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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The news you missed while reading the news

1. This:

a) It's taken years and years, but superjourno Katharine Murphy has finally worked out that Tony Abbott is a bullshit artist. Better late than never - but my goodness we've had to put up with more than our share of press-gallery-consensus bollocks from her while she tried to have us believe that Abbott was infinitely to be preferred over that nasty Gillard woman.

b) The Coalition are offering a five year contract on their tent city deal. Five years! So much for "stop the boats". If asylum-seeker numbers did drop they might need fewer tents, and where is the commercial supplier who could tolerate such uncertainty?

c) Look at it from Toll's point of view. They want to tender for a mass government purchase of tent services: Nauru or Manus, Liberal or Labor, it doesn't matter to them. They'd never get any of their own people over there due to security restrictions, and it would backfire on the government if one tenderer was able to gather information that wasn't available to all. Solution: send eager-to-please Scotty over there, get him to take some notes, and they can use that information regardless of who wins the election. Any bad publicity will be caught by Morrison and the Coalition before it would blow back on Toll.

d) The Morrison-Toll thing is the latest example of a wider generational phenomenon where the Coalition does a deal with business, it takes on the risk and the business walks off with the profit.

Left cynics claim it was ever thus, but Liberal leaders of yesteryear had a perspective on business that their successors lack. The Collins Street business community in Menzies' day were chaps he knew personally through Melbourne private schools, Melbourne University and the Melbourne bar. Menzies would want quid pro quo from rentseekers, which frightened away most of them. Fraser was cut from much the same cloth. Howard knew the Collins Street crowd never did him any favours (which Ron Walker tried to ameliorate) but by his time the action had moved far from cosy Yarraside.

Contemporary Liberals are content with a small donation to party coffers in place of a contribution towards wider policy aims. The Greiner government in NSW was the first Liberal government to accommodate business to this extent, with toll roads that never met the need identified for them nor seemed to meet the profit projections of the companies that built them. A fat lot of good it did them politically but at least those companies hired Liberals after the government staff jobs evaporated. Others have followed its pattern of outsourcing services and then running government relations for the outsourcers.

The Liberals did not give rise to the 'political class' of professional political operatives trained since university for the campaign that never ends. They did pioneer the career path post-politics (or for some, instead of elected office) whereby being elected to represent a broad, diverse set of interests in an electorate was a prelude to representing narrow, focused interests as a lobbyist. Elected representatives are at a disadvantage at representing broader interests in such an environment.

e) Morrison took News Ltd to Nauru because they wouldn't cover any slip-ups he made, and because the way they frame their stories is the way he frames his. This is a prelude of how an Abbott government will relate to the media, and it's why non-News media that seek to be 'balanced' and accommodate Abbott are mugs. Julia Gillard 's even-handed disdain for the entire press gallery will prove to be fairer and better than Abbott, Morrison et al playing favourites.

f) Well done Jonathan Swan from Fairfax for picking up this story.


2. Nicholas Stuart clearly dearly wanted to write a poignant account that a) represented the Diggers as the truest essence of Australia, and b) pointed out that ooh, the political contest is a bit close isn't it. This, however, isn't it.

Julia Gillard moved pretty damn fast, but the broadcast media slowed her down to Abbott's pace.

The military's often thought of as a conservative institution, but that doesn't mean everyone in it votes Liberal.

That is one of the stupidest straw-man positions I've ever seen. Nobody said the entire Australian Defence Force votes Liberal. It is fair to say that military, security and intelligence personnel vote conservative more than any other occupational group.

It's also fair to say that the Gillard government, in its push for a budget surplus, cut funding to troops in the field. Roman history is replete with examples showing how politically reckless that is.

Labor appointed Rudd Mark II because it believed he might be able to swing enough of these people to prevent a wipe-out. Rudd believes with more time he can convince enough of them to switch back to win. At this point, of course, it's tempting to insert the line, "we're not dealing with reality here". That's because it appears as if Labor's deficit is so great it's not going to be able to catch up. Doing this would be a massive mistake.

Appears to whom? Look at the imaginary deficit Howard pulled back to win in 2001.

My favourite part of Stuart's effort was this:

Polling by Galaxy over the weekend demonstrates the enormous degree of volatility in the electorate. Forget those 50:50 polls; in fact, ignore them all. The polls are accurate because they tell us exactly what is going on, and this is that we don't know what's happening. So, if we ignore the irrelevant predictions about "who would you vote for if an election was called today", what can we determine about the political scene.

I almost cheered when I read that, until I read that Stuart was a freelancer and not the replacement political editor. In an earlier paragraph he used the term "reality" to refer to poll results, so maybe he's seeking to liberate himself from polls before he's ready. Yes, forget them all, but realise that the entire current business model of political journalism (see below) rests on four things: polls, leadership, polls and leadership.

What do the images that stick in our memory say?

Whose memory would be?

Abbott needs to turn positive and fight fire with fire; otherwise he'll get burned.

He can't "turn positive" because he's done no policy work on which such a fight can be mounted. This is the same basic error made by Paula Matthewson here, knowing as she surely must that there is no switch to throw:

... Abbott has thrown the switch to Statesman ... The look is more polished, the language more considered, and the message has evolved from one-dimensional chants about stopping the boats and scrapping the tax to incorporate a positive element with pledges of hope, reward and opportunity.

Really? Tony Abbott?

Your derisive laughter is not helping. Back to Stuart again.

The swinging voters want an upbeat reason to get behind one side or the other.

'Swinging'? 'Upbeat'? Hey-hey, daddy-o. The fact is that this country has a great future provided the government is well run. Abbott is promising whatever Labor is promising but much less, so much less. He's not presenting a positive alternative for the simple reason that he can't. Stuart was right to trash the polls but wrong to portray an oncoming train wreck as the light at the end of the tunnel. There is no future for a journalist trying to fit in with the big media companies.


3. When we talk about the limitations of press gallery journalism, we must talk about one of its exemplars:

Malcolm Turnbull has no prospect of leading the Liberal Party to the election, despite a recent surge in media speculation and public interest.

To be fair to Hartcher, there is a role for MSM organisations not to try to be first with the latest, but instead take a more considered and verified approach. This is why it would be unseemly to point out that he is two weeks behind this piece. But let the man have his say:

The reason is a simple one: there is no venue for a party meeting to even consider a change of leaders.

The Rudd government has decided that it will call an election before the date that Parliament was due to return, according to authoritative sources.

In the absence of the scheduled return on August 20, the parliamentary Liberal Party will not be gathered in one place before polling day.

Oh come on, if it came to that Turnbull could afford to pay airfares and accommodation for every Liberal Parliamentarian to assemble and dispatch Abbott, if only he had both numbers and inclination. It's the "authoritative sources" tripe that signals his article is about to go downhill fast:

Mr Rudd is expected to call an election for September and two dates are in play - the 7th and 21st.

Oh no - election date prediction, what poll-leadership wankers write about in the six months leading up to an election. Any date but the 14th, eh? Like a true wanker he cites some bloke who monitors the media and then confuses that with what real humans are thinking.

Then, when he has finished reassuring us about realpolitik, he offers us this attempt at a think-piece, based on a straw man:

Australia is supposed to be the land of the tall poppy syndrome, where the successful are cut down to the same size as everyone else, quick smart. You're not supposed to stand out for intelligence, achievement or, worst of all, wealth.

Since when? Do you know any Australian history at all, Peter?

Less prettily, tall poppy syndrome is "an Australasian modernism for envy, jealousy and covetousness that has been labelled a notable anti-talent", according to a pair of academics ...

Who? From where? Note the passive and rickety "has been labelled" construction. Hartcher would've had an intern Google that: who says journalism is dead.

The Fairfax pollster, Nielsen's John Stirton, says: "It's fair to say that Turnbull has been the preferred Liberal leader since he lost the leadership", which was more than three years ago.

He was the most popular leader before then too, in terms of general popularity with the community as a whole. The challenge for the Liberals is to get a majority of the population voting for them, while led by a man who has only ever been popular with rusted-on Liberals.

What's going on here? Is the tall poppy syndrome a relic of a bygone Australia? Or is there some other factor at work?

"It's fascinating and, on the face of it, it implies that Australians have grown up a bit," suggests Rebecca Huntley, who studies public opinion for Ipsos Research in focus groups she convenes every seven weeks.

She offers two reasons why this might be so. One is economic. "People understand that we are at a crucial point about what sort of economy we evolve into, and about where education fits in. This is something people talk about.

"They want a contest of ideas, a proper, serious discussion between two alternatives."

