Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts

Monday 11 July 2016

On the subject of professional journalism - using Leigh Sales as an example of the disconnect between citizens and reporters


Excerpt from Tim Dunlop writing at medium.com on the subject of professional journalism and the very real, deep disconnect between citizens and reporters, 8 July 2016:

These differences are not merely minor quibbles: they point to a fundamentally different understanding of what role journalists play in a democratic society.
And here is a key point: What they point to is not just a disconnect between the expectations of audience and journalists, but to the lack of power that audiences feel in regard to their elected representatives.
This is something that goes much wider than this exchange on Twitter and it is something that I don't think very many journalists really understand, so it is worth lingering on: audiences — citizens — feel powerless. They feel that events are outside their control and that they are forever being manipulated, lied to and pushed around by people with more power and influence than them, and that that includes journalists.
Outside of voting, and maybe the odd protest, citizens feel that they can have very little effect on the political process, and they therefore expect the media — who they see as powerful compared to themselves — to fulfill that role and exercise that power on their behalf. This is a view that is encouraged by journalists themselves when they describe their work as a profession, or boast about their "insider" connections, or when they describe themselves in terms of being a watchdog on power, a fourth estate in the national polity. It is doubly reinforced when voters see journalists and politicians on a first-name basis with each other (as happened in much of the television coverage of election night) or when they see them all attending the same parties.
This is the real disconnect at the heart of the criticism Sales copped on Twitter, that her audience understood her comments to indicate, not just a failure to act properly, but a failure to understand what her job even was. Their own powerlessness — they will never get a chance to question John Howard — turns into a frustration with the profession who they see as having the power to do something about their concerns, and failing to do it. To them, Sales' Tweet was saying, no, that's not our job.
The question that arises is obvious: who is right here? Well, in one sense, there isn't an answer. No-one is right or wrong, both sides just have different expectations about the nature of the job.
But that isn't really good enough. In fact, to leave it at that would be a very journalistic response. It would be to avoid the judgement that I am saying I think is at heart of the disconnect I am trying to describe.
So I don't think there is any doubt. Sales, and any journalist who agrees with what she said, is wrong. The audience is right. Not in any sort of the-customer-is-always-right sort of way, but because what is the point of a journalism that so fundamentally contradicts the expectations of the audience for which it is created?
What a significant section of the audience heard when they saw the original Tweet by Leigh Sales was: I am on his side, not on yours. I have more empathy with his point of view than I do with my audience's. In expressing admiration for John Howard's press conference, she was telling her audience that she approaches her entire job in a way that gives politicians the benefit of doubt and she was confirming what many in the audience feel in their bones, that journalists too often come across as siding with power rather than challenging it.
That mightn't be what she meant, but she and every other journalist needs to realise that that is how it was understood. And that that underlying approach goes to the heart of how they do their job.
It is all very well to say, well, this is just how we do it, but that would be the worst sort of professional hubris, tantamount to saying, we don't care what you, our audience think.
Leigh Sales has one of the most high-profile political jobs in the land, but in Tweeting what she did she was telling her audience that she is maintaining standards and practices that fundamentally contradict their expectations.
She and other journalists can, of course, simply dismiss all this as yet another example of the Twitter "echo chamber" and reassure themselves with declarations that Twitter is not representative of the wider audience, and that the views expressed there can be safely ignored.
But I think that would be a mistake.

Another perspective on the issue from Jim Parker…..

The Failed Estate, 7 July 2016:
There’s a lesson for Australian media here. Journalists need to stop seeing themselves as players. Their job is to represent the public to decision-makers, not the other way around.  We don’t want them to make forecasts; we want to them to demand answers to simple questions. We want them, beyond rare exceptions, to stop reporting self-serving anonymous scuttlebutt and to insist that people go on the record. We would prefer that instead of guessing and surmising and speculating, they just said “I really don’t know what will happen next. But here are the facts.”  And we would prefer their editors to stop asking them to issue “hot takes” on every little brain fart in Canberra and leave them to get their teeth into a story once in a while.
As Russell Marks writes in The Monthly, in perhaps the best analysis of the media’s failures this election, journalists can do us all a big favour by giving up the pretence that they are god-like electoral analysts or judges of spin. Stop the second-hand running commentary on how the management of issues will ‘play’ in the electorate, turn your bullshit detectors up to 10 and start testing the “perceptions” against the facts.
“While intelligent journalists are running themselves ragged acting as unglorified public relations assistants for politicians, they’re not testing statements and checking claims,” Marks writes. “News reportage becomes quite literally a matter of ‘Turnbull said A, while Shorten said B’, which is close to entirely useless without context. In the end, we are told, the voters get it right. But that expression of faith in the democratic process depends on faith in the fourth estate to present political realities so that voters can make sensible choices.”
Journalism is a tough job, even tougher when your resources are constantly being cut, the bosses are asking you to file constantly and social media is bagging you. But journalists can make it a lot easier for themselves by giving up the pretence that they are all-seeing political sages and focus instead on asking good questions, reporting facts, placing those facts in context and admitting that neither they, nor anyone, has any idea about what happens next.
In journalism at least, god is dead.

