Australia’s media elite have made up their mind about Morrison’s “Australian way” climate change plan: “a vacuous piece of nonsense”, “policy junk”, “unrealistic” — and that was just yesterday’s panellists being thoughtful on Insiders.
But hang on a minute. Traditional media seems to be saying: never mind the policy, feel the politics. Sure, as policy the climate announcement may be junk — a plan to avoid having a plan — but that’s not how journalism in Australia has decided to judge things.
The test that seems to matter? Will it skate Scott Morrison through the next election?
It’s a sign of just how damaged Australia’s media — like the rest of its political elite — has been by the shock of the 2019 election. The misreading of the politics of that moment has challenged their self-confidence that they can offer a unique understanding of “what comes next”.
Then it encouraged them to go along with the conservative’s tactic of making the campaign a referendum on the, umm, Shorten government. The economic impact of Labor’s climate action? Deep, probing questions. Morrison’s “end of the weekend” laughed off as the desperation of a falling man.
Now, rather than a deeper analysis of the policy demands needed for Australia to meet the challenges of global warming, it’s deepened the desperation to nail the politics of the moment.
Even serious policy gurus find it hard to resist. Terrible policy, says Peter Hartcher, eviscerating it point-by-point in the Nine papers, but smart politics. (His masthead companion Rob Harris, meanwhile, gave the plan an intellectual burnish with the news that Morrison had even read a book by tech billionaire Bill Gates in preparation.)
The leading sceptic of the politics of the play appears to be The Australian’s Paul Kelly. He is both more supportive of the plan (or, at least, more understanding of the constraints Morrison is working under) and more dubious of its political success, arguing that by accepting the 2050 target (at least rhetorically) Morrison is sacrificing the scare campaign he waged in 2019.
Politics or policy, the rapidly accepted wisdom rests on the belief that dropping the one word “preferably” from net zero emissions by 2050 is a significant marker. In truth, it’s just the latest iteration of the Coalition’s 30-year-long “no regrets”, as explained in Marian Wilkinson’s 2020 book The Carbon Club. “No regrets,” she writes, “meant Australia would only reduce its greenhouse gas emissions if it didn’t cost us.”
Or in Morrison-speak: “Technology not taxes.” Like the boasted pivot to science by News Corps’ tabloids this month, it’s the latest manifestation of the key denialist trope: acknowledge the inconvenient science if you have to, but contest the transition if you can.
As a result — and particularly since the 2013 “axe the tax” election — Australia’s peculiar focus on the politics of climate change has priced that cost not in emissions, GDP or current account, but in electoral success.
There’s hope (or fear, depending on your point of view) that the trope’s soothing power fell apart with the shock of the bushfires of the summer before last. News Corp’s refusal to accept that the bushfires were linked to climate change finally forced James Murdoch to leave the family company.
The most recent IPCC report, released in August, confirmed the message: yep, turns out Australia’s fires were (and will be) intensified by global heating.
For three decades, conservatives have won elections by talking out of both sides of their collective mouth on climate change — concerned in the city, denialist in the bush. But now they’re wedged behind the competing demands of their two constituencies, under threat from liberal independents (hello, Zali Steggall) in its wealthy city suburbs and from extreme populists (hello, Pauline Hanson!) in regional Australia.
It’s always been tricky, pulling off a worried head-shaking to its wealthy urban constituents with a sly winking to its regional voters along with sotto voce assurances to its fossil-fuel donors. It called for the “modern Liberals” running in the city and the Nationals running in the bush with a same-same-but-different messaging.
Morrison is betting that reshaping the “no regrets” con will get him through once again. Reporting politics over policy may prove him right.
It is frustrating why the liberals are able to say one thing in the city and another in regions and get a free pass, whilst Labor doing the same is lambasted as peak hypocrisy. This is not to say what Labor does is right but it’s so tiring watching the Wilson’s, Sharma’s and Birmingham’s claim to care about the climate crisis to zero political cost.
The press gallery actually need to stop being friends with these muppets. They are the enemy. Treat them with hostility. Don’t let them lie and be painted as geniuses for creating moronic strategies like saying the “Canberra bubble”.
They are the ultimate Canberra Bubble.
Labor said something?
It’s breath taking how the gallery simply says ‘the gov’t will ofcourse do a scare campaign and wedge labor on this or that” whilst seemingly not recognising that they are the willing vehicle for this information warfare. Coincidentally more often then not straight in the corner for the coalition. All the while when blaming social media.
They willingly report lies and then defend themselves by saying ‘they’re just reporting what was said’. That’s not reporting, it’s disseminating lies. Politicians have changed the rules and can often be considered bad faith actors and these so called journalists are still playing the old game just assuming the politicians would never so blatantly cheat.
When was the occupation “political reporter” invented? The reporting of politics as gladiatorial blood-sport has been catastrophic for society. Now more than ever.
And the cause of that catastrophe?
Politicians and reporters all accept the current mainstream orthodox economic dogma, therefore all that is left is to report on the “gladiatorial blood-sport” of Left versus Right politics
The reporters, following the edicts of mainstream economists, are loathe to consider MMT which teaches us economics need not be ‘the dismal science’ in all respects…..but a lifetime spent by mainstream economists on studying neo-Keynesian orthodoxy, denying the capacity of central banks of sovereign currency-issuing governments to issue and spend debt-free money (in the nation’s own currency) without taxing or borrowing from the private sector, explains the close-mindedness of economic orthodoxy.
MMT offers a way out of the current conundrum at Glasgow: no-one wants to foot the massive bill to roll-out solar/wind + pumped-hydro storage + smart grid on a global scale, while closing down and compensating the fossil industry (compensation maybe costing between $10 trillion and $100 trillion?); voters hate carbon taxes, private investors demand them (to act as ‘price signals’ in the free market), and the fossil industry is resisting the stranding of formerly-valuable fossil assets.
Whereas the public sector (government), in order to obtain the necessary funding which is not forthcoming from the private sector without a crippling carbon tax, can simply type some numbers into the accounts of all the people required to build the green infrastructure… a ‘trick’ which the private sector and free markets cannot emulate.
Problem solved: the only ‘costs’ are opportunity costs – which are irrelevant if we are in a race to save the planet.
So frustrating to see (and hear) the mainstream media focusing on the politics and not the substance, repeating the government’s talking points uncritically. As if the warnings from the UN about a code red for humanity could be set aside, for the preoccupation with election hopes of the Morrison Government. It makes me wonder when journalists will realise they have responsibility for reporting in the public interest, and as citizens, in a time of increasing real time impacts of climate warming. The collective loss of memory for what we have been experiencing over recent decades, the failure to join the dots for the sake of an obsequious headline. Sometimes I think the Millennium Drought did not happen. Nor that 173 people lost their lives in catastrophic bushfires on Black Saturday, ten years before Black Summer. Both were strongly linked to a warming climate, yet the warning of more to come was ignored. The media (with some exceptions) bears significant responsibility for failing to report the real time costs, to people’s lives and livelihoods, and psychological wellbeing, let alone the environmental damage, being incurred through inaction.
you know the press sided with the Krypton government right up to when the planet exploded .
Our media – rather than ‘holding the powerful to account (instead obsessed with access, and perhaps the odd tasty leaked morsel) – is complicit in selling this poop.
Imagine them treating Labor to the same indulgences
Has the term “running dogs” ever been more applicable?