How not to cover politics

First, there was this superb dissection of how The New York Times published only the story its journalist was able to write. This is an excellent takedown of standard political reporting.

Nikki Barrowclough started out writing profile pieces on herself living in France, or with a Frenchman, or something like that. For some reason The Good Weekend commissioned her to write a profile piece on Mark Arbib.

Arbib is one of those figures in politics who doesn't have a high profile, but who has a considerable impact on those who do and on the way politics works, and in a way that isn't fully explained in Politics I courses. To do a profile like this you need to be able to explain how a kid from Bondi got to wield such power, not just describe his ascent through Young Labor and Sussex Street as though he rose smoothly in a balloon, or on some sort of escalator, like it was inevitable. There was the odd anonymous, bitchy aside, but no real explanation of why this guy can kybosh the career of two Premiers (and much else besides).

It is anti-democratic and patronising to suggest that politics can only be understood and explained by a specific caste. Yet, someone who doesn't understand politics can't really explain why senior people in responsible positions within government fear to do things that he doesn't like. Barrowclough mentioned that two NSW Premiers have gone down because they fell foul of Arbib - but you have to ask what areas of policy would be different were it not for Mark bloody Arbib.

... Arbib replies, "I have always done what is in the party's and the national interest, even when it has been detrimental to my career. All I'm going to say is that much of what has been reported in the media is incorrect and not factual. That's it. Full stop."

There is no evidence of him doing anything that was detrimental to his career, whether in the national interest or not: Barrowclough's job was to test that, not just transcribe it. I would suggest that helping Barry O'Farrell become Premier of NSW was also in the national interest, but I accept that thousands hundreds quite a few Labor supporters would disagree.

Mark Arbib undertook "work experience" as Minister for Employment Participation Minister and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Government Service Delivery 2009-10, and it is unclear what fraction of bugger-all he achieved in either role (especially when you consider that government service delivery was one of the reasons Labor was hammered at the last election).

He is Minister for Social Housing and Homelessness, and it is unclear what he is doing in that role. Barrowclough acknowledges that she doesn't focus on policy but doesn't really explain why anonymous bitchiness and childhood memories are enough of a substitute (the childhood stuff might be worthwhile in a colour magazine but it is possible to write about public policy in an engaging way. The fact that people in leading NGOs working on housing think he's a great guy/a fool/a bastard/never around and takes no interest would be significant.

Arbib is Minister for Indigenous Employment and Economic Development. Given that policy in this area over a hundred years has ranged from half-hearted to half-arsed, how does Arbib rate? How often does he travel to Aboriginal communities (not just picturesque remote ones, not just Noel Pearson's people, but grungy settlements in urban areas)? Do his professions of deep concern, combined with his sheer clout within the ALP, lead to policy outcomes that help Aboriginal people seeking meaningful work? Are the policy people you quote in passing major players in that area, and is a Parliament House internship worth much more than window-dressing?

He was and is Minister for Sport. The old dilemma of sport policy is the extent to which it should foster elite performance or community participation: what's Arbib's take on that?

He gave $45m of taxpayers' money to a bid for the FIFA World Cup that went nowhere at all, including at least a million to the sort of spiv NSW Labor specialises in; if he was such a master fixer he would have done better than that at a world-class numbers-crunching event. The fact that he hasn't been filleted by the relevant Shadow Minister, Luke Hartsuyker, can only be attributed to:

1. Hartsuyker being lazy and stupid;


2. The Coalition not wishing to embroil Frank Lowy in a partisan spat (or not being smart enough to target Arbib without collateral damage falling on Lowy); or


3. A combination of the above.

Seriously, what the Coalition needs to do now is start knocking off some ministers. Peter Garrett survived everything they could throw at him - but imagine if the Opposition were to knock off Mark Arbib. It would be the scalp of scalps, the biggest loss to a government since the air disaster of 13 August 1940 on the Menzies Government. It wouldn't alter the numbers in the House immediately but it would take a while for the power vacuum within Labor to subside.

The fact that Arbib stood down from the Federal Executive of the ALP in 2010 is significant, and Barrowclough missed that too. He'd been on that body for six years, and membership of an club like that is not given up lightly for anyone who takes politics seriously. Gillard and her Cabinet must have resented answering to a body that included a junior minister who wasn't across his portfolio: yes, he would have said that he would have spent more time with his portfolio or career or whatever, but a good journalist would push through that.

