A vote against the media

Tony Abbott's appeal has always been a mystery to me, having first met the guy twenty years ago. Now, finally, I get it: you've seen in the media how the Labor government is treated like a circus, so vote Coalition and that will stop. There will only ever be steady-as-she-goes reporting of modest incremental contributions to the common weal, delivered by prudent and sensible ministers who are quoted verbatim and given the benefit of the doubt.

Bollocks to that.

Tony Abbott is neither prudent nor sensible. It's a myth that the Howard government was. Abbott's sense of entitlement is ferocious, more so than a thousand welfare queens or a brace of miners, kept in check only by fear of letting so many powerful people down if Labor get back in through his indiscipline. Unlike Hawke with his alcoholism, Abbott can't face the fact that his default personality - all of it, pretty much - is the problem. The Abbott family (diddly dum, click-click) is foisting him on us because otherwise he'll mope around the house with them, asking hard and weird questions about their virginity. Should he attain the trappings of office he would be, as Hillary Clinton said of her husband, a hard dog to keep on the porch.

Then there'd be the usual pantomime about The Budget Is Worse Than We Thought, which will do for all but a few of the policies that Abbott has announced over the past month. The slow media is yet to discover Christopher Pyne's dalliance with James Ashby while Mal Brough gets screwed, not to mention Arthur Sinodinos' with the Obeid family; they think they'll cover this All In Good Time, underestimating the extent to which time is against them. The Coalition doesn't have the deep reserves that enables a third of the Cabinet to fall away and keep up with the competition. The press gallery are wrong to assume they do, or that it needn't come to that.

The slow media have no right to be bored with the pantomime, it is being put on for their benefit. The latest to fall into this trap is Mark Kenny. Just because Katharine Murphy has moved on from Fairfax, there is no need for someone to act all disdainful as though they are somehow above it: I hear you, they cry, and we're sick of it too; but like some ridiculous addict he just can't leave the junk alone. They can't go off and do something else, get some perspective because, dear reader, they're not above it all really. After all those years reporting politics they can't tell which bits are false any more.

One wonders what he would he make of the current dry argument over Australia's future?

Not to mention the decline in language (and keep in mind I am posting this almost a whole day after that was posted. You can bet Fairfax have had plenty of feedback on that and other howlers, and they've ignored the lot.

But then, this is not really about Australia's future, is it?

Yes Mark, every election is about Australia's future. You might not want to report it that way, but it is. That's why, when making decisions about who to vote for, it is necessary to ignore journalists or to wade through vast volumes of bilge in order to winnow out what was said, what was done, and what little from all that might work its way through to our lives.

Unable to see forward, voters are thus left ...

Unable to see? Does he really believe, in spite of all the evidence, that press gallery journalists are indispensible to finding out how we are and shall be governed? What illumination does anyone imagine Kenny and his ilk are offering?

Mention 2010 and pungent memories flood back such as the leaks that stopped Gillard's campaign dead in its tracks in week two and lumbered us with the hung Parliament. Abbott's wooden stake through the heart of WorkChoices, via his melodramatic, "dead, buried, cremated" mantra was another big talking point.

And who can forget the bizarre "Real Julia" declaration - a more abject piece of repositioning has rarely been attempted. Of course, voters never forgot Gillard's "no carbon tax under the government I lead" pledge.

The current election campaign, however, has failed to live up to even these tawdry standards.

Note the examples Kenny gives, of campaign talking points crafted for clowns like him rather than for digestion by actual humans. As a senior journalist he had a responsibility to insist that he would never sink to such depths, but he's shirked that and blames others for his weakness.

Rubbishy unsourced yarns have blown up like summer storms.

When you've covered politics for as long as I have, you'll realise that press gallery journalists like Mark Kenny have lived on 'rubbishy unsourced yarns' for three years. He was the one who flogged Gillard-AWU long after even Abbott started looking sheepish about it. It's got to the point where you automatically assume that any report from Mark Kenny is a rubbishy unsourced yarn. This is why you smack him down when he comes over all lofty.

There was the claim that Rudd had berated a make-up artist, until it emerged that he'd done nothing of the sort. Another alleged that he'd postponed a national security committee meeting on the Syria crisis to film a celebrity TV cooking slot, until it turned out he hadn't.

If I was a journalist I'd investigate whether the Liberal Party was putting those claims about, rather than passively noting them as though they came out of thin air.

The parties themselves can hardly complain. Constrained by Labor's blood-strewn path to the poll, its recycled leader has struggled to reconcile his role as the last PM's assassin against an ill-defined promise of "a new way". Labor still has not explained what this "new way" actually entails.

Fair point, but if he did how would you know? Can you explain how the current education funding model works, and how the proposals from each of Labor and the Coalition will change the status quo? What do you mean, no? What do you even do on the bus all day Mark, play Uno with Kieran Gilbert or swap rubbishy unsourced yarns (RUYs) with cousin Chris?

On Tuesday, Rudd held a Sydney harbourside press conference to explain the plan to relocate the Garden Island naval base to Brisbane. It was already going off the rails, but running into a fuming NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell, made it a train wreck.

Quite the mixed metaphor for a shipyard. And "running into" O'Farrell? Oh, please. Do you even know how these things work? O'Farrell does, ask him.

Labor's troubled campaign has allowed Abbott to sail through with minimal pressure.

No, a dumb and lazy press gallery has done that. Fearful editors afraid that Labor will not intervene to stop new technologies that undermine their business model have given Abbott a rails run for three long years.

His gold-plated paid parental leave scheme not only makes a mockery of the claim of fiscal prudence, it reverses the precept of the modern liberal democratic state where tax rates reflect people's capacity to pay, and where the least well-off are given assistance on the basis of need.

That's all true of course. It was true three years ago too, when he first proposed it without consulting his front bench. And now he's done it again, to them and to the press gallery. Ask Mark Kenny if he can explain the PPL and why it's different to the Gillard government's scheme. Ask him why the model presumes a model of fulltime employment that is vanishing before our eyes, particularly for women - hell, ask Tony Abbott that, because Mark Kenny won't and neither will the morons who follow Abbott around and confuse themselves with journalists.

Kenny can't imagine why election campaigns can or should be different to this, but he remains convinced this kind of RUY reporting is all that you deserve. Fairfax's traditions of great journalism should be enough to force him out, but the contrast is not obvious because the organisation clearly has no pride in those traditions. People tell broadcast media vox-pops that they are tuning out from the media and making their own minds up. They tell pollsters it's pretty much 50-50 and they're disengaged, but with 3% margin of error you can textor that to a firm 52-48 without necessarily lying. There is no reason why the polls should be better than the journalism, but there is every reason why the journalism should be better than it is. All we need are different journalists.

People are voting against the media because they are not providing the information that people need to make a decision. In a democracy it is people who make the decision, not pollsters or journalists or other dingbats like them. The metrics that slow media uses to measure consumption - clickthroughs and guesstimate multiples of how many see a bought newspaper or see/hear messages pumped through the air - are deliberately shallow, treating all content as equally worthy. Politicians selling different messages have no hope with a media that takes them all at face value, striving for a mean centre which doesn't exist and hasn't for years.

