with the campaign against proposed laws that might send journalists to prison, she might've been able to point to a recent example where fearless reporting outed a family-values hypocrite and a crap Agriculture minister, rather than misrepresenting a political liability as the nation's choice.</li>
</ul>If you're going to trash your reputation for fearlessness in gathering and disseminating information, be it on your head. This is why it's silly to stake your reputation covering for Joyce: five years from now he'll be gone from politics, will you be gone from journalism by then?<br />
<blockquote>Joyce, a Jesuit-educated Catholic, has long proclaimed the sanctity of traditional marriage. He has often spoken of his conservative “family” values.<br />
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During the debate on same-sex marriage Joyce advocated against it, saying he believed marriage was a heterosexual institution that had “stood the test of time” and was “a special relationship between a man and a woman, predominantly for the purpose of bringing children into the world”. He then abstained from the same-sex marriage vote, perhaps because he realised how untenable and hypocritical his position was.<br />
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Joyce is a leader, not just a regular MP, so his character is part of his political brand. Voters are now free to judge him on it.</blockquote>Voters are always free to judge him on it. Always. On 2 December you should have provided voters with the information they would need to make such a judgment, and you chose not to do so, diminishing your value as a provider of information.<br />
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Joyce's decision on the same-sex marriage vote is less important than the decisions cast by people who sincerely believed the Deputy Prime Minister, and who believed that his words were quoted in the appropriate context by Fairfax outlets. They weren't, and it doesn't matter whether or not Joyce's office and/or the Fairfax newsrooms were festooned with knowing smirks as his words were quoted without that vital context: that he could not imagine any same-sex couple might fulfil the rights and obligations of marriage at least as well as he had (this is where the blithe "love child expose" bullshit falls down).<br />
<blockquote>Then there is the human factor of the story. Who can look at the photo of Vikki Campion, surprised by a photographer outside her Canberra home, heavily pregnant and wearing gym gear, and not feel a little icky about it?<br />
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It is such a huge invasion of her privacy, not to mention the privacy of the unborn child, at a time when a woman is at her most vulnerable (and prone to emotional distress).</blockquote>Can I direct you to your highly ethical coverage of Lindy Chamberlain, or Stormy Daniels, and ask you to shut the hell up about <i>icky</i>.<br />
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Here's icky for ya: Vikki Campion is a former NewsCorp employee. That invasion of privacy, the slut-shaming and all the rest of it, was done by people whom Campion personally knows and worked with. You'd think there would be some "honour among thieves" among Caroline Overington and the Murdoch people, but clearly not. Jacqueline Maley's newsroom is full of former and prospective NewsCorp employees: there but for the grace of God and Rupert Murdoch go we all.<br />
<blockquote>Some readers will remember the huge scrutiny and nasty sexual innuendo Julia Gillard copped over her personal life and suspect a double standard is at play. </blockquote>No suspicion: the contrary case simply cannot be made. Contrast with the treatment of the current Prime Minister of New Zealand, and start preparing lists of press gallery journalists who need to be replaced as soon as possible.<br />
<blockquote>The scandal is unlikely to be a career-ender for Joyce.</blockquote>Only people who don't understand politics would say this. Anyone who's seen politicians come and go knows that Joyce has more past than future. His Cabinet picks showed the overreach of a man on his way out. We know not the date or the time (unless the press gallery are holding out on us again), but only a fool would be shocked at the prospect of a new father suddenly wanting to spend more time with his little one - particularly if the youngest Joyce proves to be a boy. Watch as the very same photographer snaps pictures of Barnaby being a doting dad! <br />
<blockquote>Finally, there are Joyce’s four daughters and wife to consider.</blockquote>You should have considered them when Joyce trotted them out for staged pictures that made it look like he could manage a long-distance family life on top of everything else. You could have used some journo skills to show that he was a sham and a joke at that, too. We'd be better informed, and you'd be the respected news outlet that nobody in the newsroom dares admit you no longer are.<br />
<blockquote>The families of politicians are generally considered off-limits for good reason: they didn’t sign up for public scrutiny ...</blockquote>Driving down the main street denouncing one's father, the Deputy Prime Minister, deserved some scrutiny; Fairfax diminished itself as a reliable news outlet by failing to provide even that. <br />
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Imagine the impact on Australian politics of a Deputy Prime Minister felled by the feisty women of his broken household, who weren't going to put up with his shit any more. Some allies you are, Jacqueline Maley and Caroline Overington and all the rest of you arse-covering swine. Barnaby fucked up, and so did all those newsroom heroes: you haven't exactly made a strong case for more resources and loyal readers, have you? Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-8369576239901567812018-02-02T14:07:00.003+11:002018-02-02T14:07:57.123+11:00Constant Constance FaceNSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance should be a politician at the top of his game. He is the steward of several large transformative infrastructure projects, and a former state Treasurer: all that, and not yet 45. In his current predicament he is more like someone at the top of that slow initial climb of a roller-coaster, just before plunging and being jerked this way and that before eventually being returned to where he started.<br />
<br />
Transport is one portfolio that resists nimble, blithe solutions. Decisions made 50 years ago limit the options available to decision-makers today, and those made today limit those going forward. <a href="https://www.citymetric.com/transport/trains-sydney-are-collapsing-chaos-while-government-yells-about-union-menace-3632">This article</a> gives a good summary of why the problems with Sydney's passenger rail system are so intractable and multi-dimensional; they also show why Constance, a politician largely focused on the current news cycle, is so badly placed to deal with them.<br />
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History is a nightmare from which Andrew Constance is trying to awaken. No minister ever gets a blank slate and unlimited resources, yet Constance has no sense of historical continuum and his place within it: you can't appeal to him on that basis in the same way you can't argue with your cat about rugby league. For him, there is no history, and no future beyond the next news cycle or election, there is only now. <br />
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Whether it's the tram tracks to Sydney's inner-west being of a different gauge to the proposed tram line through the inner-east, or arguments over proposed routes of tram and train lines that haven't been well managed, or now train timetabling that stretches human and physical resources beyond safe and sustainable usage - Constance isn't good at addressing issues with complex long-term causes and where the few options available are all controversial. <br />
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The decision to hold a public contest to name a ferry and claim 'Ferry McFerryface' was the popular choice (even though it wasn't) shows some important political lessons, and not just the ones about lying:<ul><li>The UK contest in 2016 that would have named a government research vessel 'Boaty McBoatface' was a clear expression of contempt by those who voted against their government and political class. Constance's "captain's pick" in favour of 'Ferry McFerryface' shows that contempt returned in full measure, with interest.</li>
<li>The contest overseen by Constance returned 'Ian Kiernan' as the popular choice for the ferry. Kiernan was a property developer and a recreational yachtsman who is best known for having founded <a href="http://www.cleanup.org.au/au/">Clean Up Australia</a>. Unlike most property developers/yachtsmen, Kiernan was never beholden to the Liberals. He organised a broad, well-regarded social movement that is the envy of any political party. In the past, a Liberal Transport Minister might have gritted teeth and done a grip-and-grin with Kiernan in front of the new ferry bearing his name, but Constance has used the more basic tools of PR to deflect onto May Gibbs (there are those who admire this sort of thing, many of them journalists covering politics).</li>
<li>Constance's attempts to raise the bogeyman of unionism are absurd. Previous leaders of the union covering train drivers, like Bernie Willingale or Michael Costa, were bloody-minded negotiators who happily inconvenienced the public at the slightest provocation. Constance can and does stick to a script, lacking the wit to realise that underlying assumptions have changed and confusing persistence with commitment. He is going to have more trouble going forward in that portfolio rather than less.</li>
</ul>Constance has no experience of having to negotiate with workers to keep an enterprise running, and nor does he come from the IPA/CIS wing that militates against union privileges. The fact that the union was quickly shut down by the Fair Work Commission in its attempt to strike undercuts the scare campaign. De-fanging the union movement makes them look like benign workers' self-help societies. For a government focused on the future, with infrastructure projects and Gonski-level education funding, carrying on about unions is a throwback to an earlier time.<br />
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NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is someone with a sense of history and future, and has set many of the directions within which Constance has to work. She has put him in a portfolio she knows well, and she backs him because she sympathises with the limits which he faces. There are, however, limits on her ability to indulge Constance indefinitely. There will be a state election on the last Saturday in March 2019, which means 2018 will be a year of clearing niggling controversies. Given that Constance is a <strike>fuckup</strike> ongoing source of controversy in a high-profile portfolio, he can't last as Transport Minister. She is loyal - she and Constance go back more than 20 years together - but she is not overly sentimental.<br />
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The ongoing war within the NSW between the far right and the relative moderates means the right will be out for blood. They are not going to take on Berejiklian directly, and nor will they take on sitting federal MPs. Berejiklian will be able to toss them the severed head of Andrew Constance and appoint one of their mouth-breathers as Assistant Minister for Whatever. Factionalism aside, it is hard to see where Berejiklian will find someone with the requisite depth of skills and understanding to be a useful Transport Minister, unless she deprives another equally important and complex portfolio of its minister. <br />
<br />
There were rumours that he might switch to federal politics. Safe Liberal seats in NSW are largely held by his contemporaries, bar one - Warringah - but he doesn't have the political skills or momentum to knock off a former Prime Minister. Constance holds the state seat of <a href="www.elections.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/130784/electoral_maps_A5_final_BEGA.pdf">Bega</a>; I'll defer to others who know the politics of that area, but I note as Treasurer and now Transport Minister he hasn't been that successful in improving the road that holds that electorate together, the Princes Highway. Two federal electorates cover that area: <ul><li><a href="www.aec.gov.au/profiles/nsw/files/2016/2016-aec-nsw-a4-map-eden-monaro.pdf">Eden Monaro</a> is increasingly safe for Labor due to demographic overspill from the ACT, and the formidable incumbent Mike Kelly.</li>
<li><a href="www.aec.gov.au/profiles/nsw/files/2016/2016-aec-nsw-a4-map-gilmore.pdf">Gilmore</a> is represented by the hapless Ann Sudmalis; if the Court of Disputed Returns found against Sudmalis, or if she trips over her own shoelaces again, it is entirely possible Constance would fly the Liberal flag (with Turnbull offering one of those Assistant Minister for Whatever roles). However, Gilmore is one of those seats standing between Labor and federal government. If the polls are as indicative as their sponsors hope, I don't fancy his chances.</li>
</ul>This is not to say that Constance is finished altogether. He might make a solid Minister for Tourism, state or federal; those who thought more highly of him, including himself, have been shown up. People who like him and those who don't agree that he can be warm and engaging in person. When they concede that, his various political opponents should be forgiven by their respective bases. <br />
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He was always going to graduate to one of those roles post-politics that involve lunching and golfing and opening doors for one's lunch/golf companions. It's just that the moment has arrived 15 or so years earlier than he might have planned. He is older than Nick Greiner, Nathan Rees, Kristina Keneally, Mike Baird, and Gladys Berejiklian when each became Premier; older than John Howard or Peter Costello when each became federal Treasurer. He doesn't have the sort of resume that makes the private sector create board seats for him (and aren't the boards of corporate Australia crying out for more mediocre white men). Sydney lacks Melbourne's parallel power structures of gentlemen's clubs and AFL clubs. <br />
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The great political-class fantasy is that you can get into politics at a young age and bypass all those worker ants climbing the corporate ladder, landing some cushy all-care-no-responsibility corporate job that will take you through middle-to-old age. Yet, the very rhetoric of politics these days is that there are no free rides, no featherbedding, and everyone has to pull their weight. We see this in an age of mass sackings and insecure jobs, where CEO tenures last scarcely longer than fruit flies. <br />
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Very few operatives who have made their careers in politics actually make it to the sunlit uplands of non-executive directorships. They bristle at the indignities of freelance consulting, only realising post-politics the nature of the "jobs jobs jobs!" they trumpeted while in office. They often seem to be unfulfilled somehow, hanging around party head office during election campaigns but contributing little, maybe sounded out occasionally by up-and-comers or journalists desperate for a "senior party source". If they're willing to delude themselves about their own careers, you can see why they do the same to gullible journalists and their dwindling audiences. Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-80042614608482116842018-01-09T16:29:00.000+11:002018-01-20T14:48:32.468+11:00Join the queueRecent comments by Peter Dutton on Sudanese crime in Melbourne, in support of the Victorian Liberals' attempts to court that old political tart Laura Norder, underline two failures of strategy: in his portfolio, and within the Victoria Liberals in their quest for state government this November.<br />
