What we cover when we cover politics

The Federal Parliamentary press gallery purports to cover goings-on in federal parliament, with a central focus on the lame theatre of Question Time and the pursuit of rumours. When called upon to cover major issues of substance and complexity that arise in that place from time to time (e.g. the Budget, Aboriginal disadvantage, misogyny, sexual abuse of children), supposedly experienced correspondents dismiss them with "the devil is in the detail" and go back to the ephemera that sustains them.

Stephanie Peatling's press gallery stories that are worth reading: they can be traced back to actual public issues and rarely involve the same dreary flights of fancy that apparently keeps her colleagues employed. In any industry full of mouthy bludgers the quiet achievers are the most interesting; this article is in that vein.

Peatling refers to Peta Credlin opening up about about a topic that could hardly be more personal. Given that Credlin approached the journalists concerned to do so, and given the fact that she is more powerful than almost any elected Liberal MP, is she now deserving of greater scrutiny by the media than she has so far received? If we are to really understand what the Coalition wants - in the short term, within some passing parliamentary standing-order feint, or in the long term from "an Abbott government" - surely it is fair and relevant to scrutinise someone Credlin more closely than has been the case to date.

The odd profile that declares someone to be a "power behind the throne" and leaves it at that might suit the person concerned perfectly well, but in a democracy it is not on.

When you elect a government, you elect a whole package. Senior staffers and advisers are part of that package. Many of those people who came out of Paul Keating's office with a book publishing deal might have served their employer, party and country better building linkages between vague big-picture pronouncements and practical outcomes of same. The early Howard government would have been better understood had journos not just used Grahame Morris as a source for colourful quotes, but really examined what made him tick and how he made his presence felt. The transition of Julia Gillard from a wooden repeater of catchphrases to a genuine and direct communicator has to, in large part (but not wholly) the result of a turnover of staff. Staff deserve scrutiny.

The problem with that is twofold, as Peatling alludes to in her quotes from Paula Matthewson. Firstly, nobody elects staffers. Secondly, thanks to The West Wing many think that their roles deserve more attention than they get, and would only be too happy to hog what little limelight falls upon Australian federal politics.

The response to that is also twofold: first, whether or not people elect them, they are there; they are influencing policy outcomes, they way our taxes are spent and our laws made. Second, professional journalists should be able to filter out self-aggrandisement chaff from the kernels of real stories.

This applies to staffers who become lobbyists. The Rudd Government set up a lobbyists' register where lobbyists are identified individually, along with who they are working for. No press gallery journalist has made effective use of this resource. In the corridors of Parliament House, lobbyists sail past journalists on their way to ministers' offices to conduct business that will change the way government policy works; journalists wave them by without a second thought that these people might have a story worth telling.

Peatling's quote from Damian Ogden fails to examine what happens when there are jarring differences between a politician's personal story and their subsequent actions in office, as happened with Obama. It seems (and you have to do a fair bit of inference to Peatling's article, and drag in a lot of other stuff to reach this conclusion) that you have to rely on the other side to run a bunch of turkeys, but are rewarded with mandates that vindicate both image and reality.

There are journalists who cover substantive issues, and who do so seemingly in isolation from the federal parliament whose deliberations are so crucial to those issues. It is silly to demarcate journalists who, for example, have been patiently describing what the NDIS is and how it might affect particular individuals, from those who are supposedly following the passage of the relevant legislation through the parliament (there is so often a surprise deal in the Senate in the early hours of the morning of a sitting day that changes a bill so profoundly, which is almost never covered in any detail, that it is worth having dedicated Senate correspondents).

It is often said that covering politics is like an iceberg, where elected representatives are the above-surface visible portion while the far larger part (staffers, lobbyists, permanent public servants) are below the surface and out of sight. This may be so, but isn't that what journalists are for: to uncover what is hidden and to make sense of it?

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

- George Orwell

Press gallery journalists should be more often guided by their colleagues who cover those areas that federal politics regulates - between them, they would make for better coverage of how we are governed than we receive today. It would mean less jowl-wobbling outrage about "context" and the forced redundancy for many who are now, falsely, regarded as paragons of a profession that can only survive with such disruptive innovation. Someone like Stephanie Peatling would almost certainly handle such a transition much better than the stale, cliched offerings of almost all of her colleagues, particularly those encrusted with self-referential journosphere accolades.

The empty mantle

The Liberal Party hasn't started 2013 at all well.

When your mainstream media coverage is stuck on an issue that makes people squirm (Peta Credlin's fertility) within a wider theme that is death for your side of politics (women: Tony Abbott just doesn't get them, but his side of politics wants him to be Prime Minister anyway), you need to change the subject fast. The Liberals chose the wrong guy (Josh Frydenberg) and the wrong subject (workplace relations).

Here's the article by Josh with a warm-up routine by David Crowe. You can read both for free by copying the headlines into Google.

First to Crowe. When Michael Stutchbury left The Australian he took a few acolytes with him, which didn't quite create a vacuum but did result in the backwash that swept Crowe into that organ (whether Fairfax or News benefitted least from that particular exchange is a debate fit only for pubs in Surry Hills or Pyrmont; even blogs have higher standards than that). Paul Kelly used to hold the title that Crowe now occupies, and the very idea of him writing a cloying intro for an Opposition backbencher would have seen him crack the mother of all tantrums.

TONY Abbott is being urged by his allies to commit to major workplace reform and encourage the use of individual agreements, as the Coalition's internal debate on the key election issue escalates despite fears of a political backlash.

It is not escalating. Liberal MPs are in their electorates, spending time with the families for whom they will later leave politics to spend more time. They are being asked can they really win with that man, and have run out of Chrissy comestibles onto which the conversation can be deflected.

Howard government adviser and rising Liberal MP Josh Frydenberg has reignited the industrial relations debate by calling for a crackdown on union power as well as changes to make it easier for employers and their staff to use individual contracts instead of union awards.

He's reignited nothing. As we'll see, Josh is proposing nothing that hasn't been chewed over for much of the past seven or so years. Crowe is wrong to make out that Frydenberg is shifting the debate, or adding anything nearly so substantial to constitute "ignition".

The Opposition Leader has raised hopes for a more assertive Coalition stance on industrial relations by vowing to release detailed policies early in the year, as business leaders seek a clear commitment from the Coalition to dismantle elements of Labor's regime.

Less than a fortnight into the year is pretty early, and to be fair to Abbott he is serving the community to a far greater extent as a volunteer firefighter than he has or even can by applying his talents and experience as a politician. Frydenberg isn't jumping the gun, as Crowe is trying to make out. He is part of the strategy of taking up media space without saying anything.

... Mr Frydenberg is stepping up the case for major reform by citing a "productivity slump" and a spike in workplace disputes as proof that the Fair Work regime has failed to deliver on Labor's promises.

He's not stepping up anything, he's reiterating what has been said before. Crowe is being cute with language here. It's the policy of his paper that Australia's overall productivity has flatlined since WorkChoices was abolished, even though economists find it hard to prove. Can't wait to read the article where Josh clearly establishes that the increase in disputes is directly attributable to the legislation.