If you think Stephen Conroy was mean to the media, what with Convergence and Finkelstein and his slapdash attempts to beef up the Press Council, imagine what will happen once politicians realise the media have stopped being a conduit for information and have become a bottleneck. Neil Chenoweth might be ready for Col Allan to turn, but he doesn't realise that Allan has nowhere to turn - not even to Murdoch, who will be inevitably disappointed by Allan's bullshit. Neither does Mark Kenny, nor Katharine Murphy, nor any of them really. The late Slim Dusty was wrong: there's nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear, than a pack of obtuse and banal journalists to whom even avid consumers of political content have stopped listening.

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Where's the money going to?

We could talk about this public funding of elections thing, I suppose; how it's both outrageous and at the same time just what you'd expect from those people, whether the government is responsible for a Liberal backflip, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.

We could talk about political funding as some sort of human right, where the more money you have the greater your right to donate it as you will, and that donations should be as secret as the votes that are cast. This would only be appropriate if there were well-empowered investigative and enforcement mechanisms against fraud and bribery (including serious measures against offenders such as massive fines, imprisonment of individuals, prevention of offending individuals and parties from contesting elections), and because that won't happen I don't support uncapped donations, and I don't agree that donations should be kept secret. The issue with political donations is always the quid-pro-quo, and if you're not going to chase that down then don't even bother. There are bigger questions when it comes to human rights, frankly.

It's taken as given that political parties these days need vast amounts of money, in the tens of millions, a need that cannot be slaked or even questioned. I'm interested in why political parties need that amount of money.

It can't be the broadcast media; declining audiences and financial mismanagement mean that it is less expensive, not more so, to run a national campaign.

It can't be direct mail; that technology peaked in the 1990s and the costs of postage and other processing have hardly skyrocketed since then. Hopefully the one lesson to be learned from the Howard government's re-election campaign in 2007 is that it is a very, very long way from being the be-all-and-end-all when it comes to effective political campaigning. When Grahame Morris recently used direct mail as an example of sophisticated modern electioneering he just looked like a sad old relic.

It can't be online campaigning (and here I lump broadcasting via bogusurl.com.au-type websites and social media tools in together); it costs less than you might imagine, and anyway Australians have barely embraced a fraction of the online campaigning tools available to political parties in the US or UK.

It can't be a shortage of 'creatives' to craft advertising copy; there is an excess of such people at a time where big ad agencies and broadcast media outfits are shedding staff, and where there are more graduates of such courses than there are jobs for them to do. Anyone who has been a political staffer could do, and many are doing, that sort of work. Such people earn get less than images of their flash lifestyles might suggest.

There are two reasons why political parties "need" vast amounts of money.

Firstly, they need to take up the slack for a whole lot of electioneering busywork that used to be done by volunteers. Many volunteers have left, and those who stayed are ageing and dying. I was a member of the Liberal Party from 1986 to 2000, and as the election draws closer I think about how I'd be gearing up to distribute material, and both enlist and train volunteers to hand out how-to-votes at polling booths; but as the old song says: baby that was years ago, I've left it all behind.

I think about my late aunt, a Liberal stalwart further to the right than me on Sydney's Upper North Shore; she too ran herself ragged on polling day, but by 2007 she could no longer keep up a full day in the field. I'm sure she blamed herself for Howard's loss to the end; I live in Bennelong and voted for Maxine McKew. By 2010 Aunty Elizabeth was in the grip of the ailment that would kill her later that year, notwithstanding her own almost-indomitable will and her affection for Abbott. I still voted for McKew but most of my neighbours didn't.

Now the ranks of Liberals, and Labor too, are depleted still further. The person who'll offer you a how-to-vote on 14 September may well be paid to do that, and there is no more point in blaming them for the shortcomings of their employer than there is in bawling out a waiter or a shop assistant.

Secondly, parasites like this and that are gobbling up as much money as the taxpayer will throw at them. The idea of, er, pieces like this are not about the issues described in them, but a way of hoping you won't mind him receiving ever-larger dollops of public largesse. Political parties will raise whatever money they have to raise to get the election won. Governments, which political parties offer to run for us, have to trim their budgets in line with restricted income. There are plenty of good businesses full of smart, hardworking people that have hit the wall because cashflow dried up. No major party has ever lost an election because they ran out of money. Even the hopeless NSW Labor government in 2011 had plenty of cash to splash about.

If Hawker|Textor or whomever jack up their fees, the respective party will pay it and use whatever funds are available - whether from the taxpayer, from Mrs Reinhart, Tom Waterhouse, Eddie Obeid, or anyone/anywhere else really. Public funding for elections does not satisfy major parties' urge to outraise and outspend their competition, in the same way that private schools do not lower their fees commensurately when they get extra money from government. Public funding of election campaigns is not some sort of bulwark for our democracy, because the spending is spent by and the services are rendered to a private party, a non-government organisation, whose affairs are not scrutinised by anyone who isn't a member (and not even by most of those).

Advisers/consultants are the people who suggest politicians talk about entitlements and the cutting thereof. They are not those whose entitlements are cut.

Public funding does not head off corruption. The allegations before the NSW ICAC about Ian Macdonald, Obeid and a range of other characters are very grave, and do indeed speak of the culture of NSW Labor. Apparently Obeid impressed then NSW Labor State Secretary Graham Richardson sufficiently to win a spot on the Legislative Council ticket; donations from Obeid and entities associated with him to NSW Labor around that time are hard to detect, and in any case the ICAC seemed focused on other issues.

If NSW Labor had half the public electoral that they've had, or twice as much, would they have made different/better decisions? Should NSW Labor today be liable for the actions of those guys (or of other ministers and premiers not so far investigated publicly)? Have the Victorian Liberals acted improperly over Mr Shaw sufficient to affect their public funding? What about Mr Brough and other LNPQers over Ashby-Slipper? I could go on.

Needless to say, I reject the desperate thesis of Mike Seccombe and John Birmingham that only public funding can save us from the kind of timocracy besetting the US. It's the mentality of the hostage-taker's victim - "Just give them whatever they want!" - rather than focusing on hunting down the hostage-takers. The victory of Obama over Romney last year, with a concerted campaign of exposing people like Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers confirms the correctness of focusing on those who would corrupt the system and on not entrenching political advisers as a mendicant class.

No Digger, no sailor or airman, died for the public funding of election campaigns. That money would definitely be better spent on their care and rehabilitation, or even tossed into the gaping maw of the Deficit.

If you want to change government policy, there are ways and means of doing so. It is rarely appropriate to break the law to do so, such as committing acts of violence or jacking up on paying your taxes. Everyone's taxes goes toward things that the taxpayer wouldn't necessarily have spent that money on or even valued very much, but even so I am kind of serious about my intention to collect all the banal political jetsam that comes my way and send it to my accountant with the expectation of a tax deduction.

The government should reintroduce all of those provisions on transparency and disclosure as the final piece of legislation this term, making parliament sit longer in order to pass it if it has to. It probably won't, though.

The case why taxpayers should have to fund election campaigns as well as the elections themselves and other government services is not as strong as that small and loose confederation of the self-interested and the well-meaning-but-shortsighted might hope.

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The aroma of decay

Two disgracefully beef-witted articles by experienced journalists about their 'profession' almost but did not quite succeed in detracting me from completing articles and other activities.

The first one was Sweet Barrie Cassidy, showing us how journalists no longer pride themselves on their resistance to bullshit but the sheer quantity of it that they swallow:

The Coalition's strategy reminds Barrie Cassidy of the campaign that brought David Cameron to power in Britain.

