Author Archives: David Walker

About David Walker

David Walker is the chief operating officer of WorkDay Media, publisher of the online finance industry information service Banking Day. He has previously been director of comunications and advocacy for the Business Council of Australia, director of policy and communications for the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, site director for online finance start-up eChoice and an editor and columnist at The Age.

Finkelstein media report’s four fatal flaws

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“Make the media more accountable for their sins, and worry less about new technologies and freedom of speech”.

That’s a one-line summary of Ray Finkelstein’s Independent Media Inquiry.  It argues for a new system of media regulation to apply to journalists, commentators and most of the Australians who contribute to online news and opinion. It wants a government-created News Media Council to set standards for all media – broadcast, print, online. When necessary, that Council should “require a news media outlet to publish an apology, correction or retraction, or afford a person a right to reply”. And when the media outlet won’t comply? Normal contempt of court rules would apply. So eventually, an editor would spend some time in a jail cell.

The report is already copping it from the management of Australia’s major print media groups, who see themselves as its targets. I’m writing more out of interest. I’m involved in the media, as chief operating officer of the online publishing firm WorkDay Media. But WorkDay Media has always been happy to make corrections and grant prominent rights of reply; it has even tried to join the Australian Press Council. As a business manager, there’s nothing in the report that worries me.

There’s a lot to admire, too. I have done enough report-authoring to be impressed by the speed with which Finkelstein and his team (mostly lawyers) marshalled their arguments into something at once informed and understandable. It’s a good introduction to Australian media regulation issues, it appropriately handballs the issue of print media industry assistance to a Productivity Commission inquiry, and it seeks to align the jarringly different treatments of broadcast, print and online media.

But for all that, the Finkelstein report remains a flawed 468-page attempt to justify new government regulation of media. Four flaws, in particular, make it unconvincing.

1. Deploying the accountability dodge

The first question about this inquiry has always been: why now? Why should Australia introduce new media accountability regulations just when the Internet has delivered a huge new source of media competition?

Of course, one answer might be “because Bob Brown wants to restrict News Limited and the federal government at least wants to frighten it”. But you can’t make that the philosophical basis for a government inquiry. And besides, the fact that an inquiry has a political motive does not prevent it coming up with useful conclusions; all inquiries are founded with politics in mind.

So: why now? Finkelstein’s answer is first that there is an “increasing and legitimate demand for press accountability”, and second that the federal government must accommodate that demand. He has plenty of evidence for the first point, much of it drawn from public opinion research.  Trust in the media is relatively low and may be declining, many voters think the media use their power irresponsibly, most people think various media outlets report inaccurately, journalists often recycle press releases, and sometimes media seem to be pursuing the agendas of vested interests (ranging from poker machines owners to the Victoria Police) or overstating things such as the likely effect of the carbon price on household budgets. The call for accountability is the report’s keystone, the piece of rock which keeps everything else from falling down.

But calling for accountability only suggests we need some rules. It does not tell you what those rules should be.

Setting down those rules is hard. Nevertheless, if you’re serious about accountability, that’s what you have to do.

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The “It’s Time” of 2012?

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We keep reading claims that Tony Abbott is a low-grade politician who would be wiped off the face of Australian politics if the ALP could only get its act together. Since Abbott has already knocked off one of Australia’s most popular prime ministers and taken another to within an inch of election defeat, it seems more likely that he knows what he’s doing.

The latest evidence of Abbott’s cluefulness has come over the Christmas break. He has adopted a piece of communication that can take him a good way towards the next election:

“We can be better than this”

If the Coalition plays it right, this short and sharp line could be the “It’s Time” of 2012. It manages to go not just beyond criticism of the government but beyond conservative politics as well. It’s a line that can underpin his transition from “negativity” to producing the thing he is shortest on, which is actual policy. It can appeal to middle-of-the-road voters who glance at politics only from time to time. It’s a claim about the Coalition, but also about the nation. It’s ideal for the world of the three-second media grab, but can work in longer statements too. It’s personally ideal for Abbott, with his strong moral streak and his belief (not universal among modern conservatives) that government is a high calling. It can underpin everything he says.

