Politics
The media’s anti-policy bias
If one follows the media there are only two things happening in Canberra. One is a defamation case involving two young former Liberal Party parliamentary staff, and the other is a supposed calamitous failure by the government – the incompetent Labor government – to ensure community safety, by deliberately letting 148 hardened criminals out of detention.
That’s the spin, shouted from the rooftop by right-wing media, and to which some other commentators are drawn, because they have spent 18 months patiently waiting for the Albanese government to stuff something up.
The facts of the latter are reasonably straightforward. The High Court confirmed the doctrine of the separation of powers: the government’s role is to pass laws, it’s up to the courts to decide if people should be deprived of liberty. Once the High Court ruled, the government had no option but to release the detainees. The opposition was unequivocally wrong in law in asserting that the government has discretion in this matter. On the ABC’s 730 program on Wednesday night Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus explained the situation clearly – in a way that ministers should have done earlier, rather than parroting the words of speaking notes written in defensive, vague and inconclusive language.
Then on Thursday morning Abul Rizvi, former Deputy Secretary of the Immigration Department, and constitutional law expert Kim Rubenstein, explained the legal processes that will almost certainly see some of these 148 people returned to some defined period of preventative detention: Preventative Detention legislation has passed. What happens next?. (13 minutes)
The government was rash in suggesting that the release of the detainees posed no heightened risk to the community, but we can imagine the headlines if Minister O’Neil had said “Of course I cannot categorically state that the release of these detainees, imposes no risk to the community. This is a tiny addition to general background risk posed by offenders who have served their sentences and who might re-offend”.
Of course the opposition was going to make political capital out of the situation and it did. Deputy Opposition Leader Sussan Ley blamed the government for letting rapists loose on Australian women, repeating the mantra “we locked them up, Labor let them out”. Shadow Immigration Minister Dan Tehan presented a hysterical, Duttonesque outburst – it would be wrong to call it an “argument”. Using a little sophistry both Ley and Tehan conveyed the impression that release of the detainees was a deliberate choice of the government and that had the Coalition been in power it would have kept the group in detention. Shadow Foreign Minister Simon Birmingham was more measured and didn’t resort to hysteria: he tried his utmost to suggest that the government had been administratively incompetent.
Fortunately there are elected politicians, other than those on the “opposition” benches, ready to comment critically on the government’s performance. Kylea Tink, independent Member for North Sydney, in a ten-minute interview on the ABC, was quite critical of the government’s handling of the matter – its apologetic and defensive communications, the way it allowed the opposition to push it around, and its reluctance to tell the community more about the general nature of the released detainees. She was also generally critical of both Labor and Coalition administrations for the way, over 30 years, that they have dealt with people they cannot deport. Some of them may have committed bad crimes, but so too have many Australian citizens: why are these 148 people treated differently?
She criticized the government for rushing the legislation:
The whole process in the last three to four weeks has just been completely unacceptable, and not up to the standards that the Australian public have every right to expect.
She criticized the government for not having put down the fear campaign pushed by the opposition and right-wing media:
At the moment what we’re being told as Australians is that we need to be frightened of all of these people, that these people are the worst of the worst.
Her most scathing criticism was directed to the opposition:
I think the way the opposition has handled this whole scenario is very, very problematic, and I think it shows their absolute determination to destroying what is essentially the moral fibre of our society. To use a High Court ruling in this way to drive fear and division across our community is not in the best interests of our society. … Australians are sick of this type of politics.
Tink asserts, almost certainly correctly, that the Australian public is sick of this type of politics, but it seems to be the only politics most journalists can imagine, and they inadvertently promote it.
Michelle Grattan captures the media’s obsession in her Conversation article View from The Hill: government’s announcement tsunami overshadowed by crisis over ex-detainees. Grattan explains that there are many important policy issues in train. She mentions NDIS funding, aged care funding, an immigration review. One could add employment services, the Cop 28 negotiations, housing, the stage 3 tax cuts and defence purchasing. And there is a policing matter about dealing with an unexpected extra few violent offenders who have served their time: is that a “crisis”?
Journalists present the situation as if some force out of human control has elevated this last issue to an overwhelming prominence.
But there is no such superhuman force. It’s journalists who have decided that they will set the agenda for the public – that they will decide what’s important for the public and what’s not. It’s not about “left” or “right” bias. It’s about arrogance and a refusal to acknowledge that their choice of subject is a moral choice.
For the public this is worse than a bias, because a bias, by definition, is consistent. We may be shocked by the journalism in Sky After Dark or the Sydney Telegraph, but we know where they’re coming from. But we never learn what stories other journalists chose not to cover, leaving us uninformed on large aspects of public policy.
We should also ask why the ABC, which is held by the public as a trusted source, should give airtime to politicians such as Ley and Tehan. The reason they do so is presumably to give “the opposition” a fair go, so that they can point to faults in the government’s policies and promote their own. But Ley and Tehan didn’t do that: that task was left to Tink. The ABC seems to be trapped by a convention that when a party is defined as “the opposition” its spokespeople have an unrestricted license to spread fear, bullshit, lies and division.
The ABC would surely be truer to its charter if it sought out politicians with reasoned criticism of the government’s policies and kept people like Dutton, Ley and Tehan off air until they have some meaningful criticism of government policy and can make those criticisms in a way that is respectful of the audience and does not raise fear and alarm.
As for partisan politics, most of these former detainees would have come to Australia when the Coalition’s weak border protection regime was in effect – a regime strong on rhetoric about boat arrivals and appallingly weak on airport security. Indeed we know that one of the people at the centre of the High Court case is a convicted paedophile whose pathway to a visa was approved by Peter Dutton when he was immigration minister. But that’s yesterday’s story: today’s stories are about two slanging matches, one in the ACT Supreme Court the other up on the hill.
In some countries, young voters are flocking to the far right
Last week we linked to research showing that young Australians are voting strongly against the Coalition, and that as they age they hold on to those preferences. In last year’s federal election only 22 percent of those aged 18 to 26, and 27 percent of those aged 27 to 41, cast a first preference vote for the Coalition. The Green vote is particularly strong among these age groups.
The landscape in Europe may be different. Writing in The Guardian Why are young voters flocking to the far right in parts of Europe Jon Henley and Pjotr Sauer note that an increasing proportion of young people have been attracted to candidates such as Geert Wilders, Marine le Pen and Giorgia Meloni.
Right-wing demagogues are adept at identifying people’s grievances, and using that identification to muster support. Wilders, for example, was promising young people access to housing and health care. Can they deliver, however, because realistically the only way the far right govern is in coalition with traditional centre-right parties, which are traditionally opposed to spending on services such as health care and housing.