Thanks to Nick Davies from The Guardian and the Leveson Inquiry, we know that the British media, and its relationship with that country's political and law-enforcement systems, was essentially corrupt. The Cameron government came to office as a result of a corrupt politico-media strategy, in a corrupt politico-media environment. Cassidy is pretty much alleging the same is true of the Australian media today.

When David Cameron became leader of the British Conservatives in December 2005, he set about almost immediately creating a sense of inevitability: he was the prime minister in waiting and Labour’s days were numbered.

Fraser Nelson, writing for the Spectator in June 2006, quoted a senior Conservative policy maker who said the game plan was to create a "Cameronian aroma" which was "vastly more important than any specific policies the party would advocate."

Nelson wrote: "The task (according to the policy maker) is to create an aroma around the Conservatives so people naturally imagine our policies are the right ones without necessarily knowing what they are. It is about turning the intangibility of Mr Cameron into an asset.

When Tony Abbott became leader of the Australian conservatives in 2009, he set about almost immediately creating a sense that the Rudd government faffed around and backed down all the time, which it had done and continued to do. He continued this long after the Gillard government outflanked him in negotiations after 2010, and outflanked him again and again on key legislation since. As a conservative, Abbott cannot pick the difference between a passing fad and a structural shift, and neither can Sweet Barrie or the press gallery.

Abbott is not intangible. He was a high-profile figure in the previous conservative government. Cameron had been a press secretary, not an MP or a minister, under the Thatcher and Major governments. The only people who like Abbott are people who don't know him very well, and the few who are no better than he is, clearly including Sweet Barrie.

... the notion that Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey are somehow being unfair by not spelling out chapter and verse the Coalition's economic strategy until the last couple of weeks of the election campaign.

They will not because ... they don't have to.

But they do have to - if for no other reason to give journalists some self-respect.

So unfair of us to expect politicians to tell us how they will govern us. So unfair of us to expect journalists to go through the undignified work of finding out. Waiting until the last minute didn't work last time and it didn't work the time before, either.

The electorate already regards their policies as superior to the Government's without even knowing what they are. They base that judgment on the "aroma", the sense that the Coalition is simply better at economic management than Labor.

No, they give the Coalition the benefit of the doubt, because a) the government has been relentlessly bagged at every turn and b) the Coalition hasn't been scrutinised as an alternative government. The broadcast media in general and the press gallery in particular are responsible for that. The only "aroma" here is one of decay on their part.

There will be considerable cynicism with that approach all the way through until September, and no doubt some uncomfortable truths expressed when the policy is finally released. But those truths will need to be exceptionally uncomfortable – and vividly transparent – if the entrenched views of the Government's competency, or lack of it, is going to be reversed.

Abbott's whole approach has been to pretend that economic and political realities are different to the way they are. The quibbling over the accuracy and validity of budget figures are a sign of that. The government has not been able to pretend things are different to the way they are, and has faced up to reality. The broadcast media, Sweet Barrie included, are endorsing the non-reality based approach.

In his speech, Abbott promised to keep the tax cuts and the pension increases linked to the carbon tax, and to delay the increase in super contributions.

He also kept open the option of keeping all of the Government's tax increases and spending cuts "to deal with the budget emergency".

But apart from that, it was essentially a political speech, big on a critique of the Government and short on alternatives.

Tony Abbott has a record of saying things he doesn't really mean in order to get elected, and then doing things other than what he'd said once in office. The idea that any politician can cut taxes and increase spending at a time of economic uncertainty, while criticising others for being economically irresponsible, is bullshit. Sweet Barrie and the gang have a responsibility to call out the opposition on that, a responsibility they have shirked.

First, the Coalition put out the two policies ahead of the budget that were never going to be well received: a timid industrial relations document that disappointed their traditional constituency and a far from convincing National Broadband Network alternative.

Labor Party research has found the Coalition's NBN policy is close to the disaster that social media feedback suggested it was.

Not only do two-thirds of Australians have some knowledge of the policy, but by two-to-one, they prefer the Government's approach ...

But it was quickly accepted by business that Abbott and his colleagues would be pushed no further on workplace reform, at least not now.

In both cases, it is fair to accept that the Coalition will act differently on those policy areas than their words suggest. Harsh realities like the unsustainability of the copper networks and the link between productivity and the workplace relations system, and the focus on those realities, did for those policies.

Note also Cassidy's old-media harrumph about the link between social media opinion and poll findings. Liberal Party research almost certainly shows the same thing, but because it is not self-serving they will not share it with Sweet Barrie nor anyone else. Sometimes it's best to examine events in real time rather than wait around for someone to spin you out some pollshit.

The reason why business is not condemning the Coalition's stated workplace relations policy is because they know there is no relationship between that and what the Coalition would actually do. Real journalists would have smoked that out, but not Sweet Barrie or the press gallery.

The second stage of the strategy will see the Coalition incrementally release as many "good news" policy initiatives that it can muster in the period between now and the release of the pre-election update in mid-August.

All of them will be based upon unrealistic economic assumptions, not the least of which is the imperative to cut the budget for its own sake. It's one thing for different parties to offer competing policies based on an understanding of where the country is at, but it's another thing for one party to both refuse to face reality and insist that it is still in the game. The Coalition still think the electorate are greedy bastards who just want cash shovelled at them/us, and the results of the last two elections don't support that; the one thing Kevin Rudd got right was to call Howard on his cash-splashes, after which one of the most deft politicians of our time ran out of options. Neither the Coalition nor the media (including Sweet Barrie) have any excuse for not having learned that lesson.

Enough to create interest and hold at bay those demanding more detail.

Interest is conditional upon detail. The less detail, the less credibility and the less interest. The term for high-interest-low-detail is hype.

The third and final stage is the tricky bit - the release of the "bad news" along with the funding detail, which last time around proved to be so ropy.

On that score, a party with a big lead in the opinion polls has the luxury of assuming it will come too late to make very much difference.

Just like Beazley in 2001, I suppose. Ropey policies before the budget, ropey policies after the budget, and ropey, dopey, slippery-slopey policies after the PEFO - and they're still going to cruise to victory apparently - if Sweet Barrie and the aromatic press gallery have anything to do with it. So much for this old stager insisting that the press would get around to scrutinising Abbott in their own sweet time.

The Government will howl long and hard about [the press falling into line with Coalition strategy]. The tactic will frustrate many people who want to make a considered judgment on the two policy prescriptions. But that's how it will happen this time and next, no matter who is in government and who is in opposition.

It will only happen next time if the Coalition is vindicated this time. If the Coalition is not vindicated then the way Australian journalism is practiced will have to change. The idea that the press gallery can survive regardless of the election outcome is manifestly false, another example of journos kidding themselves to the endangerment of their careers.

Fraser Nelson in that Spectator article suggested the British general election in 2010 would be about the Cameron fragrance versus the five-year plans of the government.

And as Britain enters recession for the third time under the incumbents, it is clear that the politicians and the press sold them an absolute dog of a government, one that had no policies that were appropriate or even credible in terms of the economic and political circumstances facing that country. The same prospect faces us today, and the journosphere is doing nothing to avert the political and economic - and yes, media - disaster that befalls the UK today.

Make that the 10-year plans of the Gillard Government and you get the picture here.

No Barrie. The Cameron fragrance has dispersed, and so too have the plans of the previous government. The UK is left in a political wasteland. If Abbott wins Australia will have a government that has no clue and a Labor opposition unsure of what lessons the electorate was trying to teach it - but hey, the press gallery will stumble and bumble along, attempting to assure us that not only does Abbott's shit not stink but that it is positively fragrant (and who knows more about Abbott's shit than the press gallery?).