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<h2>The end of the line</h2>Immigration policy in Australia was set at the turn of the century by then-Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock, backed by John Howard and his government and only ever tweaked by successive governments since then. <br />
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The first thing to say about immigration to Australia overall is that <a href="https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2017/01/high-immigration-masked-australias-economic-decline/">it has increased significantly this century</a>. Where the crackdown has come, and the headlines, is in the refugee and asylum-seeker intakes.<br />
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Ruddock developed the idea of a 'queue' for refugees - yes, the world was full of desperate people fleeing war and persecution, but all that was required for such people to enter Australia was to "join the queue", fill out some forms and applications would be processed in due course. People who paid people-smugglers and arrived in Australia by boat without visas were "queue jumpers", denying places on the small (and successively reduced) quota for refugee intake to those who did all the right things and waited patiently.<br />
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Here's where Dutton has torpedoed that policy, and made himself look silly: successive Immigration ministers from Ruddock to Morrison told us there were people waiting patiently in refugee camps in Africa unable to enter Australia because bad people from the Middle East tried to jump the queue by coming here on boats. None of the people on Nauru or Manus are from South Sudan. They are people who have come here through the very vetting systems that Dutton now oversees. <br />
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If you agree with Dutton that Sudanese gangs are terrifying Melbourne, then it follows that he has failed to vet these people properly. You can't believe that Dutton, with his inflated powers as Home Affairs Minister, is keeping Australia safe if you also accept that he has waved through the very people apparently causing this mayhem. Say what you will about Daniel Andrews, his government simply has no role in immigration vetting. Why detain people at Nauru, Manus, Woodville or anywhere else when you are clearly so careless? Dutton is undermining his own narrative:<br />
<blockquote>"But the short answer is that, if people haven't integrated, if they are not abiding by our laws, if they don't adhere to our culture, then they are not welcome here."</blockquote>Bit late for that champ. <br />
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No journalist has called him on it. Credulous dickheads like <a href="https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/federal/victorians-scared-to-go-to-restaurants-at-night-because-of-street-gang-violence-peter-dutton-20180103-h0cvu4.html">this one</a> simply hung a whole story on a radio transcript. He even took to social media to insist - without evidence, like the gun journalist that he is - that somewhere in Yarraside there <i>is so</i> a homebody who uses fear of Sudanese gangs as an excuse to hide quivering within their dank little abode. <br />
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In 2018, we know that a quote - even a direct, exclusive one - is no basis for a story. Politicians say things, in the same way that the sun rises in the east or bears shit in the woods; it is not news in itself. The fact that a press gallery exists as a make-work scheme for journalists gathering and disseminating quotes is actually a reason against supporting the Australian media, at least until they realise what a low-value proposition it is. <br />
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<h2>Hearts and minds</h2>Victoria isn't the place for a Laura Norder campaign, despite the self-defeating willingness of Matthew Guy to give it his very best shot. <br />
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The last three Liberal Premiers to win office by beating Labor - Ted Baillieu, Jeff Kennett, and Henry Bolte - all did so without a heavy focus on Laura Norder (the latter two won because Labor had collapsed internally). The last Coalition government of 2010-14 (in which Matthew Guy was a minister, and many of his frontbenchers were also ministers) reduced police numbers and experienced a decrease in crime overall. Guy might call out Sudanese gang activity, but it isn't clear what he proposes to do about it, or whether those proposals might actually decrease criminal activity to warrant a change of government.<br />
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Victoria is the state with both the highest proportion of residents born outside Australia. It also records the lowest aggregate vote for One Nation and its anti-immigration ilk. When Pauline Hanson was setting up in the late 1990s, the only senior politician who really called her out was not Kim Beazley, but then-Premier Jeff Kennett. Racial demonisation is not unknown in Victorian politics, but Matthew Guy is going to have to work harder than he thinks to make it work for him.<br />
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If you don't believe in Victorian exceptionalism, consider how Laura Norder failed the Coalition in NSW. In the late 1990s, Labor held office under Bob Carr, and the Coalition under successive leaders was unshakeable in its conviction that Laura Norder could force Carr out. Carr simply never let the Coalition get to the right of him on those issues. Whenever a crime hit the front page of the Murdoch papers, Carr would introduce a new bill to parliament to reiterate opposition to, say, murder or sexual assault, and would happily match the Coalition in lengthening sentences or criticising judicial officers based on little more than half-baked reporting of complex legal cases. <br />
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In Queensland, the Newman government retreated into Laura Norder once its election promises for an economic bonanza proved elusive. Again, Labor simply matched them on sentencing or whatever, and where Labor wouldn't match (e.g. the appointment of magistrate Tim Carmody as Chief Justice, or the weird pink jumpsuit thing with bikies) Newman had lost more votes than he won. In Western Australia, the economic performance of the government rendered Laura Norder moot. In the Northern Territory, the CLP ended up with the brutality of Don Dale and nowhere else to go. In South Australia, the ACT, and Tasmania, the Liberals shrieked about Laura Norder for the entire time they'd been out of government, and so what?<br />
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Laura Norder is a dead loss as a strategy for the Coalition to win government. In Victoria and elsewhere, it has to be part - a small one - of a wider strategy to highlight Labor's internal political collapse. Getting Labor to collapse internally from the outside can be tricky and waiting for it to happen can be boring, but it happens nonetheless from time to time.<br />
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<h2>The deaf leading the deaf</h2>So, a tone-deaf federal Coalition government is going all in to help a tone-deaf Coalition opposition in Melbourne execute a dud strategy. Peter Dutton impresses nobody who is not already a rusted-on Liberal, and wins no votes in that state which simply do not exist to the right of the Coalition. The federal government's dumping of Gippsland's Darren Chester from Cabinet makes it perfectly clear how it values Victoria and Victorians.<br />
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The fact that he lectures Victorians from far beyond the Murray - further even than Canberra or Sydney - is more of an issue than cosmopolitan Melburnians dare admit. Queensland is where Victorians go for sun and recreation, not for advice on how to run their state. With the restaurants of Melbourne doing a roaring trade, Dutton isn't merely wrong but downright foolish. An authoritarian who looks foolish loses everything. <br />
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Dutton, and similar comments from Turnbull, aren't helping bring about a Guy government. Given the precarious numbers of their own government, can they be said to buttress their own government's standing in Victoria? A seat won is a seat won, whether in Queensland or Victoria, yeah? <br />
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Maybe Laura Norder will help Jason Wood in La Trobe. But then Wood is a former police officer, and every problem is a nail when your only tool is a hammer. The Coalition seemed happy to drop him in 2010, an election in which La Trobe was one of the few seats Labor won from the Coalition. La Trobe aside, it is hard to see where the federal Coalition government will gain votes in Victoria from its contribution to wooing Laura Norder. <br />
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Keep in mind that the Victorian state electoral boundaries are due to be redrawn before the next election. When they were <a href="www.tallyroom.com.au/15395">redrawn on the state level in 2013</a>* they disadvantaged the Coalition. This is not because of political bias but geography: Melbourne has expanded to the north and west in recent years. It is likely that new seats will be created there, at the expense of rural seats or those in Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs, once the bulwark of the Liberal Party. The Coalition parties have no base or infrastructure to speak of to the north and west of Melbourne. <br />
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Polling trends indicate the Coalition is unlikely to win new seats, and that any new seats will almost certainly be beyond their reach. It will struggle to hold marginals like Chisholm, even if its boundaries change relatively little. It did surprisingly well in Melbourne Ports in 2016, but this is unlikely to be repeated given the government's insensitive handling of same-sex marriage, and given a likely state election campaign going hard on Laura Norder and failing. This will intensify pressure on the party's safest seats for party renewal. Of the safest Coalition seats in Victoria, only one (Kevin Andrews in Menzies) is held by someone aged over 60 with more past than future, and the party can't get rid of him: its battles for party renewal will not be expansionary, they will be internalised, and bloody. <br />
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<h2>Oh, but scare campaigns sell papers</h2>No they don't. They have no effect at all on relentlessly declining sales. And even if this were true, do Matthew Guy and Peter Dutton have some sort of obligation to help Murdoch sell papers at the expense of winning elections? <br />
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There is no such thing as great tabloid journalism, it's all patronising shit. Murdoch has withdrawn his rags from official circulation audits because he's so embarrassed, and because he runs them for reasons other than profit-making business. Here's proof that anyone can do it:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG29MDxxo1Yv2Dko6_HERMo-AlXUKZOTCC6l7K4VePLTLL5axQJldQQAmkwzcSI6BQIINNI02GJK3bQ_qujOhw3ywIi955OUXMtk5UmKUltU4lTFEf1_SbPHkeeVpYvfc3KwCI/s1600/springboks-vs-wallabies2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG29MDxxo1Yv2Dko6_HERMo-AlXUKZOTCC6l7K4VePLTLL5axQJldQQAmkwzcSI6BQIINNI02GJK3bQ_qujOhw3ywIi955OUXMtk5UmKUltU4lTFEf1_SbPHkeeVpYvfc3KwCI/s320/springboks-vs-wallabies2.jpg" width="320" height="232" data-original-width="420" data-original-height="304" /></a></div><center>African gang attacks Australia shock<br />
(c) www.thesocialite.co.za</center><br />
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* In searching for information to link to in support of this piece, I searched for Antony Green's detailed commentary on the Victorian redistribution, but it would appear that the ABC has dumped that content.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-17541566371064850372017-11-26T11:20:00.001+11:002017-11-26T15:21:02.395+11:00The end of Peter DuttonFor much of the past 12 months, the press gallery has agreed that the power of Peter Dutton has grown within the government, possibly to the point where he could challenge Turnbull for the Liberal leadership and hence become Prime Minister. It's time to call bullshit on that, and to point out that the more enthusiastic advocates for Dutton (or those most hungry for stink) aren't helping us understand how the government works. <br />
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Dutton solves none of the problems facing the country. Think about the big issues (go on, dare to do so despite our appalling national leadership and inadequate media):<ul><li>Maintaining stable electrical power supplies (and gas for that matter) in the face of changing technologies - that is, to take on the political risk that all state governments but WA and Queensland have shirked;</li>
<li>An economy that creates jobs within a sustainable environment;</li>
<li>A relationship with Indigenous people that goes beyond the tokenistic, but which does not negate non-Indigenous Australia to the extent we tried to negate them;</li>
<li>The ability to encourage people to come to our country, as visitors and migrants, but not to the point where we fear the loss of who we are (see above); and</li>
<li>[insert your big issue here].</li>
</ul>Dutton offers answers to none of these questions.<br />
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Dutton offers no answers to questions of good government, he has fucked up every portfolio he's held (including the current one, see below). He offers no political answers either: he's not more popular than Turnbull, and any regional variations in relative popularity for one is offset elsewhere. <br />
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The proof of this is in the Queensland election. Had Dutton been a political go-getter, if he had half the ambition of Howard or Abbott or Turnbull or even Sam Dastyari, Dutton would have been at the side of every LNP candidate in every winnable seat up and down the state. Were he a potent political threat Palaszczuk should be cursing him by name, piling on to the outrage about Manus, but she rightly regards him as irrelevant. Maybe he's raised heaps of money for the LNP behind the scenes, but I doubt it. <br />
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Turnbull's main political weakness is his lack of judgment: when to push open a door ajar, and when to walk by it. Dutton has the same weakness. He was right not to throw himself into the 2015 Queensland election, when Campbell Newman threw away one of the biggest majorities ever, and at the next Queensland election it will be too late. <br />
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Dutton is too stupid to know Manus has reached its endgame. As a junior policeman he was removed from situations requiring subtlety and deftness, but as a senior politician he has been let loose by a weak leadership and goaded by right-wingers thirsty for some impact (yes, the government of Australia is less well run than the Queensland Police). All cruelty requires prizing toughness over all other considerations, and Dutton has shielded himself from those considerations for too long.<br />
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UN and non-government agencies have long criticised Australia's mandatory detention system, and so have journalists from outside the press gallery (recent converts to the idea that the system is appallingly inhumane, like Paul Bongiorno and Michael Gordon, do not count). Dutton assumes that recent criticism, accompanied by video, is more of the same and can either be ignored or fed into culture wars. <br />