What's his Master's thesis on, Nikki? It would be in the UNSW Library if you asked for it.

Former NSW federal Labor MP Michael Hatton feels great enmity towards Arbib. He says that debate in the NSW branch of the ALP was stifled after Arbib took control as general secretary in 2004, and that it has been that way ever since.

To what extent is Arbib to blame for that? Is it a good thing (after 2004 Labor won a State and Federal election) or a bad thing (Labor's policy ideas on State and Federal level since then have been dire, and their polling in both arenas is way beyond ups-and-downs and heading for the abyss)?

Still another source says, "The Left and Right haven't had serious wars for a long time ... Mark saying that he stopped the wars simply isn't true. The wars were long over. He did deals with the Left in order to screw over his enemies in the Right, and to assist the hard Left against the soft Left. His [machinations] infuriated everyone in the Right."

Again: good thing or bad? Never mind the ALP, what about the impacts on state and nation? What policy ideas were nurtured and championed by someone who fell as chaff before Arbib? What stupid, wasteful and unnecessary policies have been foisted upon us simply because this joker decided to flex his muscles?

No politician is entitled to be taken at face value. Too much of Nikki Barrowclough's Arbib profile is a non-political profile of someone who is entirely political; a profile of (say) Nicole Kidman that paid no attention to the craft of acting would be considered too trite for The Good Weekend, but that's what happened here. From the start of the article Arbib knew he was dealing with a lightweight, and so we have seen; but we might yet hope for better from the journosphere.

Arbib is not a policy detail guy and I hope he'll be hammered again and again whenever he exerts the clout that Labor seems unable to resist. He supposedly joined the Labor Party because he cares about people and issues, but there's no evidence of that. He has supposedly put the interests of party, state and nation ahead of his own interests, but there's no proof of that. This was a poor piece, neither an in-depth study of a man nor a study of his (seemingly crucial) place in the political context. If Nikki Barrowclough was paid well for this piece at least one good thing will have come from it.

Mark Arbib initially declined to be interviewed when I rang his office in December, the same month The Sydney Morning Herald broke the story about him. His change of heart doesn't mean he has forgiven Fairfax for what he regards as the newspaper's malicious treatment of him. He hasn't. But he's also media savvy.

Maybe that's it: a soft piece like this, peppered with a few anonymous quotes to maintain a perception of "balance" without anything that will really wound him, is designed to build bridges between a key politician and a news organ that feeds on political gossip.

As with the New York Times piece referred to above, it's one thing for a journalist to write a story about politics without any real understanding of politics; it's quite another for a serious MSM brand to not be able to tell whether or not a journalist really understands the subject matter they're covering.

Into the void

Lenore Taylor thinks, and wants you to think, that you can fill a void with more void.

The problem is [Labor] does not yet know exactly what it is fighting for. And it is not entirely in control of its own battle plan.

As Labor MPs work those things out, Tony Abbott is filling the void with his analysis of what Labor intends, a tactic it could surely have anticipated.

His analysis of what Labor intends is bullshit: half-baked economic projections (whose authors don't endorse the uses to which he puts their work), scaremongering, bullshit, sheer disrespect for this country and its people, and an increasingly reciprocated scorn for those who are not already rusted-on supporters - and on top of all that, more bullshit. Abbott fills the void of carbon policy in the same way that maggots can give a carcass the impression of simmering, twitching vitality.

A government is never in control of their own battle plan. No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

There are ways in which Labor could conceivably bridge the gulf between the Greens' high ambition for a carbon pricing scheme and the high anxiety about its impact on industry and households.

It is hard to imagine right now, with industry - especially manufacturers that are struggling with the high dollar - staking out a tough negotiating position early ...

Dudes, when a government is in a tight spot a "tough negotiating position" won't really cut it. Labor are not going to cave in to the Greens - especially after they kick their arses in the third successive election (Fed, Vics, and NSW later this month) - so chances are you will cop whatever they come out with.

If Abbott was doing something to allay those fears, providing calm and measured leadership with sound policies widely regarded as sensible - then he'd be streets ahead of where he is. He's a fools-rush-in kinda guy, and journos fancy themselves as trample-anyone-to-get-the-story activists, so they deserve each other even though we deserve better from each.