The only reason to watch Cassidy's show Insiders is for the old-school interviewing. Cassidy might be the last consistently good interviewer in Australian political journalism (quibble with that if you will, but name me better - everyone else has abandoned the field). The flick-through of cartoons and photos is also very good and deserves more space. Just as The Simpsons outgrew The Tracey Ullman Show, let's hope Talking Pictures keeps going long after Insiders has gone. The other three-quarters of the show, inane jabbering about spin, is a complete waste of time and resources.

That lack of reflection by the media about their own role is also present in this piece on a site much lauded by the broadcast media for its skill in colonising new media with the values of the old. It's all very well as an introductory piece on how to get media attention for people who've never done it before. It's bullshit when addressed to the current government - as if there is any way of opening the closed, small and inflexible minds of the press gallery.

Julia Gillard came to office without the help of the press gallery, only the second PM to do so in the past 50 years. If she wins re-election she will have no reason at all to thank the media, or to change the way she deals with them going forward. Rizvi makes the same mistake that Sweet Barrie makes, assuming that the press gallery is as permanent a feature of the Canberra landscape as Lake Burley Griffin.

Be in no doubt that the careers of every political journalist in Canberra, and beyond, is in play right now. Their die is cast, and even if Abbott were to win it would only prolong the inevitable. There is no market for obtuse journalism, no desire to hear from Kool-Aid drinkers like Jamila Rizvi and Sweet Barrie Cassidy - let alone drink the regurgitated stuff as they would have us do.

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The ambulance at the bottom of the cliff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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Honour and good sense

Never give in, never give in; never, never, never, never. In nothing - great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

- Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, to Harrow School, 1941

Once again, misbehaviour at Sydney University's colleges has hit the news in Sydney, and thus been inflicted on the nation; this time at St John's College. There is, however, something different about the treatment of this issue. The way we look at such antics is different. These places claim to be helping raise the future leaders of our society, and because the society is different then the nature of leadership taught at and by places like St John's has to change.

The ideas behind "initiation ceremonies" at university colleges are as follows:

• Look, we're all corrupt. Just because you're sweet 16 and never been kissed, doesn't mean we all are. We won't be looked down upon by pure little swots when we're in our cups, so when you're covered in vomit and faeces you're no better than us.
• If you see anything wrong, shut up. Just shut up.
• You will exert power over others as a matter of course, and you will be able to pass on the humiliations of this day.
• Conventional morality is something you inflict on others (e.g. calling women 'whores'), not something you have to practice yourself, and if you play along we'll all stick together so that you don't wear any consequences.

None of those notions are relevant to any sort of leadership today. There are consequences from misjudgments and misbehaviour, and they have an importance that goes beyond mere solidarity or the keeping-up of appearances in which nobody believes any more. If you're a pig in the company of your besties then you're easily led astray, and will be no good to anyone as a team member, let alone as a leader.

Peter FitzSimons illustrates the leadership problem, however unwittingly, with this. He starts out by owning his Fellow Senate thing but ends with a particularly feeble bleat:

Not surprisingly, the worst of the excesses over the years have come from the all-male colleges, as the cocktail of undiluted testosterone mixed with too much alcohol and sudden liberation from school discipline has long been a fraught one.

These places are not mere dormitories as is the case on many American campuses, but wonderfully independent institutions with long histories and great traditions that have produced wonderful citizens who have made great contributions.

They have the capacity to change their own cultures, as we have seen with St Andrew's, particularly, and are now seeing with St John's. They will go on. And prosper. Independently.

"Independently" of what, Peter? Independently of whom? If the University can claim credit for colleges' successes it must also accept blame for the failures, and the legalistic duckshoving that allows the University to claim credit but escape blame is to be scorned. The Vice-Chancellor of the University resents the fact that his institution is being tarnished but there's not a damn thing he can do, so don't you make a show of owning the problem and then cheering your "independence" of it.

Why are those who have supposedly made "great contributions" unable to provide positive leadership to people with names like Benedict Aungles, who may not even survive beyond the rigidly hierarchical institutions like those described by Dickens or J. K. Rowling. You can't hush things up and shut down debate in today's world, and nor can you wait for these things to blow over like they might have in the past.

You just can't, and everybody who says otherwise - however eminent they may seem - is misleading you. They need a new operating model and there is nobody leading them toward what such a model might look like - not even Cardinal Pell:

FIVE Catholic priests quit the council of the elite St John's College last night as the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, and the Premier, Barry O'Farrell, voiced their disgust over the initiation ritual scandal ...

Cardinal Pell said he no longer had confidence that the council was able to fix the problems within the elite college at the university.

The mass resignation of the five priests from the 18-person council has left it powerless to continue to govern. Cardinal Pell called on the government to change the laws governing St John's in a move that could mean the church cedes sole control of the 150-year-old institution.

"Unfortunately, I no longer have confidence in the capacity of the council of St John's College to reform life at the college, despite their goodwill and the dedication of the chairman," he said. "I have therefore requested the priest Fellows of the council to resign."

"Unfortunately" is not the word to use here. This predicament isn't one of fortune, but of neglect.

Pell has the power to order the priests to resign, as the article should have made clear. He clearly has no call or suasion over the other members - none of whom were good enough to provide the sort of leadership that might have saved Georgie Carter from the assumption that those within the walls of the College were smarter than those without. Only later in that badly-edited article do we see that the council cannot operate without at least one priest (and a fat lot of good it did with six of them). Once again, for all their wittering about secularism, it falls to government to bail out a church institution.

The clearest MSM assessment of the current controversy, with its antecedents, is Johnsman Richard Ackland. Ackland** talked about the venerable institution he went to and the desire to fit in, and ends his piece with this:

At St John's the main concern of some of the fellows was the reputation of the young men who had conducted the horrible initiation ceremonies. Not the women who were the victims of their actions.

None of the male students have been rusticated because that might damage their reputations. They should be free to go on to higher things where as leaders they can bring their "values" unimpeded into board rooms, the professions and politics.

It isn't only women who are the victims here. As for "values", nobody seriously believes we are going to see a listed board or a Cabinet full of chundering dickheads yelling abuse at passing women. Ackland is right, however, in indicating that such "values" do not facilitate leadership but actually impede it.

All institutions require sound leadership, and even seemingly robust ones will fail without it. Leadership involves knowing when to introduce new ideas and when to rely on the tried-and-true; knowing what parts of Tradition are useful going forward and which have had their day. What the socialisation of somewhere like St John's does is remove the ability to tell the difference.

The people on the St John's College board are eminent people in their own ways, steeped in the symbolism of the Lord and the Queen and the Pope and all they represent. The fact that they are fighting tooth and nail for a set of pranks that are at best silly and repulsive and at worst deadly. They cannot tell what these traditions are upholding. They think that any weakening of any tradition, however redundant or counterproductive, is a victory for the Secularists and Feminists and Socialists and other sub-species of Barbarian.

Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey are both Johnsmen. Some believe that they are the next Prime Minister and Treasurer of this country. Neither is particularly good at identifying problems when they occur and taking action before they become bigger problems. Both have a fixation on hushing things up which they don't want to be made known. This attitude has become so pervasive that a non-Johnsman like Michelle Grattan shares their conviction that the leak is the big story, while the fact that the Coalition lack ability in economic management or policy direction is somehow beside the point.

