I’d thoroughly endorse some of the arguments made in that post about the narrow limits of the field of political contestation, and the way it’s skewed towards a neo-liberal consensus where many questions just don’t get on the agenda for what passes for public debate. Where I’d take issue with Dr_Tad is the claim that process isn’t political. It may well be the case that none of Bob Katter, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor have either a particularly coherent ideological position or an intention to fundamentally transform our politics. But that’s not quite the point – political shifts are very often unintended, and extend beyond the desires of political actors.

That’s potentially the case with the call for a “new politics”, I think.

It’s been interesting this week to see some serious debate about our participation in Afghanistan, questioning about why on shore processing of refugees is so verboten, and around issues to do with rural health and the decline of particular non-urban cultures and modes of economic sustainability. We don’t normally talk about these things – that is, the politico-media complex doesn’t open up a space where such questions can be politicised.

Obviously, I’d also like to see us talking about social mobility, distributional justice and a vision of social justice which transcends what I’ve called, in a piece for The Drumroll, Gillardism. I have some hope that The Greens can stimulate a real debate on such questions, as well as one on those issues which are totemic for the party. But, even in the absence of such a focus from Greens MPs and Senators, the shift of the centre of political discourse and the fracturing of its points of unanimity can only be positive for those wishing to move on those issues, and one hopes, might also bear fruit in something of a revival of social movements.

We’ll see. But I do think that any “rupture in the political fabric” presents new possibilities.

Guy Rundle put it very well indeed when he observed that “the economic question” has been taken off the table in recent decades, and “the political question” displaced onto culture wars. His article for Crikey yesterday discusses these issues more eloquently than I am doing, so I’m taking the liberty of reproducing it in its entirety over the fold (with permission).

You can tell that something that resembles politics is happening in Australia now, by the chorus of derision that professional insiders are directing at the three rural independents, and any suggestion that this impasse of a result may be an opportunity for the country to stop and think about what sort of political institutions and processes it wants.

With the ‘doughty three’ (like that huh?), releasing their seven point letter to the PM, the establishment commentariat has gone into panicky overdrive in an attempt to head it off. It’s bad enough the Greens have snuck into the Lower House (for a second, not first time), now there’s three possibly, four independents.

And that godamn WA National won’t take the whip. You can see why they’re spitting. Imagine if you had to report politics on your front page, rather than writing a series of memos to party heavies, cunningly disguised as actual news.

Thus Michelle Grattan in The Age:

Rob Oakeshott sees safety in his bold model for consensus politics?—?but others will see naivety. Parliamentary reform is one thing, and much needed … But Oakeshott’s proposals go way beyond ordinary change.

What? Beyond change that can be absorbed back into the system? Noooooooooooo!!!!

This is a terrible election result for Australian foreign policy, Greg Sheets Sheridan wrote, mourning that the man of steel would not be succeeded by the age of Iron. The Greens are less fussed about Afghanistan than they were about Iraq…But they might make the difference in dissuading it from offering any increased help there, or undertaking any new security role either.

God, a prudent foreign policy with checks and balances on war? Nooooooooooo!!!!

None of this will be easy as demonstrated by the confused ramblings of Rob Oakeshott during the past 24 hours, Paul Polonius Kelly remarks. Forget the nonsense that party politics has taken a blow or is in retreat.

Not easy? No business as usual? Nooooooooo!!!!

Tim Soutphommasane, the Oz’s pet left philosopher, counselled against ‘educated despair’ by which he meant any meditating on whether things could be done other than through the existing party shells.

And Dennis Shanahan simply wants a new election to be held immediately, and to keep repeating it until we get it Right.

The 2010 election result has offered that rarest and most blessed of things, a rupture and a discontinuity in the process. It’s one that makes it impossible to sell the line that the parliamentary electoral system we are ruled by has some deep-seated pole of wisdom that somehow expresses rather than imposes a political form. What the result is making clear to people is the inherent arbitrariness of the system, its closed nature, and the way in which that is obscured when a party is elected with an unchallengeable majority.

The difficulty for the business as usual crowd, is that they spend so much time celebrating the virtues of the single member electorate system, that when it throws up a number of actual single members, they can’t damn it out of hand.

And when such members begin to suggest that the process by which they were chosen could be reflexively acted on by both MPs and the public, the business-as-usual crowd panic about stability. Weird, isn’t it? Post-election Iraq has been without a government for several months, with no working coalition in sight, and this is an example of democracy at work. Australia has a few days or weeks with no majority party but a process of rational and open negotiation, and it’s a disaster.