And it has been particularly well-suited to the past week, when even the most uninterested voter will have noticed that the ALP seems to be having a rather messy domestic argument.

No doubt many people will accuse Abbott of hypocrisy, dark intent, attempting to take Australia back to a mythical 1950s White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-picket-fence era, etc etc. That misses the point. “We can be better than this” is a terrific way to communicate your commitment. Labor could have used it equally well in 2007.

And it’s good for politics to have politicians arguing that politics and Australian democracy should have a high moral aspect. Just as one example, repeating that “we can be better than this” makes it hard to spend the rest of your time saying “turn back the boats”.

There’s surely a lesson here for the ALP, whose most memorable line from the past week is the Infrastructure and Transport Minister’s disclosure that his life’s calling is “fighting Tories”. I understand the temptation, and have enjoyed the activity myself from time to time. But as a message to a jaded public, it’s pure poison. Yet it was still being quoted with enthusiastic approval this morning by Senator Doug Cameron. Thousands of listeners no doubt wondered what has happened to aspirations to run the country well. (Others no doubt wondered what a “Tory” is: the term is far less common here than in the UK or Canada.)

The PM, like her predecessor, seems to understand that people want leaders with great public purpose. Hence the lines in her address yesterday:

“When [the public] look at politicians, actually the doubts that they have is that we are in it for a purpose. That we are in it with some courage to get behind a purpose that we believe is right … I intend to be a stronger and more forceful advocate of what we are doing and what we are achieving for the Australian people.”

Gillard’s address has much to recommend it. It also suffers from the problem which Peter Brent has neatly titled Too Much Meta: Gillard has been explaining that she plans to win back the public, instead of actually winning back the public.

With luck, though, the PM’s address is just the necessary prelude to the renewed focus on governing well which is now so vital to the ALP’s long-term success. Governing well is something Gillard is perfectly capable of doing. It also represents Labor’s best chance to win back the public.

Oppositions can talk about how good they will be. Governments get to show it, which creates a far deeper and more lasting impression.

Saving the furniture that really matters: the ALP challenge for the next decade

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The picture of Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership painted over the weekend by former speechwriter Jamie Button ought to be fatal to Rudd’s leadership bid. It jibes with a number of other assessments, including some just this week by senior Cabinet ministers like Nicola Roxon. To the best of my knowledge, Button’s is a pretty accurate picture:

“The truth is, Rudd was impossible to work with. He regularly treated his staff, public servants and backbenchers with rudeness and contempt. He was vindictive, intervening to deny people appointments or preselections, often based on grudges that went back years.

“He made crushing demands on his staff, and when they laboured through the night to meet those demands, they received no thanks, and often the work was not used. People who dared stand up to him were put in ‘the freezer’ and not consulted or spoken to for months. The prodigious loyalty of his staff to him was mostly not repaid. He put them down behind their backs. He seemed to feel that everyone was always letting him down. In meetings, as I saw, he could emanate a kind of icy rage that was as mysterious as it was disturbing.

“He governed by – seemed almost to thrive on – crisis. Important papers went unsigned, staff and public servants would be pulled onto flights, in at least one case halfway around the world, on the off chance that he needed to consult them. Vital decisions were held up while he struggled to make up his mind, frequently demanding more pieces of information that merely delayed the final result. The fate of the government seemed to hinge on the psychology of one man.

“As I watched this unfold in Canberra, I tried hard to put aside my own poor experience of working for Rudd. I had also been a journalist for more than 20 years, and I knew that just because three people complain about something or someone it does not make it true. When 30 or more witnesses do, you can start to believe it.”

That account is all the more compelling because Jamie Button has a deserved reputation as an upright and decent journalist. And he’s the son of much-missed ALP hero John Button to boot.

The move to reinstall Kevin Ruddd as prime minister is frequently described in terms of “saving the furniture”, a way of saying that Rudd will lose the ALP less seats than Gillard at the next election.

But Labor’s biggest problem may not be that it will lose a lot of seats at the next election.