Mr Frydenberg marks out three reform targets including scaling back unfair dismissal laws, which currently apply to employers with 15 or more staff. While [he] does not nominate an alternative threshold, some within the Coalition favour an increase to 20 or 25 staff so that more small businesses would gain exemptions from the unfair dismissal laws.

Why does he not nominate an alternative threshold? Why have others done so without putting their names to it? Surely this is part of the broader policy debate? Why can't the Liberals have a debate any more?

Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox assailed the Fair Work regime last year in a speech that singled out IFAs for criticism on the grounds they had "promised so much but delivered so little".

Mr Willox said employers and employees could not rely on IFAs because the current rules meant either side of an agreement could unilaterally terminate the IFA with only 28 days' notice.

The government's review of the Fair Work laws last year suggested the period be extended to 90 days but Mr Willox said companies and their staff needed a more secure arrangement with terms of up to four years.

This is poor criticism: do you want flexibility, or comfort and security? Many commercial contracts have terms of less than 28 days. News Ltd could sack David Crowe and have him off their premises in far less time than that. If you want comfort and security offer permanent employment, or enter into a commercial arrangement beyond the Fair Work Act. Why criticise a piece of legislation for being too flexible, then complaining it isn't flexible enough? Rather than just transcribed Willox's words Crowe should have questioned him on it, like a journalist would.

Mr Ciobo urged Mr Abbott last year to back the restoration of individual employment contracts like the Australian Workplace Agreements used in the Howard government's Work Choices.

Other MPs are wary of doing so as Labor seizes on talk of individual agreements to claim an Abbott government would bring back Work Choices and AWAs, which were widely criticised in the 2007 election campaign for cutting working conditions.

In a sign of the internal differences, opposition Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey declared last November that workplace reform was not a Coalition priority.

Bullshit.

Howard offered Joe Hockey the Faustian bargain whereby he could get into Cabinet only if he put together a piece of workplace relations legislation that was flexible only for employers, but which didn't appear that way and enabled the then-government to fudge electorally unappealling aspects of it. Hockey seized the opportunity and produced a piece of legislation every bit as long and convoluted as the Corporations Act, and which also brought on the biggest labour-movement scare campaign in recent history.

It isn't quite fair to blame Hockey for single-handedly losing the 2007 election for his side of politics. He should, however, have stood up to Howard and demanded some flexibility, and he had a duty to steer the party away from those rocks in debates since that time. The idea that the Coalition would have nothing to say on workplace reform is garbage - particularly as the leader said that there would be a whole new policy early this year, meaning that it is in fact a priority at the very time Hockey claimed it wasn't.

Mr Frydenberg has spoken consistently on the need for workplace reform but insisted last night that he was not proposing a return to the Howard government's IR regime.

Mr Frydenberg said his call for changes to the IFAs did not amount to reinstating a key element of Work Choices.

"It's about tweaking existing provisions in the Fair Work Act to ensure that they work more effectively for both employer and employee, so they're a more attractive option than is currently the case because they're under-utilised," he said.

Ah, so Josh doesn't want to "ignite", he just wants to "tweak". Why didn't you say so, David? LIBERAL MP BASICALLY HAPPY WITH LABOR WORKPLACE LAWS, CALLS FOR TWEAKING would be more accurate than exciting, but accuracy is an under-appreciated and greatly missed feature of newspapers today.

Extending the timeframe of the IFAs, along the lines proposed by Mr Willox from AI Group, was a serious issue that needed to be looked at, Mr Frydenberg said.

What non-committal tosh. Crowe should have called Frydenberg on that.

Mr Frydenberg, who worked as director of global banking at Deutsche Bank and as a lawyer at Mallesons Stephen Jaques before entering parliament, cites the business criticism of the Fair Work Act as a reason for an urgent response from the Coalition.

Again, Crowe is being cute here, puffing up Frydenberg's title at Deutsche and omitting the most substantial part of his pre-parliamentary resume. Frydenberg spent relatively little time in the private sector; there are senior officials in the Chinese Communist Party with more actual private-sector experience than he, including in the important practical areas of dealing with employees and unions. Crowe should have told his readers that Josh is yet another MP who has spent much of his pre-parliamentary career as a party hack (Frydenberg was a staffer to Downer and Howard). Regular readers of The Australian loathe career staffers and wrongly assume hacks are a feature only of the hated Labor government, and would discount Frydenberg's words accordingly if only they knew.

It's understandable that Frydenberg should want to get his name in the paper, but Crowe is meant to be the one with a bit of sense and experience on what news is. Crowe should have looked at Frydenberg's article and declared it as non-meaty as a tofuburger, then gently broken it to Josh that he won't get a run until he can actually contribute to a debate rather than just calling for one. Crowe has tried subtly undercutting Frydenberg but it hasn't worked.

Enough of Crowe and on to Frydenberg directly:

Labor believes there is a trade-off in the workplace between flexibility and fairness, and a contest between a greedy employer and a helpless employee.

This is simply not true.

Employers and employees need each other. Without an effective, workable partnership, there is no enterprise, no profit and no job.

Straw-man knockdown followed by vacuous motherhood statement! If there is such a thing as a stamp of authenticity from Josh Frydenberg, that has to be it.

This workable partnership is under threat from an overregulated workplace, where unions are emboldened, militancy is on the rise and productivity in decline.

These are problems of the government's own making. In return for union financial support at the 2007 election, the Rudd government's Fair Work Act increased union power in more than 120 areas. Greater right of entry, more authority over greenfield sites and an enhanced ability to restrict the use of independent contractors are just some examples ...

This is Australia's new industrial landscape - a throwback to the past, unwinding not only John Howard's reforms (which were responsible for more than two million new jobs and a 20 per cent rise in real wages), but also those of Paul Keating, whose 1993 reforms encouraged enterprise bargaining at the workplace level.

The result has seen productivity slump and costs rise, penalising the very workers Labor purports to represent.

This has all the red-meat indicators of a desire to scrap the Fair Work Act altogether and start again: none of that "tweaking" nonsense that Crowe was quoting. Which is it? Is the current legislative environment completely inadequate or in need of shoring up?

Working days lost through industrial disputes were up 83 per cent in the year to June 2012, levels not seen since 2004, and high-profile stoppages such as the Qantas strike and the blockade at Grocon's Myer Emporium site dominated front pages.

The two examples quoted were employer-initiated lockouts rather than employee- or union-initiated actions: not helpful in making Josh's point. It's telling that 2004 is the nadir Frydenberg uses: while Howard was in office but before WorkChoices, the point where the mining boom started to take off and so did wage demands. He fails to mention low unemployment as a factor in increased disputation.

I'll leave to a qualified economist to deal with productivity and industrial disputations. There's plenty of quant goodness to be had here too, and I'm disappointed it's to be expected that Frydenberg hasn't even engaged with the data.

Greater industrial disputation not only creates higher costs for companies that are inevitably passed on to consumers but can also lead to companies cancelling projects in the pipeline.

In the past 12 months Shell, BHP and Woodside have shelved more than $100 billion of investment as the viability of resource projects is called into question.

And when asked why they shelved those projects, those companies explicitly state that high labour costs aren't a factor. Only cranks like Gina Rinehart, who wants the government to build all her infrastructure and to pay her employees no more than $2/day, bellyache about high labour costs as a factor in investing in this country. The companies Frydenberg cites are all mining companies: mining produces about as many jobs as the arts sector.