Tuesday 5 July 2016

Explaining the 2016 federal election result


The mainstream media is currently indulging in a political post mortem orgy and, in the end what its bloody dissection reveals is less about the political processes involved in the federal election campaign and more about the media itself.
Even given the official polling day fell within school holidays, one would have thought that the MSM would have paused to wonder if the record number of voters marching towards the prepoll stations in June might have indicated that the electorate was about to flex its muscle.
In recent years journalists have ignored the fact that in Australia the electorate has always had a contrary mind of its own. 
That the only truism that holds in every election is that it does not vote to install one particular political party in government – it votes in the hope of keeping a political party from either gaining government or gaining enough power to control both houses of parliament.
Hence the current state of play in the national ballot paper count.
Malcolm Bligh Turnbull is learning to his cost that he could change the rules on voting at Senate elections or he could call a double dissolution federal election – he just couldn’t do both without punishment.
Anthony John Abbott is learning that passive-aggressive election campaigning and failure to appear genuinely contrite for past failures also imposes a real political cost on the party he once led.
William Richard Shorten’s lesson is that it may just possibly take not one but two election cycles before Labor is fully forgiven for its self-indulgent federal in-fighting between 2007-2013.

Here are two of The Guardian’s ‘best’ efforts to explain the 2 July election result….. 
The Guardian, 4 July 2016:
At the moment the Liberal party is a burnt and broken enterprise and to repair it may be quite impossible. 
Tony Abbott’s baton of failure has been passed to Malcolm Turnbull. The party is stuck in a miserable warp that locks out the country’s crying unresolved issues, and there’s no one in the wings with the integrity, intellect and command to drag it out of its pitiable state.
The great issues of the day that define who we are as a country were not part of the Coalition’s play sheet, and this includes: climate change, offshore imprisonment of refugees and marriage equality. Instead, we had the mirage of an economic “plan” for jobs and growth, which on closer inspection turned out to be trickle-down economics based on a bunch of tax cuts for the better off.  
Turnbull says he can form a majority government, in which event it will be a sour little victory – a victory without a mandate. The hard-right soul of the party is also in flames – just look at what happened in Tasmania where Senator Eric Abetz’s Christian regressives run the local machine. There’s no moral authority to be found there – all we might hope for is that now he sits quietly in a corner for a very long time. 
The party started to take a primordial direction under John Howard, who is now paraded as a patron saint. The Liberals failed to heed the message that was delivered in 2007 when the saint was flung ignominiously by voters out of his own seat. 
Turnbull and Scott Morrison crying foul on Saturday night about Labor party lies was a treat to behold. The “we wus robbed” line coming from the people who brought us children overboard, Islamic scares, the “intelligence” for the Iraq war and fake budget projections is an exciting new audacity. Even the party’s very name is a lie. 
The campaign was laced with warnings about “hung parliaments”, “vote sharing fiascos”, “chaos”. The obverse is that MPs should be puppets and parliament a rubber stamp for the party with the majority of seats, doing what the executive commands – yet “stability” has not been a uniform feature of the long history of Westminster-style parliaments. Indeed, the Senate has ensured that in Australia hung parliaments are the norm and minority governments are not unknown. 
Importantly, this state of affairs is not always unworkable. Julia Gillard’s government operated both as a minority and in a hung parliament quite effectively, even if chaotically. 
With the support of crossbenchers and the Greens, the Gillard Labor government passed 561 bills through parliament, not one of which was defeated on the floor of the House of Representatives, including the National Broadband Network, the carbon tax, the resource rent tax (even though it turned out not to be very effective), the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the household assistance package, and pension increases. Despite the raucous attacks from the Coalition, by any standard it was an effective government…..
The Guardian, 3 July 2016:
It hadn’t even got to 11pm before the campaign post-mortems and leadership speculation began.
On the Coalition side.
I confess: sitting on the Sky News election desk, I could barely believe the booth results as they started coming in. I had expected it to be close; I had even (bravely) predicted a hung parliament. But if I am honest, I had been dreading the election night desk duty just a little, expecting to spend my time explaining why Labor was not picking up enough seats in western Sydney.
In fact, I had expected that I would need to answer questions about the future of Bill Shorten’s leadership.
Instead, before either party leader had addressed their party faithful, Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership was under question, and the blue on blue violence was underway. Cory Bernardi was arguing with Mark Textor on Twitter, Peta Credlin was calling the double dissolution a strategic mistake, and Andrew Bolt was demanding Turnbull resign.
How did this happen?
Let’s start with an uninspiring and tactically foolish campaign from the Coalition. The proposed company tax cuts never excited the electorate, no matter how exciting it is to be alive in these times.
The Coalition’s superannuation policy divided its party faithful and disappointed their donors.
The predicted scare campaigns from the Coalition – on negative gearing, on border security, on unions, and on election costings – never materialised.
And Malcolm Turnbull, having seized the prime ministership, never seized the economic leadership as he promised to do. Turnbull’s economic narrative was incoherent, flip flopping between increasing the GST, allow the state to levy income taxes, fixing bracket creep, and giving companies a tax break.
His campaign slogan didn’t even include a verb, for goodness’ sake. “Jobs and growth” isn’t a plan, it’s a list.
Turnbull’s campaign events were orchestrated, low-risk, and low-key. Look at the Coalition’s campaign launch: I’ve been to christenings with more people in attendance and wakes with more enthusiasm. He never seemed to actually fight for the job; rather he sat back waiting for the people to elect him…..

