Here’s a great example of how the Australian media no longer serves Australians on some of the biggest issues facing the country — and why we’re facing a lost decade and more on productivity and innovation.
Regardless of the content of Monday morning’s speech on economic reform by Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister was entitled to expect it might have received detailed coverage and dissection by the media. It outlined the government’s intention on its economic agenda at a crucial point for the economy both in terms of the need for immediate stimulus and structural reform.
At The Australian Financial Review today, there are several articles and an editorial addressing the speech. Whatever you might think of what was on offer — we’ll come to that — the AFR took the speech seriously.
It was less so elsewhere. The Australian had a couple of comment pieces — someone from the IPA supporting deregulation (surprise!) and Judith Sloan calling for a return to WorkChoices (double surprise). Thereafter it stopped. The other Nine papers ran nothing on the speech today. Nor was there any analytical coverage on the ABC, which like much of the Press Gallery is preoccupied with the second order issue of the government’s tax cuts.
The ABC, coincidentally, didn’t carry a preview of Morrison’s speech yesterday morning. The Australian, the AFR and the Nine tabloids had all been given the speech, or major chunks thereof, on the weekend, and all ran a preview of it. As it turned out, in the case of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and to a lesser extent The Australian, that’s all they ran.
This practice of dropping speeches to newspapers ahead of delivery has occurred under both sides for a long time. It’s advantageous for politicians: broadcasters are unlikely to cover a policy speech so newspapers are the only sources of detailed coverage, but won’t be interested in a speech delivered the day before, even by a prime minister.
So the speech is dropped the day before delivery so that the morning editions will carry some detail of it. Better yet, that preview coverage will never be critical. Journalists won’t savage a speech to which they’ve been given a preview because if they do they won’t get a preview of the next speech. They’ll be cut off the drip while other outlets and colleagues that play the game continue to enjoy access. The result is essentially free advertising for the speech, along with, maybe, some discussion of the political tactics involved.
But this kind of insider game serves readers and audiences even more poorly if that’s where the coverage ends. AFR readers got yesterday’s preview and then some detailed discussion today. For the readers of the SMH and The Age, that flat preview coverage was all they got. Even the readers of the Oz only got some ideological ranting (OK, that’s pretty much all they ever get, but still). ABC audiences got little or nothing.
Two of the AFR’s articles were essentially about business welcoming the opportunity to demand industrial relations reform and deregulation, while its editorial is another demand for a return to Workchoices. All of them could have been written, and perhaps were, simply by assembling the usual clichés from a thousand other AFR articles and editorials.
To be fair, the AFR’s industrial relations roundsman David Marin-Guzman also discussed the ACTU’s perspective on industrial relations. The AFR also ran a piece by Adrian Blundell-Wignall that actually grappled with what would enhance productivity — something that none of Morrison, business or the AFR’s editors actually bothered to do themselves.
But other than the AFR, the rest of the media failed. Morrison’s speech was a collection of the same business wish list we’ve been hearing for decades, not even coherently written. Diligent analysis would have highlighted its contradictions on deregulation (Morrison is lauding deregulation while his own energy minister is threatening gas and electricity companies with heavy-handed regulation that is little short of de facto nationalisation). It would have noted that WorkChoices led to a significant deterioration in labour productivity and pointed out how few of Morrison’s suggestions had anything to do with serious proposals for reform put forward by independent bodies like the Productivity Commission.
That is, they would have served voters and the national interest by talking seriously about lifting productivity and economic growth.
It’s not just this government that appears unable to rise to the challenge of leadership on the economy.
What could the media be doing to better interrogate the government? Is Australia facing down a decade of lost growth? Send your thoughts and full name to boss@crikey.com.au
I will cut the media some slack for once.
Everybody is exhausted by politics at the moment. We’ve just had a federal election. The opposition is still in regroup mode. A detailed analysis of Morrison’s economic policies would be pissing into the wind; almost nobody is listening, and it’s 3 years before much can be done about it even for people who are listening. And even then, the top-of-mind issue is not economic policy, but how to get voters to listen to policy-based pitches.