Prime Minister Gillard placed education and the changing nature of the economy at the centre of what she was offering, what she was about, and Abbott was afraid to debate her too. Yet, Hartcher is are happy to quote the warmed-over opinions of someone like Huntley to the same effect. Gillard would have swung it around like a gate and only Hartcher's co-dependence with Rudd prevents him seeing it.

Huntley actually owns and runs Ipsos-Mackay Research, but in Hartcher's reporting she comes across as just some sort of functionary/spokesperson. Huntley is telling Hartcher how he should be doing his job, but he just quotes her verbatim and moves on. Like all fundamentally facile people he can quote somebody else calling for ideas but doesn't actually promote any, struggling to get out from under his own cliches and those of his 'profession'.

But both [Abbott and Gillard] speak to the public in scripted "talking points" and use heavy-handed repetition in such an obvious way they demean people's intelligence.

That's how they talk to journalists. People find each of them clever, warm, and caring. The fact that politicians have to restrict themselves to talking points when speaking to journalists shows the limitations of the broadcast media as the conduit between politicians and voters.

Towards the end of his prime ministership, John Howard told me that in an earlier Australia, a young man watching someone drive past in an expensive car might have felt resentful. But today, said Howard, he was more likely to think "that could be me one day".

I heard Howard mention that at a Liberal function in the late '90s. I wondered: was Howard referring to himself there? Hartcher never wondered that. He's got a column to bang out and any nuance goes against his "talking points".

If these analysts are right, leadership, integrity, even obvious intelligence are in demand as valued commodities for our leaders.

Those qualities reflect the best of this country, leaving aside the question as to what extent Rudd and Turnbull have them; and dealing with the big questions requires them in spades.

Who said you never read any good news in the newspapers?

What started with a straw-man ends with another. Who said newspapers offer leadership, integrity, even obvious intelligence?

---

Murphy is starting to wake up all too slowly and may yet slip back into journalistic slumber. Hartcher is presented with real stories but can't fit them into his frame of reference. Stuart wants to assemble a series of cliches only to be mugged by the polls on which his profession (and those who commissioned him) rely so heavily. They get mugged by reality but carry on as though nothing has happened. If these people are going to miss big, real stories and dish up pap, then what hope does the broadcast media, or Fairfax in particular, really have?

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Go on

Every night in my dreams
I see you, I feel you
That is how I know you go on

Far across the distance
And spaces between us
You have come to show you go on ...

- Celine Dion My heart will go on

Fairfax journalists apparently loved this, which is a shame. It is another exercise in self-delusion that has seen the company diminish both the quantity and quality of its actual journalism and disappear up itself, a process that those who really love both the company and the ideals they project upon it would condemn in the strongest terms, and should work to reverse if they can.

The greatest compliment a fiercely independent media organisation can receive is condemnation from those who fear free speech and unfailing scrutiny of the rich and powerful.

It's almost a pity that the appearance of James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch in, and at the launch of, Killing Fairfax by Pamela Williams wasn't about that. Packer and Murdoch weren't fearful of Fairfax. They may have been at earlier points in their careers, but it is clear that they had come to be contemptuous of it. It has been a long time since either man underwent any serious scrutiny in Fairfax beyond petty spats surrounding their respective homes in Sydney's eastern suburbs.

Fairfax lacked the ability and the wit to monitor Packer's transformation into a casino mogul using the media wealth he inherited from his father. One minute he was blowing the family dough on OneTel and Scientology, the next he became a global presence in the casino industry. Having read Fairfax closely over many years it is unclear how this transformation took place. From this, one need not necessarily conclude that Packer is a genius or even that he has learned some lessons along the way; this isn't about him, it's about Fairfax.

A fiercely independent media organisation: wouldn't that be a great idea.

Fairfax has failed at its basic task of explaining big, complex issues like the global casino industry and where Packer fits into it. Being able to explain big, complex issues is why people had loyally bought newspapers, and they have turned away from newspapers that fail consistently in that task. Note the name newspapers, not adpapers: the news was always the appeal. To imagine The Sydney Morning Herald as The Trading Post with Column 8 and David Astle's crosswords tacked onto it is to misremember its past and to misunderstand what a newspaper is.

Classified ads were undoubtedly important - but the bins outside newsagencies on Saturday mornings always contained more of the classified-supported sections than those focusing on news and sport. People who bought newspapers daily and weekly did and do so for the sake of news. Nobody buys cars or moves houses or changes jobs on a daily basis (and those who do rarely regard the Herald as the indispensible source of information on such matters). People do those things occasionally, but not every day. Regular readers aren't there for the ads. The news is to ads what the Trojan horse was to the armies of the Greeks, a means of getting inside the ramparts. How the ad sales boys could bluff supposedly fearless and opinionated journos in the running of media companies is a matter for the historians now.

... we do not accept [Packer's and Murdoch's] false premises that the company which has funded the Herald's quality journalism for so long is dying, nor that this pair of moguls' sons can claim credit for any problems Fairfax has faced.

Most of Fairfax's wounds were self-inflicted: Fred Hilmer, the business school chief, swatting away opportunities that might have sustained his company; John B. Fairfax, a son-of-a-mogul if ever there was one and no better than his half-brother Warwick as custodian of his inheritance; but we know all that. It's a pity that this editorial can't bring itself to face the curate's egg of its recent past, and why Packer and Murdoch have such solid grounds to regard it as a mish-mash.

Rather, we see the premature exaltation of Packer and Murdoch as proof certain that the Herald and its stablemates are doing just as they always have. And that is fulfilling a crucial democratic duty, without fear or favour, without regard to commercial self-interest.

Whoa, fancy; putting the qualifier after that which has been qualified ("proof certain"). What a clumsy way to break up a run-on sentence that is, starting a sentence with a conjoining word.

Packer and Murdoch ran companies that were commercial competitors of Fairfax, and Fairfax ran stories that needled those competitors to some extent. This is hardly as bold as the editorialist would hope.

With respect, what an affront it surely is to all Australians for Packer and Murdoch to rejoice over threats to quality journalism.

With respect, what an affront to have one's commercial interest confused with that of the nation. Fairfax noted this when James Packer hid his commercial interest in the proposed Barangaroo casino behind those of Sydney and Australia more broadly. How distasteful it is to have a sniffy put-down couched with the phrase "with respect".

And it will survive, funded by a new, sustainable business model to replace what were once, indeed, rivers of gold.

Click those ruby-red slippers together and believe, believe, believe. And no, don't tell me such cynicism is unwarranted. More than two decades of false starts have made those who follow the commercial self-interest of Fairfax more closely than I sceptical to say the least that this time - for sure! - that when it comes to 21st century media this, finally, is the mounting wave that will roll them shoreward soon.

Technological advances in the past two decades have forced Fairfax and other newspaper companies to change as those lucrative classified advertising revenues slowed sharply and shifted to online outfits.

Packer and Murdoch rode by chance with some of them, gambling that they could cash in and wreak delicious revenge against Fairfax for daring to expose their families' power and behaviour to unwanted scrutiny.

Packer runs the ruler over investments more carefully than he did, and you have to admit that Seek was a beauty. Lachlan Murdoch was more clever than lucky with his online RealEstate investment. Fairfax could've been sustained by both those 'outfits'. They close to leave them to others, who can hardly be blamed for not only being pleased with their investment but with denying it to hapless and badly led Fairfax.

The people who killed Fairfax were the people who were running it. That's where the blame really belongs.

- Ita Buttrose, who worked for both James Packer's and Lachlan Murdoch's fathers.

Quite so. But back to the editorialist:

"You'd have to say they've got thin skins," was the conclusion of Killing Fairfax author Pam Williams - tellingly, a Fairfax employee.

It's telling that the editorialist thinks this is telling. She has something snide to say about people who compete with her employer. Do you think she would've got interviews with those men by revealing that sort of attitude?

With glasses raised in toast this week, Packer said: "Fairfax didn't see any of this coming. They thought it was all beneath them. They thought we were idiots. You know, I think we killed Fairfax." Murdoch responded: "I think so".

For the sake of those who value democracy and a proudly Australian voice, let's hope not.

A couple of paragraphs ago the editorialist had unshakeable faith that Fairfax was as healthy as Australian democracy itself and has a robust future. Packer and Murdoch talk about having killed Fairfax - in the past tense - and the editorialist can only whimper, "I hope not". Don't you know whether or not your own employer is alive or dead? If not, do you know anything at all, and can you be trusted with the basic functions of a newspaper?