What has happened in Australia, in little more than the wink of an eye, is that the political question has been pushed into an entirely new dimension. Ever since the 1970s the economic question has lain moribund as a major political division, no matter what lip service is paid to the gulf separating etc etc, and the occasional flashpoint such as WorkChoices.

The political question who leads, how and through what institutions has barely been regarded as political at all, or cynically manipulated, as in Howard’s handling of the Republic debate.

The virtual stasis of both these questions is one reason why so much political energy flows into cultural questions and why culture wars become the dominant mode of struggle.

Once an interruption such as the 2010 election makes it impossible for that stasis to be maintained, the energy flows back into the political question, and real change can be imagined by all except those whose job depends on nothing changing ever, ie the mainstream commentariat.

Once that happens, the left/right divisions based overwhelmingly on the economic (and social-cultural) question cease to be of primary importance, and there is the possibility of new processes, and new flows which make provisional blocs in different ways. It’s the most imaginative solutions that become the most possible.

Thus, why should we not consider Rob Oakeshott’s idea of a multi-party cabinet? Why is Dennis Shanalamadingdong’s idea of a whole new election the ‘sensible’ idea, while Oakeshott’s idea that the people who actually have been elected form a government seen as the whacky one? The Constitution recognises parliament, the GG as head-of-state, and her/his appointed ministers as government. It has nothing to say about prime ministers or parties.

So Shanahan’s suggestion is that the system has failed because it worked.

What’s happened in this election is that the process of parliamentary electoral politics which is minimally democratic and the party-based politics of interests, which isn’t democratic in the slightest, have come into contradiction, in a situation where the system usually silently serves the interests. The profound cynicism and mild fear of the commentariat have caused them to back the interests against the system.

The process has left many people high and dry, desperate to catch up. Thus Paul Kelly, who disguises his cynical anti-democratic power elitism by sporadic attacks on cultural elites, is desperate for a cozy party system that can be nagged to impose a yet more neoliberal agenda, against the oft-expressed wishes of the mass of the Australian people.

The fetishisation of ‘stability’, as if the country was Bosnia-Herzegovina one heartbeat away from a shooting war, is a con. If we are so pusillanimous as to entirely subordinate our political process to the flickering of the global markets, then we may as well let Goldman Sachs choose the government.

Stability is the very achievement that allows a country the luxury of uncertainty, when isolated outbreaks of actual public will throw up an ensemble capable of creating a new situation. I’m under no illusion that the rural independents are about to put the whole constitution and political apparatus into play. But they don’t need to.

The mere process over the last three days has done more to make visible the invisible structures of power, and their potential (if not straightforward) transformability, than a hundred civics lessons. Other gains, such as an increased role for private members bills, would serve to bang the wedge a little further into the old tree dead.

Stability is not the issue, nor is it the danger. The danger is a politics so deadened that only the most demented and monomaniacal, the Feeneys, Shortens, and Bitars, can stand it, and everyone else retires to their private lives. The more the commentariat shriek in fear, the more interesting the ride.

The independents and minor parties should push this process until the rivets are popping.

A couple of other excellent pieces on the performance of the political media, and its interconnection with pollies and political strategists, have come to light over the couple of two days. The first is an excellent piece by Laura Tingle on the misreporting of the RSPT stoush, and how much of the media swallowed the mining industry’s line whole.

Yesterday, Grog’s Gamut posted a passionate piece on his blog, critiquing the performance of the media pack in this election campaign specifically. You can read it here. Interestingly, the post sparked quite a debate on Twitter, with notable contributors being journalism academic and blogger Jason Wilson, Tim Dunlop, Greens web coordinator David Paris, and journalists James Massola, Samantha Maiden, Tony Wright and Latika Bourke.

Unfortunately, the debate is difficult to archive in the absence of a unifying hashtag. But the journos’ defence was partly that questions about policy were being put to the leaders, and, interestingly, that editors encouraged questions about the narrative. There’s a lot more to it than that, and I hope Jason Wilson follows up with a promised piece on it, which would better summarise a quite complex interchange than I am doing here. [The questions raised deserve some analysis and reflection, and all I'm really writing here is a very quickly composed set of night thinking observations!]

In the @GrogsGamut debate, then, there was a view being put that critics of the media didn’t understand the media as process.