Hockey can be forgiven for brushing off student pranks. Neither he nor Bill Shorten can, however, be forgiven for brushing off the much broader and more damaging issue of clerical sexual abuse as they do here. Hockey's record of action (rather than impotent if well-meant sympathy) on behalf of victims of clerical child abuse is not strong enough to sustain a claim that he's only trying to protect the victims.

As for Shorten: imagine if Daniel Grollo was harbouring a nest of pedophiles*, and see if your mealy-mouthed bullshit would be any different.

In recent years we have seen apologies for church-government co-operative policies to take children from their mothers. We have acknowledged such policies as misguided and the perpetuation of such policies as failures of leadership (and when I talk about "we" here, I refer you to set-piece speeches on the record by both Hockey and Shorten. Oh, and Abbott too. Our representatives). Clerical child abuse is another example of this phenomenon, yet Hockey and Shorten and others raised to occupy leadership positions take no action to head off such widespread systemic failure and poo-pooh any attempts to do so.

If that's what it takes, then go drink a bucket of off-milk and dog-food boys, get over yourselves, and show us some leadership.

It is telling that there is a very strong push for people to join corporate boards and judicial placements who would never have set foot in an animal house like that - women, people who speak Asian languages, people with an understanding of the arts - anyone but your bog-standard Johnsman-like output who has been raised to assume that positions of leadership are his thing.

The last word goes to, of all people, the well-meaning and much-undermined Rector of St John's College, Mr Michael Bongers:

Mr Bongers plans to keep confronting the old ways at John's. "There is a wonderful learning experience in this for everyone. But it's not just the whole student community. It's beyond that: the old boy network."

He is not intent on banning every tradition. "They must pass the test of commonsense, of decency, of the laws of the land. You've got to show you are respecting people and that you are respecting property and respecting the reputation of this college."

In other words, it's a question of leadership. Knowing which traditions enhance institutions and which disgrace them. It's a paradox that institutions that traditionally provide our leaders have to change fundamentally in order to continue doing so, but hopefully we can get some leaders who can manage the transition. Michael Bongers has shown more leadership than pretty much every living Johnsman, and this lesson in leadership should be recognised as more than just another journo-led kerfuffle bound to blow over eventually.

* This is a hypothetical example, I make no assertion to this effect.

** Update 10/11/12: I apologise to Richard Ackland for the slander of calling him a Johnsman and thank the commenters below for pointing out my error.

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Who robbed Ken Ticehurst?

Ken Ticehurst feels robbed of a job and of a lifetime parliamentary pension, and apparently he blames Craig Thomson. If I was Ticehurst I'd be looking a little closer to home.

I hold no brief for Thomson. It was always bogus that he should just waltz in from Melbourne and take a seat in a complex and fast-evolving area with which he had no connection, but people voted for him. It was interesting that the committees in which he got involved did not relate at all to the sorts of issues that his former union purports to cover. There is no trace at all of the current Labor government doing anything for health services workers specifically, compared with manufacturing workers or other workers whose union-Labor connections can be demonstrated to have borne fruit. It isn't credible that an organisation should put him through hell and then give him a leg-up into a job where he could exert power over his tormentors. All that stuff about "I don't recall" or signing off expense approvals in his sleep does not indicate innocence but an absence of care and focus that makes him unfit for any purpose at all.

LIBERAL MP Ken Ticehurst, who lost the seat of Dobell in 2007 to Labor's Craig Thomson, plans to sue Mr Thomson for lost earnings, claiming he was robbed of his seat, costing him a lifetime parliamentary pension of $85,000 a year.

First of all, it's inaccurate to call Ticehurst a "Liberal MP" when he hasn't been one for some time. Peter Costello was an MP more recently than Ticehurst was, but nobody refers to him as though he were a sitting MP.

Secondly, Ticehurst's assumptions are worth considering here:

• In the 2007 election, many Liberal MPs lost their seats. Had Labor selected another candidate than Thomson it is entirely possible that candidate would have beaten Ticehurst. It's one thing for bloggers, journalists or others to play psephological what-if; but I don't want courts to second-guess how people might or might not have voted. The people are sovereign in Australian politics because they vote on the composition of parliament, which forms legislation that is interpreted by the courts. If the courts start second-guessing the franchise, the whole separation of powers has to be rethought.
• Being a Member of Parliament can be compared to a fixed-term employment contract between elections. It cannot be regarded as other jobs for the purposes of wrongful dismissal, or lack of consideration in not having his contract renewed. Is he entitled to sue anyone who didn't vote for him?
• Is Ken Ticehurst entitled to be a Member of Parliament just because he had been one in the past?
• If Ticehurst had been re-elected in 2007, he would have become eligible for a parliamentary pension in 2008. Should voters - or judges - be expected to vote Ken a pension, regardless of other considerations of people for their representatives?

More interesting though is this quote:

Mr Ticehurst said then treasurer Peter Costello's office had informed him of allegations about Mr Thomson, including his use of prostitutes, before the 2007 election. "If we knew, Labor must have known," Mr Ticehurst said.

If you knew, it was in your interest to do something about it at the time. There is nothing in what Fair Work Australia uncovered that any half-decent journalist could have produced; an injunction could have been procured to disqualify Thomson as a candidate or force a byelection.

He said David Gazard, then a political adviser to Mr Costello, showed him a file containing allegations against Mr Thomson.

There are two possibilities here:

• Ticehurst is wrong and Gazard would never have done something like that. If so, what does it benefit Ticehurst to bag Gazard like that?
• Ticehurst is right and Gazard held out to him the information that might have saved his political career. Why didn't the NSW Liberals run the campaign against Thomson? Why wasn't a journalist set up with this information on deep background? If those running the NSW Liberals had the ability to save a seat, and failed to so, does this reflect on the competence and prudence of those charged with winning the seats that will lift the Coalition into office?

I have no idea whether Ticehurst is or isn't accurate about Gazard. What is interesting is that Gazard has not been subject to the scrutiny that forced one of Julia Gillard's former press secretaries out of his job earlier this very year.

Mr Gazard said he did not recall specific allegations from that time.

Why on earth people think they're being clever or even adequate with a statement like that is unclear. Abbott and Pyne have rendered "no specific knowledge" a national punchline. Gazard is an experienced and highly-regarded Liberal staffer-consultant in Canberra, despite his disastrous foray into practical politics (he was Liberal candidate for Eden-Monaro in 2010, a seat regarded as an indicator of the national result; it swung hard to Labor as very few other seats did. The Liberals have preselected a candidate for 2013 who's very much like Gazard). For all that, Gazard is more highly regarded in politics than two-time winner Ken Ticehurst, and nobody in the media other than a state politics reporter have even questioned Gazard on this (never mind turning up the heat on the guy; what other dirt does Gazard have on Labor figures?).

Mr Ticehurst, who still lives in Dobell, said he would seek legal advice. "There could be a case and I think it's worth pursuing. If he gets charged with anything, which seems inevitable now, I will be taking action."

There have been a plethora of threatened lawsuits used to pressure people into silence - Chris Mitchell and Julie Posetti, Melinda Tankard Reist and Jennifer Wilson, George Pell and Catherine Deveny - without taking the financial and reputational risk of testing their claims against the law of the land. It is tempting to lump Ticehurst's proposal in with this same gutless bunch. In any case, a lawsuit is commenced with a writ, not a press release.