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When a boatload of asylum-seekers foundered on the rocks at Christmas Island in 2012, with accompanying video, Australians were appalled. The out-of-sight-out-of-mind approach to offshore detention was exposed. So too was the nation's entire political class, which were heavily invested in "strong on border security" and could not easily or deftly change course. Michael Keenan and Joe Hockey shed tears of self-pity and the sheer impossibility of changing course: and so too did the press gallery, which from then until now took the Coalition at its word on these matters. <br />
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The solution then largely consisted of media management: restricting access to Christmas Island, redefining what a "boat arrival" meant, harsh words to dwindling media proprietors and threats of outsiderdom to press gallery insiders. The press gallery responded to this not with defiance, as journalists might, but by insisting then-Immigration Minister Scott Morrison was a genius for his ability to bamboozle the press gallery. Morrison is less effective in bamboozling economists outside the press gallery in his current role, but that respect has transferred to Dutton for his continuation and expansion of limits of media access to content sources beyond official statements.<br />
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Now we know that official statements are in disgrace, and bear no relation to reality: moving people from one settlement to another violently, cutting off water and medical aid, and doing it all in a media environment that can't be controlled exposes Manus to its Australian sponsors. NZ's offer to take some refugees, denied again, makes it look as though the government doesn't want the problem solved, or is so obstinate that it overlooks obvious solutions (a common feature of all governments nearing their end). The double game of Australia taking credit but blaming the locals is over: all the gallery's faithful stenography to that end was always wasted, but is now irrelevant. <br />
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Dutton has batted away politically-correct lefties before, and is doing so again, not realising it's too late for that. The combination of images from Manus going global, combined with the policy being shunned by all but the farthest right (even Trump blanched at it: "you're worse than I am"); along with a reputation for ripping off backpackers, and now being lumped in with human rights abuses in Myanmar in terms of callousness to asylum-seekers, it's too late for cosy chats with Ray Hadley trying to discourage listeners from believing their lying eyes. <br />
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With Trump's US and Brexit UK shunning clever and ambitious migrants, we see now that there is no plan for Australia to offer an attractive destination. We see nothing for tourism and education beyond the lazy assumption that more Chinese will ramp up numbers for us. Nobody has any right to assume that the Immigration Minister would even want to play a long game on this front: this government has a vacuous leader, nobody from the press gallery went looking for evidence of long-term national-interest thinking, and the Opposition dares not engage in any product differentiation on this issue. And so, an absurdly inadequate minister is off the hook.<br />
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Had Labor been re-elected federally in 2010 to a greater extent than it was, it is entirely likely that Dutton's career would have ended then. Dutton's seat, Dickson, between northern Brisbane and the southern Sunshine Coast, is almost entirely represented by Labor in state parliament. Dutton's mate Dan Purdie won a state seat, but so what? The LNP machine is not exactly the killer outfit it was five years ago, and whatever the answers might be to the LNP's malaise almost none reside in that potato head of his. Contrast that with the way John Howard rebuilt the Liberal Party from the ground up in 1995-96.<br />
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When skittish politicians get worried about an unpopular leader, they try to imagine that leader in their local community shaking hands with local worthies and randoms. This is the political equivalent of picturing what your house looks like from the kerb; nobody pretends it's all-important but it isn't unimportant either. Those who were unimpressed with John Howard underestimated his ability to walk among ordinary people, chat with them and appear to be listening; those who love the guy rave about his ability to do that, a quality pretty much absent in your standard political-class drone.<br />
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It was hard to imagine gimlet-eyed obsessive Abbott in actual communities with actual voters, but he waddled around the country doing passable imitations of political gladhanding. Then, he spent two years returning to Canberra screwing the people whose hands he'd shaken. Liberals found this dissonance puzzling, until Peta Credlin and the passage of time helped them realise Abbott was really like that. As he became both less popular and less effective, it was easy to imagine Turnbull gladhanding the way back to popularity. No Liberal, not even those in safe seats, wants Dutton anywhere near voters who like their local MP but have their doubts. Again, you'll notice he played scant role in Queensland, and he's not doing much heavy lifting in the success story of immigration that is Bennelong.<br />
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Dutton doesn't look like the stereotype of a Queenslander, like Bob Katter does; Abbott looks more like a copper than he does. For all his aggregation of power over federal intelligence and law enforcement capabilities, Dutton has played no role in shaping public debates in the area. He hasn't brought in much experience from his own experience as a police officer (oddly cut short just before he became eligible for considerable benefits). Maybe the guy just doesn't believe in public debate. Maybe he just isn't a leader to anyone outside the Liberal right. He's probably not the right person to dissuade people from their growing inclination to chuck out the incumbent government. <br />
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With his bald pate and deadpan features, Dutton looks like a public servant who says no, like a banker foreclosing on busted small businesses. Howard had that look too, but he could do sunny optimism better than Dutton. Dutton goes hard in Question Time, but Labor seem to have his measure after his lacklustre opposition to Nicola Roxon and Catherine King's painstaking work in Health when he was minister (besides, who gives a fuck about Question Time?). He is such a cold fish that <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/good-weekend/peter-dutton-im-just-not-impacted-by-that-hatred-20170516-gw5pt1.html">this experienced (non-gallery) journalist was moved to tears at a simple display of humanity</a> before some children. He is not a steady hand in an uncertain future. Anyone who thinks leaks and backbench rebellions would cease under a Dutton leadership is kidding themselves. <br />
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Shorten will look like a model of calm forward thinking in contrast to the darkly foreboding Dutton. If you were a Liberal MP in a marginal seat, or a Liberal candidate in a Labor one, Peter Dutton is lead in your saddlebags. You'd risk chucking Turnbull for someone with more of the common touch, but you'd no more choose Dutton than Kevin Andrews or Peta Credlin. His biggest fans are the people who also insist we can have lve new coal-fired power stations and no same-sex marriage. He offers empty threats and petty bullying, maybe not even that. Dutton embodies the Liberal predicament - frustration without resolution - but it is wishful thinking to insist he's got what it takes to fix it.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-45051005543827672302017-11-15T00:32:00.002+11:002017-11-15T00:32:51.858+11:00So close, and yet so farThere was a time when to be the best male Australian tennis player was to be the best at that sport, to be able to beat any man in the world anywhere in the world. Rod Laver, Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall, and John Newcombe, along with supporting players like Ken Emmerson or Tony Roche, dominated the sport as it transitioned from an amateur era to a professional one. This dominance lasted over a decade, which hadn't happened in Australian sport before or since: in swimming or cricket there were seasons of Australian dominance in fits and starts, even with uniquely talented individuals like Bradman or Dawn Fraser. Even in women's tennis, Margaret Smith Court was <strike>a freak</strike> <i>sui generis</i>; Evonne Goolagong Cawley did not breeze past her contemporaries as Smith did. Both those women left tennis to raise families, while Newcombe and Roche in particular tried to keep alight the mystic flame of Australian men's tennis. <br />
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John Alexander was fated to be the leading Australian male tennis player behind Newcombe. Later in their careers, Newcombe and Rosewall held off the brash and aggressive American Jimmy Connors, but Alexander in his prime could not. The 1970s saw the Europeans adopt Australian coaching techniques: Ilie Nastase from Romania, Bjorn Borg from Sweden, Guillermo Vilas from Argentina, Connors, and others all showed that there was nothing in our water, nor in Vegemite or Milo, nor in any other way essentially Australian about the skill and focus necessary to win big-time singles tennis tournaments. Alexander was a very good singles tennis player, but not a great one. He wasn't lucky, like Gosford's Mark Edmonson winning the 1976 Australian Open. He didn't have a heart-rending back-story and an oafish foil, like Jelena Dokic. The recent parallel would be Andy Roddick, the US male succeeding Sampras and Agassi and Courier, but fated to be creamed regularly by Nadal and Federer and Djokovic. John Alexander showed us the important lesson that sometimes guts and determination just aren't enough.<br />
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Alexander won the Australian Open twice as half of separate doubles pairings. He didn't bond with one other player to form a memorable killer team like like MacNamara/McNamee or Woodforde/Woodbridge, and he had a reputation for being short-tempered. Other tennis players had this reputation too - but in the 1950s and '60s the optics were all of Gentlemanly Behaviour and Good Sportsmanship. Winners are grinners, and the image of Laver or Newcombe grinning so often holding up trophies smoothed any jagged edges in their reputations. In their later years, Connors and Nastase freely admitted to having been pricks, assessments not contradicted by observers at the time. Not so Alexander: when Connors or Nastase threw their racquets around, intimidated ball boys, talked back to umpires, or snarled at interviewers, this Bad Sportsmanship somehow underlined their foreignness. When Alexander did the same, it confirmed him as a sore loser and UnAustralian and Surely There's Another Talented Young Australian We Can All Get Behind? <br />
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I was a kid in the 1970s. My Dad's family were all big on tennis, playing and watching. They made it clear to me, my brother, and my cousins, that we were not to carry on like John Alexander. Better to do your best and lose gracefully than to end up like that guy. <br />
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I've said before in this blog that I used to live in Bennelong, and that I observed a number of times how awkward he is with actual humans whom he has represented in parliament. He seems to be attentive only to people he knows well, or who are important, or both; seven years representing the community has not defrosted him. One thing the left always underestimated about Howard was his preparedness to engage with locals, to talk sincerely about vandalism in West Ryde or schools in Gladesville at the same time as he was dealing with Iraq or the economy. Alexander still can't fake genuine interest in the small stuff. Alexander is a tall man (I'm 183cm and he's a head taller than me), and often such people have to work hard not to appear aloof - but he always looks pained when approached by randoms, always on the lookout for someone else to talk to or somewhere else to be. He has mastered the ability to turn up to an event just before pictures are taken and leave immediately afterwards, with local papers happy to create the impression of warm engagement on his behalf. <br />
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Once he beat Maxine McKew in 2010 the massed dim lights of Australian political journalism went off him, and he seems to like it that way. He increased his margin out of that limelight, confirming his political instincts. In the past two elections he has faced an authentic product of Labor's left-leaning local branches, Lyndal Hewison, a local teacher and a nice person; at the last election she lost the primaries to Alexander 28-51. Yes, that's right: this remote man has increased the Liberal vote in Bennelong to the point where it doesn't go to preferences, back to where it was early in Howard's prime ministership despite the massive demographic changes in the area since. The swing against the Coalition that saw so many Liberals lose their seats last July saw Alexander hold steady. <br />
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I kept looking around Bennelong for an example of Alexander's legacy, and I think I found it. Behind Eastwood Library, there's a kids' playground and a public toilet and an oval that shows up in old maps as a lake. In that area is a green, wooden table-tennis table: Alexander had it placed there, a nod to Eastwood's Chinese community, who all seem far too busy to use it. It's also a nod to Alexander's tennis career but he's too busy to use it too. Like the local real estate market, it isn't a level playing field. Only the die-hards come forth with bats and a ball and a cloth to wipe the birdshit; they don't stay for long. <br />
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It's almost fitting that Labor have passed over Hewison for the byelection, or promising local mayor Jerome Laxale, in favour of Kristina Keneally. She's warm and engaging where Alexander is aloof and awkward. Like Alexander, she lives in another part of town, and in the 1970s and '80s spent quite a bit of time in the United States. Also like Alexander, she knows what it is to step up just as a winning streak is ending, and to cop the blame for that. <br />
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Her media experience counts for nothing. The total audience for Sky News is so small, and perishingly so in Bennelong, that she may as well have spent the past six years getting drunk. Her former co-host Ross Cameron is politically just as dead today as he was in 2004. The idea that she'll be a media darling like former press gallery journalist Maxine McKew - and that this will count for something - is bullshit. <br />
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Toward the end of his career, John Watkins was Deputy Premier and State MP for Ryde (the state electorate that takes up much of Bennelong). When Watkins retired in 2008 Ryde swung heavily to the Liberals. That byelection may have been the last time Keneally set foot in the electorate until the last day or so. That byelection was a precursor for the 2011 state election, and so too Federal Labor is hoping for a dramatic result that works against the incumbent government. Like it or not, Keneally is associated with a flailing and failed government, one that casts a shadow over a government that is yet to come.<br />