In May, BHP chairman Jac Nasser said "restrictive labour regulations have quickly become one of the most problematic factors for doing business in Australia". Using BHP's Queensland coal business as an example, he said in the past year alone that business faced "3200 incidents of industrial action" and "received over 1000 notices of intention to take industrial action and then approximately 500 notices withdrawing that action given on less than 24 hours' notice".

BHP's experience is not a one-off. David Peever, managing director of Rio Tinto Australia, has also spoken out on the issue and Santos chief executive David Knox has said Australian labour costs were double those in competing jurisdictions.

When Nasser was called on his labour regulations remarks, he admitted that they weren't that significant. Commodity prices and the Australian dollar are far more significant in determining the viability of projects in Australia.

This hasn't gone unnoticed by our competitors and global equity investors. Last year Australia fell from 11th to 15th on the World Bank's ease of doing business index ...

And how much of that was down to the Fair Work Act and other workplace legislation? None? Thought so.

and in the World Economic Forum's measure of global competitiveness, Australia fell four places to 20th overall and 123rd out of 144 countries for flexibility in wage determination and 120th in hiring and firing practices.

The latter two indicators are tricky to sell politically. If you are going to make it easier to sack people you run straight back into the Your Rights At Work campaign. Innes Willox was complaining about a mere 28 days notice: imagine the flexibility of giving immediate notice.

If you're going to criticise the current legislation, it is important to be clear about what your criticism is. You might think you're a tactical genius for attacking from both sides at once, but it makes you look flaky.

... Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten remains, in Kathy Jackson's words, "Dracula in charge of the blood bank".

Not a smart move to be quoting Kathy Jackson. Abbott is stuck with her but you may as well go boozing with Peter Slipper for all the good it will do to your cause.

A former secretary of the AWU, Shorten has become "the minister for unions".

Yep, that's what happens to Labor workplace relations ministers. Something similar happens in Coalition governments to Nationals who become Minister for Primary Industry. I learnt that in first-year politics. It's amazing that Josh has only just discovered it; and not necessarily an indictment of teaching at whatever uni Josh went to as one can only do so much.

[Shorten] conducted a Clayton's review of the Fair Work Act ... ignored the Department of Finance's suggestion that the implications for productivity be included ... stacked the Fair Work Commission with former union officials ... government's intervention in a legal case in support of the union movement... crudely "partisan".

So with stock-standard Liberal criticism of a Labor minister, and referring to criticism from employer groups, it is hard to see how Frydenberg is getting out in front of Liberal policy or even contributing much to it. Crowe has sold readers a dog here; everything Frydenberg has said is a rehash of what others have said, with no inkling or enlightenment as to what we might expect from Coalition workplace relations policy (even though, according to a former Liberal Workplace Relations Minister, it isn't a priority at all).

Not to mention his long silence over the Craig Thomson matter, which has raised serious questions about the conduct of senior union officials and the willingness of Fair Work Australia to conduct a proper and timely inquiry.

Michael Lawler has a lot to answer for, eh Josh?

Since union votes continue to dominate Labor conferences and ex-union officials continue to dominate the Labor caucus - even though overall union membership is in freefall - it is clear only the Coalition can make the practical changes necessary to our industrial relations system.

By that logic, only Labor governments can regulate corporate interests.

Tony Abbott has the track record to do this. As a reforming minister he instigated the Cole Royal Commission, which led to the creation of the Australian Building and Construction Commission. In his book Battlelines he identifies the "destructive" elements of Labor's Fair Work legislation while pointing to industrial relations reform as a road to a more productive and fairer society.

Here we are in the fourth-last paragraph of Josh's article. While Frydenberg has name-checked everyone who has ever criticised Shorten and the legislation he administers, he hasn't used it to propel his argument as to what's wrong and what needs to be fixed. All he's done here is name-check the leader, who basically set in place the conditions that led to the breakout of 2004.

Now is the opportunity for the Coalition to go on the front foot and put forward proposals that make unfair dismissal laws less of a burden on small business, lead to individual flexibility arrangements in the Fair Work Act becoming more attractive to employers and employees, and put the brakes on coercive union power beyond reinstating the ABCC and making unions more accountable through reforms to their governance arrangements.

That's it? That's the policy substance we've all been looking for?

That's what The Australian (Financial Review) and the employer organisations has been expounding for years: some sort of alchemy whereby WorkChoices will just pop back onto the statute books without voters noticing. This is more substantial than Frydenberg's effort, and it reads like the blimpish eructations of an armchair general who doesn't bear responsibility for Liberals on the front line. If you asked someone like David Crowe what changes the Coalition would make to workplace relations - shit, if you asked me - off the top of one's head and without reference to Josh Frydenberg, anyone would probably rattle off a list like that. Buy the paper, indeed.

The only attempt Frydenberg has made at dealing with workplace relations policy was this. Scroll down to my name and you'll note my comments on how he and his mate Alan failed to take the issues (which affect broader workplace relations issues) seriously. With this earlier article, his sorry record generally, and now yesterday's effort (even with Crowe's build-up), it's clear that policy is not Josh's thing.

Ironically, the issue that Josh was tasked to change the conversation from - Peta Credlin's reproductive difficulties at work - offers a host of workplace relations issues that are worthy of examination from a policy perspective.

Policy wonkery is not the be-all-and-end-all of politics; there is a place for hard-headed political calculation too. Business got WorkChoices out of the Liberals but when WorkChoices was threatened in the 2007 election, they all but abandoned it and the Coalition. Greg Jericho might think outfits like this are somehow sinister, but from a Liberal perspective they are laughably insufficient. If Innes Willox wants WorkChoices back he can bloody well pay for it: if business won't back workplace relations reform to the extent necessary to beat the labour movement, the Liberals should not stick their necks out for them. If Frydenberg was ever going to bite a bullet in this debate, that was it: he shirked that too.

Never mind seizing the mantle, Frydenberg should just take his coat. There is nothing for his leader or his party in his typically sorry offering. Josh Frydenberg, as was said of Newt Gingrich, is a dumb person's idea of a deep thinker. He drifts into policy debates with nothing to say, no contribution to make, and drifts away having made no impact whatsoever. No Labor ministers need fear any challenge by Josh Frydenberg, and it's doubtful any do. Flattering him as Crowe and others do goes beyond merely gilding the lily: to call Josh Frydenberg an up-and-coming Liberal is to set him, and the Liberal Party, up for failure.

We need more and better consideration of the big issues facing Australia than Josh is capable of offering. We also need the press gallery to stop dragging him out of his depth and insisting that his hapless floundering is so much artful positioning.

Exit strategy

The Coalition had hoped to win the 2013 election with a series of stunts that boxed Labor into a range of narrow, unpopular positions while enabling the Coalition to basically cruise into office promising anything and nothing. Everyone in the Coalition has been devoted to that strategy and it worked, for a while.

Now the strategy starting to fall apart. The government is occupying more positions that are less unpopular and looking more like a government. It is in a position to challenge the Coalition to prove itself rather than being able to maintain the position that all politicians dream of: to have their words taken at face value.