Ticehurst could have deep-sixed Thomson himself, but he chose not to. If he is right about then-staffers of the Liberal Party (including Gazard), then they have squibbed the chance to retain a seat that they could ill-afford to lose at any of the last two elections.

Until recently, Abbott's office was accused of managing media too tightly. They may think they're being clever in refracting their message off dead satellites like Ken Ticehurst, but all that's happening is that they're losing control over the narrative. An old chancer having one last pitch for his pension is just another complicating factor in what should be a simple bad-news story for Labor, playing the same role that James Ashby is to Slipper. Factor in Kroger-Costello on top of that and the unravelling is at hand; the Coalition never understood why it lost in 2007 or 2010 and thinks that anything that denied it can only be illegitimate. Any action Ken Ticehurst may take against Thomson will draw publicity and attention away from the Liberal candidate for Dobell. The Coalition isn't ready for government at the next election, and Dobell is just another example why they will botch it between now and election day.

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News of the Screwed

Power - pop!

Read about the things that happen throughout the world
Don't believe in everything you see or hear
The neighbours talk day in day out about the goings on
They tell us what they want - they don't give an inch

Look at the pictures taken by the cameras they cannot lie
The truth is in what you see - not what you read
Little men tapping things out - points of view
Remember their views are not the gospel truth

Don't believe it all
Find out for yourself
Check before you spread
News of the world

Never doubt
Never ask
Never moan
Never search
Never find
Never know

Each morning our key to the world comes through the door
More than often its just a comic, not much more
Don't take it too serious - not many do
Read between the lines and you'll find the truth

Read all about it, read all about it - news of the world, news of the world
Read all about it, read all about it, read all about it - news of the world

- The Jam News of the World

Culture warriors of the right should be made of sterner stuff than to complain that lefties are onto them over the British News Ltd privacy invasion scandal. No conservative case can be made for the invasion of privacy perpetrated by News of the World and its sty-mates: it lived in the gutter and it died there.

Defenders of News of the World claimed that its antics were indispensible because one day it might uncover a real story one day, and it would need to draw on some great reservoir of profit and public goodwill to get through. Well, it had 168 years and the most it could come up with were:

• A footballer having sex with women to whom he was not married;
• Inside accounts of brothels for the benefit of those lacking the guts to go there themselves, and lacking any empathy for those who work in such places;
• Medical details for a very ill infant whose father happened to be a prominent politician;
• Tittle-tattle generally; and
• That's about it really.

Those are the sorts of things that defenders of News of the World call "the big stories". They're not big stories; they are very, very petty indeed. Real conservatives rail against these things being aired in the public domain, and despair that such nonsense drives out informing, edifying and inspiring news that almost all hacks can't be bothered finding, let alone writing about. This would explain why public support for that newspaper has collapsed so quickly. It reminded me of the way Gatsby's social whirl collapses after the dead girl is found on his premises: one minute he's the King of West Egg and has Daisy within reach, the next minute he's a pariah.

If a government of a democratic-capitalist country set out to ban an investigative media outlet, or something genuinely popular, there would be public outcry and politicians would either back down or relent to some extent. News of the World was one of the biggest-selling newspapers in the western world, yet its only defence comes from those who worked were employed there. Let us have no more of this hypocrisy - I'll get to Christopher Hitchens shortly - that the closure of a factory or a shop is just another story but the closure of a newspaper is somehow a particularly poignant disaster.

I won't blame Hitchens for the headline in his piece but it is indicative of a contempt for readers found in the journosphere. Animals lap things up. No good journalism ever comes from those who mock the meat on which they feed, or who mock those who consume their output.

The reality of the scandals coming out of the Murdoch UK operation is clearly too noisome for one who has so long relied on it for sustenance. Were any other corporation in any other industry to be found to be some ethically retarded as News International, Christopher Hitchens would be first among those to call for it to be shut down. Instead, Hitchens seeks sanctuary in literature.

First, the sad news of human frailty was not bugled with lurid and sensational tactics. It was laid out more in sorrow than in anger, published on a Sabbath day that was still full of legal and moral force, and strove to show how easy was the fall from grace. Second, and in keeping, its reporters and editors took a very high moral tone. They would take the investigation of a brothel, say, only so far.

Once a certain point of complicity had been reached, there would appear a phrase that became celebrated both in print and in court. "At this stage," the reporter would solemnly intone, "I made an excuse and left."

This degree of detachment was thought essential to the proper conduct of business.

Hand it to Rupert Murdoch and his minions: They got hold of the solid old "News of the Screws" or "Nudes of the World" and made it into a paper where the question was not how low can human nature sink, but rather is there anything, however depraved, a reporter cannot be induced to do?

That depravity meant that it had nowhere to go when the public turned against them. The speed with which it was shut down showed the degree to which people were played for suckers: let to run, then reeled in, as editorial whim required.

Hitchens then flees back into literature, only to lunge out at his readers: "Yes, dear reader, you are a hypocrite, too". Even when I was in London I never bought a copy, I never read its website, so he clearly can't include me. When I hear or see the kind of thing that was its stock in trade I feel no surprise, and I doubt there is much correlation between its advertisements and my consumption habits. Can you imagine Sebastian Flyte or George Orwell accepting an invitation to a focus group for News of the World? It was always big on hypocrisy, but it lacked (and its former employee Hitchens is still lacking) both self-awareness and any real engagement with its audience necessary to assess its readership and meet their needs.

Then, he tries his hand at populism, having seen the master at work:

When reporters speak so easily of the great influence exerted on politicians by Murdoch's papers, what they really mean is by Murdoch's readers. His only real knack lies in knowing what they want.

This assumes, falsely, a link between the meeting of said wants and the ability to mobilise readers to meet the interests of the proprietor. News of the World should have been wound down slowly, were it truly an instrument of great power, not snuffed out like a candle once the electric lights were switched on.

The most neglected aspect of the entire imbroglio is this. Most of the allegations of shady practice against the Murdoch octopus have come from another newspaper.

True enough: one of the last newspapers that engages in investigative journalism, The Guardian, has the credibility to rally the public in a way that News of the World never could (and before you think this is some sort of paean to the left, consider that the UK Telegraph has an equivalent reputation for its stories on parliamentary expenses and articles like this).

Over the same period, Rusbridger and The Guardian formed the London end of the media consortium that tried to impose some element of sorting and priority on the mess that WikiLeaks had become.

Here Hitchens lapses back into piffle.

The journalists at the UK Telegraph had the good sense and humility to put all their documentation online and trust readers to help them build the story. Issues requiring detailed knowledge of accounting practice and the rules of claimable expenses was entrusted to informed and engaged readers, and they came through: this is twentyfirst century journalism at its most promising. By contrast, those at the Guardian, The New York Times and Australia's Fairfax are engaged in old-school gatekeeper journalism where lawyers and ad-sales dollies will decide what stories see the light of day, and journalists will simply transcribe them rather than explain. Journalists had nothing to do with Wikileaks: all the data simply fell into their laps, and much of the way they report it shows an insistence on presenting stories as tittle-tattle: what politician A said about politician B, etc.

... a lot hangs on the outcome of the battle between the Murdochian and Guardian world views.

Indeed it does, but not for the dialectical reasons Hitchens might imagine.

Firstly, illegal intrusions into privacy will continue. The knee-jerk response to September 11 has normalised intrusions of that sort. Government agencies do it but they offer the impression of security, far more defensible than insubstantial tittle-tattle. Big companies breach their customers' privacy inadvertently, as happened to Sony recently, and they look like idiots - but News' sins are those of commission, not omission.