With respect, Packer left the media because the power his family sought through it was evaporating and money mattered too much.

With respect, the phrase "with respect" is out of place here. Packer could have turned Channel 9 into Australia's HBO, but at every step Fairfax would have painted him as a pale imitation of his father (just as John B. Fairfax and Warwick Fairfax Jr were). Packer has built a company with global reach in a tough industry over the past decade, something no other Australian organisation has.

By contrast, Murdoch's investments in DMG Australia and Channel 10 has been as imperfect as Fairfax admits its own record to have been.

With respect, the Murdoch empire has relied on global film revenue to fund its news media, will rely on TV revenue in future and has used phone-hacking to seek a commercial advantage.

With respect, you speak too soon on phone-hacking. With respect, Murdoch's own business model in unsustainable, as Fairfax has often pointed out, so if vast film-industry and TV profits can't sustain news media, then what hope does Fairfax's model stand?

By contrast Fairfax is developing a business model that can ensure the Herald serves the Australian public with independent journalism for another 182 years.

"... that can ensure ..." ... that might ensure ... that hopefully ensures ... oh timid certainty, thy name is Fairfax.

Of what is Fairfax journalism "independent"? It is not independent of journo-groupthink, where media organisations report the same things in the same manner while resisting the urge to explore different issues from different perspectives. Like other media outlets, The Australian loves the idea of EXCLUSIVEs but I love how it tires of them and wonders why Fairfax and the ABC seem so happy to let them have them - a day or say later, Fairfax will meekly run the story.

Fairfax employees in the parliamentary press gallery followed and upheld the narratives set by News Ltd, and I have set out the symbiotic relationship between Peter Hartcher and Kevin Rudd here. Add to that the proportion of Fairfax stories that are simply rewrites of press releases written by press secretaries and other publicists, and the statement that Fairfax journalism is independent journalism is exposed for the bullshit that it is.

That Williams can write a book which exposes her employer to cheap shots from rivals says a lot about editorial independence.

It sure does: fishing for backhanded compliments, using Pam Williams as bait.

Contrast this to the Murdoch empire's rejection of internal dissent and insistence on groupthink ...

That explains why it brought Stutchbury back from News Ltd to run a peace-love-and-mung-beans management style at The Australian Financial Review.

... to Kerry Packer's intolerance of criticism and his son's "hatred, hatred, hatred, hatred" outburst in describing his motivations against Fairfax.

Kerry Packer was about as tolerant of criticism as Fred Hilmer, Brian McCarthy, or Greg Hywood. I'd hate Fairfax too if it treated me in the way that Fairfax treated James Packer.

Contrast it to the Herald's ability to give credit where it is due and play every issue on its merits.

I remember how the Herald treated Prime Minister Gillard, and then pivoted to insist that history would treat her government more kindly than its own groupthink-fucked employees did - including the editorialist, it must be said. I remember how the Herald gained a reputation for beautiful writing on cricket by publishing Peter Roebuck, and then ran a shower of squalid pieces on him soon after his death, making me wonder what sort of person would even want to work at a place like that. I could go on about this fantasy of "play every issue on its merits"; nothing wrong with building castles in the air, you just can't live in them or pretend that you do.

To the chagrin of Packer and Murdoch, the Herald's team of fearless journalists remains a thorn in the side ...

A thorn in the side of whom? Since this blog was founded in 2006 it has scrutinised the Leader of the Federal Opposition, for example, far more closely than almost all Fairfax journalists put together and cubed.

... a check and balance on the extremes of power ...

In theory, this is what journalists do, and to be fair there are some historical examples where this has happened.

... a challenge to the cosy status quo ...

Fairfax are the cosy status quo in the Australian media, pale imitations of News Ltd. The only difference is that the status quo in Australia's news media isn't cosy, it's frightened.

Kate McClymont, Adele Ferguson, Linton Besser, Peter Hartcher and so many more - let no businessman or politician say their work and that of countless other Fairfax journalists has not made this country a better and more civilised place.

I am a businessman, I suppose, but it's not in that capacity that I blog here - and God knows I am no politician - so let me state freely: the work of contemporary Fairfax employees has done all too little to make this or any other country better or more civilised. Kate McClymont runs colour pieces on notable but relatively economically and politically powerless people like Michael McGurk or Craig Thomson. Hartcher is Kevin Rudd's press secretary on the Fairfax payroll.

The other two named write enjoyable and informative pieces to be sure, but there are thousands of Australians working as teachers, nurses, hairdressers, bus drivers, arc welders, bar staff, bookkeepers, database administrators, etc who do every bit as much to make this country a better and more civilised place. This is where Fairfax, and journalists generally, need to get over themselves and reach out to the audience they supposedly serve, but who seem so reluctant to appreciate the service they are supposedly being rendered on the same basis as those who render it.

The Herald believes Australians will always value quality journalism and keep supporting a business that has a long record of delivering it. While you can now access the Herald's journalism in many ways, the core promise has not changed.

The promise may not have changed but the delivery has. Fairfax's record is an indictment of its anaemic present.

And you still have a choice about what sort of country Australia should be.

I've always had that choice, and so have you. It isn't Fairfax's place to grant or deny it.

It can be one where the commercial interests of Packer and Murdoch prevail, self-satisfied and free of scrutiny.

And it will be if the editor of The Australian Financial Review gets his way, given his switch to a kinder, gentler, PR-friendly approach to business and his Murdoch-style demonisation and misrepresentation of those whose interests are different to those of people like Murdoch and Packer.

The other is one where, as the first Herald editorial said in 1831, editorial management of newspapers is conducted upon principles of candour, honesty and honour. Where respect and deference are paid to all classes.

Oh, please.

Freedom of thinking. No wish to mislead.

Fairfax reporting of the Gillard government was misleading and not at all free, of press gallery groupthink and a desire to deliver Fairfax's audience to different political interests rather than serve them. This is yet another example where the lofty rhetoric of this editorialist crashes to earth in a cloud of bulldust.

No interests to gratify.

Again, look no further than Peter Hartcher's coverage of Kevin Rudd to belie this. He only hopped into Abbott when Rudd was in office, and when Gillard was PM he more than gratified Coalition delusions of adequacy. There are others that might serve to return Fairfax to the humility this piece has lost.

Dissent with respect, to establish a principle.

Wouldn't that be lovely.

By these sentiments we shall be guided, and, whether friends or foes, by these we shall judge others; we have a right, therefore, to expect that by these we shall be judged.

This assumes that Fairfax is capable of living up to the aspirations of this editorialist, which it isn't. It's already proven that. This similarly vacuous editorial of The Age on 22 June this year is both the standard by which Fairfax lives, and dies. Who thinks The Age has become more (or less) policy-focused since Labor's federal caucus apparently acceded to its demands? The same people, well-meaning perhaps but counterproductive definitely, who cheered the Herald's blustery editorial yesterday.

I want to be livid that Fairfax is seeking to treat "quality journalism" or "Australian democracy" as properties of its the commercial self-interest of Fairfax, but I just can't do it; when you see how badly the company has been at pursuing its commercial interests, through acts of commission and omission over many years, it's just wryly amusing.

It's too late and too feeble to castigate The Age's editorialist for hypocrisy and backsliding: you may as well rail at the hopeless addict who has pledged yet again to give away the poison that is killing them, and yet again you find them intoxicated again and you wonder why you bother, only to realise it isn't about you. It isn't even about these windbag editorialists that Fairfax employs to small-h herald their decline. These editorialists should just pull their heads in for their own sakes, not just for the commercial self-interest of their employer pro tem.

Fairfax has consciously and consistently chosen to play a smaller and smaller role in a widening news media environment full of participants hungry for news that is both interesting and trustworthy. That's their choice; but regardless of the outlet Fairfax chooses to excrete this stuff, it should spare us this crap that their past is their future and that Australian democracy is its gift to us. These delusions must die before Fairfax can play any sort of valuable role in this country's future. To sustain those delusions is to kill Fairfax by its own hand.

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My review of 'The Stalking of Julia Gillard'

You can read my review of The Stalking of Julia Gillard by Kerry-Anne Walsh here at the King's Tribune, where they take such good care of it.

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Since Wednesday night

Setting aside the familiar travesty at Lang Park, what happened on Wednesday night was that Labor MPs stampeded against two big issues that they had feared and avoided until then. They had feared the power of right-wing union bosses over their preselections, and they had feared having Rudd return to re-impose his micromanaging/dithering style of governance. What also happened was that they caved before the media embargo against Gillard (of which more in another article yet to be published) in the hope that Rudd might enable some coverage of actual government policy, and with it a case for re-election that was denied to them under the anti-Gillard embargo.