Losing a bag of seats is pretty much a given. The 2012 or 2013 election will almost certainly not repeat the events of 1993, with Labor coming from behind to score an upset win. (If Labor did come from behind, it would probably require the sort of dubious policies – notably those cancelled L-A-W tax cuts – that helped hand Labor such a big loss one election later, in 1996.) Labor’s fate at the next election seems written at this point.

But winning the next election is not the only game the ALP must play. Labor’s biggest problem may instead be something worse.

Consider. Two of its past four leaders – Latham and Rudd – have been in their different ways dysfunctional. In both cases, but especially in the case of Rudd, that dysfunctionality has now been pretty well documented in a way that will linger for years. And still today, many in the ALP are talking more loudly in public about the need to beat Tony Abbott than they are about the need to run a good government.

In short, the ALP now faces a “good government” challenge as big as the “economic management” challenge it faced in 1975. In the wake of the Whitlam government, Labor’s greatest struggle was to convince voters it could be trusted with the economy. After Rudd, its biggest problem may be that voters do not trust it with the machinery of government. After the ructions of the federal and NSW parties, voters may start to worry that the ALP will install someone who can beat the Coalition regardless of whether they can run a government. If that happens, Labor will start to find that it doesn’t matter who they put in the leadership: the ALP brand has been so damaged that voters start to be much less trusting of whoever is leader, and whatever ideas they offer.

“Good government” has never been one of the ALP’s most beloved phrases. When you speak to the ALP, you speak of being a “reforming government” or even a “crusading government”. The party has an underdog mentality: it thinks that when it gets in, it shakes up the place and then, in its favorite tragic story, inevitably loses.

That mentality needs to change now. In the past 40 years the ALP has been in government as often as out of it. It won’t be easy, but “good government” is now a quality the ALP has to add to its brand.

That’s an argument for keeping Julia Gillard as PM, no matter what she polls. But more importantly, it’s the challenge for the ALP to 2020 and beyond.

Please, no more “faceless men”

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A small plea to Kevin Rudd and everyone else in the country: can we restrict the term “faceless men” to people who are actually unknown?

Today I see a reference to “Crean and other faceless men”. For pity’s sake, Simon Crean has been in public life since 1979 and in Parliament since 1990. He has spent years as a minister. He served two years as Opposition Leader. He’s been photographed, televised, caricatured. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a bronze of him somewhere.

Faceless? Really? This is what you get for two decades of public service?

Simon Crean’s about as much a faceless man as the PM.

For that matter, “faceless men” like Senator Don Farrell have web pages and are fairly well known to a lot of people in Adelaide. Farrell has been elected to Parliament; you can go in and watch him at work most sitting days in Canberra.

Faceless? Really?

The term “faceless men” was also applied back in 2010 to AWU head Paul Howes – one of Australia’s best-known union officials – in the wake of Rudd’s original ousting. Bizarrely, the term “faceless” seems to have been applied as a result of Howes’ appearance on Lateline. And yes, Lateline showed his face. They do that all the time. It’s a television program.

Faceless? Really?

Robert Menzies invented the term “faceless men” in 1963 as a reference to the 36-member all-male ALP executive of the day, most of them genuinely unknown outside ALP and union circles. The story is well told by Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Bolt in The Australian. Menzies went on to describe the ALP executive as men “whose qualifications are unknown, who have no elected responsibility to you”.

In 1963, “faceless men” was hard politics, but legitimate politics. It was also a great phrase. But its day is long gone. Today it’s not mere cliché – it’s idiocy.

Post-challenge update: Elsewhere on Troppo, Derrida Derider argues – and I think he’s right – that the 2012 challenge has been remarkable for the fact that factional warriors were less important than ever before:

“In fact the trouble with the 2012 [challenge] is that, far from being an unaccountable process by unknown factional warriors, it was all too open. Both opposition and support for Rudd cut right across all factional lines. Quite simply there were no backroom deals here …”

George Bush, Bruno Latour and the end of postmodernism

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For discussion: one of the far right’s greatest achievements in the past decade has been to show post-modernists how wrong they were.

Let me explain. In a famous 2004 article on the Iraq War, the New York Times journalist Ron Suskind quotes an aide to George W. Bush (possibly Karl Rove) disparaging what the aide calls “the reality-based community”:

“‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.’