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What are the possibilities for this byelection, and what are the consequences more broadly?<ul><li>Alexander wins handsomely, like he has at the past two general elections. This (along with the likely re-election of Barnaby Joyce in New England) would confirm Turnbull and the government and they will blunder on. Surely the performance of the government will give rise to a protest vote.</li>
<li>Keneally wins Bennelong. This is unlikely but it would panic the Liberals into wounding Turnbull and generally running around with their hair on fire while trying to convince Sharkie and McGowan that they really are a stable and responsible government.</li>
<li>Keneally gets a swing toward Labor but doesn't win. This will be the kind of result that anyone can read anything into, producing the kind of inconclusive and fatuous jabber that is "political debate" and "insider commentary" in the Australian media. This is the most likely result.</li>
</ul>Keneally will wander the streets saying "你 好" to people and getting "G'day" in return. Alexander will be out and about wincing at people for the cameras and it will make no difference at all. Turnbull will condescend to petty locals in their petty lives and people will vote for him with gritted teeth. Shorten will turn up and create surprise at being a regular guy, who may be up for consideration next time. Labor's NSW head office will be confirmed in its view that the best way to win in Bennelong is to override the local branches.<br />
<br />
It will be quite the blessing that the press gallery will mostly be on holidays, and that The Daily Telly won't lose one of its few presenters who doesn't just nod along with Paul Murray or Chris Kenny. The sheer witlessness of Australian political journalism will not be affected in any way by this byelection. The Australian media has in its archives all of that stuff about Alexander's sporting and political career, and Keneally's: and yet the sheer wasteland of drivel on this topic (no I won't link to it) stretches out before us once again, with no useful information and no respite. <br />
Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-60956933886076191192017-11-05T08:26:00.000+11:002017-11-05T08:26:00.258+11:00The choice of Joyce<blockquote><i>But look, oh look, the Gothic tree’s on fire<br />
with blown galahs, and fuming with wild wings.<br />
The hard inquiring wind strikes to the bone and whines division.</i><br />
<br />
- Judith Wright <i>For New England</i></blockquote>The press gallery seems to be of one mind that Barnaby Joyce will win the New England byelection handily on December 2. Tony Windsor isn't running, PHON and ShooFiFa aren't running, therefore Joyce will win it in a canter, won't he? <br />
<br />
Joyce has an excellent ground operation, the envy of any party. At the last election we saw money was no object; Joyce started his political career as the champion of Cubbie Station, and ever since he's had more sympathy for those who breach their water allocations than you might expect from the leader of the farmers' party. He's cultivated a beautiful friendship with Gina Rinehart. Those who say Joyce will win easily have a point: surely on the night of December 2 they'll simply weigh Nationals votes rather than count them, and that he's good for at least 70 percent of first preferences, surely? <br />
<br />
I'm not so sure. Joyce is no longer a fresh face in a promising government. He is not a powerful member of a stable government that is racking up substantial achievements. Election campaigns often end differently to the way they start, and experienced press gallery journalists should know this.<br />
<br />
This isn't simple contrariness against the gallery. To be fair to them, I'm not exactly the go-to guy for political predictions - but then again, when I said Tony Abbott would never be Prime Minister, I was closer to the mark than those who assumed he was good enough to become Prime Minister. On the same basis, I reckon any victory Joyce wins in New England will be pyrrhic.<br />
<br />
<h2>Strong and stable</h2>Joyce's central offering to the people of New England is that he is Deputy Prime Minister in a stable Coalition government. He spent the first couple of days of the byelection campaign sledging unnamed detractors from within that same government; strong people do not do this, they dismiss their detractors. Since then we've seen the President of the Senate and the Minister for Energy experience similar doubts over their nationality as that which put Joyce into the position he is in now. <br />
<br />
Electricity infrastructure in New England has not been gold-plated. Coal-fired power still comes from the Hunter and from Queensland, and its cost to New England customers is rising as it is for the rest of us. It isn't only hippies who are installing solar in the hope of boosting reliability and cutting costs over time. If you don't blame Joyce for making the price and reliability of power worse, then you can't claim that he is doing much to make things better. <br />
<br />
The position in Manus now, under this government, is similar to that point in the Gillard government where boatloads of asylum seekers were crashing against the rocks of Christmas Island. Remember Michael Keenan and Joe Hockey coming over all teary at that? They are the same people pooh-poohing the men on Manus Island digging for water while coming down off anti-depressants. It goes way beyond a bad look. A policy has failed when it ends up at this point, and so have the ministers responsible for it - and Barnaby Joyce has been one of those ministers. <br />
<br />
This isn't to say Manus is a hot-button issue in New England right now, but it does go to the competence of the government and Joyce's place within it. It does mean that other political actors have scope to exploit the gap between what good government should look like, and what Barnaby's offering. The status quo, steady-as-she-goes approach isn't the elixir that the lazy press gallery thinks it is.<br />
<br />
<h2>Old-fashioned journalism</h2>He's the last of the backslappin', have-a-beer politicians - well, the last you'll find above municipal level. Some journalists have to hunt for their stories, but the press gallery love nothing better than dusting off a cliche, painting by numbers and then flicking it at the public. They'll be looking forward to writing those same stories from the pubs of New England - particularly where Joyce is the main act and not a sideshow in a multi-faceted, continental general election. It will be interesting to see if Joyce gets sick of them, or if he discloses some tidbit too tempting not to share. <br />
<br />
Another cliche is the idea that people - rustics, particularly - are so bedazzled by promises of public largesse that they auction their vote the highest bidder. It's hard to imagine more largesse than that promised by Shenhua in its various explorations into the Liverpool Plains, or the similar proposals for the Pilliga. It doesn't quite work out like that. Joyce is stuck between those locals who like both places as they are, and the whiny drone of the economic vandal: "business confidence". NSW Mineral Resources Minister Don Harwin has almost nobbled the Liverpool Plains proposal, but any decision (including none) would have put Joyce in a difficult position. Mining companies were all very well when they were lobbying for non-farming land, but now that they're after the prime stuff it's all a bit Faustian for everyone's mate Barnaby. <br />
<br />
The advent of social media and the weaponisation of polling this century saw the end of taxi-driver journalism. Journalists would hire taxis and represent the driver's patter as The Voice Of The Common Man, warping all coverage of political and social issues around half-baked impressions gained from reading tabloids and listening to gruntback radio. If you have ever wondered how Ray Hadley got to be like that, look back at taxi-driver journalism and wonder no more. When you hear journalists praising old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism, part of what they mean is plonking their arses in the back of Ray Hadley's taxi, switching on the tape recorder, and letting their stories write themselves. The only practitioners of taxi-driver journalism these days are press gallery journalists, long cut off from - dare one describe it thus - the mainstream of traditional media offices. <br />
<br />
They'll miss the stories that are both more interesting and more telling. You don't have to pretend that warmed-over cliches are valuable and worth supporting.<br />
<br />
<h2>Tamworth, Tamworth, Tamworth</h2>Tamworth's airport is over-engineered for a town of its size. The airport was designed half a century ago to accept the biggest aircraft of that time, the Boeing 727. The idea was not to facilitate junkets from Canberra, or even the annual spike in tourism for the Country Music Festival. Tamworth airport was designed to support high-value agricultural exports by aircraft, where food could depart New England in the morning and then be consumed that evening in Asian cities. <br />
<br />
Despite several free trade agreements endorsed by the Cabinet of which Joyce was a member, that dream is no closer to reality than it was in the 1970s, when Joyce and I were growing up in that area. Contrast this with the Wellcamp airport west of Toowoomba, which went from conception to execution within the past decade and which handles the sort of cargo (including from northern NSW) promised but rarely delivered from Tamworth airport.<br />
<br />
If you ask Barnaby Joyce about Tamworth airport and its potential, he will offer a generous helping of word-salad that the equally ignorant press gallery will accept and pass on without demur or examination. It will also show how disconnected government policy is from actual economic development in this area, not to mention the value-free and valueless practice of press gallery stenography.<br />
<br />
During byelections, press gallery journalists gingerly venture forth beyond those concentric roads around the building from which they operate and afflict the people beset by the candidates and flyers in those communities that in Canberra are just are names on maps. In the New England byelection, taxi-driver journalism is concentrated on Tamworth. Tamworth is the biggest town in New England, with regular air connections to Sydney (not many 727s on that route any more, but never mind). It's easy to blow in to Tamworth, squawking and flapping with the tape recorder, and get back to the city without having to bunk down in a local motel. However, there are two main problems with this as quality information: 1) towns within New England like Quirindi, Uralla, or Inverell aren't suburbs of Tamworth, with distinctions that matter for those who understand the subtleties of rural communities; and 2) a review of voting records shows that Tamworth's polling booths are particularly strong for the Country/NCP/Nationals. <br />
<br />
If you want to reinforce your preconceived notion that Barnaby is returning to Canberra as a formality, go to Tamworth and get a full dose of it. Senior press gallery journos have done exactly this, from almost every media outlet represented in the gallery, which again utterly defeats laws and other measures designed to foster media diversity. Every gallery outlet but the ABC has closed its regional and suburban outlets, making coverage of this community with nuance and depth impossible. As I've said, you don't have to pretend that warmed-over cliches are valuable and worth supporting. <br />
<br />
For a short time, Tamworth turned away from the Nationals to send Tony Windsor to state and federal parliament. The Gillard government's abrupt ban of live cattle exports to Indonesia hit Tamworth's meatworks hard. Tamworth did not get the benefit from the NBN that Armidale got. Then again, when Tony Abbott became Prime Minister, Windsor's difficult choice became understandable. The vote against Windsor in 2016 was a vote against this difficult and aberrant part of Tamworth's history and a return to the National status quo; it may negate his ability to shift the Nationals vote in future contests. His absence from this byelection hardly negates Tamworth's history as strong Nationals turf.<br />
<br />
<h2>A careless man</h2>Barnaby Joyce once drove a government vehicle through floodwater, barely escaping with his life and writing off the vehicle. Most rural people, and some in the cities, rightly regard people who drive through floodwaters as idiots. <br />
<br />
There is no evidence Joyce has learned anything from that. He spent more than $600,000 on refitting offices in New England. He toyed with the lives of public servants and the effectiveness of an agency vital to Australian agriculture by shifting its offices. He promised a white paper (a comprehensive policy document) on Australian agriculture that shows no evidence of in-depth, long-term consideration, and which failed to even consider that changes to the climate might affect agriculture. His blustering approach to his own citizenship has forced a byelection on his electorate that need not have been necessary: when Jackie Kelly did something similar in Lindsay in 1996, the press gallery lectured her for foolishness and the waste of public money arising from it. <br />
<br />
Joyce is careless with matters of public trust, and with public moneys. People recognise this and will vote accordingly. The survival of the Turnbull government, however, depends upon the foregoing not being the case, or being overlooked.<br />
<br />
<h2>Sunday, 3 December 2017</h2>Both Joyce and the government of which he's part are on the nose. The press gallery believe both that a) Joyce has some sort of magic on the campaign trail, and b) the government has been behind in the polls; but they have not concluded and dare not consider that c) New England voters will mark Joyce and the government down on December 2.<br />
<br />
Having blithely assumed that Joyce would return to Canberra, reinforced with a quick fly-by through Tamworth, press gallery journos will be at a loss to explain why Joyce will not be returning to Canberra with a thumping majority. They will assert their expertise in matters political nonetheless.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-11865037233592041612017-08-13T19:57:00.000+10:002017-08-13T19:57:15.192+10:00Marriage Equality 1: Accepting our way of life<blockquote><i>We search for leaders on our hands and knees</i><br />
<br />
- Richard Clapton <i>Best years of our lives</i></blockquote>Marriage equality will happen, sooner or later, by any one of what seem now like a variety of political means. <br />
<br />
There were only seven members of this government prepared to stick their necks out and bring on marriage equality. I leave them aside here, and also the jihadists like Abbott or Abetz or The Jack Man, and say: most of the others must realise it is inevitable. <br />
<br />
One day, a vote on marriage equality will come before the parliament. Coalition MPs may vote for it, or they may not. People who weren't able to get married will do so. As in other countries, the institution of marriage will be strengthened rather than diminished. The Prime Minister of New Zealand, Bill English, had voted against it but <a href="http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2016/12/bill-english-changes-view-on-gay-marriage.html">came to change his mind</a>, and so too will they.<br />
<br />
When that day comes, most current Coalition MPs will simply anticipate that they can shrug, concede they were wrong and expect to simply move on. Malcolm Turnbull will, I suspect, be in this number.<br />