Over the period 2007-10, Kevin Rudd irritated a lot of people in caucus through backflips and backdowns publicly, and in private snubbing and bawling-out and other forms of rudeness. People in caucus complained but ultimately did nothing. Only when this behaviour came to alarm a few union leaders was action taken against Rudd: they phoned members of caucus over the evening of 23 June 2010 and told them that they were to vote for Gillard, which they did. The lesson in sheer power terms was clear: powerful people step up and act while powerless people sit around and whinge.

In the first week of the election campaign, Tony Abbott's campaign to become Prime Minister stalled over his inability to sound convincing when talking about workplace relations (a mistake he has compounded this year, with his no-mark workplace relations policy that Eric Abetz all but disowned in a debate with Shorten at the National Press Club). Rudd leaked to Laurie Oakes and Labor people haven't forgiven him for that. In the period since, Rudd knew that the union leaders hadn't shifted: that's why he was belted last March and dodged the challenge earlier this year. It was still fair to regard those guys as the drivers of caucus.

The unions haven't rolled out a supportive campaign for the ALP like they did in 2007; this doesn't mean the ALP needs to trash the unions but they are entitled to wonder what they are getting in return for being lorded over. Now that the ALP's preselections for the coming election have all been settled, and there is nothing to lose, why not ignore the small number of union leaders who won't help you and can't touch you? After the election you can rebuild those fences if you need to.

As to Rudd's micromanaging/dithering style, its persistence is unclear from this angle (and do you reckon journos will pick it up this time? Fool me once, etc.). If this style has changed, it will be a value-add brought by latecomers to Team Rudd like Crean, Wong, and Shorten, rather than thick-and-thin loyalists like Chris Bowen or Bruce Hawker insisting that Rudd has "changed" in some undefinable way. If they don't win the election it doesn't matter; if they do, they had better work out some arrangement whereby Rudd's staff is imposed upon him or something, but then if they had done that after 2007 they would be in a different position today.

The idea that the micromanaging/dithering style is fixed in place is fascinating only to those who give Tony Abbott the benefit of the doubt. On and since Wednesday night we learned, again, that Abbott can't deal with foreseeable events. He was caught out when Gillard replaced Rudd in 2010. He was caught out when Gillard thrashed Rudd in March 2012. The Coalition look like the little pigs from the fable who built their houses from straw and sticks, unaware that the wolf could even do the huff-and-puff until the wreckage literally and undeniably lay strewn around them.

Abbott claims to have learned the lessons from Hewson's time in 1990-93, but I don't think he has: when Labor replaced Hawke with Keating in 1991 the Coalition's game changed, but their tactics never accommodated the new and fiercer opponent. Only last week the Coalition said that Rudd had been "assassinated" in 2010, a stupid line for a country where the practice is almost unknown. Rudd seems to have been de-assassinated in a way that simply isn't possible for John Newman or Donald Mackay.

Eventually, the Coalition will come up with a line of attack against Rudd. It will almost certainly involve a lot of crocodile tears about poor Julia Gillard. If Abbott really was "the best Opposition Leader ever", or even a good one, he would have shifted seamlessly to counter Rudd so that Labor appeared to flounder no matter who led them. Rudd has, as David Jackmanson points out as AusVotes2013, anticipated the Coalition attack and pretty much blunted it already.

Since Wednesday the Liberals held a US-style rally starring the prissy Bruce Billson and the repellent Sophie Mirabella (prediction: neither will be re-elected). They introduced John Howard, who became cranky in referring to Rudd - 2007 all over again. If you believe Howard embodied, or even led, an era in which Australia was comfortable and relaxed, then you should only wheel him out in public when he's feeling that way. Mr Comfortable and Relaxed was never convincing as an attack dog. The two Labor leaders who beat him (Hawke and Rudd) knew that a serene leaderlike pose was the best way to counter his attacks. Howard saw off three Labor leaders (Keating, Crean, and Latham) who made him look calm and avuncular by contrast, and another (Beazley) who was not so much calm as complacent. Cranky Howard is worse for the Liberals than no Howard at all. Cranky Howard looks like he is driving Abbott behind the scenes, as though Abbott isn't his own man - however true that is, it's a perception for which the Liberals can't afford to offer more support.

Since Wednesday night we learned that the consensus of the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery is not only meaningless, but actually works against telling us how we are governed. At the start of this month people like Barrie Cassidy confidently asserted that the Rudd challenge was really on, drawing on the full depth and breadth of their experience and credibility to make the Big Call. They simply assumed that their credibility had remained intact after three years of log-rolling and jabbering on this subject. Then they said that the steam was coming off any (imagined) Rudd challenge - at the very point when caucus members like Penny Wong and Bob Carr were actually telling Prime Minister Gillard that they would not be voting for her. This was worse than the usual dreary beat-up. What the press gallery reported was the direct opposite of what was happening.

There is quite the debate in journo circles about how far you go to protect your sources, and almost all journalists agree that it is better to tell your audience less than the full truth in order to protect your sources. In this case, however, we already know who the press gallery use as their pro-Rudd sources: any MP who quit or was sacked over the past three years (or overlooked, in the case of Doug "mind mah tea" Cameron). We know now that their sources have led to press gallery journalists reporting the opposite of the truth - insisting that there was a challenge when there wasn't, and vice versa - to the point where the press gallery consensus simply can no longer be trusted as a source of information about federal politics.

Pampered journos such as those in the press gallery go to industry events where they are regaled with tales of danger by other journalists who dodge writs from Sydney property developers, bullets from Mexican drug gangs or rocket-propelled grenades from Western Asian fundamentalists. They think they have something in common with those people, but they don't. Look at the English-language news outlets from North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Iran - note the skirting of major political issues within those jurisdictions, the simple recitation of government announcements and quotes without verification or context, lots of passive voice, and the assumption that the official PR-heavy activities of the great and good are all there is to 'politics'. That's the type of journalism with which Australian press gallery journalism is most closely aligned - not the derring-do, truth-at-all-costs work that attracts gullible people to fundraising dinners.

On Wednesday night Bob Carr claimed that a number of asylum-seekers who come to Australia by boat are "economic migrants" (like my Scottish forebears in the 1830s, presumably). It's clear that detention is an idea that has to be tried and failed before it will be abandoned. I don't know how many more people will have to be drowned at sea or banged up in the various detention centres before that will happen, in the same way that it wasn't clear that 43 is the number of Australian servicemen who had to die in Afghanistan (and may there be no more).

Mandatory offshore detention will work for Labor at this election because it is the middle ground between the do-nothing/laissez-faire option, and the creepy cruelty offered by Scott Morrison and the Coalition. Beyond that, it is a policy that can't work either to reduce the flow of asylum-seekers to Australia, or to process asylum claims in a more systematic way. Despite having failed, it cannot be abandoned straight away but abandoned it will be eventually; along with the high-minded criticism that it is cruel and inhumane and in breach of our international obligations, this policy will come to attract the contempt that is due to all impractical, pointless, expensive, window-dressing policy measures.

I miss Julia Gillard and I still think she could have turned it around and beaten Abbott, and could would should might have been a better Prime Minister than she had been. The polls do not disprove this. I suppose nothing will prove or disprove it, but this is my blog and that is what I reckon.

We haven't seen a policy wonk like her in the Prime Ministership since Deakin. Australian Labor is still playing catch-up since it failed to rethink its purpose to the extent that other social-democrat governments did in the 1930s and '40s, but Julia Gillard has brought them almost up to date. I'm fairly unsentimental when it comes to Labor as a delivery mechanism for policy outcomes, but I stand in awe of the sheer love in this piece, and with it the notion that progress is meant to be made, set back, reassessed and moved forward again, whether at the general political and policy level or at the lives of particular little girls and their family.

The appalling sexism that was piled onto Gillard particularly (but not only) toward the end of her Prime Ministership has brought sexism and gender issues into the centre of public debate like nothing else had, or perhaps ever could have. The scrutiny of the Gillard government's cuts to welfare payments for single parents is almost unprecedented for its breadth, prevalence and quality across both traditional and social media. The debate over sexism in the military is no longer a litany of isolated incidents as it was under previous governments, but a systematic one demanding to be addressed at the highest level. Serious analysis from a gender perspective has arrived at the centre of how we understand the national debate rather than being a perennial but fringe issue. Rudd's promise to increase the number of female ministers will only increase the applicability of gender analysis on government; expect more feminist breakdowns of the budget and other issues on which gender perspectives had touched only in passing.