The Coalition has failed to address its Howard-era weaknesses in workplace relations and in being seen to engage with what might broadly be called "the future": policies such as education, telecommunications, economic/ cultural/ military/ other engagement with Asia, all fall into that general but palpable category. The idea that Labor are trying to deal with those issues but the Coalition aren't even trying will be a key reason why Gillard will get another go, however grudgingly, and why the idea of an Abbott Government will remain both a fantasy for Libs and a bogey for everyone else.

The failure of the Coalition's strategy can no longer be attributed to a failure of commitment. Right-whingers used to blame moderates for undermining the Coalition in past election campaigns, but by 2007 there were no more moderates left to blame. There is nobody in senior federal Coalition ranks who is not in thrall to the proven failure that is Mark Textor and his basic assumptions, which are:

• Nobody really cares about policy detail or how policies actually affect them, elections are really all about "the vibe";
• Part of "the vibe" involves a chip on the shoulder about "elites", from which corporate and political elites are excluded but which does include people involved in the arts and/or education; and
• That Mark Textor is a genius. Any doubts about the first two points can simply be negated by the sheer obvious force of this one, so shut up.

There is no scope to challenge that failing Coalition strategy now that we are in an election year, not even privately within Coalition circles. There will come a time for finger-pointing, where petty mudslinging and big-picture canvas-splashing become indistinguishable; there'll be plenty of that this time next year. As a Coalition insider the best you can do is see clearly what is going on, pack your parachute and shuffle discreetly toward an exit-row seat. This is what Arthur Sinodinos did in early 2007, and what Julie Bishop has done on regular occasions since then.

Two Coalition staffers (are they financial members of the Party, and does it matter either way?) are in their personal endgames as far as bringing about an Abbott government is concerned. They each have an exit strategy, but the differences are fascinating.

Peta Credlin's exit strategy involves pregnancy, as you can see if you winnow out the dross from this. She warned Abbott that she had other options and was pursuing them, while helping confine Abbott to a series of inescapable and flawed positions (e.g. on carbon tax). If she gets pregnant, nobody will blame her for leaving Abbott to play his game of double-or-nothing with basically the same stake he had last time (except fewer women's votes).

It's touching that she took Abbott at his word on abortion and IVF, but pretty stupid that she expects the nation to do likewise. It's puzzling that News Ltd believes such views makes one "progressive". The Coalition vote has not gained appreciably in any way that compensates for the collapse in support from women since 2010, and Credlin bears much responsibility for this - until she takes her leave.

Credlin was happy to describe herself as "The Queen of No" when it suited her purposes, which were identical to those of the seemingly-powerful Abbott. Now that Abbott has lost his lustre Credlin needs a change of image, as a prelude to a change of scene. Remember how Mark Arbib said that he was quitting to spend more time with his children (remember how the press gallery took him at face value)? Credlin doesn't have children, and given that her husband is the Liberal Party's Federal Director and Campaign Manager she is already in the right position to spend as much time with Brian Loughnane as anyone could want.

Loughnane's absence from Credlin's recounting of her IVF experience across different publishing outlets is telling. IVF is rarely a journey on which women go by themselves. Almost every every other article on the topic features both parties in a couple recounting their different perspectives of a process that is almost always medically and emotionally fraught. Samantha Maiden was clearly too polite to ask after Loughnane, and being a rookie reporter she also blew the opportunity to ask Credlin some pointed journo-style questions about Gillard-AWU or other political scandals du jour, or indeed about Coalition strategy more broadly.

The fact that Loughnane has opted out of such a public discussion of a private matter is to his credit. It is hard to imagine the stiff-necked Liberal backroom operators of yesteryear - Andrew Robb, Sinodinos, Alister Drysdale, even Grahame Morris - discussing whether or not their boys can swim and how this is affecting their partners and/or their relationships. Credlin has to go through this to get an alibi. Loughnane doesn't need one, he is strapped in for death or glory.

So too is The Situation. Imagine his outrage if a government staffer had used a publicly-funded fridge for this private purpose: the shaken head, the sotto voce lamentation at waste, the dog-whistling to those with a religious objection to IVF, etc.

This is where the testimonials from the women in Abbott's life fail: nobody doubts Tony will support women who support him. In the same way, nobody doubts his antipathy and/or indifference to the broad mass of women beyond his personal circle, who believe they should be able to enjoy basic rights over their bodies and reproduction without having to form close personal relationships with Tony Abbott. That's how you break the silly set-piece debates Gordon Graham is talking about here; it is possible to 'win' such debates and lose the election. The extrapolation from Abbott's private life to the country at large simply does not work.

Then there's the question of "support". Given that an Abbott government will seek to reduce existing levels of government spending, nobody seriously believe Abbott would maintain or increase spending on abortion and IVF. This is why it is meaningless to claim Abbott "supports" these things for people with whom he is not close.

The first rule of Peta Credlin is that there are no flies on Peta Credlin; nor will there be, and nor will any evidence exist as to where any might have been. Her exit strategy is to spend time creating a family with which she can spend more time, the one alternative to her current role with which no conservative can legitimately quibble or sneer.

This is a rule that James Ashby would have done well to abide by. Ashby has pretty much staked everything on the Coalition coming to government and rewarding him for bringing down Peter Slipper. Ashby has no choice but to go on; he can't slink away after the sort of caning that Justice Rares dished out. It's vindication or the void.

Those who call for an inquiry into Ashby-Slipper are almost certainly wasting their time. Only rusted-on Coalition partisans and people with good memories for political ephemera even remember Slipper as being linked to Labor in some way. The more time goes on, the more Mal Brough and Mark McArdle and other LNPQ characters are implicated, the more it becomes a problem for the Coalition - and with every appeal, and every Anthony McClelland media stunt, that problem is highlighted. The government doesn't need an inquiry to draw attention to the Coalition's predicament, they will do it themselves.

Ashby is, metaphorically speaking, covered in flies; you can see where they've been, and he'll never be anything more than the Slipper honey-trap guy. He isn't going to "spend more time with his family". He's locked in to one of those horrible politico-media-legal imbroglios where nobody comes out a winner, where vindication is pretty much impossible, and where the only question comes as to when the LNPQ conspirators will drop him to minimise their losses.

Abbott isn't going to regroup because there is no idea for him to regroup around. People thought this would be true of Gillard, and they were wrong. When people like Peta Credlin start heading for the exit only a fool would stick around on the expectation of victory. Only a fool would "take one for the team" that is going nowhere and starting to fall apart. Commitment is essential to victory, but there's no point failing to put yourself into a position where you can fight another day.

Reasons to be cheerful, part 2013

Dear Alex White,

I disagree with most of your post, and its basic argument. I realise your job is to gee up people on the left and get them mobilised, but you do people a disservice by misleading them in the hope that they'll get fired up and forgive you afterwards. Maybe that's the difference between being "of the left" and just being broadly supportive of the Gillard government over the Abbott alternative.

OK, so the Gillard government has done some good things, some bad things. Sounds like every other government really - including, as you point out, the government of the US.