If you have something insightful to say about economic policy, you’d be wasting your breath to say it now, even though it’s your job to do it anyway. Sorry.
If only “The opposition is still in regroup mode“!
Far more likely, in mad Marky L’s pungent phrase, “a conga line of suck holes” as per Albumin Agonistes’ pathetic, pre-emptive grovel last week, promising to take into account (sic!) “the concerns of business”.
Can’t agree Arky, though I get and share your mood. Silence and inattention create an atmosphere of permission. The case needs to be built from the beginning for consistency and credibility.
I take your point, but since when can a same-old, same-old speech by Slomo be classified as news? It simply is not, and deserves to be ignored.
In fact the only positive aspect of this so-called government is its inability to do almost anything on the policy front, greatly reducing potential damage.
As you noted the speech was another same old same old.
The speech itself was news. The contents weren’t so hardly newsworthy.
They may be un-newsworthy because they’re old hat LNP wishful thoughts, but a LACK of content – ie. in this case a lack of something ‘new’ – should be, newsworthy. It’s a government that has had no policies for some time and went to the election with only an unaffordable tax reduction mainly for the well-off; they got away with it because the same media now ignoring Scummo’s thought bubbles chose to ignore his dearth of policies before the election, and focused as Scummo did on Labor. If you read between the lines of the kind of waffle Scummo produced in his ‘major’ speech, you’ll find the old yearning for things like ‘deregulation’ (code for forgetting about the banking RC and environmental protection and so on), ‘work choices Mk2’ and other longed-for so-called ‘reforms’, which will later sidle into the nation’s apathetic contemplations with not a word of real critique from any corner of the MSM. Before you know it the cross-benchers will be doing silly ‘deals’ to let it all happen.
The only problem with Bernard’s analysis, and I suppose what I said above, is that if the rest of the MSM did give Scummo’s ‘major’ speech the amount of attention the AFR did, it would be largely uncritical. It’s tempting to think that if you don’t pay any attention to Scummo brain farts they’ll go away; but perhaps it’s a case of be careful what you wish for.
Surely the vacuousness of Morrison’s speech and his intellectual offerings more generally is a matter of grave concern – fully deserving in itself to be discussed seriously by the media? Charles (in comments) believes it should be ignored. “Arky” says, “everybody is exhausted”.
I’d dare to suggest that what we are exhausted by and with is political trivia, ALP-bashing and thrashing, and too little seriously persistent, INFORMED analysis.
We have a Coalition – again in Government – that won the election on a campaign of knowing mis- and disinformation, with the most offensively banal slogans repeated incessantly, and a $60m ad campaign run by a dodgy “leader” of a confected political party who had no intention of winning anything but the political influence that would allow his commercial interests to flourish. Similarly, the Murdoch media openly, ruthlessly made lap dogs of all LNP candidates…to support their own predictably narrow commercial interests.
Should we simply shift our gaze from this commercially-driven jettisoning of national interests – including the climate crisis and land and water care, the corruption that seems to follow “privatisation” like night from day, as well as increasing poverty, galloping food and housing insecurity, an urgent need for Indigenous justice, far greater equity in health and education, and totally legitimate questions about how our tax dollars are gathered and spent? Especially now that the LNP and their favoured media mates are singing the Mandate Hymn?
Shifting our gaze? I’d say not. Voters – citizens – need rigorous “serving”. Thank you to all at Crikey and elsewhere willing to hold this thought front and centre.
Stefanie, the Herald ran a precis of the speech yesterday which pretended that it was a significant statement rather than another rehash. Hence my comment. Its clear that this government will again be struggling to fill parliamentary days with anything but stunts, so bare is its policy cupboard.
Of course that should be news, as it was briefly last year. But thanks to the last six years expectations of federal politics are lower than ever, both among voters and the media. And I suspect Slomo and co are quite happy with that.
Hhhmmmm, you speak good, Stephanie.
Maybe the ABC is just waiting for it’s usual “acceptable script”?
They’d hardly be expected to be critical of the blather – maybe that’s all that was left.