In my article for The Drum on Monday, I observed:
What will be most interesting over the next few days and weeks will be whether the Australian commentary machine’s momentum finally switches – an actual event has occurred, but the minute by minute “analysis” powers on, and the perpetual tweeting favours noise over signal.
There’s still a lot of noise and not much signal, I think, because literally nothing much is happening (publicly).
Bernard Keane wrote a neat piece for Crikey today, which I’ve excerpted over the fold. He could have added that elements in the media are laying the foundations for a vicious campaign against The Greens, and the rural independents should they align with Labor on confidence and supply.
Paul Kelly was particularly petulant in this morning’s Australian:
the confused ramblings of Rob Oakeshott during the past 24 hours
They cannot run, hide or dissemble with meaningless chatter about fresh opportunities unique to mankind. They must decide for Labor or Coalition. They must defend this decision before the national media, offer a coherent explanation to the Australian people and, above all, justify their decision to their electorates. Yes, that’s how you get stability.
Aside from the fact that what he sees as orthodoxy, and the natural order of things, has been disrupted – thus requiring febrile defence – Kelly is no doubt peeved that his Grand Narrative about Patriotic (neo-liberal) Reform has sunk further into the sludge of actual politics. In truth, it’s been a long time since the Australian people showed any enthusiasm for big picture economic reform, and its final collapse probably dates to the related events of Paul Keating’s defeat and Pauline Hanson’s rise. Leaving aside the GST, which is better seen as a bit of fiscal housekeeping, and WorkChoices, which of course ensured John Howard’s political demise, that is. Although it would be right to criticise our current political economy on the grounds of distributional justice, underemployment, lack of social mobility and many other things: for most people, as long as it delivers the necessities of a decent life, they’re distinctly unlikely to be wooed by the evangelists of global capitalism.
Neo-liberal acolytes such as Kelly are curiously reticent about spelling out what sort of “reform” they’d actually like to see, either because they don’t know, or because whatever they would propose is likely to be politically unpalatable, if not toxic. Yet we still see the cliches about “uncertainty” dragged out, and a demand from big business and its media mouthpieces for “strong government”. It never seems to occur to them that the only real economic reform most Australians would like to see – climate change policy – failed to be delivered by a parliament which had a majority government with a mandate, and that it’s in part the prostitution of the political process by corporate lobbies which has failed to ensure “certainty”.
Ironies abound.
Here’s Keane on the media:
With nothing much to report, and the nation seemingly grandly indifferent to the spot in which it has left its elected representatives, the press gallery has taken to obsessing over vote counts. Some, in the circumstances, decidedly mild criticisms within Labor of the campaign have been elevated to the status of civil war (you wonder how today’s media would have covered the Labor split in the ’50s). Every word from the independents is carefully analysed by journalists, who dissect them like ancient priests considering entrails in an effort to divine coming events. Rob Oakeshott’s thought bubble about a unity government sent journalists haring off in all directions (although, speaking ex cathedra today, Michelle Grattan pronounced it “naive”). The best moment was journalists reporting Tony Abbott’s embrace of a “kinder, gentler polity”?—?it was the remark he made just before launching an attack on Labor and the Greens?—?with straight faces.
Luckily there’s Bob Katter, for whom the phrase “good copy” might have been invented. Thank goodness for the Member for Kennedy, and his hat, which is surely about to get its own reality TV show. Having been ignored, or indeed treated as a rather lengthy joke by the media until now, Katter is well within his rights to be bemused about his suddenly elevated media profile and the media’s rather inconsistent attention to the issues he regards as important.
The urge to call the winner first, to project vote trends, to extrapolate from past policy which way the independents will lean, is strong, and wholly unnecessary. The AEC will determine the winners and losers in the doubtful seats in good time. Some, please note, are likely to end up in litigation. The five?—?as seems likely?—?independents will negotiate a deal with one side or the other. With whom is not clear at this point, probably not even to them, although I’ve yet to see any compelling reasons why they wouldn’t back the Coalition, given their backgrounds.
Meanwhile, the actual business of government ticks over. Australians go about their business, oblivious to the allegedly dire impacts of “uncertainty” from the interregnum. How much do they care about politics? They were monumentally disengaged during the campaign, and there was a big rise in what appeared to be deliberate informal votes, a direct act of rebellion against a preferential voting system that delivers your democratic choice to parties you may well loathe.