And here is The Australian pretending the sky has fallen down about our ears….. 
The Australian, 4 July 2016:
Australia’s top corporate figures have reacted with dismay to the possibility of a hung parliament or wafer-thin Coalition majority, warning economic reform could be paralysed for years.
As business anxiously waits on the counting of postal votes that won’t start until tomorrow, Seven Group Holdings executive chairman Kerry Stokes described the uncertainty of the weekend’s result as “disastrous” and said the current landscape in Canberra was “bad for investment and business”.
Mr Stokes was joined by other business leaders, who told The Australian that key planks of the Coalition’s reform agenda — including company tax cuts and the re-establishment of the construction industry watchdog — will be hostage to a precarious lower house majority and obstructive new Senate crossbench. Economists have also warned of an increased risk of a credit downgrade for Australia, based on the likely difficulty of passing unpopular budget repair measures.
“I think it’s disastrous,” Mr Stokes said late yesterday.
“There has been uncertainty for eight weeks.”
Now, he said, “the facts are it’s more uncertain”.
“So that’s a disaster, whichever way you want to look at it. I don’t know any way of dealing with that now to gain stability.”….
The Australian, 4 July 2016:
The double dissolution has been a double disaster for Malcolm Turnbull. Not only is his grip on power hanging from the precipice but voters have wilfully ignored his plea for stability by deliberately voting for minor parties and independents.
With 13 seats still in doubt, it remains possible the crossbench could control both houses of parliament, making the task for whoever lives in The Lodge doubly difficult.
Even if Turnbull stumbles to victory, he will govern by a wafer-thin majority and must keep one eye on each crossbench in each chamber with no margin to lose a slither of support in his own partyroom.
As the count currently stands, the Coalition’s primary vote of 42 per cent is one of its three worst results in the House of Representatives since the party created by Robert Menzies faced its first election 70 years ago.
Labor are celebrating a performance under Bill Shorten they never dreamed of achieving three years ago when the party was punted from power in the wake of the Rudd-Gillard civil war, but the primary vote of 35 per cent is the ALP’s second worst in 82 years.
The combined vote of minor and micro parties and independents is 22.8 per cent — the highest it has been since 1934 and third highest since Federation. It is the preferences of these protest votes that will decide who wins many seats.
The major parties did not secure the confidence of the voting public. No wonder we still don’t have a clear election winner.
Both parties have a smaller share of the vote than they did in 2010 when voters delivered the last hung parliament.
It is a repudiation to both Turnbull and Shorten and their appeal to voters to give them a majority, making clear they would not strike alliances with minor parties.
Shorten said the Greens were “dreaming” if they hoped to form an alliance.
Turnbull repeatedly issued the reminder that a vote for anyone other than the Liberals or Nationals would be a return to the “chaos and instability” of the hung parliament under the Gillard government.
If that was supposed to scare people, it failed.
Voters not only ignored the Prime Minister but they have forced him to get on the phone to the lower house crossbenchers — some of whom were in this position six years ago taking calls from Julia Gillard.
Shorten has also been on the phone and Labor is not ruling out the possibility it might just be able to win enough of the undecided seats on the preferences of the minor parties and independents and strike a deal with the crossbench to govern.
It’s a horror flashback to the 17-day wait in 2010 to find out who would form government……

While The Sydney Morning Herald plodded its way through this…..