Murdoch attempted to hide behind the public that had sustained him, that he felt egged him on in pursuit of tittle-tattle (a bit like some pathetic rapist you'd read about in a Murdoch tabloid, repeatedly bleating "she wanted it" in the face of all evidence going against him). When he elevated titillation to a right on par with accountable government, when he lost perspective on his prurient content, the public that had long indulged him simply abandoned him. Something similar happens to politicians: they can wear enormous popularity like armour, but when it falls away they are left with the deals and the compromises they made in their pomp, when they were riding high and everything they did or said was always "canny".

Secondly, in Australia and elsewhere the exposure of activities of this sort is most likely not from other journalists, but from IT professionals who can play all the games that Murdoch's people did but better, and with the sense and skill to expose them in a way that gives people some understanding of what is going on. Imagine trying to explain to Australian journalists about mobile phone security settings or accessing medical files remotely ("yeah, but did you read what Bolt said about Swanny? I'm trying to get a right of reply. It's the story of the day - everyone's running with it, it's a highly competitive media market you know").

The failure of bad journalism will not necessarily create more space for good. What is most likely is that editors will stuff the vacant space with dull stuff. It is more than possible that some good journalism will suffer collateral damage in all this. What this means is a distancing of journalism from politics: hopefully it will mean a greater appreciation that public and corporate policy includes decisions that aren't made by executive government.

The only journalism that will survive will not be insider goss but robustly independent investigation that knows source documents when it sees them, and how to fit it with a wider story. No amount of shrieking about "proper media outlets" will arrest this, and the shriekers probably know it (though it's hard to be sure without hacking their phones - yes, your colleagues overseas should have considered you Caroline before dragging the whole outfit through the gutter). The celebration of human frailty to which News of the World has no future: on TMZ amateurs will freely film, say, Lindsay Lohan's slow-motion suicide more graphically and pitilessly than Murdoch's complacent apparatus ever could describe it. Political insider journalism, where "favourable coverage" simply jars with a badly-served public, has no value and no future.

In Australia Murdoch owns 70% of the newspapers, yet if they had any clout at all John Howard would still be Prime Minister. In the US, Murdoch has invested billions in rightwing politics - not only in Fox, but in the vast exercise in astroturfing known as the Tea Party. Murdoch has hired almost all viable Republican candidates for President - and yet the most viable, popular and credible is the candidate who needs him least, Mitt Romney. In the UK Murdoch turning on a government followed public opinion rather than having led it.

Non-Murdoch journalism is starting, here and there, to light out for the territories of what people today need from journalism. In areas other than politics and science (IT, say), areas far from micromanaged editorial scrutiny, there are aberrant and occasional pockets of suitability in News Ltd output. The insecurity of the political class - and not just in the UK - in thrall to moguls as a substitute for a lack of community engagement is well made by The Piping Shrike. The lack of any substantial and lasting engagement by traditional media and politics with the public is ultimately their problem, not ours.

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Dickhead removal strategy

The Australian Defence Force is one of this country's most admired organisations. It lies at the heart of our national self-image, it is one of our largest employers, and unlike a lot of organisations it provides a real method for young people from relatively poor backgrounds to secure ongoing employment and skill development, to find meaning in and through their work, and to attain a degree of social mobility that is not as available in Australia today as we might hope.

There is a positive pattern at work in the ADF. Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG is every bit cut from the same cloth as, say, Ted Sheean or Sir Neville Howes VC. Actions like those of Roberts-Smith, and recognition of those actions, reinforces the high esteem in which the ADF is held. The positive bias toward the ADF is such that we seem immune from sinking to the low place where we found ourselves during the 1970s, where Vietnam veterans were social outcasts and were excluded from the recognition and adulation given to other veterans.

There is also a negative pattern. If you accept that Corporal Roberts-Smith is a product of training and tradition then the same is also true of the grubs who perpetrate and cover up for sleazy and criminal incidents.

The odd negative incident won't damage the high esteem in which the Australian Defence Force is held: but a pattern of incidents over many, many years will.

The Australian Defence Force defends Australia, and in Australia women aren't tokens, they aren't barely tolerated; women are centrally important members of the community. The ADF isn't some sort of sheltered workshop for Guys Who Want To Only Want To Be With Guys But Not In A Queer Way. If you can't handle women, you're going to be crap on the battlefield. That's why you punt these guys; not because it's PC, but because military necessity demands it. During times of war you bring your best people to the fore and weed out time-servers and game-players, so start with the sorry little wankers who pick on females.

If someone behaves like a dickhead behind the lines, chances are they'll be a dickhead when it really counts. As that commenter in the Oz said, if you're going to videotape a woman who's been fooled into having sex with you, why would I want you watching my back? You're probably setting up a videocam to film my head getting blown off rather than looking out for your mates. Punt these dickheads now.

If you're going to cut the Defence budget, don't skimp on supporting those dodging bullets in Afghanistan. Don't cut that submarine/tank/plane. Undergo dickhead removal and you'll save a motza and boost this country's defences at the same time. I thought Peter Reith was going to do this, but in Children Overboard he showed that he's more problem than solution. The DRS worked best with his departure.

Smith and Clare have really stuck their necks out by getting involved in disciplinary issues - they'll either succeed greatly or fail greatly, and though the odds are on the latter (not only in terms of this government, but all governments) it will be fascinating to watch.

By contrast, hasn't Minchin made a right clown of himself? The commandant of ADFA bent over backwards to help his son so he thinks they're Christmas. In environmental debates Minchin shows himself to be someone who surrounds himself with people who only tells him what he wants to hear - much like the worst military officers. It is best that this man should be departing, better yet if it were sooner.

It's one thing to fulminate about leaving military justice to the military, but that works only if you can trust them - which you can't. The crowd who advises you that rustbuckets are ready to go, that a small bunch of wankers deserves the benefit of the doubt, can't expect a politician to stand between them and the public who pays for them. The military brass have always taken their chances in taking on politicians - military officers are highly regarded, politicians aren't, who are you going to believe? - but there is such a pattern where military justice is a contradiction in terms that a canny politician just might land a few blows.

Note that the Governor-General hasn't spoken yet. Consider her background, then consider that she's the Commander-in-Chief, she ranks above Air Marshal Houston - and note that she hasn't spoken yet. I doubt that she's too busy arranging flowers or whatever to take careful notice of these developments.

We deserve a better military than this. Given that we look up to our military and at the same time recognise them as us at our best, then we'd be a better country if we had better people to look up to. Let us have more of the courageous Angus Houston, of truth-to-power in 2001 and the no less dexterous chopper pilot of 1979, rather than the weary figure today who must announce another death, another disgrace, another disappointment. What comes next? Dare we hope for better, and what would it look like?

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Test of character

Over the past few days we have seen Tony Abbott's character tested, and found wanting. He has cemented his reputation as one insensitive to the suffering of others, and of being unable to build any longterm policy agenda (one extending beyond the next episode of Insiders). It really is time to give up on the guy. Those who defend him look shrill and silly and miss the point.

First, Katharine Murphy once again instructs us on the attitude we are to take in order to maintain the increasingly unsustainable Canberra fantasy that Abbott is a credible PM.

Tony Abbott is serially scatological. It's a problem.

To have such a firm grasp of the wrong end of the stick does no favours in understanding this situation or presenting yourself as a credible reporter on Australian federal politics.