The government will change if they can be convinced that those who are now in Opposition will do the good things better and the bad things less badly. This is how Howard beat Keating in 1996, it is the same basis on which Rudd beat him in 2007, and it is the same basis on which neither Beazley nor Latham beat Howard.

Abbott cannot convince anyone that any policy area would be better managed by him and his crew than by the incumbents. That's why they can't and won't win. It's in the media's interests to pretend it's a tight race and that there is intense political competition, but there isn't really. The competition isn't there - people who follow politics see it now, and those who don't follow politics closely will see it when they choose to look, which will most likely happen closer to the election.

You can shove your polls up your arse. Really. Without a known polling date polls are pretty useless, and the wider the gap between the polling and the election date the less reliable it is. The statistical busywork applied to polls to convince people of their validity is much the same as that applied to astrological forecasts; the a priori assumptions are bullshit, the output is bullshit, so don't try and impress me with the process.

The fact that there is no real competition between the parties, while journalists engage in increasingly stupid tricks to insist that there is, diminishes mainstream media rather than leads a credulous population buy the nose. You're wrong to take the power of the mainstream media as given.

The potency of the AWU/Gillard thing diminished within the final sitting week of parliament last year. The idea that it will retain the potency it had earlier in that week, or that it will increase, is rubbish. I notice you didn't mention Ashby, which is OK as I'll do it for you.

James Ashby will have to appeal, but in doing so will make it difficult for the Coalition to escape the taint of sleaze. It will also make it difficult for Ashby, a man who has lived his life in pursuit of publicity and is about to learn in the harshest way possible that "there is no such thing as bad publicity" is, in fact, bullshit. The story of Ashby is all wind and no candle, leaving the protagonist without any redeeming legend or other benefits of superstardom - and, indeed, almost no grace.

Any inquiry into Abbott's earlier slush-fund attempts depends entirely upon whether Pauline Hanson will play along, which will require her to give up her dream of a parliamentary pension to carry her into old age.

These issues will negate any lingering benefit to the Coalition from Gillard/AWU and start to eat into core Coalition strengths (e.g. stewardship of the economy). They will work against the Coalition particularly hard in Queensland, where the effect will be like cutting out a melanoma with a broken bottle. Abbott has repeatedly proven powerless to stop the LNPQ from self-harm that spills over federally.

As for asylum-seekers, there is a real bind: yes, there is an active push toward exclusionary policies, but also revulsion at the impacts of those policies (e.g. children self-harming, Australian citizens being deported). Mostly, the media just present these facts; sometimes you'll see a story where someone goes into bat for one side or the other, but you get that.

The question on asylum-seekers is: who do you trust to resolve this impasse? Nobody trusts Abbott to resolve it, you can only trust Abbott to be harsher while playing stupid media games with those exposing cruelty. The Coalition loses credibility when it appears to criticise the government for doing something it would do if it had the chance.

And the bottom line is, it won't get the chance. The link between state and federal politics tends to be weak, but state governments in Queensland and Victoria are acting in such a way that it is possible to say to voters in those states: state Coalition policies are a dress-rehearsal for what an Abbott government would be like.

Labor will win 4-5 seats in each of Queensland and Victoria. Labor will win at least one seat in South Australia; it is not beyond the realms of possibility that it could win both Boothby (knocking off Andrew Southcott) and Sturt (Chris Pyne), which would make Adelaide as much a Labor town as Canberra or Wollongong. This will be offset by winning/losing one seat here or there in NT or WA, but you get that.

Labor is more likely to win Denison than the Libs. The Libs have a chance in Braddon and/or Bass.

God only knows what will happen in NSW. The Labor Right in this state has collapsed as a governing model. The O'Farrell government has had the fresh paint knocked off it, but on one side is a non-Opposition, and on the other it is not as threatening as the Abbott-led federal Opposition.

The Coalition will not win Greenway, Robertson or Page, where Labor has a strong local presence and (except in the case of Greenway) representation independent of the NSW Labor Right. Any Sussex Street stink wafting around Michelle Rowlands will be more than countermanded by the smell of sulphur emanating from the Lib, owing to the branch-stacking in that area by the religious right.

At this stage it is hard to tell what Lindsay, Banks, Reid or Lyne might do, but then Labor could pick up Cowper and/or Hughes. Windsor will win New England if he runs again.

As for Dobell, if Craig Thomson is vindicated as comprehensively as this suggests, Labor would be mad not to run him and the Coalition wouldn't have a chance, given that their candidate's only pitch is how awful Thomson appears to be if you accept everything of which he's been accused.

What Abbott will achieve in NSW is what 1980s-model Howard did - big swings in safe Labor seats (not enough to win them though) while losing close battles in the marginals. MPs like Laurie Ferguson and Chris Bowen will have their arses handed to them, but not their heads.

I don't expect Abbott to be Prime Minister at all, which is why I'm not spooked by your Abbott Government scare campaign.

The spectre of a Royal Commission into the union movement didn't save the Fraser government in the early 1980s, and that was when a majority of working people were also union members. If the unions aren't tightening their administrative practices in the light of HSU and AWU then they deserve what they get. Say what you like about the SDA, but that union's leadership has been vigilant against the kind of abuses and slackness that seem to be prevalent at sister bruvver uvver organisations.

It was the spectre of a return to WorkChoices in 2010 that stopped Abbott's momentum in the first week of that election campaign. Because he's a moron, and because people like Abetz and others on his frontbench are too, he hasn't developed an alternative policy or a strategy for "playing down" those vote-losing concerns. People didn't vote Coalition until they got over their promise to dismantle Medicare, and people won't vote Coalition until they develop a workplace relations policy that is substantially different to WorkChoices.

So Alex White, what does that leave you with? Your no-brainers about the Middle East Western Asia, the global economy and climate change. Big strategic insight right there.

Your idea that people will be like so many turkeys voting for Christmas, as instructed by The Daily Telegraph, is ridiculous. You assume that the Federal Coalition is more substantial than it is, and that the government is the supine outfit Kevin Rudd left it as: enough of these bullshit assumptions. Let us start the new year with Reasons to be Cheerful:

Coalition road split leadership shock

If this article had been written by a Murdoch journalist for a Murdoch outlet, and the Murdoch outlets were as down on the Coalition as they are on Labor at the moment, it would read like this:

HAPLESS, HOPELESS AND HELPLESS TONY ABBOTT has been undermined yet again, this time by his transport spokesman, over his promise that Coalition funding of $4 billion for big projects will put cranes over Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane within a year of its election.

Mr Abbott said that he wanted to be a prime minister "who revels in seeing cranes over our cities, who revels in seeing bulldozers at work" and has pledged that three big projects, including the WestConnex road in Sydney and the east-west road link in Melbourne, would be "under way within 12 months of a change of government". Today, Mr Abbott is not so much revelling as reeling after an interview with the Coalition transport spokesman, Warren Truss, conceded a start date for the projects could be further away - if at all.

"The project in Melbourne ... will require considerable time associated with planning and various approvals to get under way - the Sydney one as well. It is part of a bigger project now, and so there will be time ... I think it will take at least a couple of years and maybe longer for those two to start construction," said Mr Truss.