Especially with all the major polls predicting a tight result. I certainly did when I took a deep breath and hopped aboard the Turnbull bus to cover the final two weeks of the campaign. 
They turned out to be anything but. 
Rather than a man locked in the fight of his life, Turnbull looked like a footballer running down the clock. The pace of the campaign - already at a low tempo - grew positively languid. 
"We will win on July 2," Turnbull had declared weeks earlier and he was acting like it as he strolled towards the finish line. A busy day contained two events, some just one….  
Malcolm Turnbull has assured Australians he can deliver stability but after a stinging rebuke from voters, the fate of his government may not be known for days and the Prime Minister is staring down an internal push from conservative MPs for the return of Tony Abbott to the ministry.
With the final lower house seat count from the knife-edge election unlikely to be clear until the end of the week, anger is growing within the Coalition over its massive reversal of electoral fortunes, which has ended the careers of three ministers, stymied industrial relations reforms used to justify the double dissolution, and dealt up an even more unruly Senate crossbench.
Three outcomes remain possible from the election, including a razor-thin Turnbull majority if seats in doubt tumble its way, a hung parliament in which neither side has a majority, and another election is even an outside possibility if a clear winner cannot be determined.
On Sunday night, Labor took an unexpected lead in the two-party preferred vote after an update on the Australian Electoral Commission's website.
It showed the swing away from the Coalition had risen to 3.7 per cent, putting Labor in the lead by a wafer-thin margin…..

Tuesday 21 June 2016

Something died in the NSW Northern Rivers region today


APN News & Media has sold its regional newspaper business to its own shareholder, News Corp, for $36.6 million.
APN's shares reached $4.90 on the news after opening at $4.61, after jumping 11 per cent on Monday following media speculation about the sale.  
The regional assets include 12 daily newspaper, 60 community newspapers and dozens of news websites. 
News Corp already owns a 14.9 per cent stake in APN, which is currently shedding its traditional media assets but keeping its radio and AdShel divisions.  
The deal still requires shareholder and regulatory approval. Regional mastheads include the Daily Mercury in Mackay, Bundaberg's NewsMail, The Gympie Times and the Sunshine Coast Daily. 
The Australian Regional Media division would be handed over in August provided all the hurdles were cleared.…..

Echo Net Daily, 21 June 2016:
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has signed a $36.6 million deal to buy APN News & Media’s Australian regional newspaper business, which includes The Northern Star and Tweed Daily News.
The deal – which is subject to approval from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, also covers the weekly publications, Byron Shire News, Ballina Advocate, the Lismore Echo and the Richmond River Examiner.
News Corp, already holds a stake of almost 15 per cent in APN, which means shareholder approval would also be required for what would be deemed a related-party transaction.
APN Australian Regional Media has a portfolio of 12 daily and more than 60 non-daily Australian regional newspapers.
Staff at the Northern Star and the other publications received an email just before 11am today confirming that the deal had been struck…..

The Australian, 20 June 2016:
News Corp, publisher of The Australian, has long been seen as the natural owner of ARM due to potential synergies with its regional business and the fact that few people know the assets better than News Corp executive chairman, and APN’s former boss, Michael Miller.
The Queensland focused portfolio includes 12 daily newspapers such as The ­Sunshine Coast Daily and The Gympie Times, and includes more than 60 non-daily and community publications.
The sale was outlined by APN in February as part of efforts to make a more aggressive move into the radio and outdoor advertising ­sectors. The price of the portfolio is understood to have fallen short of the $50m APN had been chasing.
News Corp, advised by Aquasia, already holds a stake of almost 15 per cent in APN which means shareholder approval would also be required for what would be deemed a related-party transaction…..

VALE MEDIA DIVERSITY

Wednesday 15 June 2016

Clarence Valley Council caught trying to minimise IPART's rejection of much of its special rate rise application


Readers of North Coast Voices may recall that this blog posted on this subject in April and May this year.

The rate rise saga  refuses to die………

The Independent, 8 June 2016:

Councillor Karen Toms will challenge public statements made by Clarence Valley’s mayor, Richie Williamson, regarding IPART’s decision to grant Clarence Valley Council (CVC) a one-year-only special rate (SRV) increase of 6.5 percent, instead of 6.5 per cent for each of the next five years.

Councillor Toms’ motion of notice (NOM), which was forwarded to “all senior staff and councillors” on Friday June 3, recommends that: “Council receive and adopt the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal’s (IPART) Local Government’s Determination of Clarence Valley Council’s application for a special rate variation for 2016-17”; …, and “declare that the other reasons attributed to the Mayor Cr Williamson are not claims adopted or endorsed by Clarence Valley Council”.