It’s a tough call for the political media, which has difficulty enough hanging on to what mainstream media space and resources it has now. Any recognition that Australians are uninterested in what they report is dangerous in a media environment where resources are diminishing all the time. That, perhaps, is why journalists have tried to maintain the breathless campaign pace of what Jay Rosen calls “horse race journalism” into the interregnum, when literally nothing is happening except the slow, methodical counting of votes and some pre-negotiation positioning by the key players. Perhaps some outlets can get some pollsters out in the field and give us an opinion poll to discuss.
The time might more usefully be spent considering just why the electorate behaved as it did. There’s an assumption that a new election would put it all to rights, and somehow fix the mistake voters made on Saturday by providing a majority government. What’s to say that’s what would happen? Voters are clearly unhappy with Australian politics. Why would that be about to change?
It’s ironic to watch a pompous and self-serving commentariat – epitomised by Kelly – manufacturing scare campaigns about political instability killing further economic reform to mask their real aim of using perceived economic instability to forestall real political reform.
Indeed, the histrionics of the press gallery poo-bahs about the economic consequences of the real and long-awaited burst of democratic sunshine we are now enjoying is in almost inverse proportion to the weight the financial markets are putting on it.
The financial and political media wet itself all day on Monday about “mayhem” in the markets over the hung parliament when in fact the currency barely moved and the sharemarket ended essentially flat.
What we are seeing in the media is an outbreak of relevance deprivation syndrome. The people are seizing back their power after years of being talked down to. And it is a wonder to behold.
Paul who? Wasn’t he big once?
I fail to understand why all this brouhaha regarding a hung parliament. This is democracy at its best. On this occasion the people voted for the candidate, or party, that they disliked the least. The result may not be perfect for the politicians but on this occasion, we the people have spoken and the pollies don’t like it. They don’t like it when we take some control out of their hands, that’s why John Howard forced the Republican Convention to come up with only one model which ended being the politicians elect the president – vetoing the people their legitimate democratic right. The more power that politicians have in their hot little hands the better it is for them, not us.
Surely the increase in informal voting reflected the exhaustion of a rationale to be found for voting either for or against a major party. That, and Mark Latham told us to.
It’s not only relevance deprivation syndrome, it’s also the fact that they just don’t get it, which I guess contributes to the RDS.
This is forcing them to engage beyond their comfort zone in issues, ideas and maybe even some reporting. It has been great to see the independents actually responding to the media pack like a normal intelligent person might, including giving them a serve when necessary. In other words, the independents are not playing the game and many in the media don’t like it at all.
@2 He should stick to music, ‘Deeper Water’ was much better than the crap he’s been spouting lately.
I understand New Zealand has not had a majority government since 1992 when they introduced MMP (similar to duckworth-lewis and black scholes systems for counting what you dont understand).
Whether this has been good for them is debatable but the Kiwis seem to be amused that we are making a fuss over things. I am sure there would be plenty of case studies we could take from them on how these circumstances are dealt with.
What a hilariously inflated opinion of themselves these media clowns have. The independents ‘must defend this decision before the national media, offer a coherent explanation to the Australian people and, above all, justify their decision to their electorates.’
They ‘must’ do nothing of the sort. They are free to do whatever they deem appropriate, and the very last obligation they have is to go justifying themselves to the Paul Kellys of this world. I hope Katter tells them all to f*%$ off, loudly and often.
The independents find themselves in a position they neither sought nor anticipated. Their obligations are to do what they promised their electorates they would do should they be elected, nothing more and nothing less. If they feel inclined to take on a bigger role then that is a matter for them and their actions can be judged on their merits, but for some pissant News Ltd hack to start lecturing them about their duty to the nation is really too much.
I am amused by P Kellys rant. If only he had applied the same standard to the major parties during the campaign. I would have liked to see him demand the LNP to defend their policies and subject them to scrutiny.
Bloody hell, talk about hubris and arrogance! Even puts Smuggles to shame.
I wonder what claptrap he’ll write when Smuggles has to front up with his “policies” to be costed properly? More to the point, what will the Smuggles Set do?
And wot Ken Lovell and Trevor @9 said.
I believe any member of the commentariat that predicted “this election result will play badly in the markets” should be recusing themselves from the ongoing conversation right now.
Based on the standards of media scrutiny seen during the campaign, all the justification the independents will require will be something like ‘I don’t like the suits s/he wears, and those ears give me the heebie-jeebies. How can you trust someone who looks like that? So I decided to support the other lot, whose leader looks more leader-like.’.
So Paul K plans to actually mention the Greens – he’d better be careful, he might give them some media exposure!
Hey, they just need to say, ‘I don’t have a head for figures’ or ‘I’m not one for detail’. Seemed to work for Abbott.