<br />
LGBTIQ people have done everything right in lobbying to change the Marriage Act: they have patiently petitioned MPs, joined political parties and engaged in polite public events. The fact that they have not yet achieved their aim is an indictment of our democratic processes, especially when you consider the 2004 change that made this change necessary came about within hours after underhanded lobbying from the Exclusive Brethren. <br />
<br />
Those responsible for seeing this campaign through should be recognised as among the most capable organisers and representatives our society has. It will be interesting to see if they continue in politics by other means. The 1999 republic referendum not only gave us Turnbull and Abbott, but also Sophie Mirabella and David Elliott on the monarchist side, as well as Greg Barns and Jason Yat-Sen Li on the republicans. The monarchists made more of their people than the republicans did; you can blame Howard for wrong-footing the republicans if you will, but the fact is no promising politician arose from that movement to revive and sustain it. Lyle Shelton was a failed LNP candidate for Queensland state parliament, and people like Sally Rugg may yet switch to broader political engagement.<br />
<br />
As <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/17/malcolm-turnbull-doesnt-believe-in-marriage-equality-he-believes-in-majoritarianism">Paul Karp notes</a>, Turnbull has sought to justify the rights of LGBTIQ people in terms of whether or not a majority might accept them. This government has diminished rather than expanded our rights as citizens; they are awkward when reversing themselves. What's genuinely appalling is that LGBTIQ Australians are being treated like non-citizens. <br />
<br />
Majoritarianism is the same basis on which our immigration policy is conducted: new immigrant groups cop hazing and are accorded few if any rights, until some ill-defined process occurs after many years whereby they are granted the status of True Blue Aussies, and another group of migrants cops the hazing. It should surprise nobody that the Immigration Minister was one of the main proponents of the mail poll, with its exorbitant cost, its lack of rigour, and its disdain for the people most affected. Never mind Liberal Party rhetoric about the freedom and dignity of the individual: Australian citizens must now petition the government for rights, rather than demand them and vote accordingly for representatives who share them.<br />
<br />
Even if you agree with the Prime Minister and don't regard LGBTIQ rights as one of the most pressing issues of our time, consider those that are. Consider climate change, or economic stagnation (including, but not limited to, employee shares of corporate incomes), telecommunications and data security, education or healthcare, or changing geopolitical balances of power. In each case, this government has no real answers, and demonstrates no real ability to engage with complex, multi-faceted issues. In each case, for 15 of the past 21 years, Coalition MPs faff around, shrug, and change course - all with the clear expectation that whatever they do will and must be rewarded with perpetual electoral success.<br />
<br />
The democratic measures by which we keep politicians in check have been blunted. That's the worst thing about this debate: a ferociously democratic people have been played into negation and acquiescence by unprofessional professionals who cannot be dealt out of the game by the usual means. It's a problem for our politics, and that includes the way politics is reported by those with press gallery access - but don't even get me started on that.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-59394809480176099182017-07-12T19:54:00.000+10:002017-07-12T19:54:01.026+10:00Submission to the Senate Select Committee on the Future of Public Interest JournalismThe Senate established a select committee to investigate the future of public interest journalism. Its terms of reference are <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Future_of_Public_Interest_Journalism">here</a>. I was concerned that it would cleave too closely to the Federal Government's proposed regulatory changes to help prop up traditional media, and the recurring bludge identified most recently on <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s4699615.htm">Media Watch</a> that Google and Facebook have some sort of responsibility to maintain journalists and their managers in the style to which they've become accustomed. <br />
<br />
Here's my submission to the committee (the subheadings refer to the committee's <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Future_of_Public_Interest_Journalism/PublicInterestJournalism/Terms_of_Reference">terms of reference</a>):<br />
<br />
<h2>
(a) the current state of public interest journalism in Australia</h2>
<br />
<b><i>What is public interest journalism?</i></b><br />
<br />
A pithy and useful definition is supplied here (http://www.mediahelpingmedia.org/training-resources/journalism-basics/360-applying-the-public-interest-test-to-journalism):<br />
<blockquote>
The public interest is in having a safe, healthy and fully-functioning society. In a democracy, journalism plays a central role in that. It gives people the information they need to take part in the democratic process.<i></i></blockquote>
I’ll use this definition when I refer to ‘public interest journalism’ in this submission.<br />
<br />
<b><i>Why public interest journalism goes beyond the products offered by media companies represented in the press gallery</i></b><br />
<br />
The media organisations represented in the federal parliamentary press gallery have employed journalists to report on the activities of politicians in federal parliament – mostly the activities of the government of the day in executing policy, but also the activities of the opposition (as a potential alternative government), and politicians outside both the government and official opposition (in shaping policy and legislative outcomes and contributing to longer-term debates). <br />
<br />
There is more to the public interest than what traditional media organisations deign to cover. The public interest transcends the reach, the abilities, and the wit of particular management teams of traditional media organisations. Press gallery journalists cannot offer the breadth of coverage required for public interest journalism. There are a number of reasons for this.<br />
<br />
<b><i>The weaknesses of the fourth estate</i></b><br />
<br />
Romantic notions of “the fourth estate” aside, the press gallery is not accountable to the public as are members of parliament. The public has no role in appointing or removing members of the press gallery. Remonstrations with them have no discernible or consistent impact. The geographic and demographic composition of the press gallery is unrepresentative of the broader Australian public. Any idea that “public interest journalism” begins and ends with the press gallery is nonsense.<br />
<br />
Most news output from the press gallery concerns government announcements – activities of government and interpretations thereof that responsible ministers are more than happy to announce, and which the press gallery transcribes and broadcasts in terms broadly similar to those announced. <br />
<br />
There is a public interest in activities of government that are not announced, which go to questions of maladministration, incompetence, or even corruption. It can be tempting to see these non-announcements as a game one plays with journalists, rather than misinformation to the public at large; this is a mistake, one that public interest journalism should work to redress. <br />
<br />
Media organisations represented in the press gallery rarely do the investigation necessary to bring these activities to light for the public, and almost never from within the press gallery. They sometimes did when they were better resourced than they are today. <br />
There is no real link between any increase in funding those organisations may experience and any increase in the frequency, breadth, or complexity of investigative journalism they may deign to undertake. Investigative journalism resources required for properly effective public interest journalism does, and will continue to come from beyond traditional media organisations. Laws and policy outcomes should recognise and accommodate this. <br />
<br />
The need for such journalism does not ebb and flow with fads or commercial decisions of traditional media organisations. The public has a right to know what its government is doing, and what the options are politically; this public interest exists independently of media operational strategy. <br />
<br />
<b><i>Are you a smart-alec?</i></b><br />
<br />
As an engaged citizen and media consumer, I want to see, hear, and read what’s going on: preferably from those who understand what’s going on rather than merely physically present at a staged announcement, and who are simply relaying information supplied to them. <br />
Apparently it is not reasonable to expect traditional media organisations to engage a variety of policy experts on an expanding range of topics. It is certainly not reasonable to expect that a press gallery journalist can adequately cover any and all of the complex policy issues covered by Australia’s federal government.<br />
<br />
While the quality of online content can vary considerably, I have learned through wide and careful reading that there is no such thing as a dull subject, only dull writing and unappealing presentation of important facts. Throughout the community, there are people with deep and broad experience in many complex and important issues; it is important that we hear from them directly rather than awaiting the traditional media spotlight to fall on them. <br />
<br />
One important example is the rise of science journalism. Fairfax, NewsCorp and the ABC recently had small numbers of specialist journalists with scientific training and the ability to explain complex, cutting-edge concepts to mainstream audiences. In recent years those organisations have downsized or abolished science reporting teams, despite the urgency in public debates for greater scientific understanding by decisions-makers and the community as a whole. Public interest journalists who focus on science provide a vital service, and raise questions about traditional media avowals of quality journalism.<br />
<br />
The value of “insider knowledge” on complex, far-reaching public issues is often vastly overrated by politicians and traditional media. It is lazy and inadequate, as so often happens, to present a policy debate as “argy-bargy” within a party or across parties. It is irresponsible to abandon an important issue with the cop-out “the devil is in the detail”. Public interest journalism opens the possibility that complex policy issues might be engaged with and explained by knowledgeable, experienced people, who may help us all (including politicians and press gallery journalists) better understand and engage with the issues in public debate.<br />
<br />
Statistical knowledge – not just the data and the presentation of it, but the understanding of how data may be manipulated – has never been more important in public debate. From their earliest days, newspapers carried voluminous data on shipping movements, racing form guides, and stock market movements. Popular television coverage of sporting events includes voluminous statistical information. So do popular weather reports, financial advice, and opinion poll coverage. Public interest journalists are more likely to gather and present in-depth statistical information than traditional press gallery journalists, who feel pushed for time and unable to digest official reports with rich statistical information that might inform key current debates. <br />
<br />
The Australian community is better educated than it was. “Beer, cigs up” is not sufficient commentary on the budget. The Treasurer is scrutinised more than any other minister is because of the plethora of economics and business journalists who cover his portfolio, not all of whom are fulltime, salaried employees. Public interest journalism promises to apply similar scrutiny across all portfolios of government, far more than is possible from press gallery journalists limited to manoeuvering.<br />
<br />
The contraction of traditional news resources goes against a growing need for more and better knowledge about how we are (and might be) governed. Salaried journalists in traditional media organisations might insist on exclusive rights and privileges over access to and dissemination of official information, and the structure of the press gallery institutionalises that view. This paradox will most likely be resolved against the interests of traditional media, as independently-operating public interest journalists will come to offer greater breadth and credibility of coverage than enfeebled traditional media. Allowance must be made for such people to come and go from places where public interest information is available, and that they may not be fulltime employees of a few large organisations.<br />
<br />
The only way of ensuring viable, independent and diverse services would be to provide high-quality information to as many people as might want it, given appropriate safeguards for privacy and other forms of justice. Commercial organisations may worry about demand; the real question for regulators is and should be the supply of accurate and relevant information.<br />
<br />
<h2>
(b) Laws, market powers and practices</h2>
<br />
Do you really want diversity? The proposals put forward by the Minister for Communications seem to call for mergers and other anti-competitive measures in aid of traditional media organisations. Which is it: viability through competition and diversification, or by minimising them?<br />
<br />
Consumer law and practice have little impact on media output on public issues. One regular media practice that defeats regulation of ownership is press gallery herding around One Big Story, told from much the same angle with almost identical inputs, at any given time. This practice defeats media diversity and inhibits the amount of information broadcast to voters and taxpayers about how we are (and might be) governed. I don’t know how you regulate that out of existence: a combination of public ridicule and corporate downsizing might work.<br />
<br />
Public interest journalists know that the story is probably wherever they aren’t. They are more likely to fan out and find it, rather than timidly follow the herd. Competition and consumer laws seem somewhat beside the point. Instead, here are some laws that might be changed to foster more and better public interest journalism:<br />
<br />
<b><i>Parliamentary standing orders</i></b><br />
<br />
There is no good reason why members of the public viewing the operations of the House and the Senate should be denied the ability to take recording devices such as notepads or cameras into the press gallery. <br />
<br />
Public interest journalists should be able to take notes and pictures as freely as the press gallery can. Press gallery journalists are allowed into areas of the Parliament from which members of the public are denied access. There are predictable objections which may be dealt with as follows:<br />
<br />
<br />
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<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 4px 0px;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px;">Objection</span></b></div>
</td>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px;">Response</span></b></div>
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<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 4px 0px;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px;">Media organisations have commercial interests
that are protected by removing recording devices from members of the public</span></div>