“Unfortunately,” Cr Toms said, she had “not given enough notice to the general manager” to table the NOM at the June 14 Works, Civil and Corporate Committee meeting.

The council’s code of meeting practice requires seven working days’ notice, however, the Queen’s Birthday holiday on Monday June 13 means that Cr Tom’s NOM only gave six working days’ notice.

“The general manager has accepted the NOM for the July works civil and corporate meeting on July 12,” she said.

The meeting code states that the full seven days is required, “except in circumstances of great urgency or in the case of rescission motions”.

Councillor Toms writes in her NOM: “Mayor Williamson is quoted as saying in the Daily Examiner: “… while the council had consulted widely when it was proposing an 8 per cent increase for five consecutive years, IPART had said it did not consult the community enough once the proposed increase was changed to 6.5 per cent.

“Additionally, the Mayor is interviewed on NBN TV and made the following claims: ‘…We consulted with our community on an 8 per cent increase. Council resolved to apply for a six and a half percent increase and IPART have said to us, well you haven’t consulted on the six and a half percent; which we accept.’

“These statements by the Mayor are considerably at odds with the determination IPART published, in particular at odds with 2 criteria provided by IPART as reasons for refusal.”

The criteria state that CVC “did not demonstrate the need for, and financial impact of, the proposed rate increase in its Integrated Planning and Reporting (IP&R) documents; and, the council did not adequately make the community aware of the extent of the rate increase, as the cumulative impacts were not communicated effectively.”

Citing a letter written to Clarence Forum’s convenor John Hagger, by IPART’s principal analyst, Tony Camenzuli, Cr Toms writes that Mr Camenzuli “specifically” refutes the “reason for refusal stated by Mayor Williamson”.

“The statements by the Mayor have the effect of reducing the importance of the IPART determination and serve to mislead the public as to the clear intent of the IPART criteria,” she writes.

“Council has not ‘accepted’ or adopted in any way the reason given by Mayor Williamson as the IPART reason for refusal. In saying that ‘which we (Council) accept’, Mayor Williamson creates a false impression of the council response to the determination, noting that Council has adopted, nothing in response to the determination.”

Mr Camenzuli’s letter states: “IPART’s report does refer to the council’s decision to reduce the size of the special variation from 8% pa (47% cumulative) each year over five years, to 6.5% pa (37% cumulative) over five years (pages 5, 16).

“This decision by the council was noted as background information.

“The report does not make reference to that decision by the council as a reason for the council’s special variation application not being approved in full.”

The Clarence Valley Independent is the only newspaper left in the Clarence Valley which is not part-owned by News Corp - please show your support for media diversity and this little weekly newspaper (delivered to the door free of charge) by occasionally clicking on to read its top stories online at: http://cvindependent.com.au/.

Monday 16 May 2016

APN Australian Regional Media to remain with APN News & Media if demerger goes ahead but Murdoch circling regional mastheads


At the moment it appears that Australian east coast regional newspapers owned by APN News & Media will remain with APN if the proposed NZME demerger goes ahead.

The same applies if talks between Fairfax Media and APN result in a merger between NZME and Fairfax Media New Zealand.

However, these 100 regional newspapers and websites in Queensland and NSW  are still up for sale and the possibility that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp will be the eventual owner of some or all of that stable remains.

The Australian, 9 March 2016:

News Corp, publisher of The Australian, is believed to be circling the regional community newspapers owned by APN News and Media, which called on Credit Suisse to ­divest the portfolio.

News Corp already owns a network of 111 local mastheads, some of which are believed to be highly lucrative, and sources said the company was taking “a good look” at the APN offering.

The company declined to comment yesterday.

News already holds a stake of almost 15 per cent in the company and counts APN’s former boss ­Michael Miller as its executive chairman. It is understood News had been approached by APN to look at the portfolio. Ciaran Davis was recently named as APN’s new chief executive…..

Sources have suggested that some of the publications would be closed if a buyer could not be found. However, deal-makers yesterday said the newspapers were a good acquisition prospect for an acquirer at the right price that could capitalise on synergies and cash flow.

The news comes with the expectation of increasing deal activity in the media sector, with companies already lining up advisers in anticipation of new laws being passed that will relax restrictions on how many viewers any one television broadcaster can access nationally.

Sunday 15 May 2016

Australian Federal Election 2016: spot Amanda Vanstone's attempts at political deception in The Age newspaper


This was former Liberal Senator for South Australia and former minister in the Howard Government, Amanda Vanstone writing in The Age on 9 May 2016 in an article titled Turnbull or Shorten? The choice seems clear:


Let’s break that down a little.