Not all of the informal voting was deliberate. Some people just made mistakes.
I’ve heard that a considerable percentage of the informal votes just didn’t fill in all the boxes for the HoR, particularly in NSW and QLD which have optional preferential voting at the State level. If these people are given an opportunity to ‘correct’ their ballot papers, given the swing to the Coalition in NSW and QLD, I’d expect a re-poll will favour Abbott.
Years ago Patrick Cook produced cartoons featuring a self inflating journalist by the name of Alan Bigenuff. I reckon that Paul Kelly is modelling himself on that and, in his dreams, features large in the sort of sonorous voiced documentaries that the Yanks produce about the states. You know, grand old man of Oz democracy, sage, years of wisdom, “was present when…” and “consulted by…”. In fact he is akin to a set of bagpipes the drone note of which is enough to drive rational and peaceable people to fits of impulsive violence.
15% informal vote levels in some booths in Banks and Barton, electorates in southern not western Sydney. Morris Iemma remarked that Julia Gillard’s anti-immigration, anti-refugee comments offended migrant communities in these two very multicultural Sydney seats with substantial numbers of recent migrants from Asia and the Middle East, and was responsible for the substantial swings to the Liberals in both seats and probably also contributed to very high informal vote (9%) across the two seats.
A-G Robert McClelland suffered a 7% swing against him in Banks. He’s since claimed that supporters of Shiite Muslim leader Sheikh Mansour Leghaei – deported in June after federal government stated he posed a security risk but refused to divulge why – mobilised to hand out Liberal HtV’s and were very vocal in urging the Sydney Muslim community (a majority of whom live in this part of Sydney) not to vote ALP.
Sorry, McCLelland is Barton, Daryl Melham, Banks (8.9% swing against).
Jezery @15
You’ve heard wrong, Jezery. I was scrutineering at a large booth in Brisbane. Normal informal vote around 25. This time 90. 80% had no markings on the ballot paper whatever. The reset had obscene remarks, about half a dozen had a mark in only one box and about half a dozen had thoughtfully added an additional box with ‘Kevin Rudd’ next to it, and then put a 1 in that box.
None of these comments on informal votes seem particularly on topic. Please discuss these sorts of things on a roundtable thread.
H@20 “..Half a dozen had thoughtfully added an additional box with ‘Kevin Rudd’ next to it, and then put a 1 in that box.”
As I said elsewhere, “I’d bet London to a brick the most common spoiled vote in Griffith ( of those indicating any particular voter intent ) was Rudd 1, and nothing else, and by a country mile. That’s the down home Griffith protest vote against what the party rats did to their boy.”
mark@21…oops, should have refreshed
Philomena @17, so it depends on who makes anti-immigration and reffo -bashing comments? OK for Smuggles, but not OK for Gillard?
They can do what they like, Pompous Pissant Pratt Paul Kelly. And what may be unique ie some fecking honesty for a change amidst two party chicanery, appears to be foreign to political dinosaurs like Kelly.
Totally wrong. What a grossly stupid demand. They can sit on the cross benches and pot anything from a minority government they don’t like, except for supply and no confidence motions. That’s the kind of stability that even idiots like Kelly should understand, but apparently can’t, being trapped in the past.
They are saying, in part, you buggers are part of the problem, not the solution. Since when were Independent politicians (at least) answerable to arsewipes in the media?
Wrong again. The voters overall were incoherent, the Indies are trying to sort out the mess. What they are now saying is the greatest dollop of coherence that we’ve heard for years.
Paul Kelly should go on Mastermind, special subject, the bloody obvious.
Jane@24 Smuggles is Abbott I guess? Sorry of I’m wrong. Not that au fait with the juvenile abusive nomenclature.
The point is that many people see the vote as a way to punish, rather than to praise or endorse. If the ruling party riles then you punish it by voting for its opponents. It’s not really much more complicated that that on many levels. Human behaviour does have some predictability in a limited choice scenario.
Once again the mainstream media delivers division and misinformation while the blogging community fails to get sucked in by it.
I think the media are just as scared as the major parties that their reign of terror is over. Why not a third, forth, or fifth option other than the Libs/Labs nonsense we’ve had before? We’ve got around 30 political parties, and many independants, giving this a go, all with ideas that can help get us somewhere. We’ve also got 150 seats, not two….something the dumbed down rag hacks tend to forget.
I’m glad the Australian voters took it upon themselves to tell the self serving ideologues in Canberra where to shove it. Now it’s time to listen to the creative and democratic spirit of people like Oakeshott, and actually do something in the public interest – reform Canberra, and the voting system.