</td>
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<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 4px 0px;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px;">Would these be the same media organisations who recently
sacked their photographers? Why are public resources protecting private
interests?</span></div>
</td>
</tr>
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<td style="background-color: transparent; border-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: none; border-style: none solid solid; border-width: 0px 1px 1px; margin: 0px; padding: 0cm 5.4pt; width: 225.4pt;" valign="top" width="451">
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 4px 0px;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px;">Media organisations comply with rules about
parliamentary decorum</span></div>
</td>
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<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 4px 0px;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px;">Do they? Would they be rules that help, or hinder,
public understanding of how we are governed?</span></div>
</td>
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<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 4px 0px;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px;">Random members of the public might create
security risks</span></div>
</td>
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<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 4px 0px;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-size: 10pt; margin: 0px;">Parliament represents members of the public, and
public access to parliamentary proceedings are an essential part of the
parliament’s operations. Security issues are for security professionals.</span></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />
Parliament has its own very sophisticated systems for recording official proceedings. The idea that public interest journalism might interfere with them is absurd. Standing orders that inhibit members of the public to take recording devices into the public galleries should be amended as soon as possible, as a sign of commitment to public interest journalism.<br />
<br />
<b><i>Fair use as a defence under copyright, freedom of information, and defamation laws</i></b><br />
<br />
Public interest journalism should not be inhibited by restrictions arising from copyright. The Public Interest Journalism Foundation has called for ‘fair use’ provisions to cover public interest journalists, similar to those covering other researchers; you should look into this.<br />
<br />
Freedom of information laws should only apply where there are violations of personal privacy, national security, or to police operations and judicial proceedings. <br />
<br />
Public interest journalism should be a defence against defamation, similar to the principles in the High Court’s Lange case.<br />
<br />
<b><i>Open Government and Government 2.0 initiatives</i></b><br />
<br />
The Australian government should be an impartial provider of high-quality, relevant data. That data should be readily available online, with appropriate safeguards for privacy, justice, and national security. The Australian Bureau of Statistics should be a leader in collecting and providing this data openly but securely (including in ways that resist spoofing), so that users can be sure Australian government data can be trusted. <br />
<br />
Government agencies, politicians, and private providers (including the media and public interest journalists) may create value from that data by presenting it as information or even commercially-appealing content. It should not be the role of politicians to second-guess how certain data may or may not be used, and to restrict access according to short-term and half-baked tactical calculations. <br />
I wish that the principles set out in the Open Government Partnership National Action Plan were applied, so that we could see fair and appropriate use of government data applied to public benefit. The Australian government’s commitment to the themes <i>ii. Open data and digital transformation</i> and <i>iii. Access to government information</i> should be a matter for close and ongoing scrutiny, for public interest journalists and parliamentarians alike.<br />
<br />
Whatever resources government is committing to public data provision initiatives, it isn’t enough. The fate of the 2016 census (and, perhaps, the quality of ongoing government decisions based on that data) shows it cannot be done on the cheap. Readily available data enables creation of quality public interest journalism, and enables checking of news as to whether or not it might be fake.<br />
<br />
<b><i>The Public Interest Journalism Foundation</i></b> <br />
<br />
I support calls by the Public Interest Journalism Foundation to promote a culture of philanthropy to support public interest journalism, and to review legal restrictions (such as those described above) that inhibit it.<br />
<br />
Calls to ensure diversity through reviews, legislation or public funds are problematic. In recent years we have seen cuts to legal aid and public broadcasting, and expansions of police powers over freedoms of the public in the name of security; the very idea that scope might be opened to public interest journalism against a trend of diminishing these important and related issues is questionable.<br />
<br />
<b><i>The terms of reference specifically refer to competition and consumer law, thank you very much. Your suggestions are outside our terms of reference</i></b><br />
<br />
Are you serious about public interest journalism or not? You could work to reform those laws if you wanted.<br />
<br />
<h2>
(c) and (e) Fake news, propaganda, search engines</h2>
<br />
“Fake news” and propaganda are not new. Two persistent examples of fake news arose from Russia:<br />
<ul>
<li>19th century Tsarist secret police fabricated a book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to provide documentary proof of a global Jewish conspiracy. Even though it has been extensively discredited, the book was a key text in Nazi Germany and is still disseminated among far-right groups today; and</li>
<li>In 1945 Soviet troops discovered that Hitler had died. Stalin had his skull brought to Moscow. Yet, Soviet propaganda held that US and British forces had allowed Hitler to escape war-torn Berlin, and that he was living in South America, plotting his return.</li>
</ul>
This is not to say that Russia is somehow prone to “fake news” and propaganda, or that information from there is unreliable. Note that both of those examples pre-date the internet. It should surprise nobody, in government or outside it, that those who place a premium on information being fast and conveniently available run the risk of that information being untrue and unreliable. <br />
<br />
For media organisations, the pressure on journalists to produce “content” to tight and shifting deadlines exposes them to the risk of unreliable information. By broadcasting it they risk damaging their credibility as their financial position worsens – but that’s their choice, not yours. I agree with New York University academic Jay Rosen when he urges media organisations to create value by focusing on truth and reliability over the traditional media imperative to be “first with the latest”, a battle that cannot be won against free internet-based providers.<br />
<br />
Given that most press gallery coverage of politics simply involves relaying announcements and splicing together press releases, little of value is lost when online aggregators take these stories and promulgate them with no return to the media organisations originating that coverage. Media outlets who would have writers work for little or no reward get “a taste of their own medicine” when that work in turn is freely aggregated and distributed.<br />
<br />
<h2>
(d) Public interest journalism in underserviced markets: regional areas, culturally and linguistically diverse markets</h2>
<br />
Public interest journalism has a role in extrapolating high-level activities of government (e.g. millions of dollars spent in a particular area) and exploring how they affect a particular community, whether or not a particular affect has been included in a formal announcement. Whether or not traditional media organisations regard these communities as commercially appealing markets is beside the point of public interest journalism.<br />
<br />
The more people there are engaged in public interest journalism, the higher the chances that local communities will be better informed on matters that affect them. Communities need not be geographically defined, but by language or other specialist interest. <br />
<br />
“All politics is local”: this is a truism known to politicians, journalists, and to members of the public. While politics might operate on that level, the practice of Australian political journalism largely doesn’t. <br />
<br />
The weakness of centralised traditional media is evident during and after election campaigns. In NSW and Australian elections, we see facile coverage of western Sydney that is resented by those who live there, and uninformative to those who don’t. Something similar is happening in the US after last year’s election, where centralised media descends on communities in Appalachia and the Midwest that have few media resources of their own, and which are poorly served by centralised national media. By creating room for public interest journalism, you relieve pressure of traditional media that simply isn’t coping with the demands placed upon it.<br />
<br />
Again, there are two main ways that the Australian government can boost public interest journalism to these communities:<br />
<ul>
<li>The provision of reliable and relevant data online as an exemplar of, and expression of faith in, high quantity and high quality public information to inform public debate; and</li>
<li>The removal of petty and self-defeating rules restricting access to quality data and information, and the privileging of other concerns less important than public interest journalism ahead of it.</li>
</ul>
I question whether public broadcasters should maintain correspondents in media-saturated locations like the UK and the US. In theory, an Australian voice from those places provides a uniquely different perspective on events from those places. In practice it is hard to see what that difference is, and whether resources might be diverted to improve reporting in the public interest.<br />
<br />
I hope that members of those communities will rise to these and other related challenges of the information age.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-22524200140015100312017-07-10T08:02:00.000+10:002017-07-10T08:02:14.384+10:00Distressed assets, part 2Following on from yesterday on Bernardi's political bottom-feeding:<br />
<br />
<h2>What becomes of the broken-hearted</h2><br />
Bernardi has some capacity to make inroads into the Coalition, particularly the Liberal Party, but only after the Turnbull government has gone. Nobody, not even George Christensen, wants to do to the extant government what Jack Beasley or Vince Gair did to Labor back in the day. Bernardi may be able to lord it over the churchmice who run Family First, but there are limits to his political reach and skill. <br />
<br />
In South Australia, losses at state and federal level will see out the Liberals. Pyne and Marshall are not strong enough to hold out for long against a concerted movement by both Bernardi and Xenophon, not even if Pyne shakes down defence contractors for campaign funds. Say what you will about Xenophon, but he's tougher, smarter, and more deft at both policy and tactics than Pyne. Every step Pyne took to the right to maintain his place under Abbott and survive all that sniping from Minchin is erased by Bernardi.<br />
<br />
The Liberals in WA (the most right-wing division of the party) are in disarray, discredited after so long in state government and little to show for the boom but debt. WA's normally strident business community is weakened and cannot afford to antagonise the new state Labor government, nor discount the prospect of a federal one. Once Cormann is gone, and Dame Rachel Cleland dies, who will block Liberal ears to the siren call of AusCons? <br />
<br />
Michael Kroger has almost succeeded in his life's work of ridding the Victorian Liberals of Hamerite moderates. Liberal preselections are beset by such dire candidates they make Sophie's Choice look straighforward. Whatever doubts Daniel Andrews may have are surely allayed by the unshakeable commitment by Kroger, Matthew Guy and Inga Peulich to douse their party in voter repellent. Once they lose three or four federal seats and get belted on Spring Street, they will embrace Bernardi like the old VFL used to snaffle Magarey Medallists - especially if Bernardi gets Bolt on board.<br />
<br />
The ACT Liberals are pretty much Bernardi people anyway. Zed is one good lunch away from throwing in his lot with Bernardi, or he'll lose to the Greens and the party structure will switch to AusCons bag and baggage. The NT's CLP might take a detour via Hanson but they will end up in his camp sooner or later. <br />
<br />
All of the above scenarios, and the ones in the preceding post, show the one thing required for Bernardi to succeed politically: a vacuum.<br />
<br />
In Tasmania, Abetz and Lambie will see off Bernardi. As the Hodgman government fades, a conservative may appear who doesn't like Abetz and won't play second-fiddle to Lambie, and may turn to Bernardi: there are too many variables for that to even postulate now. <br />
<br />
The Queensland LNP was formed to secure state government, keeping control in gnarled rustic hands while presenting a civil face to the urban south-east. They only succeeded once. Once. What happens if they get smashed, not just by a Labor government but <i>one led by women! Two of them!</i> Re-establishing the Liberal Party's Qld division and the non-national Nationals won't be an option. <br />
<br />
Queensland is a long way from South Australia, but Bernardi can speak slowly and it isn't like he's from Sydney or Melbourne. Some LNPers may drift to AusCons if the scenarios with Katter and Hanson come off, but again there are too many variables. <br />
<br />
This leaves NSW. <br />
<br />
There are two factors operating in NSW. First, the Coalition is running a functioning, popular government, that is getting stuff done and solving problems. There are some right-wingers, but not enough to destroy the government with dogmatic focus on issues that don't matter and neglect of those that do. Right-wingers like Dominic Perrottet and Anthony Roberts are on a sweet wicket, and nothing Bernardi says or does will entice them away from their current roles.<br />
<br />
The second is the current federal member for Warringah. Abbott was never a factional leader, but he's had to become a figurehead because the Liberal right in NSW are such monkeys. He can't sit around Canberra or go jogging or do whatever else he does with any confidence that his homeboys are minding the shop. <br />
<br />
Whenever you see the press gallery insisting that Abbott is lunging for his old job, know that he's flat out securing his own preselection. Preselection (the process by which a party endorses a candidate to run for a parliamentary seat) is basic political competence, one of those fundamental skills upon which higher-order operations depend. Even the newest, lowliest backbencher has won preselection. <br />
<br />
Murdoch TV personality Ross Cameron was the little brother Abbott never had. He spent eight years as MP for Parramatta on Abbott, like those betas who trail around behind school bullies. Cameron should be one of Abbott's chief lieutenants within the NSW Liberals, but instead he has fallen foul of a basic rule that has seen him suspended from the party for five years. Quite why Murdoch TV regard him as some sort of sage is unclear to me. Another of Abbott's posse, Jokus Ludicrous, is facing similar disciplinary action because of similarly basic stupidity. Abbott's bestie, David Gillespie, is under threat of losing his seat over yet another basic act of dumbness.<br />