Schooling

Yes, Malcolm Turnbull went to a public primary school at Vaucluse in Sydney’s affluent Eastern Suburbs for about three years and, yes he went to Sydney Grammar School from the age of eight with the assistance of a scholarship for at least part of that period. He graduated from university during the years when undergraduate and post-graduate tertiary education was free of course fees in Australia. He was the child of divorced parents. All this is on the public record.

Bill Shorten went to a local Catholic primary school before attending Xavier College’s junior & senior schools in the Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne – his mother taught at Xavier and presumably there was some degree of discount on his school fees. So yes, he also had a private education in affluent suburbs. He graduated from university during the years when tertiary education was free of course fees and undertook a post-graduate degree during a period when course fees were re-instituted. His parents divorced when he was about 20 years of age. All of which is also on the public record.

Wealth

Malcolm Turnbull inherited assets worth an est. $2 million from his hotel-broker father before he turned 29 years of age according to one of his biographers Paddy Manning and, he and his wife independently and jointly went on to garner considerably greater wealth which was last estimated to be in the vicinity of $200 million. His last Statement of Registrable Interests lists a veritable slew of financial investments and an expensive property portfolio shared between he and his wife. It is not known if he inherited any money from his mother.

It is not known to the writer if Bill Shorten inherited any money to speak of from his dry-dock manager father or his mother, however his last Statement of Registrable Interests lists very little in assets held by either he or his wife beyond their mortgaged family home.

What essentially separates these two men are the differences in their personal and political philosophies and the wide gap between their different levels of personal wealth.

Although this is something Amanda Vanstone is trying hard to distort in this federal election campaign and something The Age appears to be so indifferent to that its editor is not reigning in her excesses.  

Monday 25 April 2016

Australian Federal Election 2016: can the Turnbull Government afford to aggravate aged pensioners in an election year budget?


Meme found on Twitter*

With less than a month to the release of the 2016-17 federal budget papers the Guvmin Gazette begins to use the tired old ploy of pointing a finger at the working poor, unemployed, single parents, aged and disability pensioners.

Using the journalist’s own calculation of the number of persons “wholly dependent” on Centrelink and Dept. of Veterans’ Affairs cash transfers reveals an unimpressive 27.8% of the 16,405,465 citizens the Australian Electoral Commission calculated were eligible to vote on 31 December 2015 and, even if one reworks the journalists numbers based on citizens who had actually registered to vote by the end of December, the percentage only rises to a still unimpressive 29.2%.

Because there is no clickbait story in those percentages, the final percentage figure is boosted by adding numbers allegedly representing both public sector employees and low paid private sector workers. This enabled the newspaper to erroneously headline the article as One in two voters is fully reliant on public welfare.

Excerpts from that article in The Australian on 16 April 2016:

Nearly half of voters in the looming federal election will rely ­entirely on government payments for their incomes, confront­ing Scott Morrison with a demographic and political powder keg as he frames a May 3 budget ­relying on spending restraint to rein in the deficit.

Analysis by The Weekend Australian has revealed that more than 44 per cent of voters, almost 6.4 million people, are ­either public sector employees (1.89 million) or wholly dependent on federal government pensions, allowances and parenting payments (4.48 million). The figure grows further when private sector workers who receive more in welfare than they pay in tax are added.

The Coalition holds seven of the 10 most welfare-dependent seats in the nation while Labor holds three……

The figures have emerged as Patrick McClure, whose review of the welfare system for the Abbott government called for drastic simplification of 75 federal payments and supplements, said about three quarters of his review had still not yet been taken up.

The extent of reliance on ­government payments for voters’ incomes has emerged as the ­Coalition and Labor are locked in a political battle over the Treasurer’s insistence that the government will rely on spending restraint and expanding the economy rather than lifting the overall tax burden to cut the deficit.

Ratings agency Moody’s raised the stakes ahead of the budget, ­declaring this week that the failure of the political system to ­deliver genuine spending restraint suggested the government had to consider tax increases to close the deficit gap. Mr Morrison stood firm yesterday, maintaining his position that “the government is not looking to increase the tax burden on the economy’’…..

The Nationals appear to be the most vulnerable to a crackdown on welfare and government spending.

The Weekend Australian’s analysis of social security by federal electorate shows the junior Coalition partner holds half of the 10 most welfare-dependent seats (which even excludes family tax benefit payments, which can be held concurrently with other payments). The 10 seats have between 40,000 and 50,000 wholly welfare dependent voters out of a total electorate of about 105,000 voters. Another three are held by Labor and two by the Liberals.