Since Wednesday night much has changed, but much abides. The press gallery has failed the nation, its employers, and the politicians who sustain them; it has no future in its current form. The Coalition is left with, as the masterful Piping Shrike observes, "an unpopular leader ... with policies that the electorate doesn’t especially like", and too late to change either much. Labor wants to be both reformist and risk-averse: good luck with that, but then that seems to be what the country wants too. We are a have-your-cake-and-eat-it kind of people.

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Civility and its absence

Two recent articles show both how the Liberal Party isn't ready for government, and how the media don't even understand how the Liberal Party works.

First, this:

West Australian Liberal MP Judi Moylan gave a clarion call to moderate types on her exit from Parliament this week.

That's the sort of stale, cliche-ridden prose Baird was taught to use at The Sydney Morning Herald. You could be excused for switching off right there, but she does have things to say so long as you don't look too closely at her assumptions.

What even is a "clarion call"? A clarion was a trumpet used in the Middle Ages with a shrill, piercing sound. Moylan's voice is hardly shrill and piercing.

What/Whom does she mean by "moderate types"? Does she mean someone like me, an active Liberal for 14 years until 2000 until it just became too embarrassing for all concerned? Does she mean someone like Scott Morrison, who fended off a preselection candidate further to the right of him but who stands against everything Moylan stood for? Does she mean a hollow shell like George Brandis?

To be a moderate in the Liberal Party, you have to believe that it is about more than the legacy of John Howard. The Liberal Party is not about anything more than the legacy of John Howard. Judi Moylan joined the Liberal Party before it became the vessel of Howard's legacy, and so did many of the "moderate types" of Baird's imagining. Seventeen years of membership dues (since 1996) make you wonder what you are achieving as "moderate types" in a party that was barely tolerant of them/us by the time I left, and increasingly hostile since. Baird assumes a group of people who are no longer active in Liberal Party politics, or who are but no longer moderate in any meaningful sense, might be lazily lasso'd with this phrase "moderate types".

In her valedictory speech, [Moylan] spoke of her intense, abiding concern about the 600,000 children living in poverty in Australia: "Why have we not been able to do better?" ... [She] also talked about her "strident opposition" to indefinite mandatory detention of asylum seekers - and especially of children. ... We don't hear much of this kind of talk from the Coalition these days, do we?

No, and people who work against poverty and mandatory detention have nobody to talk to in the Liberal Party. Branches don't want to hear from you and engage with your ideas, there are no policy mechanisms to speak of, Federal backbenchers will only get yelled at by Peta Credlin or Joe Hockey for proffering ideas. People who work against poverty and mandatory detention, and people who work for the election of an Abbott government, are not the same people. They talk past one another and operate at cross-purposes. And yet, Julia Baird assumes "moderate types" should be in there facilitating interaction.

Moylan told ABC Radio's Alexandra Kirk that there has been somewhat of an exodus of moderate members from Parliament, "and a few more will be departing this Parliament. So it is a bit of a concern. John Howard always said the Liberal Party's a broad church, and I think we need to have those differing voices within the party to give it balance. And, indeed, to reflect the community that we are elected to serve."

Twenty years ago it might have been "a bit of a concern". Now it's just idle and obtuse to be staring at the cold bones of people you always thought of as full of life. Howard only used the broad-church thing after he gained an unshakable grip on that bully pulpit.

The drift of the Liberal Party to the right has been often discussed over the past decade. The lack of civility in Federal Parliament has been often discussed over the past month.

Those timeframes are way, way too short, the mark of a dilettante. The treatment of Liberal moderates in the 1990s has been every bit as vicious as the treatment of senior figures in the Gillard government today. A commitment to civility in debate is a commitment to breadth of participation and inclusiveness; a departure from civility creates the conditions whereby good and sensible people will depart the field, and that only oafs and opportunists like Abbott and whoever will replace Moylan will scoop such prizes as there are in an increasingly dirty pool.

The current rash of vitriol, negativity and slogans crowds out decent debate. The sheer hatred of political leaders - both Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard - trumpeted on social media is palpable and distracting.

I am sick to death of bloody journalists who can't and won't address the failure of their own 'profession'.

The very organs that publish Julia Baird articles, and those that compete with them, are the very media outlets that have failed to use what comes from Canberra as the raw materials for public debate. They have focused exclusively on personalities: where that happens the emotion cannot be channelled into productive or educative ends. You need a commitment to facts and context, which broadcast media outlets kind of had in the past and certainly don't now.

The better social media outlets are picking up that slack. It is idle for Julia Baird to assume that social media can represent only chaos, and that broadcast media outlets such as those that have marooned her mid-career are even capable of bringing order and form to productive debate.

A new study published in the journal Psychological Science found some crucial, fascinating insights into how extremists can shift their positions to more moderate stances ... A shift in views would happen only if extremists were asked to explain the details and mechanics of policy.

With all due respect, no shit.

People who have made their way up through the ranks of a party recognise the structures of power and authority within that party. They do not recognise alternative power/authority structures. Liberals believe they can accord power and authority to, say, vaudeville act Lord Monckton, who reflects it back at them, while whatever structures of power/authority that enable a respected climate scientist to put their position is to be ignored, and if not shut down then negated. Journalists who produce he-said-she-said, teach-the-controversy output help obscure our understandings more than they help show us what is reliable and what is false. Journalists in broadcast media outlets do not help understand issues because simply presenting the controversy is all they can do.

I have seen extremist anti-abortionists confront pro-choicers and eventually agree to disagree on the issue, with mutual respect between the protagonists. Is that a "moderate" outcome, or a non-outcome?

The implications of this are huge.

First, when we do not force people - politicians, parties, pundits - to explain the mechanics and details upholding policies, poorly thought out views go unchecked.

Yep, and in the absence of same all you have to go on are Julia's glasses and Tony's lycra. Let's be clear: the tone of public debate is in large part set by the broadcast media outlets, and they have let slip a lot of nasty comments about the government being nasty, illegitimate, criminal, which have been returned in full measure complete with gutless complaints by those who dish it but can't cop it.

You'll notice that the reasons why journalists focus on, oh, anything other than the mechanics and details surrounding policy are not examined. Nor is the assumption that they are well-placed and capable of doing such a service. All we get is this one line.

Second, the role of the journalist is vital.

Vital, but absent. A lot of what Baird airily dismisses as 'vitriol' online is in fact keening for some proper journalism. There is no proof that broadcast media journalism has the analytical skill, or even the temerity, to pin down politicians and ask policy-related questions (and understand the answers).

Third, so is party cohesion.

Oh, fuck off.

Kevin Rudd is nowhere near getting the numbers to knock off Julia Gillard. This has been true every day for the last three years. Just because Rudd's supporters lack the sense and wit to stop crying wolf, it does not mean that broadcast media outlets privileged to take up space in the press gallery have a right to squeeze out other issues. Advocates trying to get stories up on defence procurement, climate change or any number of really important issues are fobbed off by the sort of people who commission Julia Baird articles - but those same people can't get enough Ruddmentum, running warmed-over stories from eighteen months ago.

I realise "fuck off" isn't a very civil response. What Baird was trying to do was defend the indefensible (clogging the arteries of public debate with crap, then complaining that public debate is crap, and then blaming ... social media?), and maintain her blindness toward the failings of her 'profession'. I'm entitled to be bored and frustrated and impatient with dilettantes who wade into a debate without having thought out what's really going on here. A debate over the politico-media complex involves the media as a matter of course, which includes people Baird considers colleagues.

Abbott said this week if there was a change of government in September, Parliament would be a "better place: There has been too much venom and too many baseless accusations of bad faith." While some argue his time - and team - in opposition has strongly contributed to this problem, most would agree.

In 2010 Abbott actually used George H W Bush's form of words about "a kinder, gentler polity", and he delivered anything but. Simply by passing on phrases like "this criminal government" the broadcast media has helped Abbott discourage the kind of civility against which he strains, and which he finds challenging. This is what Paul Keating meant when he described Abbott's modus operandi as "give me the job or I'll wreck the joint". He simply cannot be taken at his word; yet, Baird was trained to believe that a direct quote was a solid basis for a story.

Abbott would seek to insist upon niceness and respect for the simple reason that, while he can dish out spite and disrespect to others, he cannot cop it himself. He lacks the self-reflective qualities necessary to understand why what he has done unto others would be visited upon him. He would seek to recreate the kind of intellectually lazy defence shield that surrounded John Howard, where anyone who quibbled with anything he said or did however mildly - like Judi Moylan, for example - would have their concerns shouted down by being branded a "Howard Hater" by someone like Janet Albrechtsen, or Tony Abbott.

