Australia's National Micro-debate
Australian politicians seemingly pick and choose, as best it suits them, which issues in the national debate are worth discussing and which are merely trivial. Tough questions are unfairly dismissed as alarmist, or as belonging to the world of "The Canberra Bubble". But the true origin of trivial national debate lies in Australia's Political-journalistic echo chamber. Ideas that would otherwise be dismissed as backwards looking, and stories that deserve a mention in footnotes at best, are instead rented space to fester in the national psyche. Buoyed by journalists who act as mouthpieces for the political hands that feed them, dirty and baseless rhetoric is shot into circulation and inflated with a false sense of legitimacy. This is the beginning of the national micro-debate. The party who this rhetoric aims to denigrate is then demanded an answer of. Their failure to "properly" address these largely manufactured points of debate is then claimed as evidence of their incompetence. All this unfolds as forward-looking and substantive debates on big ideas are left in the too hard basket.
Recently our Prime Minister has been running this line: "Bill Shorten refuses to tell Australia what the cost of his climate change policy is." Labor's would-be Climate Change and Energy minister, Mark Butler called the ensuing media coverage the "Faux Climate Change Debate." The existential threat posed by climate change was ignored, and a scare campaign about the dollar cost of fighting it ran rampant. Labor insisted that a policy which would compel 250 different carbon emitters in a fluctuating market to cap their emissions could not be pre-emptively costed. Unsurprisingly this factual response didn't satisfy the Coalition, but nor did it satisfy the media, who, having given the Liberal party line such weight, continue to demand a number be produced out of thin air.
There are many more recent examples of this sort of low level debate in Australia. Instead of a focus on Mark Daley's plans for NSW and how they could impact electorates with significant Asian populations, we saw a spotlight on his comment that highly educated Asian people were moving in to Sydney. Instead of a conversation about either major party developing a humane policy for processing refugee arrivals that upholds their human rights, we were subjected to a racist conversation about "rapists" and "paedophiles" being brought to Australia under the Medivac bill. Instead of a robust debate about Australia's electoral candidates and their policies, we were fed stories about press conference gaffes that only members of the press gallery would ever be interested in. Broadly the media is far more concerned with crowning a winner for each day of the campaign than they are about the merits of the leader's ideas. They're more interested in having the electorate focus on trivial arguments than they are about starting a conversation about policy and reform.
Only once we pop this notion of a Canberra bubble can we have an honest conversation about Australia's media bubble. Often it's left to International publications to pick up their Australian counterpart's slack. A recent article in the New York Times told the harrowing story of Patrick Cumaiyi, an Indigenous man who had his skull broken by police after an in-custody flight to Darwin. It's worth noting that there are independent Indigenous publications that do a fantastic job of reporting these common and pervasive cases of abuse. Australia's media giants, however, clearly have no economic or political interest in printing headlines that challenge the status quo. Although the ABC did eventually catch wind of the New York Times article and discuss it, they too have been guilty of an effective blackout when it comes to stories like this one. The modern ABC is on sedatives, stifled by a Coalition-branded muzzle and threats of funding cuts. The Coalition would gladly give it a root canal because they know they can't afford for our public broadcaster to bare real teeth. Even in it's current state of impotence the ABC is still painted as some sort of far-left boogeyman by the Government.
The course of the national debate is chartered by the government of the day. Fundamentally, an absence of sustained, courageous leadership allows this low calibre discourse to arise. Only in a political landscape entirely lacking imagination could such micro-issues be debated as if they were true sticking points in a march towards national progress. Sterile as the national debate has become, big picture ideas are now far too liberally labelled as controversial, reckless, or radical.
Recently our Prime Minister has been running this line: "Bill Shorten refuses to tell Australia what the cost of his climate change policy is." Labor's would-be Climate Change and Energy minister, Mark Butler called the ensuing media coverage the "Faux Climate Change Debate." The existential threat posed by climate change was ignored, and a scare campaign about the dollar cost of fighting it ran rampant. Labor insisted that a policy which would compel 250 different carbon emitters in a fluctuating market to cap their emissions could not be pre-emptively costed. Unsurprisingly this factual response didn't satisfy the Coalition, but nor did it satisfy the media, who, having given the Liberal party line such weight, continue to demand a number be produced out of thin air.
There are many more recent examples of this sort of low level debate in Australia. Instead of a focus on Mark Daley's plans for NSW and how they could impact electorates with significant Asian populations, we saw a spotlight on his comment that highly educated Asian people were moving in to Sydney. Instead of a conversation about either major party developing a humane policy for processing refugee arrivals that upholds their human rights, we were subjected to a racist conversation about "rapists" and "paedophiles" being brought to Australia under the Medivac bill. Instead of a robust debate about Australia's electoral candidates and their policies, we were fed stories about press conference gaffes that only members of the press gallery would ever be interested in. Broadly the media is far more concerned with crowning a winner for each day of the campaign than they are about the merits of the leader's ideas. They're more interested in having the electorate focus on trivial arguments than they are about starting a conversation about policy and reform.
Only once we pop this notion of a Canberra bubble can we have an honest conversation about Australia's media bubble. Often it's left to International publications to pick up their Australian counterpart's slack. A recent article in the New York Times told the harrowing story of Patrick Cumaiyi, an Indigenous man who had his skull broken by police after an in-custody flight to Darwin. It's worth noting that there are independent Indigenous publications that do a fantastic job of reporting these common and pervasive cases of abuse. Australia's media giants, however, clearly have no economic or political interest in printing headlines that challenge the status quo. Although the ABC did eventually catch wind of the New York Times article and discuss it, they too have been guilty of an effective blackout when it comes to stories like this one. The modern ABC is on sedatives, stifled by a Coalition-branded muzzle and threats of funding cuts. The Coalition would gladly give it a root canal because they know they can't afford for our public broadcaster to bare real teeth. Even in it's current state of impotence the ABC is still painted as some sort of far-left boogeyman by the Government.
The course of the national debate is chartered by the government of the day. Fundamentally, an absence of sustained, courageous leadership allows this low calibre discourse to arise. Only in a political landscape entirely lacking imagination could such micro-issues be debated as if they were true sticking points in a march towards national progress. Sterile as the national debate has become, big picture ideas are now far too liberally labelled as controversial, reckless, or radical.
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