<br />
Those guys should be supporting Abbott, not putting themselves in need of support. After 23 years in Parliament, he should have a tight-knit band of professionals who head off any threat to his political survival and keep the home fires burning. Abbott fans will tell you what a great guy he is, and how his staff love him, but if the guy can't keep preselection in Warringah then he's fundamentally weak and probably even more of a prick than I think he is. Canberra is brutal at exposing and homing in on political weakness, and no weakness is more fundamental than preselection: the result of building a team in your local branches that is both loyal and effective.<br />
<br />
Here is where the idea that Turnbull is worse than Abbott falls down. For all his limitations, Turnbull can hold his preselection against all comers. He has a loyal and effective base within his local branches. Whatever travails he may have with Dutton or Shorten or Trump, his base is sufficiently solid so that he can act on the national stage.<br />
<br />
The idea that the government are going to elect a leader who can't be sure his own branches are behind him is stupid, an idea advanced only by people who don't understand politics and have no business reporting on it. Abbott might feel more at home in a party that consisted only of conservatives - but it wouldn't be a governing party. He fancies his chances at winning a wider constituency, and to do that you need to be in an established party with a track record of being in government - like, say, the Liberal Party as it is currently constituted.<br />
<br />
If Bernardi offered Abbott a role within AusCons it would be a comedown for both men. Bernardi can lord it over Gichuhi or Carling-Jenkins, but Abbott is a different beast. Would Abbott be a net gain to the AusCons?<br />
<br />
If Turnbull and Berejiklian lost office then the right would be out for revenge - but they are so stupid they would fuck that up too, and activate the party's "let's not be hasty" mindset that saw them lose state government for 16 years. There might be a few individuals and even a few Liberal branches that might defect to AusCons, but so what? The defection of, say, Walter Villatora might not be the coup Bernardi's people might want the press gallery to believe.<br />
<br />
<h2>Follow the money</h2><br />
Bernardi was unsuccessful in securing money from the US right, such as the Koch brothers (the real reason for his trip to New York last year, to the point where questions should be asked about his publicly-funded trip and its impact on Australia's representation at the UN). He might be more successful if the Republicans lose Congress in 2018 and the White House in 2020, and those donors spread more of their funding internationally.<br />
<br />
Bernardi won't be able to conduct fundraising and parliamentary business simultaneously, but who would he trust to raise the money? Where is his Santamaria? Where, apart from his wife is his sounding board?<br />
<br />
Any liquidator will want to make sure his party's financial management is even tighter than his message discipline. Even the whiff of impropriety will repel potential and current members, and will invalidate any of the prospects described here for Bernardi's and AusCons' future. The Liberal Party will not take kindly to having its money switch with members to AusCons.<br />
<br />
<h2>Why Bernardi can't win in the long term</h2><br />
When you're a liquidator/administrator, you don't have a long-term stake in the business you're taking over. The dream that inspired the business and motivated those within it is over: those people may weep as you take their security passes and send them home. You stop the bleeding and focus on the short-to-medium term interests of the stakeholders, who all have unequal importance when dividing what's left of the loot.<br />
<br />
Bernardi's wish for an equal-but-opposite broad social base for conservatism is doomed:<ul><li>Workers join unions to secure better wages and working conditions; there is no countervailing broad movement for less and worse, especially as the Reserve Bank and the Business Council realise the economic impacts of consumers withholding spending.</li>
<li>Progressive social movements seek to force change on politicians often unwilling to grant it; few will work as hard or as long to retain stasis.</li>
<li>Even conservative women bristle at being patronised, denied opportunities open to male counterparts, and/or subjected to violence. Countervailing forces to feminism are weak and yield when pushed or even exposed.</li>
<li>And while there is countervailing force to same-sex marriage, there appears to be no fallback option should it ever come to a vote and pass the parliament. It's hard enough to maintain one's own marriage let alone interfere in those of others.</li></ul>Assuming you can't just outlaw GetUp! and the ACTU, what would happen with a broad-based activist left and a broad-based activist right? There are two possibilities: <ol><li>Centrist stasis, moderate liberals in ever more pointless set-piece quadrilles with Centre Unity Labor, achieving little of real import; or</li>
<li>A hopelessly riven polity that talks past one another, as we see in the US; or</li>
<li>There is no third option. Conservatives do black/white only. As Tony Abbott shows us, nuance is for sissies and losers.</li></ol>Where is the left-wing Alan Jones? Probably arguing with the right-wing Van Badham. This kind of shit is where Bernardi's head is at. As a liquidator, and then as a politician, Bernardi's focus is short-to-medium, which is a problem for any conservative. <br />
<br />
We live in an age of great upheaval, and conservatives are people looking for timeless continuities when everything seems nasty, brutish, and short. Bernardi says he's a conservative, and for all I know he may live a traditional life in Adelaide's more sylvan glades, but it isn't enough. As per the dot-points above, he doesn't have a long-term agenda. Where are the institutions that might buttress enduring human interests: the church? Government? Western Civ expressed through arts institutions? <br />
<br />
Thanks to publicly-subsidised education at Sydney and Oxford, Tony Abbott can drop Western Civ references from Augustine to Zwingli - but he doesn't live those values. He can't show conservative voters how to do so, nor persuade non-conservatives why it's desirable (remember his proposal for hard-to-dissolve covenant marriages?). Bernardi can't just do old-school scolding, hoping tradition will back him up. If he gets Abbott in the tent, he cedes control, but without Abbott he runs a boutique operation beneath his ambition.<br />
<br />
Once he assembles a ramshackle gang (with or without Abbott), Bernardi will have to keep them together and focused on some long-term goal that's bigger than all of them. There is no proof Bernardi has leadership skills. There is no proof he has a strong team outside parliament offering depth of perspective and a sounding board, as the major parties do with their executives. I've explained his lack of a long-term agenda. What he's doing is clearly working for some in the current, transitory environment; but to use a phrase much used by hippies, it's just not sustainable.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-76755276273502480732017-07-09T08:28:00.000+10:002017-07-13T16:46:57.495+10:00Distressed assets, Part 1Despite its both-sidesism, <a href="http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/politics-on-the-edge-lee-rhiannon-and-cory-bernardis-extreme-similarities-20170627-gwzzy3.html">John Warhurst's piece on Senators Rhiannon and Bernardi</a> is worth reading. I wish political commentary from the press gallery was half this good.<br />
<br />
Warhurst makes some good points on Bernardi (and on Rhiannon too - <i>balance!</i>), and on Bernardi's wish for conservatism to become a movement that extends beyond parliament. I won't speculate on Rhiannon's wider game, but Bernardi's is interesting because it indicates a new development in Australian politics. <br />
<br />
<h2>
The pattern (from which Bernardi is departing)</h2>
<br />
The Liberal Party and the Nationals (including the Northern Territory's CLP and the LNP in Queensland) represent the enduring political institutions on the right of Australian politics. Right-wing parties operating beyond the Coalition tend to rise and fall with individuals and/or with short-term political predicaments that, when resolved, push the smaller party into oblivion. <br />
<br />
Far-right white-supremacist parties tend to congeal around a leader: now Blair Cotrell, formerly Jim Saleam or Eric Butler or Francis de Groot. While this remains a virulent strain in Australian politics, it goes into remission without a disciplined leader, and relies heavily on the personal quirks of whomever has managed to herd those turkeys at any given time.<br />
<br />
Slightly to the left of those guys, but mainly to the right of the Coalition, we have seen right-wing insurgencies from Pauline Hanson, Bob Katter, Brian Harradine, Fred Nile, David Leyonhjelm, Bob Day, Rob Brokenshire, Clive Palmer, and others who slip my mind at this hour. They have all built political vehicles that got them elected and re-elected, and achieved not much else (I'm not counting pissed-off Coalition MPs who lose preselection, flounce to the cross-benches, and get flushed out of the political system at the next election). <br />
<br />
Most were flashes in the pan. Harradine served in the Senate for a generation. Fred Nile is NSW's longest-serving MP; when he was elected in 1981, the state's current Premier and Opposition Leader were in primary school. Hanson, briefly an MP in the late 1990s, has returned after a career on life support from dying commercial media - but for how much longer?<br />
<br />
<h2>
The exception that proves the rule</h2>
<br />
The one right-wing movement that endured outside the Coalition and had a real effect on the Labor-Liberal "main game" was the Democratic Labor Party. It was formed out of the Catholic Social Studies Movement, orchestrated but not led by Bartholomew Augustine (Bob) Santamaria. It sought to represent conservative working people in line with Catholic teaching on labour representation and other social policies, including anti-communism; this placed them outside the ALP, which was not communist but also not as anti-communist as the Coalition. <br />
<br />
The DLP held the balance of power in the Senate between 1955 and 1974, mostly passing government bills put to them with few or no modifications. They won a NSW state seat from 1973-76 because a Liberal minister forgot to lodge his nomination forms. It was considered a spent force after then, except in campus elections at Victorian universities. <br />
<br />
The party was resurrected around the turn of the century by Archbishop George Pell, who wanted a distinctively Catholic voice within Australian conservatism. <br />
<br />
Pell ramped up the DLP, with representatives elected to the Senate and the Victorian Legislative Council. He involved the Church in the Institute of Public Affairs, which was integrated with the Liberal Party in Victoria (and which promptly dropped libertarian positions on issues like abortion or euthanasia). Chris Berg was paid to write a book extolling the virtues of Western Civilisation, and put the Church at the heart of it; but in his hands a compelling, vibrant and eventful story became a damp grey mist. Pell wrote articles for <i>Quadrant</i> and served on its board. Catholic schools received more government funding than at any time in Australian history.<br />
<br />
In 2003, Peter Hollingworth resigned as Governor-General because he had mismanaged instances of child abuse within Anglican church organisations for which he had been responsible. Howard briefly considered holding a royal commission into child sexual abuse within church institutions; Pell told him he would recreate sectarian divisions by such a move. Howard's lifelong political project was to unite conservatives across sectarian lines within the Liberal Party, so (as Pell knew) his words cut deep. <br />
<br />
The DLP won a seat in the Senate, but John Madigan left the party before losing the seat. It may not have retained its place in Victoria's upper house at the state's next election, even had Pell not himself been charged with sexual offences against children. A subsequent royal commission, called by an atheist woman PM, showed the Catholic Church could not be trusted to run aspects of its affairs and that the application of secular law to practices within the Church would prevail over internal processes. The imbroglio over government funding of schools reached a consensus that funding Catholic schools would be reduced, and that they would not spend public money contrary to government guidelines. <br />
<br />
In short, all that Pell hoped to achieve in Australian politics from reviving the DLP lies in ruins. He has the right to remain silent - but in politics as in law, anything he does say may be taken down and used against him. <br />
<br />
<h2>
Enter Cory Bernardi (but not in That Way)</h2>
<br />
When Cory Bernardi left the Liberal Party he gave up his wish to unite broadly conservative forces within the Coalition, which had been his aim as recently as <a href="http://andrewelder.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/cory-georges-excellent-adventure.html">late last year</a>. It was reasonable to assume that Bernardi would build up Australian Conservatives as just another vanity project, electing nobody but himself, and that it would die when either the voters of South Australia grew tired of him, or he of them.<br />
<br />
Before entering parliament, Bernardi was an accountant specialising in insolvency. While standard Liberals talk about growth and opportunity, Bernardi's experience comes in once the go-getters have gotten and gone, following a very tightly regulated process. He has brought these skills to bear on distressed political assets on the right. Not since the Liberal Party was formed in 1944 has anybody bothered to do this in an ongoing, systematic way. Press gallery journalists look to shoehorn developments into clichés and call it news, so it is disappointing but not surprising that they have missed this development. <br />
<br />
Family First was the Protestants' attempt to match the DLP and get around Fred. They succeeded in electing Stephen Fielding and Bob Day to the Senate, but neither was capable of building the party beyond himself. Bernardi picked it up for a song. Having two Senators looks like momentum, like Chipp and Mason for the Democrats in 1977. It made up for his failure to secure funding from Gina Rinehart, and from the right-wing groups now reaping the billions they sowed into what is now the Trump Administration. <br />
<br />
He did the same with the DLP, wiping both the Pell taint and the antediluvian irrelevance of Madigan. He gave Rachel Carling-Jenkins MLC with more options than a slow slide into irrelevance. He spread his wings beyond South Australia, which is more than small-l liberal Nick Xenophon could manage. <br />
<br />
To pick Bernardi's next move, develop a nose for decay within what look like viable structures.<br />
<br />
Bob Katter is 72 years old. Maybe he will want to keep travelling from balmy Charters Towers to chilly Canberra indefinitely, but maybe he won't; maybe the decision, one way or another, will be made for him.<br />
<br />
Fred Nile is 83 this September. He has fought off successors within his own party, and the hacks and sycophants surrounding him now won't be able to run a chook raffle without him. If Bernardi comes calling they will hear him out at least. <br />