Those relying on government payments in Nationals seats tend to receive age and disability pensions while Labor seats are disproportionately home to family tax benefit recipients. Liberal seats tend to have a higher proportion of holders of the Commonwealth Seniors Health Card (a benefit for older Australians not eligible for the Age Pension). The unemployed (receiving Newstart or Youth Allowance (Other) recipients) are relatively evenly spread.....

What the article also doesn’t say is that average social assistance in cash transfers is much wider than the categories stated and government money received by individuals with their own incorporated business income comes in at est. $73 per week per person, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

On the NSW Far North Coast the largest single group of persons eligible to vote and receiving federal government cash transfers in June 2015 were aged pensioners.

Broken down by federal electorate** the numbers are:

Cowper (Nationals seat) – 23,261 persons
Page (Nationals seat) – 22,512 persons
Richmond (Labor seat) – 21,238 persons
TOTAL – 67,011 persons.

Australia-wide the total number of aged pensioners as of June 2015 was 2,486,195 individuals  of which an estimated 646,000 are currently receiving a part-pension.

All of these people have relatives and a significant number would be full or part-time carers of their older family member.

The Australian is right in one respect – that’s a demographic and political powder keg facing both the Prime Minister and Treasurer in an election year.

However, backgrounding the Murdoch media with ideology-based statistical spin is not going to impress voters after that particular strategy was worked to death during the Abbott leadership years.

Footnote

* It is possible (based on the American experience) that around 5% of Australian online users 65 years of age and over use Twitter.

** In the NSW Northern Rivers region aged pensioners (potentially eligible to vote in June 2015) by local government area (LGA):

Ballina LGA – 6,636 persons
Byron LGA  – 3,059 persons
Clarence Valley LGA – 9,341 persons (9,304 of these individuals living in Grafton City & region, Maclean, Yamba and Iluka)
Kyogle LGA  – 1,357 persons
Lismore LGA – 5,389 persons
Richmond Valley LGA – 3,778 persons
Tweed LGA – 16,229 persons
TOTAL – 40,400 persons.

Thursday 21 April 2016

Then Australian Attorney-General George Brandis in March 2015: "Media organisations are not the target of this law. The targets of this law are criminals and paedophiles and terrorists"*


The Australian federal police have admitted they sought access to a Guardian reporter’s metadata without a warrant in an attempt to hunt down his sources.
It is the first time the AFP has confirmed seeking access to a journalist’s metadata in a particular case.
The admission came to light when the AFP told the privacy commissioner it had sought “subscriber checks” and email records relating to the Guardian Australia journalist Paul Farrell, and the correspondence was sent to Farrell by the office of the Australian information commissioner……
The AFP’s submission said: “You will see that exemptions have been claimed under s47E(d) and s37(2)(b) on some folios. These exemptions primarily relate to e-mail and other subscriber checks relating to Mr Farrell, and examination of meta data associated with some electronic files.”  [The Guardian, 14 April 2016]

At 11.35am AEST on 17 April 2014 The Guardian published journalist Paul Farrell’s article Australian ship went far deeper into Indonesian waters than disclosed with this map:


And this observation:

The redacted version of the classified report, obtained by the Australian Associated Press under freedom of information laws, said: “Entry to Indonesian waters was inadvertent, arising from miscalculation of the maritime boundaries, in that the calculation did not take into account archipelagic baselines.”

Crucially, the report adds: “Territorial seas declared by foreign nations are generally not depicted on Australian hydrographic charts.”

But the digital map from the vessel casts doubt on these findings, and clearly shows the Australian ship crossing the red line that marks the point of Indonesia’s baselines and entering its waters past the headlands near Pelabuhan Ratu bay. Indonesia’s territorial seas are 12 nautical miles further out from where the baselines are marked in red. It is not known whether the digital mapping device was operational at the time the Ocean Protector entered Indonesian waters.

If he wasn’t a blip on the Australian Federal Police radar before the publication date of that article, Paul Farrell was from then on.

However, it is unclear if the initial request to investigate this journalist came from the then Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Scott Morrison, his department or some other individual or agency.

Although what appears to be Folio 3 of an est. 200 pages in Case No.5610147 seems to suggest that Customs (now called Border Force) may have been the complainant of record by May 2014 and the media finger points to the head of Australian Customs and Border Protection Services, Michael Pezzullo.

On 12 Febraury2016 Farrell stated of this investigation:

The files are made up of operational centre meeting minutes, file notes, interview records and a plan for an investigation the AFP undertook into one of my stories. Most concerning is what appears to be a list of suspects the AFP drew up, along with possible offences they believe they may have committed.
The documents show that during the course of an investigation into my sources for a story I had written, an AFP officer logged more than 800 electronic updates on the investigation file.