Here's the thing though: the Coalition vote is up and while Gillard and her party have taken a hiding, people just don't warm to Abbott. They (We?) never warmed to him, after all this time. Only journalists and other boofheads like the guy.

But the Greens have been talking about "a range of measures" to start reducing Australia's emissions.

You bet they are: petty little measures, like public transport run on recycled vegetable oil and crap like that. Imagine Sarah Hanson-Young holding a press conference on a green-powered bus that has broken down on Sydney's Anzac Bridge at peak hour, making the case for the common good. Labor will gently bat away plans like that and in so doing look "balanced", reasonable managers of the common weal holding off the maddies. By the time it's all over Labor will have outfoxed the Greens again, and calmly put in place a policy of some sort that exhausts all attempts at Liberal hype.

The danger is that while they are talking, Abbott will have convinced voters that any carbon pricing scheme is bad.

With what? How, exactly? What terrible, ignorant piffle this is.

After the News Ltd polls in the electorates of Lyne and New England painting Oakeshott and Windsor at odds with their voters, I would love to see the voters of Warringah similarly polled. Folks of Manly, Mosman, Curl Curl and Belrose are generally not the stiff-backed reactionaries you might imagine. Ask them what they think about some sort of carbon abatement strategy. Ask them what they think of no mining tax at all, or Muslim-baiting, or whether anthropogenic climate change is "crap". Sure, many will agree 100% - they keep voting for him - but you might be surprised.

If dweebs like Peter Macdonald and David Bell can carve out a political career in that area, imagine what real grass-roots activism can do in a community that tends to be well-heeled but not snooty, which prides itself on living among beautiful bushland and magnificent shorelines.

If you started now, you'd get someone with a bit of go who lived locally (and to live in that area, you need all the go you can muster to pay the mortgage) who could take a few positions and attract some attention, working at the strong community level well below the radar of the mainstream media, enough to give Abbott and his ever-decreasing party membership a real fright in 2013. NSW Labor has no chance and must be excluded from local politics altogether. People like Lenore Taylor would be in slack-jawed amazement at the very idea of a representative who represented Warringah better and more effectively than the highly unusual Tony Abbott appears to do, at the very idea that an electorate may not perceive its political needs as people like her have instructed them.

It's effete to say that Australians produce a tiny proportion of the world's carbon problems and hence can only offer a tiny solution to said problems. The same might be said of Australia's mighty contributions to the political questions of the twentieth century which spiralled into war. Had Australia opted out of the Second World War, fascism and militarism would have imploded and communism would have overextended itself; but our contribution still mattered and we earned a moral authority on which this country still trades. The stalemates in Korea, Malaysia and Afghanistan happened despite Australians' efforts and not because of them. We must join a cause that is leaving us behind, and stand against opponents who would make us poor indeed.

Something like that, Lenore Taylor, would be filling the void rather than exacerbating it.

Niki Savva: Gillard's success is assured

If I was a proper journalist, the above would be an appropriate headline that would be rigorously defended against all complaint. Remember, anyone who criticises any journalist for any reason is a wannabe authoritarian who would machine-gun little children in the streets were it not for fearless journalists and freedom of the press.

Success is assured only if the opposition obliges by getting nastier and dumber.

And you know they will.

JULIA Gillard said early on she wanted to model herself as Prime Minister on Bob Hawke, the ultimate consensus politician. Then she decided she would rather be John Howard, conviction politician. Along the way she morphed into Paul Keating.

I'm not sure that she ever said that she wanted to be John Howard: she was Deputy Leader of a party which beat him in the 2007 election. She spends the rest of the article denying that she's like Keating at all. This is a poor way to start an article: you go through it suspicious of anything she says.

She should have assumed full ownership of the decision by announcing it on her own or with her Climate Change Minister, Greg Combet, and or the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, given she is trying to sell the tax as major economic and environmental reform. Surrounding herself with Greens and independents left her open to the charge that in this, her designated year of decision and delivery, she was delivering someone else's decision, a charge Greens deputy Christine Milne gleefully verified.

I'll give her that. When describing what's going on Savva is on firmer ground than when she takes flights of fancy: a bit like Glenn Milne in that regard. You get so tired of the flights-of-fancy that when it comes to a nugget of truth, you've pretty much consigned it to the bin of history (where the flight-of-fancy soon joined it).

[Gillard] failed to line up third-party endorsements in advance.