<br />
Pauline Hanson won't hang around forever. For all the media opportunities created for her, she isn't exactly a media tart. She snarls at scrutiny and is awkward at stunts. These days her words are every bit as measured as the dullest major-party hack. In Parliament she does what the DLP did and basically votes with the government. One Nation's experience in WA showed she is clear about what she wants from her followers, but much less so about what she offers them in return. After all, the party is called Pauline Hanson's One Nation, not Your One Nation.<br />
<br />
In the late 1990s she spent two-and-a-bit years as an MP. In 2004 the federal parliamentary pension scheme was closed to new entrants. Four-and-a-bit years from being elected to the Senate in 2016 she will hit the seven-year eligibility for that lucrative old-school parliamentary pension, which has always been her light-on-the-hill. On that day (in 2020/21) you won't see her for dust, gay Muslim Aboriginal wind-turbines or no. By then her boosters in commercial media will be even weaker than they are now - learning the lesson that if your product is crap, regulatory reform won't help you. <br />
<br />
And yet, Hanson will still have a following. Bernardi will make them an offer they won't be able to refuse.<br />
<br />
Either Danny Nalliah will give politics away, or he will sign on with Bernardi. He has no third option. Christians can't convincingly maintain the politics of turning away the stranger. <br />
<br />
David Leyonhjelm would not give way to the slippery Helen D. His gunloser constituency in NSW overlaps with that of One Nation's Brian Burston. Either or both will give way to Bernardi when the time comes, or they will give over to Shooters & Fishers and leave Bernardi nothing to salvage.<br />
<br />
Clive Palmer leaves no legacy, in business or politics. Jacqui Lambie was elected in her own right and works all sides of the political street, starving Hanson of oxygen in what should be a strong One Nation state. Lambie had guts and base enough to see Palmer off, and she can do the same to Bernardi.<br />
<br />
Bernardi will be able to crystallise the supposedly large but disorganised movement of men upset with the Family Court, and against Rosie Batty's movement on domestic violence. Hanson has indicated her support for these, but as a divorced woman who had sought police protection from her exes, she is unconvincing. Were Mark Latham to throw in his lot with Bernardi (and face it, he has nowhere else to go either) it would be the biggest act of political self-abasement since Billys Hughes or Holman.<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
Tomorrow: will Bernardi cannibalise the Coalition? Does he have a long-term future?Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22534369.post-64591782289852387712017-07-04T22:02:00.000+10:002017-07-04T22:02:40.471+10:00That old junkyard dog<blockquote><i>I am not going anywhere.</i><br />
<br />
- Tony Abbott</blockquote>The traditional media are making the same mistakes with Abbott that they made when he was Opposition Leader. Almost all members of the press gallery were there when he was Prime Minister. None of them learned the lesson that Abbott talks a lot but achieves very little. All of them just did what they did in 2011, and ran his slogans verbatim. <br />
<br />
Abbott became Prime Minister in 2013 on a promise to end the interpersonal turmoil between Rudd and Gillard, and promising to change relatively little policy-wise. When he began reneging on promises to maintain education funding, and other matters scarcely covered by the press gallery for their beyond-Canberra impact, his polling sank and stayed low. The press gallery put Abbott's decline down to the 2014 budget, but only because they continued to give him the benefit of the doubt long after wiser observers had turned away. We had seen Abbott for what he was and is. <br />
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Even those who believed in <a href="http://tonyabbott.com.au/">this shower of platitudes</a> must know that Abbott can't make good on it. He can sow confusion about carbon abatement measures, but he can't pretend it is a non-issue, and the idea that he might come up with a workable solution is long proven false. And that's the most credible of his pronouncements! All the rest of it - reintroducing the 20-shilling pound, reducing costs on WestConnex by importing English convicts under a new deal with the equally desperate and incompetent May government - if press gallery experience really was worth more than I prize it at, then they would have dismissed both messenger and message long before now.<br />
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Tony Abbott is not newsworthy simply as a former PM. When tax-and-spend social democracy faded in the late 1970s - after Whitlam, and with the uninspiring examples of Callaghan and Carter and Schmidt - Billy McMahon did not start monstering the Fraser government. He was treated as a irrelevance whenever he proffered the mildest suggestion. While Whitlam himself refrained from commenting on many of the Hawke-Keating reforms, Whitlam-era relics like Tom Uren or Stewart West spoke out and were received with bemusement. Abbott's contributions should be viewed in a similar light. His slogans are slightly reworded from half-a-dozen years ago, and were stale a century before that: he has learned nothing and forgotten everything, just like the press gallery. <br />
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Some believe Abbott returning to the Prime Ministership would further ensure a Labor win at the next election, a weak-tea version of the marxist notion of 'accelerationism'. All this would mean is that the next government would be so traumatised by the ratbaggery that preceded it, that the imperative for far-reaching reform would be weakened. Areas where the current government has clearly failed, such as school funding or reducing carbon emissions, would yield half-baked compromises to "get it off the table" rather than well-considered solutions. <br />
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Weak-tea accelerationism is idle. Either go all out with buckets of blood, like the Bolsheviks did, with the risk that the blood spilt might be your own; or start planning for both the victory and what might lie beyond it. <br />
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Abbott might be disrupting the Turnbull government from its stumbling, whatever-happens agenda, but he is weak on three levels that the press gallery don't really appreciate. <br />
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First, he's weak in the administration of government. There was no link between what he promised the public and what transpired in his government. He could not get legislation through parliament: bleating about fractious politics ignores the Gillard government's successes in getting legislation through both houses in which no party had a clear majority. <br />
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Second, he's weak politically. A leader in the ascendant has his people in key positions. Abbott's people are either out of the party (e.g. Ross Cameron, Cory Bernardi) or on their way out (Jokus Ludicrous). You can't lead a party with people who aren't sure whether or not they want to be there. In parliament, his supporters are burnt-out husks (Eric Abetz, Kevin Andrews), accident-prone clowns (Michael Sukkar, Peter Dutton) or unimpressive nobodies (Craig Kelly), who don't help Abbott in his attempts to establish a new future for the party and the nation. <br />
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He's not a great judge of character. His closeness to George Pell is not the asset is was; a bit like his other friendship with <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/25/1088144978343.html">Ian MacDonald</a> from earlier in his career. <br />
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Abbott has made assertions about the Liberal Party's base, and the press gallery dumbly assumes he knows what he's talking about. They haven't twigged to the idea that he might be bluffing or lying. Take this for example:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.theshovel.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Hanson-Abbott-240x225.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://www.theshovel.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Hanson-Abbott-240x225.jpg" width="320" height="300" data-original-width="240" data-original-height="225"></a></div><center>(c) The Shovel</center><br />
No similar picture exists of Abbott with, say, Trent Zimmerman, a fellow Liberal who holds an adjacent electorate to his. If you don't even like Liberals, you can't lead them.<br />
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Third, his timing is off. If he became leader now, or soon, his failure would be complete long before the 2018 budget. 2018 would see Labor dancing around a hapless Abbott, and backbenchers preparing for opposition and/or unemployment, watching those lobbying jobs recede before their eyes. Timing is crucial for a successful leader. <br />
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Timing, and loyalty. The ability of his most feared weapon, Peta Credlin, to enforce discipline would be weaker than it was in the first half of this decade. She and Abbott had commanded loyalty and discipline by demonstrating it, but that's gone now. Had Abbott been quiet and dutiful, busying himself with the quotidian concerns of Warringah, his outbursts might have more impact. They have shown the utility of disloyalty, and there would be pushback if they tried to reintroduce the permission-to-breathe environment they had established previously. I pity the first Liberal who tells Credlin to just fuck off, but life will be easier for those who follow.<br />
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No press gallery journalist is awake to the possibility that Abbott has been paid for his speeches, to 2GB and to the IPA and CIS. He has not declared any such speaking fees, but he is probably not too proud to seek them, outside of the Liberal Party's standard (and regulated) processes for accepting donations. C'mon press gallery, let's see some journalism from you.<br />
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<a href="http://outdonews.com/news/4642354/tony-abbott-abusing-his-privilege-part-his-campaign-payback">Dickhead claims the Abbott-Turnbull disagreement is about policy</a>, when clearly it isn't. The merest whiff of policyness is more than enough to overwhelm his argy-bargy detection skills. The gallery does not do policy, it cannot use policy to assess political disagreements. This is also why Bernard Keane (no I won't link to him) was so risible: if Abbott was ever going to be challenged on policy it would've happened long before now. <br />
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Where is the journalist challenging any minister in this government on policy? Scott Morrison made a long, dreary, focus-group-ridden speech about how we're all bored with politics. No mention of his own role in that, and no fingering the media whose crap reporting is largely responsible for creating that anomie either; little wonder the gallery loved it.<br />
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The press gallery added together and cubed has no more knowledge of policy, and no ability to call him on it, than Abbott does himself. His rise to the Prime Ministership the blind leading the blind: the gallery are still blind to policy, though in fairness there isn't much to see in their limited purview. Coorey and Keane and the rest of the gang are still hankering to be (mis)led and the sucking vacuum Abbott creates draws them on, helplessly.<br />
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The press gallery serves the nation badly when all policy discussion is "argy-bargy", and when statements about policy mask underlying tensions that have nothing to do with philosophy or policy.<br />
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To give but one example: when Senator Payne correctly points out that the Navy doesn't have the infrastructure to support nuclear submarines, journalists report it as a "slap down" of Abbott rather than a simple, indisputable statement of fact. Nuclear submarines and the infrastructure necessary to support them is relatively easy to research and describe in "good old fashioned journalism" terms. If the dwindling band of journos are so keen to invoke GOFJ, they should be keen to do it; and if they don't value GOFJ, who will? <br />
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No journalist has the courage to say to Abbott: come back when you have some policy chops, not just the meat but the motion too. He might, as Captain Oates said, be some time.<br />
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A decade ago, Peter Costello wanted to be Prime Minister but couldn't explain how he'd be better than, or even different to, the foundering Howard. One sharp live interview could have burst that bubble. The leading political journalists of that time are still fossicking for fool's gold with Abbott. Labor frontbenchers write whole books that may or may not survive contact with their respective policy areas. The policy landscape is changing: even the Business Council recognise that nihilism isn't an answer on carbon or energy policy, and the plebiscite on same-sex marriage is very much less brilliant than Christopher Pyne touted it as.<br />
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The last politician to defiantly declare themselves going nowhere was Abbott's self-described political mother, Bronwyn Bishop. <br />
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The reason why northern beaches Libs kept voting for Bishop was because they thought she was a heavyweight. The reporting from Canberra certainly described her in that light - they all knew how she loved a freebie, and how she'd monster public servants over relative trifles without anything like an overarching vision, but day after day they still put her in the thick of the action. All the tales came out after she'd lost preselection; sitting on them had been a mistake, in both journalistic and political terms. Had the press gallery done some GOFJ on Bronwyn Bishop, her embarrassed local branches would have dumped her years ago. <br />
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The more the press gallery pumps up Abbott as A Former Prime Minister, One Who Has Supped With Kings And Presidents And Deserves Hectares Of Media Space, the more prone they will be to give him another go. That doesn't mean press gallery should start sledging him - it just means that a simple application of GOFJ on things like his donations, and the fact that coal is subsidised to billy-o, and how his indiscipline is repellent to leadership rather than a guarantor of it. He doesn't have any answers on jobs. He doesn't have any answers on his own job, or the one he held less than two years ago, or on those of the journalists far beyond the press gallery. <br />
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He described himself as a junkyard dog in 1994, and that's all he'll ever be. He doesn't have any teeth any more, but he still goes around gumming people who have better things to do. You can be humane about it, but it's time for those responsible to put him down, and for the rest of us to turn away.<br />
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If he wants his stuff run, make him buy ad space: he can go on junkets after he retires. Abbott has access to the money, and goodness knows traditional media could use it. They're not going anywhere either.Andrew Elderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04705844456819481896noreply@blogger.com7