Farrell is not the only journalist whose metadata has been accessed in search of sources, but the Australian Federal Police insists that it has not accessed any journalist’s metadata for the last six months – the last time being in 13 October 2015.

Footnote

Friday 15 April 2016

Mr. Denmore: "Do keep up now"


The Failed Estate, 3 April 2016:

To be fair, political media is broken because politics is broken – or at least what we call politics – the charade that takes place in Canberra or any other world capital each day featuring people and parties who don’t really believe in anything anymore, but making sure they posture and pontificate in a way that suggests they do. And the media, having so much invested in the semblance of a left-right, blue-red, coke-pepsi contest, is forced to play along with the whole silly game.

The rest of the population senses the breakdown. And not just in Australia. This is a global phenomenon, reflecting the end of a 35-year era in which neoliberal capitalism looked to have destroyed all other contenders. Politicians of the nominal left and right swallowed the consensus whole, leaving them to fight ridiculous and infantile ‘culture wars’ to justify their own sorry existence.

But ironically “the market knows best” people don’t seem to have figured that the wider population understands the issue better than the insiders do. The big problems we face are global in nature – climate change, people movements, adequacy of resources, the impotency of central banks, the dislocations wrought by “free” trade, the rise in the power of stateless corporations at the expense of people, the encroachment of “markets” into every aspect of our lives and the power of well-funded lobbies that sell private interest as public interest and destroy the possibility of people-oriented change.

THAT’S why politics is broken. And THAT’s why the media does not appear to have a clue about what’s going on right now. Oddly enough, this is a much, much bigger story than whether Malcolm loves Scott.

Do keep up now.

Sunday 20 March 2016

A reader bites back at Northern Star editorial style


The Northern Star, 23 February 2016:

Good with the bad

Good editorial David (NS 18/2), Your unwavering support for Kevin Hogan is touching. You may have some work to do convincing readers that you don't mind what political persuasion a politician is. But you do deserve credit for publishing letters criticising Kevin Hogan and the Nationals.

The Nationals are a strong force in this area, although I often wonder why because
they promise much and deliver little. I`ve lived in this area nearly 30 years so I`m
almost a local, in that time the Nationals have had an almost exclusive hold on these Northern Rivers seats, only with short disruptions when Labor`s Harry Woods and Neville Newell were elected in Page and Richmond.

When Justine Elliott and Janelle Saffin were elected in 2004 and 2007 all hell broke
loose, suddenly major infrastructure projects that were ignored for years by the
Nationals were being built.

Don Page lobbied the Howard Government long and hard for the Ballina and Alstonville bypasses, his National Party mate Ian Causley repeatedly failed to secure any funding. Safe seats; why bother, (not anymore).

When Janelle Saffin was elected these two projects were immediately funded and
built.

Kevin Hogan also made the good people from the Ballina Marine Rescue Tower wait  for over two years in inadequate facilities just so he could roll out the pork barrel closer to an election.

So David, if you think such disrespectful and cynical behaviour is OK and Kevin Hogan is on a roll, fine. If not how about some balance in your editorials and comment on issues where Kevin and his government are letting the local area down.

Keith Duncan
Pimlico

Saturday 12 March 2016

Australian Federal Election 2016: and the slurs quickly become childish


This time it is independent candidate in the NSW New England electorate, Tony Windsor, on the receiving line for daring to stand in a seat held by Nationals Deputy-Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and it’s the Murdoch media which is behaving like toddler in full tantrum mode: 
Image found on Twitter

Friday 4 March 2016

National Indigenous Times to be revived


Australian Newspaper History Group, Newsletter, No 86, February 2016:

86.1.9 Revival of National Indigenous Times to be attempted

Aboriginal businessman Wayne Bergmann has taken control of the collapsed National Indigenous Times, with the aim of transforming it into a newspaper that celebrates indigenous achievement in business, politics and sport. A company majority-owned by Bergmann has bought the paper from liquidators and is expected to relaunch it within weeks. Veteran Perth journalist Tony Barrass will become the editor of the publication, which will be resurrected online before a decision is made whether to resume in print. The old Times had enraged some aboriginal leaders with its hardline approach to indigenous affairs. Kimberley Aboriginal leader Bergmann said on 20 January that he wanted the paper to focus heavily on indigenous business success stories. Barrass, who has a 49% stake in the company, promised the publication would be upmarket, entertaining and provocative. “It will reflect a range of indigenous views, not just one political leaning,” he said (Australian, 21 January 2016, p.6).