If you actually look at Abbott's record he has never flourished in an environment of niceness, tolerance and mutual respect. Like taking performance-enhancing drugs away from Lance Armstrong, the guy starts to slip back into the pack really fast, and that is not the tragedy that Abbott boosters might imagine.

Leaders of all parties must tolerate climates in which party members can question them.

Why? Tony Abbott faces the prospect of becoming Prime Minister by doing the exact opposite of that. Judi Moylan questioned and questioned, and as she said herself much of what she cared about was left undone.

And by moderation, I mean a respect for the centre, for civility, for reason, for robust and free debate, and for opponents - and, in Australia today, a commitment to human rights.

Part of having an open debate involves the possibility that your opponent might beat you. However large it is, Tony Abbott's ego - and the collective ego of the Liberal right who put him there - cannot admit to any defeat, large or petty. Hence, the avoidance of debate - not asking questions of ministers who'd cream them in Question Time, refusing interviews from challenging interviewers - they concede nothing, yet expect their opponents to roll over at every opportunity.

As for "the centre", we now have a bipartisan commitment to conservatism that will mean it, and not centrism, will dominate national debates. Debates will be closed down rather than challenge the way things are done. Human rights concerns are fringe issues in Australian politics, not mainstream. This will be supported by the acquiescent media that applauds politicians who don't answer questions, and they in turn will be supported by Julia Baird.

Julia Baird should be supporting someone like Frances Jones, whose commitment to seeking out stories and presenting them well puts Baird and almost all of her broadcast-media colleagues to shame. Kevin Lee's description of his attempts to offer his services to the nation is well worth reading. His gentle, civil tone (even to Ray King) is lovely, in a way that few political screeds are.

On Twitter journo-school heads were calling for broadcast-media journalists to display Jones' level of initiative (with no ambition above seeking to replicate today's newsrooms, journo-schools are their own punchlines). God bless Phillip Ruddock; just when you write off the old bastard his warnings about Clarke and Opus Dei remind you of his civility-veneer, and that seams of it can run quite deep. Lee makes telling and true-ringing remarks about Abbott and Heffernan, among others.

Do I owe civility? Yes, I do.

I moderate this blog with a fair degree of civility, and as a well-weeded garden requires relatively light ongoing maintenance so too I have not been beset by industrial quantities of spambots or boofheads. In the past fortnight or so I have been cranky on Twitter, and offline I've been struggling with full-blown influenza now into its third (and hopefully last) week. I could and should be more civil than I have been, and the ability to work through issues like this rather than rail against a toxic political environment will help that.

That said, however, there are limits. It is important for any moderate to realise that the enemies of civility and moderation will only succumb when confronted with their opposites, of which they claim to be master but which masters them all too often. It is a hard lesson to learn, one that took me years, but has become well entrenched in a naturally sceptical and schismatic intellectual background.

I knew Tony Abbott slightly and have never thought highly of him, as a person or as the holder of high office. I am appalled at the prospect that he might become Prime Minister and am doing all I can to head off that prospect (and it is a prospect, if not an apparition; people who speak of it as "a reality" should give themselves an uppercut). If he gets that job I will treat him no better than the incumbent Prime Minister is treated. For seven years I have given Anthony John Abbott nothing but what he deserves, and this will not let up until his neglected gravestone reeks of stale urine and dead weeds.

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Ruling in, ruling out

'Cause the high heel he used to be has been ground down
And he listens for the footsteps that would follow him around ...

- Elvis Costello Man out of time

What is Kevin Rudd up to? He has realised the guerrilla-campaign of opposition-within-government is a lonely place to be (with only the likes of Joel Fitzgibbon for company, true loneliness would be the better option). Rudd has learned the lesson that Malcolm Turnbull learnt and applied within his party: that if you're a team player your shortcomings will be covered up, while your light can outshine lesser lights even when yours is dimmed and theirs is at full wattage. Over the past two days or so Rudd has done what nobody expected him to do: join the team, fight for the team, rule out taking over the team.

Prime Minister Gillard invested a lot in keeping the Australian-manufactured vehicle industry going, in terms of personal credibility and in terms of money: public money, billions of dollars of it, which was ringfenced against budget cuts. When Ford announced that they would cease manufacturing in this country Gillard made an appropriate but impersonal statement, and has committed to greater job retraining and placement services than other redundant workers get.

She reiterated in her calm, lawyerly way that the whole idea of throwing money at the vehicle industry was about the workers, and that they remained her focus after they had ceased to matter to Ford management. Visiting Geelong today, Rudd said it punchier and better. He's not trying to one-up the Prime Minister, he is compensating for what everyone agrees is one of her weaknesses (in areas other than education or disability care, it would seem): an ability to get to the point, stick to it and hammer it home, so that you don't forget who owns this issue and who you need to vote for if you think it's important too.

I think Kevin Rudd has had his go, and have been strongly critical of him over three years now. I remain unconvinced that his ability to manage people and information has improved one bit and nobody takes any word of oily old-school Ruddsters like Hawker to the contrary. Of course Rudd talks about great-power rivalry; all ex-PMs do that, but not even the most addled nostalgist is talking about SHOCK FRASER/KEATING LEADERSHIP TILT SHOCK. Now that Rudd's on the team, doing the right thing, it's incumbent upon critics to identify and support constructive behaviour: well done, Mr Rudd.

"Gillard-haters"* like Drag0nista and Leigh Sales are clearly upset. They'd be fine if Rudd was undermining Gillard; they'd be fine if Rudd went to ground, and rendered himself politically inert. Both fit the Abbott's-inevitable-Gillard's-doomed Narrative. Because he's done neither, they play word games with him: do you rule out ... are you leaving the door open for ... Rudd knew in 2007 that playing along with such bullshit is worth nothing in terms of votes. Abbott knows it now, and plays journos like trout on the rare occasions that a) they actually confront him and b) he doesn't walk away.

The only thing to do when confronted with that is to shirtfront the interviewer for asking pissant questions, which is what Rudd did this week and what the Prime Minister should do more often.

It doesn't matter if you trash a broadcast media interviewer, they'll still beg to have you back: they have no choice. Only those seeking to hustle their way out of obscurity believe otherwise, but the big guns know you don't cop that from a journo. The journo isn't eliciting information of value by the ruling in/ruling out thing. What they are doing is getting the jollies and the sensation of power that a child gets when offering food to a puppy and then jerking it away at the last minute, laughing, and then offering the morsel again. Old dogs know you can take a bit of skin off the cherub without being put down, and improve the relationship quite considerably over the long term.

Rudd is one politician who has certainly lost a lot of power, but the broadcasters/MSM have lost more power than he has. Nobody who doesn't know suck-up-spit-down Sales personally is going to feel for her after being outmanoeuvered by someone The Narrative regards as a political corpse.

Fitzgibbon looks like a prize fuckwit for courting publicity at his party's expense, and even those of us with no love for the ALP as an organisation see this clearly. To be fair, however, this is also true of the entire, almost entirely worthless Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery. Yet again the media turned their back on the market that will maintain or kill their jobs in order to pursue a nobody: the unspeakable in pursuit of the implausible.

God forbid that anything at all should hang upon sad-sacks Alan Griffin and Daryl Melham for tossing in the towel. Once again, Rudd has left his so-called supporters within caucus in the cold. He's done it before - pretty much every time he ran for the leadership, except 2006 and after '07 when he had enough largesse to distribute to friend and foe alike - but every time he ran and lost his supporters wondered why they bothered.

I remember when Daryl Melham's career ended, sometime in the '90s  after an interview with Kerry O'Brien. The Liberals have been targeting his seat for twenty years, one of the longest courtships in Australian politics. If they win no other seat, let Banks be the crown-of-thorns for Loughnane-Abbott. Griffin has gone from newbie to burnt-out husk without any intervening achievement, a bit like most careers in politics or political journalism really.

The Murdoch journos can't believe the Labor leadership thing really is over. The basic facts of Australian politics are clearly different to what they told us, what they demanded we pay them to tell us: Julia Gillard was Prime Minister was Prime Minister in June 2010, she was Prime Minister was Prime Minister in June 2011, she was Prime Minister was Prime Minister in June 2012, she is Prime Minister was Prime Minister in June 2013, and no amount of increasingly strident Narrative is convincing that she won't be Prime Minister was Prime Minister in June 2014, or '15.