Yeah, that's true: Howard and Costello did that well too, and its absence has been keenly felt since. Public policy has to feel like it's bubbled up from the community in some form, it never works when the smart-alecs from Canberra have come up with new ways to tax us. Surely that's the lesson of Whitlam.

[Gillard] should have been on time for the Jones interview. It's live radio, not a make-up appointment. That is unless it was part of a cunning strategy to provoke Jones, which it did, but it did not help her.

Oh piss off, it was hilarious. She's the Prime Minister of Australia, he's a disc jockey who can run off at the mouth about anything. Alan Jones in the throes of a hissy fit is side-splittingly funny, it's just a pity you have to sit through so much drivel to get there. It helped her in showing people she wasn't kowtowing to the right for once.

Then, when confronted with her unequivocal declaration before the election that she would not introduce a carbon tax, she should have copped it sweet, not try to slug it out by arguing that what she said was different from what she actually said.

Costello used to do that shit all the time. It's only "infuriating" once you realise someone other than Costello is doing it.

Her promise to give as good as she gets was also ill-advised. Yes, prime ministers have to hold their own. They also have to be prime ministerial. Tony Abbott played rope-a-dope with her all week. He is no Muhammad Ali, but he knows enough about fighting to know that if you provoke your opponent enough and keep them swinging, they end up worn and rumbled.

Rubbish. Abbott leads a party badly divided over scapegoating Muslims and immigrants. Many more weeks like the period before the carbon tax announcement, and Abbott is finished. He has to go out hard: she is the one using the ropes and pulling her punches ("rope-a-dope" is such a pithy term, almost a cliche - but go and look at the Rumble In The Jungle, Niki, and see who's the dope and who's working the ropes. Use your cliches - they've got you this far - but you let yourself down when you flaunt your ignorance like that). Never mind George Foreman, Gillard has been more like Roy Asotasi in terms of restraint. If you keep swinging at a non-target you just end up looking like a boofhead.

What [the Coalition] doubt is her competence and her integrity.

Firstly, look at who is casting the doubt, and whether they can really dispel people's doubts that they're a competent potential government. They should have won the 2010 election in their own right, but lingering doubts saw them snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory. John Hewson used to go on all the time about how Keating had a glass jaw: fat lot of good it did him.

Howard released his principles for tax reform a full year before he and Peter Costello released the final package, and they used that time to make the case for the introduction of a GST, which they called a tax - not a pricing mechanism.

In other words, this is where the carbon tax-GST parallel falls down. It's where Savva's fury at both the similarities and differences between Howard-Costello send her around in circles. Which makes her angrier: where Gillard snatches the Howard-Costello legacy out from under Abbott's nose, or where she abandons it and falls onto her face?

It is a sin tax, just as alcohol and cigarette taxes are, except all passive users will pay. If you pollute, or partake of the fruits of that pollution, you will pay.

Like fuel taxes, really. Savva tries to diminish the proposed carbon tax by likening it to petty imposts like those on ciggies, which is a contrast to Abbott's Great Big Scare Campaign but it can't be both at the same time.

Swan's attempt on Sunday to argue it was not a tax because it did not take money directly out of people's pay was feeble.

Yep, she can have that too.

On second thoughts, Gillard is best to keep him out of the debate altogether and get Combet out there as often as possible, even if that creates other problems later.

No, Swan should wear himself out this time next year. The Treasurer who steered us through the GFC, the mining tax and a carbon tax; a great reformer in hindsight perhaps but not a strong advocate. Gillard is keeping him out of his depth: I think Combet will end up looking better too, and I just hope that Paul Howes doesn't inherit Swan's seat.

I have written quite a bit about the Howard-Costello tax reform process in my book [which is pretty poor] ... As Costello's press secretary then, I have vivid memories of it including all the accusations that it was going to kill people, literally, and wreck the economy.

Before the package was released the Howard government was running 10 points behind in the polls. Nervous backbenchers urged Costello to move against the prime minister.

The parallel flatters Gillard. Having chucked two leaders in three years, the Liberals weren't going to roll Howard and Costello wasn't the man to roll him anyway.

Brian Loughnane, then chief of staff to a cabinet minister, offered to help organise a coup.

Savva is so hot-and-cold in terms of getting it right that I will give her this, particularly as Loughnane is a dipstick.

... your old mate Hawkie ... thinks you're not up to it.