This latest twist comes after a sequence of poor polls for Mr Abbott, where more Australian women would rather play footsie with a blue-ringed octopus than have him as Prime Minister. Given his inability to lay a glove on the Prime Minister during the AWU fizzer, and after serious doubts over his recent campaigns against Peter Slipper, Craig Thomson and the carbon tax, the last thing Tony Abbott needed was to have his flimsy policy platform white-anted.

Truss' off-hand references to "the project in Melbourne" and "the Sydney one" are telling. Holding a relatively safe seat in southeastern Queensland, Truss can afford to be insouciant about these projects. Like fellow banana-bender Barnaby Joyce, Truss has a folksy disdain for policy detail and hopes this will translate into the kind of popular support enjoyed by the state's Newman government last March.

Mr Abbott had promised $1.5 billion to the WestConnex motorway, $1.5 billion to the east-west link and $1 billion to the Gateway extension road in Brisbane.

The O'Farrell government has committed $1.8 billion to the WestConnex road, expected to cost $10 billion to $15 billion.

But it is uncertain where the rest of the funding will be found, even if a large proportion comes from tolls on the motorway, a 33-kilometre road between Auburn in Sydney's west that will connect to the airport and the M5 motorway in the south west. The government has set up a project office to come up with a detailed case for WestConnex by the middle of next year. It had said construction would start before the state election in March 2015.

Given Australia's fairly poor record in toll road modelling and the fact that the companies behind projects such as the cross-city and Lane Cove tunnels in Sydney and the Clem7 tunnel in Brisbane have ended up in administration, Mr Truss said the Coalition was looking for innovative ways a Coalition government could attract private investment for the projects.

"I've been approached with lots of ideas about how the government could share the investment risk on these projects," he said.

"I am not attracted to proposals where the government takes all the risk and the private sector gets all the profit. But risk sharing is something I am prepared to look at". Many of the people who approach people like Mr Truss with ideas such as these as constituents of Mr Abbott (for a waspish sneer at such people, see Miranda Albrechtsen on p. 19).

"We will have to find ways to leverage private-sector funding - particularly the Sydney and Melbourne projects are likely to require a mix of Commonwealth, state and private funding", said Mr Truss. This overlooks the fact that Mr Abbott has already committed to funding, and that journalists reported this on the assumption that the sums had already been done.

Now Mr Truss - who would be Deputy Prime Minister in an Abbott government - is casting doubt over the very idea of careful planning for major capital expenditures on infrastructure projects. "This is further proof that the Coalition is in turmoil", said a senior Canberra observer. "If the Coalition does not succeed, it runs the risk of failure".

"Investors say since toll finance projects haven't gone so well recently, they want an arrangement where the government takes some risk if toll revenue turns out to be less ...

Once a patronage estimate has been established there might be a formula under which a certain percentage of risk and profit is shared with the government, with the percentage getting bigger or smaller depending on the size of the divergence ... I haven't said yes or no to that yet but I am looking at it," Mr Truss said.

Neither Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey nor Shadow Finance Minister Andrew Robb could be contacted for comment.

This overlooks the fact that the last Labor government in NSW spent a decade bending over forwards to make unprofitable toll road projects happen. Truss was federal transport minister during this period, and during the Clem7 debacle. It is clear that nothing has been learned from this expensive experience, and that there is no hope for a better future for infrastructure projects as a result.

Under pressure on the leadership front, Mr Abbott needs these comments from Mr Truss like a hole in the head. Coalition hopes of winning support in Sydney and Melbourne must be in doubt thanks to Mr Truss' airy comments. The Coalition needs to fix this perception of division and uncertainty - and if Mr Abbott won't, someone else will do it for him.

Just doing your job

The Howard Government's policy on deterring and discouraging asylum seekers from coming to Australia by boat was widely regarded as both cruel and effective. The Labor government tried to dismantle it but this was deemed not to have "worked", if you assume that a) deterring asylum-seekers is what we want for the country, and b) every time an asylum-seeker boat arrives, it irritates you personally.

The government set up the Houston commission, framing their terms of reference to assume deterrence and discouragement as policy objectives. The commission reported, with part of its recommendations that the entire report be implemented as a comprehensive package.

The Houston commission recommended that detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island be reopened. This is basically in line with Coalition policy, which is itself an exercise in nostalgia: there was, by coincidence, a decline in the number of refugees worldwide in 2005, and for Coalition supporters that coincidence validates their policy and makes it the benchmark against which all immigration policy is judged.

Coalition policy is expensive: it costs billions of dollars to intercept boats in international waters, and then transfer them to those places and accommodate them there until their refugee status is determined. There was more money available to the government in 2005 than there is now, for two reasons. First, in 2005 every country in the world except Zimbabwe enjoyed economic growth; today many countries are struggling with economic stagnation or decline, which in some cases puts strain on the political system. Second, the Howard government was (believe it or not) a much higher-taxing government than the Gillard government.

The Coalition has won a political battle in having the government basically adopt its policy (all but for TPVs, of which more later). They know it's expensive, they know it's inhumane, and that people will go crazy with the heat and the indefinite waiting; and that the catering company from which Scott Morrison gets his costings will do little to alleviate either.

The government should not tolerate any criticism by the Coalition about asylum-seeker detention. They should point out that this is the policy they wanted, and that deterrence means that good people will continue to suffer while bad people will get away with murder. They should point out that this is the policy that the Coalition will continue if elected, only more so because Morrison will crack down on media visiting those places.

This is what passes for a principle for such people as Scott Morrison; the impact that such people have when they take their place in the real Australian community is less important than their impact on the imaginary and nebulous "24 hour news cycle".

The government should not merely explain, but assert and rebut narratives to the contrary, that they are merely carrying out the Houston committee's report (first step, though, is to actually do so, in full). This is what mandatory detention and deterrence looks like, people. Labor should position itself as the party that is open to new ways of doing things, while the Coalition and the Greens are pretty much stuck.

Bob Carr is right to use foreign policy as a means of securing co-operation over asylum-seekers. He was, however, wrong to start with a jaunt to Sri Lanka. It's not clear that decades of bloody civil war have settled down into a peace of mutual respect and the sort of competition/co-operation on which social and economic prosperity depends. There aren't too many genuine alternatives presented to Sri Lankans who want to migrate here by means other than people-smuggling, and the Australian High Commission in Colombo employs too few Australians and too many locals to do its immigration assessments.

That said, Carr is owning the policy - and given that his opposite number is the nebulous Julie Bishop, he can be forgiven for not taking the fight to opponents who have pretty much vacated his field.

The Coalition knew mandatory detention is absurdly expensive, and that it would blow out the budget. Again, the government should call them on their pretense of suddenly giving a damn about foreign aid, and that the Coalition would cut foreign aid still further because of its budget-surplus fetish.

What's also expensive is forbidding asylum-seekers from working and putting them on welfare. This is a result of lobbying from unions representing poorly-paid, low-skilled workers, many of whom are migrants anyway. It's stupid policy and the Coalition would be right to attack it, were it not for their laziness over Temporary Protection Visas (it was never clear who was being protected, from what or whom). The unexamined government is not worth electing.

The Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, apparently gets along well with Morrison. What is needed is an Immigration Minister who will take Morrison on for his dishonesty that the Coalition would run asylum-seeker policy differently, better and cheaper. A minister who would rip out Morrison's heart, dump in it, and then have it run against Morrison in his electorate and preference against him is a minister that can make this issue work against the Coalition. Accepting the Howard government's detention and deterrence policy as some ideal of perfection is stupid and unsustainable.

The same goes for the Coalition's criticisms of the government over corruption within Customs. The relevant minister, Jason Clare, is supposedly a rising star in the NSW ALP, but he was a wet fish against the Coalition's Michael Keenan. Firstly, it never occurred to the Howard government to investigate corruption in Customs, and secondly the Coalition have a budget-surplus fetish that militates against more and better resources for that agency. There are the two sticks with which you beat Keenan, and the rest of the Coalition, away from partisan criticism of a story where the government did its job. The government has no excuse for being caught out, the Fairfax-ABC investigations did not precede law-enforcement examinations, they occurred in parallel, with the minister and the AFP Commissioner across the detail.

I wish other areas of policy received as much in-depth coverage in the mainstream media as asylum-seeker policy; even so, it isn't enough. It is not too late to rebuild Fairfax around producers of high-value journalism like Nick McKenzie, and away from the false idols of journalism that are Grattan or Paul Sheehan or Peter Hartcher.

Bowen's record as a minister is dutiful but uninspired, in a key policy area where the price of failure is too politically high. Dumping him would not only encourager les autres (as Napoleon Voltaire said of the British practice of executing admirals) but it would send a clear message to the underperforming NSW ALP to either replace him with Clare, or someone outside NSW and the Labor Right entirely.

In the absence of that - or perhaps as well - the government should acknowledge the fact that it is just doing its job. It should hold up a mirror to the country that supposedly wants to shun people and do it all on the fiscal and moral cheap. Any shifting of the asylum-seeker debate (in any direction other than, say, machine-gunning people at sea or a reintroduction of racial quotas) works to show Labor as the party open to ideas about the country's future. Sensible people do not fret about shifting the debate: only PR dollies, media-relations hysterics and dictators like their debates cliched and contained.

The government should be open to changing its mind after the election but committed to the Houston findings in the short term. It should brook no nonsense from the Coalition over this commitment and beat them with the surplus-fetish stick. That's how you not only deal with a suppurating wound but start a process of healing that is also a key responsibility of government - another responsibility that the Coalition insists it can shirk, and which a lazy mainstream media will let it shirk.

Part of the fallacy behind the politico-media complex is the idea that because the mainstream media isn't doing its job, the government can get away with not doing its. The Coalition has fallen for this and relies entirely on government errors and media sloppiness. A government that steps up and does its job gets re-elected. The government should own both the status quo and the future, on asylum-seekers and customs and the budget surplus and every other issue.

You can't handle an Abbott government

JESSEP [played by Jack Nicholson]: You want answers?
KAFFEE [played by Tom Cruise]: I think I'm entitled to.
JESSEP: You want answers?
KAFFEE: I want the truth!
JESSEP: You can't handle the truth!

- from the screenplay to A Few Good Men, by Aaron Sorkin (1992)

The press gallery seeks to bring about an Abbott government by overreporting the failures of the Gillard government and ignoring narratives to the contrary (particularly if they emanate from the dreaded social media). The Gillard government does not court the press gallery like previous governments did, or like Abbott does in Opposition; the press gallery is keen to see the back of it, and keen to exercise what power it has left to secure that result. The press gallery should not seek to bring about an Abbott government because it could not handle an Abbott government.

The overreporting was shown this week with the dismissal of a sexual harassment case brought by James Ashby against the Commonwealth and the former Speaker, Peter Slipper. Allegations arising from the plaintiff's submissions received prominent and salacious coverage in the media, while the judge's findings did not.

The findings hinted at and set up basic facts that would have sent previous generations of journalists scurrying in pursuit of a big story: the idea that senior Coalition politicians conspired to bring about not only the downfall of a Speaker, but of the government, through the fabrication of a scandal. That story remains to be told, but no journalist employed by mainstream media outlet will or can tell it. No mainstream media outlet will devote resources toward that end; you will have to go to social media and spend time to piece together all those links and hints and allegations to piece together a story.

Let us have no more insistence from mainstream media outlets that Mal Brough must face the media. After the insipid efforts by the press gallery to nail the Prime Minister over the Wilson-Blewitt thing, after their simple acceptance of assertions by Joe Hockey and Tony Abbott that the Coalition has no case to answer on a conspiracy, the only thing worse than Brough not answering him questions would be him making the pretence of doing so. Imagine Brough waddling down his driveway, fielding a few badly-researched softball questions and pulled punches from the hacks there assembled, and then turning tail when he'd had enough.

News Ltd journalists set the agenda but not only running spurious stories but insisting that other outlets share the burden of running such stories, which they do. Here (do a Google search on the headline) is one of Australia's most experienced political journalists setting the scene for media coverage of Brough:

But the real political victim is now Brough, who stands accused of working with Ashby and co-worker Karen Doane in an underhanded political scheme based on disloyalty, political preferment, duplicity, and lies - all aimed at bringing down Slipper and promoting Brough.

The "real victim" is a perpetrator: when applied to other crimes this is the sort of thinking News Ltd outlets decry as namby-pamby attempts to frustrate due legal processes.

After sustaining months of allegations about the AWU slush fund scandal the Labor government is keen to hit back and threaten Brough and by extension Tony Abbott and Christopher Pyne with an inquiry of their own into a political scandal.

This is sloppy writing: the allegations on Gillard-AWU have not been sustained. There is also the question of judgment by Abbott, Pyne and Brough: did they seriously expect that they could go at Labor without fear of reprisal?

Of course, the government does not come out of the judgment without its own questions to answer: the judge said there was evidence of sexual harassment but upheld Slipper's claims for an abuse of process, which the commonwealth spent $750,000 working on and then withdrawing after paying Ashby $50,000 in compensation.

There would have been evidence of sexual harassment were it not for the other facts of the case, Dennis. The government does have to spend money in defence of spurious legal actions otherwise everybody would just line up for their chop.

The judge describes the payout given when Attorney-General Nicola Roxon was trying to kill off all the legal cases against Slipper as more than Ashby could have expected even if he had succeeded against Slipper and the commonwealth.

Easy to say in hindsight. A journalist would have taken the trouble to be wise before the event rather than after it. Note also the non-reporting of the fact that Ashby's little windfall is far outweighed by the costs order against him.

Instead of an earnest desire to tell the story before them, the wish of journalists to appear "balanced" at the expense of the story remains. On one hand, we have the carefully weighed findings of a judge; on the other we have denials by Tony Abbott, a man who admits to lying to journalists on the rare occasions when they put him under pressure. Abbott will provide press gallery journalists with daily stunts while a judge can only offer one-off judgments.

That desire for false balance can be seen in mainstream media coverage of climate change, of immunisations, and - despite Proverbs 11:1 - the teaching of religion (and religious notions such as "intelligent design") in schools. It can also be seen here, where a "Political Editor" gleefully falls upon a dubious and ill-examined study that appears to prop up his biases.

TWITTER users lean to the political left and talkback radio callers to the right, but both form part of the mainstream of opinion, according to a study.