Firstly, the 2007 election campaign was a tough one for the Coalition, and you'd expect a highly-regarded senior minister to make things easier rather than harder. By swearing at Roxon and bungling health policy, it is a truly amazing feature of our political system that defeated Liberal MPs did not line up to wring his neck (and run for preselection for the subsequent byelection), let alone for Abbott lead the party to the following election. That's not just bad manners Katharine, it's bad judgment on his part, the Liberal Party's, and yours for talking him up.

Secondly, "shit happens" is an appropriate expression for anything other than the death of a human being (let alone a dangerous situation into which Abbott voted to commit people). As I said on Drag0nista's blog (of which more later), I'd thump anyone who said that. It wasn't a faux pas, it was a window into the guy's soul: of a piece with his cry-me-a-river response to the Brisbane floods or refusing to see the late Bernie Banton for being insufficiently pure.

Kevin Rudd could turn on the bad language and he was Prime Minister for almost three years: almost three year longer than Abbott will ever hold that office. But Rudd and Abbott aren't the issue here:

But it's not time for Abbott to become bland, to lose his texture, to speak only focus group and its associated dialects - otherwise we are looking at a rerun of 2010, when political discussion elected to give itself a lobotomy, the voters all switched off in disgust, and I nearly went mad and contemplated a second career as a sandwich artist to escape the shallow febrile horror of the landscape before me.

If political journalists keep playing "gotcha" - crucifying our elected representatives every time they appear before us in three dimensions - we will lead ourselves inexorably back to the vacuum of the past 12 months, and I for one do not want to go there.

Of course you do. It's The Narrative, and without it you'd be doing a different job. If everyone in the press gallery is writing the same story, Katharine Murphy will write it too. If you want someone to dissect some tendentious bullshit with Aesculapian skill, particularly where neither major party is better than the other, there is no reason to seek out the latest piece by Katharine Murphy ...

... well, that was my opinion until I read the last four paragraphs of her piece, starting with:

If we are intent on running a substantive ruler over Abbott, then here we can make a productive critique.

This is what the article should have been, it's the only bit of any value.

This piece by PvO can be dismissed out of hand. Abbott has been his own press secretary before and during his whole time in public life. The idea that he should be ambushed by the media - and of all people, Mark bloody Riley, a prize pissant if ever there was one - is a joke. The idea that he should be ambushed with several hours' warning is nonsense.

Abbott did nothing to dispel the doubts of people who might vote Liberal, and embarrassed those who do. If there had been footage of Mark Latham breaking the taxi driver's arm, it would've been of a piece with Abbott's bobblehead routine. He's done this sort of thing once too often. Philip Coorey, however, is ignoring this and trying to present it as a one-off:

To accuse Abbott of deliberately making light of a trooper's death is absurd and no one has levelled this accusation.

If you can accuse Julia Gillard of faking tears over Queensland flood victims, why not?

However, a key factor that has so far been overlooked is that the Coalition did politicise MacKinney's death at the time.

Indeed he did. He has sowed the wind of Canberra's media storms for two decades, and now he has reaped the shitstorm.

Several weeks ago, Abbott's senior minder, Claire Kimball left the office. It's a safe bet that, had she been around, she would not have let that happen.

As stated earlier, if Claire Kimball is all that stood between this clown and the Prime Ministership, then good riddance to Claire Kimball. It's an untenable position for a media advisor to save someone with Abbott's experience from themselves.

Former Liberal staffer Drag0nista had a go at constructive criticism of Abbott. My first reaction should have been: good on you for trying. That said, I stand by my comment on that blog, and regard her piece as showing the limits of media advice. If you found a cold, decaying and beheaded corpse it would not do to plot strategies for chest compressions, crepe bandages or mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

One journalist who couldn't help himself is Greg Sheridan. Sheridan is right to disdain Bishop, but wrong to do so on an issue where she is clearly right.

The Coalition front bench could do a lot worse than read The White Man's Burden - Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly, a former senior economist at the World Bank.

Later, he says:

It is right that our aid emphasises the Asia-Pacific while European aid emphasises Africa.

But Greg, Easterley's book slams European aid in Africa: isn't Australia's practical, community based aid far better than that dished out by the EU? Did you not share the Wikileaked US criticism of Australia as ineffective against Mugabe?

A hundred million dollars will generally buy you a smile and a warm handshake in most parts of the world, especially when so much of the money will inevitably be skimmed off in corruption.

If we want to help Africa, we'd be much better off opening embassies there and promoting trade, which might actually help.

... or get skimmed off in corruption, Greg. Damned if we do, etc.

Everything [Bishop] touches she gets wrong, in both the politics and the substance.

Here she knocks Abbott into a cocked hat. Never mind Gillard, it's Julie Bishop playing Judith to Abbott's Holofernes.

Sheridan is dead right here, if clumsily expressed:

Building schools in Indonesia is about the best possible use Australian aid money could be put to.

But not here:

Also, if Abbott looks as though he can't handle Indonesia, it will threaten his credentials to be prime minister.

We've never had a Prime Minister elected to the office on the basis of appearing to "handle Indonesia". None of them have spoken Bahasa Indonesia - is there anyone who can speak that language in Federal Parliament? Howard came closest: even he took some convincing that we could do it without the Americans, and for all his experience his analysis of the place and its politics is pretty rudimentary.

Finally, Abbott's other mistake was to recommit to the Millennium aid goal for 2015. This clunky, dumb formula allows for no proper evaluation of aid levels, as every other part of government spending is subject to. It is just part of the nonsense consensus of the international relations class.

Clunky and dumb goes for much of Bush-Blair policy, but because Greg wets himself over that he refers to that consensus as "the Anglosphere" rather than "the international relations class".

It's also true that the Millennium goals represent something of a last gasp by the US and Western Europe in exerting themselves in world affairs. China and India are increasing their use of aid as part of their 'soft power', which has real implications for Australia. Stick the Easterley book Greg, and investigate that.

A cosmopolitan, sophisticated, liberal opposition with any intellectual firepower on foreign affairs might challenge this consensus. Alas, there is no sign of that in this opposition. Abbott can't do everything himself, and he is poorly served by his front bench in this area.

Abbott's whole career has seen him work against a Liberal Party (much less its parliamentary party) consisting of "cosmopolitan, sophisticated, liberal" people. Given his experience and job title, Sheridan is wrong to lament what Abbott would consider success.

Abbott's front bench can only work within the parameters their leader sets. While Abbott may not be able to be his own foreign affairs spokesman as Rudd, Beazley or Peacock were, he has to be able to set some sort of direction. Bishop's floundering is not her responsibility alone.

Tony Abbott is showing us that he can't be Prime Minister. That's the story, press gallery people. Don't wait for "anonymous rumblings", because Abetz et al are following you and not the other way around. Show us what the job of Prime Minister should involve, and then assess Abbott - and Gillard, and whomever else - against that.

The reason why the press gallery is so protective of Abbott is not that he was once a journalist back in the day. It's because he plays the politico-media game that Gillard can't and won't play. He butters up journos, he picks his favourites and treats them like they are important. They can't believe that the last true believer in old-school media relations won't restore the Whitlam-to-Rudd situation where the press gallery hold the keys to the Lodge. If Tony Abbott goes down, the press gallery would be as irrelevant as it is to voters/media consumers. Never mind Riley's riles: the efforts to prop Abbott up are starting to look silly.

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