Hawkie didn't think Keating was up to it. He didn't think Howard was up to it, nor Crean nor Latham. He was wrong about Beazley being up to it. As soon as the polls turned against Rudd, Hawke was dumping on him. Hawke thinks there was only ever one PM who could really cut it, and that was Hawke himself. When you've been around politics as long as I have, you'll know that's just Hawke.

Sorry, just quoting.

See, now you just sound catty. The obligatory reference to make-up (thanks Grog) undermines the cool perspective that behoves an insider and makes it look like a bitch-fest.

The release of the package in August 1998, with its 10 per cent GST coupled with huge tax cuts, generous compensation package, the abolition of 10 other taxes and all fully paid for with the budget still in surplus won widespread endorsement and reversed the Howard government's fortunes.

Translation: Howard had to compromise and back down on a few issues, most notably food, where media outlets like The Australian blasted him for looking weak. It was enormously gruelling, and Savva is wring to skip over it blithely (and blast Gillard by comparison).

Howard raced off to the polls on the back of euphoria, which gradually evaporated. He had a pretty good head start, but his majority fell from 18 seats to five. At least he had fat to spare, which Gillard most definitely does not.

Thirteen Coalition MPs and a couple of Senators: "fat", were they? Only arrogant staffers and beef-witted journalists would dare take that attitude (especially when you consider that Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan were among the 13 Labor candidates who carved out a chunk of Coalition "fat" for themselves).

Remember also how the then Opposition Leader shook his chubby fist and engaged in old-school Labor fightin' rhetoric, promising to "roll back" the tax? Remember how he got 50% of the vote? History - never repeats but it sometimes rhymes.

Abbott has to be ready when they are for the alternatives to this and other policies.

Can't be done. Abbott won't have anything to propose: he'll hope that the focus stays on Labor and will wilt under the klieg lights of serious scrutiny.

If she is to make it through, Gillard has to observe a few basic rules: stay dignified, don't treat people like idiots, be upfront, road-test all your arguments, then make sure you know the answer to every question because you can't afford to get one little fact wrong. It will either cost you your job or a lot of money.

Consider both Gillard and Abbott, known quantities and people with both qualities and flaws. Which of the two is most likely to observe Savva's basic rules? Put it this way: pick any one of those rules, ad ask yourself whether you could trust Tony Abbott not to breach it for a whole week.

Now, imagine you were real newspaper editor, rather than the meat-puppet occupying the job at The Australian. You'd start with that last paragraph and make her write the whole damn thing again (and no more bitchy crap about make-up!). It would be a very different article and a better one, one that gave experience as a journo and a staffer a depth and gravity Niki Savva clearly lacks.

At last

At last, there is some action on climate change that imposes a financial penalty on polluters while at the same time forcing us to modify our behaviour in whatever petty way we can.

At last, we have a Prime Minister who regards political capital as an asset to be risked in pursuit of further gains, not only politically for her party but also policy-wise for the nation. I too wish there was more of it, but developments must be welcomed however small they are.

The carbon tax will not be wound back once implemented, and anyone who says it can/will is lying. This, rather than Gillard's "no carbon tax" promise, will be the broken promise most fresh at the next election. The Liberals should be ready for this and for more scrutiny of their policies, but my guess is that they'll just do what they do in Parliament: "awww, what about her!".

The whole prospect of shifting the tax system away from what we earn toward what we do (dig up minerals, engage in carbon-emitting consumption) is fascinating. Rather than more pissant and self-interested modelling, it requires a Hayek, a Keynes, a Smith to help us put it into a broader perspective and show us what it means for our country, and what we teach our children about it.

The whole prospect of the Coalition dumping the carbon tax and the MRRT means that the Coalition will have to justify the tax system today, and in 1996-2007, as some state of nirvana (or even slightly better than the status quo). Heaven knows they lack the research skills, wit and flair of the Liberal Opposition in the first ten years after 1983 to come up with innovative ways of talking and thinking about the way we are taxed. Their 2010 economic policy was like the truculent assignment of a school student seeking a bare pass in a subject that they hated; a far cry from the bold, visionary (and, yes, slightly wacky) economic policy documents of the 1980s and '90s.

At last, we in NSW are soon to be delivered from Princess Wonkyhair and her creepy "government". Only journalists are listening to the Princess. The very idea that she should be demanding scrutiny of O'Farrell is risible.

I really hope they don't cop out now.