Those fateful words, "according to a study", preface great swathes of bad journalism. Wacky diets, black-is-white denials of corporate malfeasance, all manner of superstition and bullshit has the appearance of backup by spurious studies that are examined badly (or not at all) by supposedly sceptical truth-seeking journalists. Part of the decline of both the credibility and patronage of mainstream media is the rise of silly "according to a study" stories.

An analysis of political sentiment in Australia by an independent firm compared how views expressed on Twitter and talkback radio moved in comparison with the mainstream, as measured by a conventional national opinion poll, Newspoll.

"Independent" of whom? Newspoll isn't "independent", it is part of the organisation that employs Dennis Shanahan. The only polls with any integrity whatsoever are those produced a week or so before an actual election; with every finger-in-the-air prognostication Newspoll diminishes itself. Journalists like Hartcher diminish themselves by hanging stories on polls, telling us what we think rather than reporting on politics so that we might form opinions.

Polling can be assessed scientifically; the total number of electors is a known quantity, so assessments of a sample of voters and the questions they are asked, the methodology used etc., can be made and validated. Sentia cannot, however, make any sort of assessment of Twitter users with the same degree of confidence. Sentia's sampling can therefore be said to produce the result that would help Chambers' spruiking efforts. Imagine the poor bugger tryiung to sell a picture of social media like this:

There are rightwing ratbags on social media, like Larry Pickering and Mike Smith. There are leftwing ratbags too, and people with all sorts of opinions really.

Not even Peter Hartcher could conjure an article from such mealy-mouthed dross.

In the case of Twitter, it also confirmed what has long been remarked of social media: "It really is antisocial media," according to John Chalmers of Sentia Media.

John Chalmers is the guy who drums up media interest in Sentia and who fields enquiries from them: he would say that, he'd say anything to get publicity for his employer and its wares. Mainstream media people and other client representatives buy Chalmers coffee and lunch, while Twitter users don't; that's what Chalmers means by "anti-social".

Sentia is the author of the study, the owners of Media Monitors, and the first to make such a comparison.

Sentia is a corporation that used to be known as Media Monitors. The person or persons who might be more accurately described as "the author" is/are unnamed. This is like describing Fairfax Media as "the author" of The Sweet Spot.

While both avenues allowed anonymity, personal attacks on Twitter were harsher because comment was not moderated, Mr Chalmers said, while talkback callers were vetted by producers and presenters.

This is fine if you regard "producers and presenters" as voices of moderation and reason, and the vetting process as filtering out extreme positions and/or personal attacks. Anonymity is a straw man; I use my real name online but because Hartcher has never met me, he regards me as anonymous.

Talkback hosts are not anonymous, and outrageous attacks shapes and reinforces their reputation rather than diminishing it. They are no more or less vitriolic than anyone on Twitter. The difference between them and Twitter users is that talkback hosts attract advertising revenue with their outrageous attacks which more than compensates for any penalties (meagre fines or defamation payments) that they may suffer. Peter Hartcher has no excuse for not understanding the media business well enough to know this.

Twitter is also more volatile in the aggregate expression of political sentiment, and prone to be what Mr Chalmers described as "superficial".

I would love to see Chalmers' objective qualification of such loaded terms as 'volatile' and 'superficial'. I wish a journalist would have questioned this and reported their findings. Hartcher must have been so giddy at being vindicated by an actual study that it never occurred to his forensic investigative reporter brain to look that gift-horse in the mouth.

When Ms Gillard stumbled while walking on soft lawn in India, for instance, Twitter users reacted sharply against her, "in a way that probably doesn't represent voting intentions".

Assuming that quote came from Chalmers, it pretty much buggers his thesis that Twitter users are pro-Gillard. Whether this is the exception that proves the rule or scuppers it isn't clear: Hartcher should have called Chalmers on it and used questions like that to examine whether Sentia's "study" was strong enough to support a story like this.

In the US, the conventional wisdom is that media audiences are retreating from the broad community into increasingly narrow, closed, self-selecting political worlds.

That applied until last month's election, when rightwing US media led rightwing US voters to not merely hope but expect that their preferred candidate, Mitt Romney, would be elected President. The reality is that Romney lost the election, and that rightwing people felt let down by media that pandered to their beliefs rather than informing them. Perhaps an International Editor could examine this phenomenon; you won't get this from Hartcher, nor from his supposed competitor Greg Sheridan.

Sentia found Twitter and talkback "both reflect the same overall sentiment, to varying degrees", said Mr Chalmers. "Both are reasonably sound bellwethers of public sentiment, to a greater or lesser degree."

A breathtakingly weak ending to a weak article about a weak study.

When Tim Dunlop describes the Twitter evisceration of Mark Baker's spurious article, he is neither being rightwing or leftwing. Had Baker written a similarly tendentious article against Brough or Pyne or Abbott rather than Gillard, it would have suffered the same treatment from Twitter and not been examined at all on talkback. Hartcher's and Chalmer's left-right designations just don't work, they don't apply to what is actually happening or how it is covered - but hey, Chalmers got a run and Hartcher met a deadline, and if you think that's sufficient you are part of the media's problem (which Sentia can observe but not diagnose, and which people like Hartcher will only make worse).

Here we have seen the most senior press gallery journalists simply quote and fail to examine weak and dishonest assertions. Given that:

• the Abbott-led Opposition makes weak and dishonest assertions (e.g. promising "inquiries" into issues that it can't address while opposing whatever the government does, or anything/everything it has said about Ashby-Brough-Slipper) that are not challenged by journalists; and
• dismissing criticism ("hyperventilating") that is merely quoted and noted and not pursued by journalists; we can therefore assume that
• the Australian mainstream media will not be able to cope with an Abbott government.

The mainstream media would not play any fourth-estate accountability role. In totalitarian regimes media acts as simply a repository of quotes from politicians, and this is what many see as the role of the press gallery. ABC Twitter stenographer Latika Bourke asserts that transcription is where her job begins and ends, and she is not the only press gallery denizen who feels this way. Journals of record that record unqualified bullshit are far less valuable than those employed by them can bear to accept.

An Abbott government would so discredit any remaining value proposition that the Australian media might have. If there's one thing worse than a government that (apparently) can't do anything right, it's one that (successfully!) insists on being reported at face value. An Abbott government might dismantle the NBN (but what if it doesn't? Can you guarantee that it, alone in the history of politics, will match its promises with action in full compliance - particularly when led by Tony Abbott?), and it might butter-up self-important press gallery grandees like Hartcher and Shanahan. It might not do much else. This is not enough to put to us as a worthwhile government, or even better than the incumbents.

Imagine if the Opposition had dismissed Gillard's misogyny speech as "hyperventilating". Hartcher and Shanahan would have agreed, and Chalmers' study would have supported them both - but so what?

The Australian media can't analyse itself and can't ask the hard questions of politicians. This means it is less valuable to citizens and consumers wishing to know how we are governed, who are then forced outside the mainstream media to get those answers - far beyond the reach of Hartcher, Shanahan et al, to the point where Johnny Chalmers might have to start not only buying his own lunch but eating his own dogfood. The idea that this is a bad thing, let alone a threat to our democracy, is laughable.