The quote may not be correct, and it may be that the aide was actually making the case for action over endless analysis; it isn’t as clear as Suskind paints it. But the whole quote had a post-modern ring to it, and it set me thinking about post-modernism and the right. Just eight years later, some thoroughly belated conclusions:

First, the attempt by some on the US right to push creation science into schools is a pretty textbook implementation of the postmodern philosophy of science. Specifically, it is …

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Sorry, Jon: How political interviews should work

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Last week I was ready to write off ABC Melbourne interviewer Jon Faine for ill-judged rudeness and inadequate research. Now he’s gone and redeemed himself with a Tony Abbott interview.

Faine at his best is smartly, aggressively prosecutorial without actually being rude. Abbott at his best takes questions seriously and tell people what he thinks. They were both (mostly) at their best here, and the result was an interview that reminded me of many of Abbott’s good points even while reinforcing my view that he doesn’t present convincing responses about the economy.

The interview’s single best point is that Faine challenges Abbott about quantities. Asked about a string of high-profile job losses, Abbott starts to explain the claimed impact of the carbon tax. Faine pulls him up, noting that the high value of the Australian dollar is more important to firms like Qantas. Abbott responds coolly that while he accepts the carbon tax is not the only factor in these companies’ problems, it is a big problem. Faine asks him to address issues other than the carbon tax, and Abbott’s response is to start talking about cutting government waste. “If you succeeded in abolishing every single instance of waste in the federal government,” asks Faine, “what effect do you think that would actually have on the Australian dollar and interest rates?” Abbott says he’ll leave the modelling to the experts. Faine argues that most economists think it would make a minimal difference, and that the real issue is the mining industry’s effects on other sectors.

Note to journalists: keep asking not just what good a policy would do, but how much good it would do.

Abbott sounds tired (listen to him saying “good morning” at the start of the interview) and yet very much on his mettle here. The reason he does not come off better is that the weight of evidence suggests Faine is right: the commodity-bound $A and other outside influences are driving most of the job losses; removing the carbon tax and the mining tax and hoeing into “government waste” will, even on the best interpretation, make little improvement to national outcomes. I suspect Abbott knows this, too.

There’s a quality to this interview that is a credit to our democracy. It’s getting to the heart of important political claims and economic arguments. It’s intellectually confrontational discussion between two smart people who don’t very much like each other, all the better because both participants are working to keep a lid on their natural aggression.

Last week I said Faine was turning into a left-wing shock-jock. That was unfair. Sorry, Jon.

The RBA has not been rendered impotent by the Big Four (updated)

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The bank debate now seems officially out of control. Increasingly foolish notions about banking are being served up day after day. One example: the developing meme that claims the banks have decided they will no longer be bound by official interest rate policy.

One morning last week I listened to ABC’s Melbourne local radio presenter, Jon Faine, beat up the banking industry’s official spokesman, Steven Münchenberg, on radio (audio here). Münchenberg could well be Australia’s King Of Making Difficult Arguments Sound Reasonable, but Faine is fast turning into Australia’s One And Only Left-Wing Shock-Jock, and the whole thing quickly became pretty awful to listen to. Its worst awfulness was that Faine kept insisting that the banks were now rendering government and Reserve Bank policy impotent. By deciding to react to rising overseas funding costs by raising their rates, he claimed, the banks were saying: “we will decide what’s best for the Australian economy; we won’t let the Reserve Bank decide what’s best for the Australian economy”. “It nobbles the government’s main strategy for trying to in some ways address inflation and therefore control what goes on in parts of Australia”s economic activity,” Faine declared, in a tone that suggested he knew exactly what he was talking about.

If Faine were right, this would be a huge problem for macroeconomic management in Australia. Thankfully, it’s populist blather. As a couple of Faine’s phrases disclose, he has little idea about how or why the Reserve Bank conducts monetary policy. If Faine really believes it … Continue reading →

The Independent Media Inquiry: Six impossible things by February 28th

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Right now Ray Finkelstein and Matthew Ricketson, the two members of the federal government’s Independent Media Inquiry, are trying to finish off their report to the government. It’s due by 28 February.