The five hundredth post

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

- from Why I write by George Orwell

This is apparently the 500th post on this blog.

I started writing because I was a moderate liberal who could no longer remain in the Liberal Party, but who missed a forum (however flawed) for discussing political issues. I wondered then, and wonder still, what moderate liberalism means in today's Australia. I missed opportunities to talk through big issues and explore them, at a time when having a firm and fixed opinion became more important than testing whether it was useful to the policies of the nation and state.

Often I find myself sucked into discussing the journalism from which I'm quoting, and watching a "profession" like journalism sink under the weight of its own bullshit is no less fascinating than when it is applied to representative democracy and aforesaid moderate liberalism.

There's plenty to write about in both of the above, and in doing so quarantine it from the rest of life. I don't have a cat, so I can't write about that. I do have a family, including kids who say/do the darndest things, but I have other opportunities to talk about them. I have a job - in the private sector - and all my colleagues are good people. I keep on top of sport but am rarely moved to write much beyond the standard analysis - and besides, sporting events can be evanescent anyway. I am profoundly moved by art but am self-consciously inarticulate about it. I tried a separate blog about food but I even bored myself in writing it, who knows what it must have been like reading it.

I don't regale my family and friends with political and media analysis unless asked, which happens rarely and almost never more than once by the same person.

68,948 separate IP addresses have viewed this blog. The five most popular blogposts have been:

• Deriding Paul Howes: 1,116 Pageviews


• Why the Coalition telecommunications policy has failed: 946 Pageviews


• A pity: 716 Pageviews


• Dry but not high: 690 Pageviews


• Relationship breakdown: 561 Pageviews

Those are tiny numbers: sometimes I prefer to think of this site as "boutique" rather than obscure, but that would assume a sophistication I don't have as a writer or analyst. I try to call it as I see it and explain why I see it that way. I publish all comments that lift the tone of the blog.

Thank you for visiting.

They would say that, wouldn't they

The voice of the media isn't the voice of the people.

First, Ben Packham gets sucked in:

The nation's commercial broadcasters ... say they're picking up a new level of frustration in their audiences they've not heard before.

They would say that - they're just entertainers drumming up business after all. Packham would have you scurrying for a radio, tuning into little men is padded rooms jabbering away to themselves as though they have some Truth about the nation and the way it is governed which is otherwise denied to you or I.

Mr Windsor blamed "shock jocks" for death threats he'd received, including one he played on national television.

Yes, he did. He did not blame all "commercial broadcasters", as stated in Packham's second paragraph, which is why I cut it out of the first quote above. It's hardly news that said broadcasters would fail to blame themselves for what tumbles out of their faces.

But Sydney broadcaster Ray Hadley said [Tony Windsor MP] was "stark, raving mad" to play the threat on television.

"He should have contacted the Australian Federal Police; he chose not to do that," he said.

He did that as well, Ray - but you knew that. He chose not to go on your show and do that, and couldn't you have used the ratings had he done so? Windsor showed that the threat was real and exposed the gutless, anonymous threat for what it was. There are people out there who recognise the voice on the tape: a little man in a padded room who can only deal with feedback that has been carefully vetted would not be expected to do so.

Broadcaster Leon Byner, from Adelaide's FIVEaa, said the only thing he was guilty of was "inciting public interest" in matters of importance. "I think it is easy to blame broadcasters for all sorts of stuff," he said. "I think it is as much the kind of temperature of the debate at the moment on a range of issues, as it is anything to do with people on or off air."

Byner has no idea what happens off air. The vague, framework-only nature of the debate means that it is easy to write the debate over a carbon tax off as something that only energises Canberra-watchers. Byner and Hadley and others have no job if they don't make stuff up and whip listeners into such a frenzy that they (at the very least) ring Byner, Hadley et al and tell them how successful they've been at having been manipulated.

Byner said the carbon tax was a "tax on living" and many of his listeners were upset about it.

Much like the GST, and you saw how quickly the media beat-ups and Canberra hoo-ha dissipated once the tax was in place and people were paying it.

It isn't only "shock-jocks" who believe their own PR. Michael Gordon, a man who never successfully hid his adoration of Keating and another firm believer that vox media, vox populi, came out with this

YOU don't get many free kicks in politics, but Tony Abbott seemed to rack them up at will across the country this week when he made the early running in the great carbon tax fight with Julia Gillard - and he did it without straying far from the national capital.