Having Rudd as leader in this election was essential to the Liberal psyche.

The Liberals who survived the 2007 election mostly accepted the people's decision, and began casting about for a post-Howard future. They thought Costello would lead them there and they were wrong. There was a hard core of people like Bronwyn Bishop who simply refused, Tea Party style, to accept that an actual majority of actual Australian voters elected a Labor government. They thought that Rudd had swindled them, and every time he backed down and watered down the positions with which he beat Howard he fed that perception. Nelson was their compromise candidate: nobody wanted Abbott after his performance at the election yet they were afraid Turnbull would rush them into some strange future of a republic, education, hi-tech and fine arts, of the sort that Keating had tried to foist onto Labor.

Turnbull got up when Nelson could go on no longer and he assuaged the most basic fears of the organised Liberal Right, directed from beyond Canberra. When Turnbull failed too they put Abbott in, as they wanted all along because they could control him as he presented a face to the press gallery that it found appealing (and the public will swallow whatever the press gallery feeds them, apparently).

Abbott needs to face Rudd and beat him. Only then can the Howard continuum be restored and maintained. That's why Abbott looked crestfallen when Gillard trounced Rudd last year, and why the Liberals didn't laugh when Rudd refused to challenge earlier this year (the key union bosses remained behind Gillard; had they shifted, they'd have told their people in caucus to vote for Rudd, and Rudd would now be PM. Rudd knew they hadn't shifted and wasn't obliged to commit political suicide).

The role of the press gallery and their broadcast media colleagues in leadership transitions over the past seven years is an anachronism, a homage to an image of the press and its role within Parliament that no longer applies. The parties' relationship to the media in leadership transitions used to be intimate: they would watch collaborators gather and disperse. They could point to evidence contradicting those who would "play down leadership tensions".

Now their position can be likened to [another analogy that compares grown journalists to children!] the schoolyard bullying tactic whereby taller children take the property of a smaller child and throw it back and forth above the owner's feebly grasping hands. The difference is, though, that the child whose property is being used as a plaything knows what's going on; after seven long years, no press gallery journalist - no newbie with fresh perspective, no old hand who's seen it all - none of them have twigged to the way leadership challenges actually happen.

Seven years. Six leadership changes in that time. Two elections, and another coming up. None of them have twigged to the way leadership challenges actually happen.

Now that you understand the difference between how leadership challenges actually work, and how they are reported by the press gallery and others in the broadcast media (or if you will, MSM), you can see the level of self-delusion from this tribune of the Conventional Wisdom:

That could have been written at any point in the last three years, and would have been no more valid then than it is now. It's not even informative, failing as journalism at every level other than the ovine everyone else is doing it. Looking to the caucus to find out what's going on with the leadership is like looking for Lasseter's Reef in the carpark of the Rooty Hill RSL: it just ain't there.

Leadership changes have been carefully managed affairs for the past seven years: in that time Labor has changed leaders twice, the Liberals three times, and in every case the fix has been in long before the press gallery even got wind of it. Even the Greens notified the MSM only after the Brown-Milne-WhishWilson deal was done.

That journalist is wasting her time running the same non-story she's run for three years, the same non-story the press gallery ran about Howard and Costello before that. You can be a veteran press gallery journalist in this country with a resume consisting of nothing but bullshit.

No amount of MSM wishin'-and-hopin'- that the realities of the past seven years might be different this time will make it so. Party leadership changes are just not decided in Canberra. Pollies will wring their hands over a dud leader but won't move without being told by people who put and keep them there - people who aren't in Canberra and who rarely talk to journos anyway. This is one of the many changes that affects the way that the broadcast media does its job which has nothing whatsoever to do with the dreaded Internet.

The ABC's Mark Colvin insisted at the Sydney Writers' Festival that journalists were the victim of an imaginary construct called "the 24 hour news cycle", and on Twitter this week he claimed that it explains this. It doesn't. Neither Morrison nor Fitzgibbon had anything new or interesting to say and only the most skittish and idiotic sheep would contend otherwise.

The press gallery in Canberra doesn't operate on anything like a "24 hour news cycle". The one exception to that was the night of 23-24 June 2010, a leadership transition brought on by people who cared nothing for the comfortable routines of traditional media.

The fact that Prime Minister Gillard is the first occupant of that office since McMahon who has not courted the media before securing it explains why she gets unrelentingly negative coverage, and why her policy-lite opponent is excused for not facing up to economic and social realities of the nation he would govern. The press gallery is denying us the information we need to make a decision other than that which would bring about a government that they - and their construction of 'we' - would want.

It is perfectly appropriate to laugh at the sheer effrontery of journalists caught off-guard when a press release is issued at 4.30pm on a Friday. Have you ever had something crop up at work when you thought a day was nearing its end? I have, so have most people, and journalists should keep that in mind when they chew up airtime/space with their bellyaching.

If a government is truly gone you don't need to get as shrieky as the broadcast media is (and some of the more gullible bloggers are) now. Look at the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger coverage of the doomed Howard federal government - or even the she's-quite-nice-really coverage of NSW's Kenneally government in 2011, a government that actually did die of shame. If you really do believe the polls and the backroom consultants who insist it's all over then the absence of such coverage about Gillard is suspicious.

Rudd is courting the same audience that he courted in 2006: the lumpen public (nobody you know, just those randoms 'in the field' of a poll); and the heads of the ALP's most powerful unions, whom he won over in '06 and lost in '10 and clearly hopes to win again. By neither sulking nor abasing himself, he is doing what they have told him is necessary and unavoidable: those who fight for Labor when their prospects seem darkest have a future, while those who simply jeer or walk away might not be welcomed back.

Maybe Rudd will feint again between now and September and glory in the title of the only Federal Labor MP north of Sussex Street. Maybe he'll turn on Gillard again when Abbott is having a dead-cat bounce. Drag0nista is right when she uses Rudd's words that a leopard never changes its spots - that may be so, but a leopard can be de-clawed and -fanged, and boxed into a small enclosure. I've seen it happen and so have most Australians, assuming their experiences of leopards is similar to mine.

The point here is that none of the Conventional Wisdom surfers and Narrative-mongers predicted Rudd would support the leader who replaced him. It might well be fleeting, and to some it's infuriating, but you can't deny it's happened or that it might recur. Having thus failed your analysis of what might happen in a new light is pretty much moot. You just can't trust the press gallery (like other essentially conservative people who exist in a matrix of cliches) to differentiate a passing fad from a structural shift, and report it to you.

Those yet-unreleased Liberal policies would want to be real doozies, instantly and firmly embraced by a grateful nation that truly believes Abbott and Hockey and their support acts really can and will deliver Australia from what ails it under Rudd and Gillard. Yep, click your ruby-red slippers together and believe, believe, believe.


* News Ltd columnist Miranda Devine used to claim that anyone who criticised the Howard government for any reason was a "Howard hater". In that sense, Drag0nista can be said to be a "Gillard hater". When I wrote that I thought I was being terribly wry. Oh well.

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The aroma of decay 2: starve the hungry

People are hungry for information about different aspects of public policy and what it means for the country. Three experienced journalists from three of the country's major news organisations freely admit that's all very well, but we're going to write about whatever distracts our tiny little minds and you can all go to hell.

According to 'Sweet' Barrie Cassidy:

Australia, it seems, is not having an election on September 14, but a handover. Never before has there been this level of expectation that a government is about to be thrown out

It does if you are trapped in the narrative. People are ambivalent about both the government and the alternative - by "people", I exclude current and past press gallery journalists.

Tony Abbott's near tearful tribute to the departing former government minister Martin Ferguson was properly, and widely, acclaimed for its generosity and bi-partisanship ... He was none too subtlety [sic] implying that Labor under Julia Gillard was no longer the party that "over the years, made a monumental contribution to this country… at its best, a nation building party".

Martin Ferguson helped dilute the mining tax to the point where it brought down one Prime Minister, became a laughing stock under the next one, and none of it blew back on Ferguson: clever politics that. Ferguson helped make Rudd an irritant long after his own talents and behaviours should have rendered him politically inert, which earned him the gratitude of the Liberals. He never really got stuck into the Liberals that much - other Labor people, and Greens, were more his targets - and they in turn spared him.

Abbott has made the same point with less subtlety in the past. Note that we've seen the Prime Minister weep twice in recent months - over her late father and for a scheme that would help disabled people and their families. We've seen Abbott tear up for a political opponent who helped him; it's always about him.

That same morning, the lead story in The Australian newspaper detailed how the Government is continuing to write green loans in defiance of the Coalition's call for the contracts to cease.