Writing these reports is frequently difficult, but Finkelstein and Ricketson have a particularly intriguing task. It’s more difficult because they clearly want to rein in a few of traditional media’s worst excesses – and they want to do it just at a time when that traditional media is shrinking in importance in the face of an Internet-driven explosion of information availability:

  1. Finkelstein and Ricketson have to examine what the terms of reference call “the effectiveness of the current media codes of practice in Australia”. That’s tough enough on its own, because it’s hard to think of a more effective system which isn’t also more restrictive of freedom of speech. The head of Curtin University’s journalism department, Dr Joseph Fernandez, has made this point well – see the transcript of his evidence here. Fernandez perhaps understands these issues clearly because he spent 14 years editing newspapers in Malaysia, a country where editors face real experience of freedom-of-expression issues.
  2. They must examine the codes of practice “in light of technological change that is leading to the migration of print media to digital and online platforms”. Their problem here is that technological change is leading to an explosion of content that undermines the case for even existing restrictions on publishers. This is a point that Ian Rogers and I have tried to make at length in WorkDay Media’s submission to the inquiry. Traditional media had a level of oligopoly power over information distribution. These days anyone can publish. There is no longer any such thing as “the media” – rather, there is a huge and messy range of information forms, sources and channels with different levels of reach, frequency, engagement, audience trust and motivation. This is great for citizens: the “marketplace of ideas” has never been closer to being fully realised. But it’s bad for traditional publishers – and for aspiring regulators.
  3. They must assess “the impact of this technological change on the business model that has supported the investment by traditional media organisations in quality journalism and the production of news”.  For anyone who pulls the economics of media apart, the answer is pretty obvious: printed newspapers mostly won’t survive. They are losing advertisers and readers to a fundamentally more attractive and efficient Internet. The media analyst Roger Colman calculates that “all metropolitan newspapers in print editions will be unprofitable, definitely, by 2020″. But a surprising number of people don’t want to say this. And if Finkelstein and Ricketson do say it, they will instantly raise the question: “so why are we bothering about extra regulation of print media now?”.
  4. They must figure out how investment in quality journalism ”can be supported, and diversity enhanced, in the changed media environment”. This is an interesting question. But as Ian Rogers and I have argued, the answer is less obvious than many people think. The media and those who analyse it are constantly in danger of over-estimating traditional print media journalism’s contribution to the world, and underestimating the benefits of the information availability explosion which the Internet is bringing us.
  5. They must look at “ways of substantially strengthening the independence and effectiveness of the Australian Press Council, including in relation to online publications”. The ABC’s Jonathan Holmes has predicted that the inquiry will push from a stronger Press Council with more powers and a much broader remit. And that will bring us back to the inquiry’s fundamental problem: it seems to want a more activist government media body just at the time when technology is making traditional media of all sorts less dominant and undermining the case for media regulation.
  6. They will feel pressure to come up with a solution that fits in with the interim report of the Convergence Review, which has decided the inconsistency of Australia media regulations should be addressed by a system of regulating equally all members of a vaguely-defined group called “content services enterprises”. These firms’ content would be subjected to a public-interest test. The firms covered would include television, radio, newspapers and online outlets – which means print and online journalism would face new restrictions. Finkelstein and Ricketson are at least awake to the freedom-of-expression minefield that such a law would sow. As Jonathan Holmes again points out,  the convergence review’s authors seem largely, weirdly, oblivious to the whole issue.

The Independent Media Inquiry could sensibly suggest that a voluntary body provide reputation indicators for online and offline media. That’s the solution recommended by Monash University’s Dr Johan Lidberg. (The Council could also make it easier for small online media organisations to join.)

But if the inquiry recommends the Press Council or a new media super-regulator starts regulating a much wider group of reporters and commenters, and government follows that recommendation, three things will happen. The council  will be quickly overwhelmed, it will be forced to make impossible judgments, and it will eventually become a joke.

[Update: An hour after first posting, I gave in to the impulse to properly honour Lewis Carroll by adding a sixth point, on the Convergence Review.]