The Fin Review reported yesterday that a host of resource company execs are descending on Canberra on Friday for a pow wow with Martin Ferguson. Initially this meeting was being presented as a way of circumventing the BCA, who released a doom and gloom laden report last week basically threatening a capital strike. But it’s now clear that it’s nothing of the sort, as Marn’s department have also sent the BCA an invite. Industry sources expressed pleasure at Ferguson’s involvement, telling the Fin that they found him easier to deal with and more amenable to their views than Climate Change Minister Penny Wong. Hardly surprising…
Further reports today (as well as Stephen Mayne’s piece in Crikey) reinforce what was being said yesterday – that the polluters and the “skeptics” are making the running on the business response to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper. What looks like being the outcome is, in my view, a default back to the Howard position. Continue reading ‘Emissions trading and rent seeking: round two’
Of media narratives, truth and narratologies
It would be interesting to study the role of the economics editor. In Australia, at least, those papers and media outlets which employ such a person appear to see the role as enforcing the BCA line on liberal economics, even if sometimes the actually existing BCA companies have their hands well and truly out for the largesse of the state. There’s a bit of a story about ideology here, and the neo-liberal whip gig only really works if one is not too partisan about it – so Paul Kelly’s portentous ponderings fit the bill exactly. At The Australian (and here, the broader tale is one of the trajectory of that paper overall), Michael Stutchbury has taken the commentary in a more openly pro-Coalition direction. Witness, as they say on the op/ed pages, his latest rather unfocused piece – decrying Labor governments (and social democrats, and Rudd advisor Andrew Charlton) for mixing politics with economics. Magically, of course, blatant political fixes by conservative administrations never seem to attract the same opprobrium. It’s as if the “reform test” constantly being applied to Kevin Rudd (despite what he himself has said about his own views on economics, and perhaps it were better had he been taken at his word) were one of complete purity in adherence to the gospel according to the Productivity Commission, or whoever represents the yardstick for this stuff at any particular point in time.
It would be possible to expose any number of non-sequiturs, rhetorical moves, sophistries, and general incoherence in Stutchbury’s article.
But there’s a broader point here.
We live, we’re told sometimes, in an age of story-telling. Continue reading ‘Of media narratives, truth and narratologies’