He then goes on to quote talkback radio spots where Abbott beat up Labor policies for the edification of people who vote Coalition anyway:

Or former Liberal MP Gary Hardgrave on Brisbane's 4BC, who confided: "Look, Tony Abbott, you say you can't stop the anger over the tax. I've got to tell you, no one needs to whip it up. It is very, very thick in the real world outside of Canberra."

Michael, you're supposed to be a professional journalist and careful about the words you use. Is "confided" the right word for what a "shock-jock" says over an open microphone? How would Gary Hardgrave know about "the real world outside of Canberra" given his ultimately unsuccessful political career and his not-necessarily successful career as a radio announcer?

Did it not occur to you not to take these words at face value?

The Opposition Leader had two punches to throw this week and he executed both with customary energy and flair - the broken promise and the prospect of (another) big tax on everything. Julia Gillard struggled initially for just one reason: her failure to give a simple, cogent explanation for declaring on election eve that there would not be a carbon tax if her government were returned.

The Opposition Leader knew that talkback radio loves a beat-up, and he believes that beating up non-issues is his job. I would argue that showing us what an Abbott government would look like is his job, but maybe that's what he's doing: hype and bullshit while shirking the big issues.

Gillard should have someone in her office with the necessary level of brain damage to anticipate how "shock-jocks" will operate and how to countermand them. It worked a treat with Alan Jones: her mere presence reduced him to his natural state of being a nasty, petty man, the sort not to be invited into one's home by electronic or any other means.

Gillard knows that this debate will determine her fate, and her initial failure made it all the more difficult to move to the ground where she wants the battle to be fought, the ground where it will ultimately be decided - the question of which side of politics is better placed to avoid what scientists warn will be the catastrophic consequences of man-made climate change.

That rather clumsy sentence-paragraph tells us nothing new, and fails to demonstrate any examination of the issues or of the politics. Gillard is proposing something: Abbott is proposing nothing.

Gillard's challenge is all the greater because she can't yet say what the carbon price will be, who will pay it (and when) and how households will be compensated for higher energy bills. The only certainty when the tax commences in July next year is that every cent raised will be used to assist households, help businesses move to a clean energy economy and tackle climate change.

Well, no Michael: it isn't a certainty, as even a well-designed program may have flaws that will only become clear in the execution. If you were an experienced journalist, you'd know that.

In this vacuum, Abbott found photo opportunities at a fruit shop and a fish shop as he asserted that household power bills will increase by $300 a year, the price of petrol will rise by 6½¢ a litre, and that the increases will "cascade right through the economy".

Those photo ops were not substantive things that filled the vacuum, but another aspect of the vacuum: he wouldn't know what costs are going up or down, and he doesn't know much about the economy because he is a proven economic retard.

The scare campaign was relentless, with some unforseen consequences.

Gordon's idea of "unforseen [sic] consequences" include:

• That Sophie Mirabella and Eric Abetz would say things that were stupid and demonstrated their lack of perspective, manners and propriety; and


• That whipping up fear, uncertainty and doubt leads to toxic elements in the public debate, like the Windsor death threats (and the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords, Michael; but that happened outside Canberra so forget it).

Maybe it's part of Michael Gordon's charm that he's easily surprised.

Momentum shifted on Wednesday, when Abbott focused his attack on the lack of detail in the Gillard plan and demanded she reveal what the tax would be, who would pay it and how households would be compensated. As Gillard observed, the approach completely undermined all the claims about specific petrol and power bill price hikes that Abbott had nominated to incite his "people's revolt".

By Thursday, the line of attack shifted to the question of whether Australia was acting in advance of global consensus and "frog-marching Australians prematurely into a big, new tax that will raise prices and cost jobs". Gillard responded that 32 other nations had emissions trading schemes. "Australia should not lead the world, but we should not be left behind, either," she said.

In Windsor's assessment, the opposition "flat-lined" as the debate shifted from the "lie" to the substance.

It's the job of a journalist to seek out the substance, Michael, and to contrast any "lies" against that substance. The "line of attack" may be what Abbott wants you to focus on, but it's not really news. Journalists should be big enough to ignore what isn't news and focus on what is.

Abbott is certainly in a strong position ...

Really?

A week ago he was too gutless to stand up to Cory Bernardi, let alone Greg Combet and the Cabinet. He contradicted himself four times in as many days on a major issue. Who gives a damn what callers put to air by talkback radio say?