Imagine that. This lame duck soon-to-be-replaced government is blatantly defying Coalition policy!

Had they forgotten that the Coalition wrote to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation way back in February asking them not to write any more loans after July 1?

Clearly the 'lame duck' idea needs to be reworked, if you can bear to break from the press gallery herd. What Cassidy is describing here is an overreach of the part of the Coalition, not a bearing-out of the Abbott-inevitable-Gillard-doomed Narrative in which the broadcast media are stuck. This is what Cassidy means by "this level of expectation" and "atmospherics"; it's a media concoction, not a real thing (and before you start on about polls: they're media concoctions too).

This is not so much hubris on the Opposition's part ...

Oh yes it is. On their part, and on the broadcast media's too, Barrie.

So now Tony Abbott, without appearing to be too presumptuous of course, gets himself up to speed on national security issues and invites the cameras in as he discusses weighty issues with the 'incoming' Attorney General George Brandis.

He hasn't had a national security briefing in three years. Brandis has form in disclosing matters which ought not be disclosed publicly, and yet there Abbott is doing a theatrical consultation with him. It is clear why they would want the publicity; it is less clear why the cameras would bother turning up.

And the best Julia Gillard can do in the meantime is to adopt a persona of strained civility. That's what lame duck American presidents usually do.

Oh fuck off, and never mind US Presidents. The broadcast media treated Obama like he was a 'lame duck', until his opponent proved himself to be a worse option for that country. Obama won last year's election in the face of a more-in-sorrow-than-anger media expectation to the contrary, similar to those besetting our media now.

Gillard does best when she fights, when shows that she's passionate and why, when she backs her words with actions. Anyone who's been paying attention to Australian politics in recent years could and should have observed that.

Cassidy's attempt to link current Australian politics with the US system fails at one crucial point: the election hasn't actually been held yet. This is not a minor technicality. Anyone who's seen the ups and downs of Australian politics should be a bit more wary than Cassidy has been.

Jacqueline Maley goes on and on about a minor incident affecting the PM, and finds reassurance in her interpretation that we're all as shallow as she is:

The media are often criticised for focusing on trivialities, but judging by the reader traffic on the sandwich story on the Herald website, people were more interested in that, at least in a casual sense, than they were in the electoral funding story which was also running hot on Thursday.

Folks just loved that salami sandwich yarn.

At least in a casual sense. You don't generate or maintain reader loyalty with shite like that. The Daily Telegraph is Sydney's most-read newspaper but it has been in decline by 9% year on year, thanks to the legacy of Col Allan out of which they cannot snap. When big stories happen readers abandon the Tele for more trusted sources, reducing the Tele still further to orchestrated stunts called "campaigns". Maley is adopting the shallow metrics of the Tele in justifying her position, if not her career, and frankly I can't see it doing her or her employer much good.

The white noise of constant reportage - video, tweets, short-n-sharp news stories online, not to mention the countless columns, like this one, that comment on all that stuff - becomes like chewing bubblegum after a while. You get a headache and you long for a square meal.

And if there is one thing you won't get from Jacqueline Maley, it's "square meal" journalism. Oh, but she has an excuse - you're it.

But the fractious media landscape just holds a mirror up to the public's lack of engagement with politics. While those inside the bubble of Parliament House are paying as much attention as ever, beyond the occasional chuckle at a sandwich story, most casual politics observers have had enough.

Both leaders are personally unpopular and there is even caution among some television producers about putting the Prime Minister on screen for any length of time. People are switching off.

Yes, because the only stories on offer are bubblegum journalism. If you go looking for "square meal" journalism, the broadcast media can't and won't help you. Maley knows that reporting of the sandwich thing is 'casual', but it's all she has to go on, so she 'reports' in detail a story that was covered in greater detail by others without adding anything new. This might be her idea of adding value, and it is clearly her editor's - but it adds no value at all to anyone who was looking for further insight, how a trivial incident might illustrate something of wider significance.

The only things that cut through the white noise are mini-scandals such as the sandwich ...

They don't "cut through". Stuff like that is white noise. Jacqueline Maley is white noise, not a trusted source of information about how we are and might be governed. She has latched onto an insubstantial story and tried to insist that it's indicative of something bigger, which it isn't. She's tried to absolve herself and the other press-gallery ovines, but she can't.

You can't just write crappy stories and then claim that because people are switching off your crappy stories, you're justified in writing crap. Insofar as Maley is saying anything at all, that's it, and once again she's got it wrong.

Labor had signed consent from Abbott on its legislation for extra taxpayer cash for the parties' "administration fees", but in the face of public anger and internal party disquiet, he reneged.

It was smart populist politics.

"The people have spoken," he told reporters of his decision. The about-turn might have made him look tricky, but it had the greater political benefit of putting him on the right side of the argument, in terms of public opinion.

Abbott has a reputation for shifty behaviour that he needs to shake if he is going to be elected - it would be "smart populist politics" if he acted to diminish that reputation rather than enhance it. If he's going to shaft people he works with every day, what makes you think we can trust what he says? Maley cannot tell what's smart and what isn't. She assumes that whatever Abbott does must be smart. This is a key reason why her employer is declining in market reach and influence.

The public is looking to Abbott to lead the nation away from a doubtful incumbent government. Maley can't help you when it comes to Abbott, and she sees the guy more often than most. It's her job to give us the facts that will help us make the decision, not tell us what the decision is; but she ain't in the fact-providing decision-supporting business and nor is anyone else in the press gallery really. She said that it isn't her job to ask dixers [i.e. easy questions that invite flattering answers], but when it comes to Abbott it clearly is.

What's special and different about the Canberra bubble is that they are the only people who actually take Tony Abbott at his word. He signed a deal, he's a man of his word. He broke a deal - he's a man of his word. He was rolled by his party, he's the leader our nation needs. Gillard has a salami sandwich tossed at her, she's a loser; Abbott has a shit sandwich served to him, he's a winner. Canberra insiders like Maley accept this and pass it on, can't see the problem. Maley genuinely can't see that her job is to find out and tell us what, if anything, Abbott won't renege on, and why Gillard keeps going in the face of ignominies and what she achieves in the process.

Keep tossing those sandwiches, boys. You're keeping Jacqueline Maley in a job, for the time being. There is no proof that she or most of her colleagues could write anything worthwhile about education funding (the real reason why the Prime Minister went to that school and what she achieved there - brought to you by an unpaid blogger, not a 'professional' like Maley), or about public funding of political parties (again, unpaid blogger 1, 'professional journalist' 0 in terms of reliable coverage of substantive issues).

Then we have a former newsreader who is so ill-equipped to evaluate competing policies, who regards politics itself as so distasteful that she can't even write about those who would govern us and how they would do so, that she seeks refuge in the distraction of colour-and-movement from the political fringes.

Assange has plenty to say, but a) he might not make it to sit in the Parliament and b) how would we be governed differently if he had a casting vote? Palmer has plenty to say too, but he probably won't make it either and his agenda is rendered no clearer for Kostakidis' examination. Both of them can be a bit flaky and change direction abruptly, yet they attract Kostakidis' attention because she's jaded and likes a bit of colour-and-movement.

Here's the bind in which journalists are caught: they won't investigate what they perceive to be the next government, because doing so might upset the ascent they regard as inevitable. They won't investigate the incumbents because they don't think it's worth their while. They're preparing us and making excuses for Abbott. Worse, they are so incompetent at communicating nuance and complex ideas that they think the very attempt at doing so is dull, and turns the audience off, so they don't even try. I agree with this, but the tragedy of most journos (including the three examined here) is that they seriously believe that's what they do as a matter of course.

Cassidy, Maley and Kostakidis are pretty much finished if the Abbott-successful-Gillard-doomed narrative fails, which is why all three and their generation of journalists are plugging it with all their might. It's a sorry sight to see, wherever vindication will sit on them no better than failure.

Maybe, if you're a colour-and-movement aficionado, politics today is just too hard for you. Maybe your idea of colour-and-movement is a tossed sandwich, which it is for Maley. Maybe it's a quick summary of the press gallery is thinking, as it is for Cassidy. If politics is for you, and you want to find out what's going on and why, none of those experienced journalists can or will help you. This is a real pity, for journalism in general and for the organisations that pay Cassidy, Maley and Kostakidis to slap up some journo-pablum from time to time. It's a particular problem for the outfit that put Kostakidis' piece up, being a new entrant to the Australian market promising higher standards but which may end up patronising us with an inferior offering that its home market would not tolerate.

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