[Senator Bob] Brown had a succinct answer when asked if he agreed the Greens were exerting more influence than ever before. ''Yes, I do, because that's what the people of Australia voted for,'' he said, and he's right. But the real test of the relationship is what it produces when it comes to the detail of the carbon price - and whether the result is acceptable to the likes of Windsor and to corporations and peak business groups that are on record as supporters of action.

Brown was stupid to cloud the issue of carbon tax with gay marriage &c, it was as though he was willing the scheme to fail. There's another story gone begging, Michael.

As a relief from this piffle I went to the usually astute Shaun Carney, but all I found was this:

At this early stage of the debate, the momentum appears to be with the Coalition. Abbott's got some undeserved rough treatment from the media in the past, but he's getting an easy go of it right now, especially from commercial radio.

Tony Abbott has had a better run from the media than any Opposition Leader since Kevin Rudd, because he has buttered up the journosphere to the point where they simply cannot ask him the kind of pointed questions that investigative journalists ask. As to the first sentence, it's unquantifiable nonsense.

Abbott's statement of belief in man-made climate change is ... code and it has been effective to the extent that it has kept Abbott and the Coalition well and truly in the political contest. But it has so far not given him primacy over a weakened government. On the question of cost, Abbott is exposed. His "direct action" approach is funded by taxes. It has to be, and at $10.5 billion it's hardly cheap. And it also follows that by definition an Abbott government would be putting a price on carbon by spending public money on carbon abatement.

The guy has to be asked why he's spending $10.5b on something he is half-hearted about at best. No-one's doing it. If you think the Liberals were split over migrants and multiculturalism, wait 'til you examine them on what has to be the only challenge to economic management as the overarching public policy issue of our time.

Then, however, Carney slides back in to confusing climate skeptics/deniers with those who don't already vote Liberal. Unlike his two other colleagues in the journosphere, he brings it home with this spot-on summation:

Crazy brave is Gillard's only option. The political prize? Tony Abbott would be left with nothing to say, his leadership destroyed.

Lenore Taylor said on Insiders that it would be harder for Gillard once a carbon price figure is set, but I disagree so long as she doesn't buckle. People would rather not be taxed but nobody likes a whinger. All Abbott can do is whinge; all Gillard can do is get on with the job.

The question of lying was dealt with comprehensively, not by any journalist but by drag0nista.

The week before last, Abbott showed that whinging doesn't get you far in holding an increasingly impatient Liberal Party together. He's pulling out all stops and he's no further ahead than he was six months ago. Question the assuption that Abbott is really ready for government; certainly, the assumption that Labor are so inept that they will knock on power into the hands of rugby men Abbott and Hockey is starting to be questioned.

Professional journalists question assumptions. Hacks try to spin out non-stories, not in order to sell newspapers or improve public debate, but because they're lazy and stupid and don't care about the low esteem of their occupation nor the way the country is governed.

Kia kaha

Kia kaha, Christchurch!
People proud of their dullness, hardiness and sense
Of place find it hard to be told that
You can't go home again.

Kia kaha, Libya!
How have you put up with this shit for so long? He'll break
Many of you, and break the hearts of those who survive,
But your spirit shows already that a free Libya will be worth it.

Kia kaha, Zimbabwe!
Mugabe has sent his bullies to do unto Libya what he has done unto you for
So long. Take heart from distant neighbours by the Nile and Mediterranean;
The old man can't deliver what little he offers, stop cringing behind him in embarrassment.

Kia kaha, Oruzgan!
Do you really believe that your lives will get better if the Aussies leave?
If so, let us know.
If not, let us know.

Kia kaha, Cuba!
The Yanks know already that you can't be pushed around,
But your government doesn't. They expect you to be grateful but look
At northern Africa and the Middle East. Once you have
A firm place to stand, push them over.

Kia kaha, government of Pakistan!
If India offers you cash for Kashmir, take it;
If KarzaiLtd offers you cash for the North West Provinces, take it;
More money, less hassle; what's not to like?

Kia kaha, Ireland!
Fucked by Church and Mammon, you've dealt
With worse, and are better for having dealt with that,
But how much better do you have to get?

Kia kaha, Taiwanese factory workers!
This phone you made me isn't that great really.
I can't talk to Telstra about it, so what
Could I possibly say to you about this thing you made?