On that point, one of the fascinating things about ABC News 24 is that you can see the raw material, if you like, as the entirety of both major party leaders’ press conferences are broadcast. We highlighted one grab from Julia Gillard’s presser in Perth here earlier, but my overall impression is that her fight back really didn’t flow through to the nightly news in any real way.

So, Labor Outsider’s point on a previous post about the real difficulty that politicians have in communicating messages holds true. Had you been watching 24 hour news, or reading blogs or the Twitter conversation, you’d have perceived the story moving on from the now stale talking points about leaks and polls, but that doesn’t translate (at least not immediately) into what most voters see.

The speeds at which the media cycle moves, then, are not unidirectional. And the mass communication aspect, the distillation of raw reporting into a product packaged up for most voters to see, is highly selective – not just via highlighting the narrative, but also by selecting particular policy announcements to report, and particular ones to ignore.

Talking about the nightly tv news, one other observation I’ve made is that ABC and SBS, in particular, are very meta. It’s not so much about reporting what’s being said, but about “analysing” its significance. That can be quite egregious, and for what it’s worth, I think SBS tv news is the worst offender. It’s very difficult to see Karen Middleton as ever being even handed as between Labor and the Coalition, and that bleeds into the ‘straight’ news.

All that’s by way of introduction to a roundtable thread were you can discuss any aspect of the media’s coverage of the campaign, and its role in the contest, you wish.

Elsewhere: An Onymous Lefty.

In case you need a reminder that some political ads have always been terrible, I offer this example cherrypicked from Wilson’s post:

Apologies in advance if that gives you nightmares.

So, this thread is a roundtable where you can discuss anything to do with political advertising, particularly in this campaign.

Peter Brent provides a good summary of why this state is so important to the outcome. Half of the seats are held by margins of 5% or less, federal Labor has little in the way of a solid base, swings are often more marked than elsewhere in the country, and up to 10 seats are in play.

Some polling has shown Labor in danger of losing enough seats in Queensland to endanger its overall majority, though Dennis Atkins is right to say that the swings are very patchy. Queensland is a demographically and geographically diverse state, a point made well by Jason Wilson in an article on the key seats in Central and North Queensland.

Wilson, writing of the national media missing the issues and local campaigns in regional electorates, also observes:

This is the problem with a travelling pack – flying to a new destination each day, they don’t always know what’s at stake at each whistle-stop.

So you’re invited to fill in the gaps!

The Weekly is a colossus, that really does reach an incredibly wide sweep of Australian voters. Looking bad in it means looking bad to a lot of people. For a man who is struggling with women voters, Tony Abbott has at the very least taken a huge risk with his comments. If they really were off the cuff, and really do hurt him, he will come to regret going unprepared to an encounter with the Weekly, one of Australia’s most important political publications.

To reiterate Mr Elder’s question – one that of course many feminists asked before either of us did – why aren’t magazines like the Weekly taken more seriously, more often, by more journos, scholars and political junkies, as both public sphere institutions, and as places where politics happens?

As summer holidays end, and Parliament prepares to resume, we’ve seen two stories this last week which have had lots of normally not so engaged voters talking; Abbott’s remarks about young women’s sexuality (quickly spun away as ‘private advice’ to his daughters when their potential for embedding a negative perception of his persona became clear) and Julia Gillard’s launch of the Myschool website.

Despite my own reservations about the latter, I have no doubt whatsoever it’s been a big political plus for the Government as the election year begins in earnest. Can the same be said for Tony’s thoughts about sexuality?

Mark Scott’s announcement was accompanied by the now ritualised shots across the bow from News Limited columnists. As Margaret Simons observes:

…it is another example of how one of the chief battles of the media decade will be between public broadcasters and commercial viewer-pays services.

Indeed. But it also raises the question of whether the ABC’s limited resources should be targeted towards jumping into the same space already occupied by Sky News. Mark Scott’s strategy for the ABC, when you substract some of the bells and whistles about ‘user generated content’, is increasingly looking like turning the ABC into a major competitor in a range of news and public affairs spaces.

The temptation in these debates is to default to a simplistic response, something along the lines of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. But profound shifts in the public broadcasting landscape require a more nuanced evaluation. As Simons herself notes, the question of the ABC Charter will be raised, not least by commercial vested interests.

However, as Jason Wilson argues at New Matilda:

…as news consumers and taxpayers, we’re entitled to pause for a moment and wonder whether it actually makes sense for us.

Go read the rest of Wilson’s piece.

His conclusion:

Indeed, if the ABC really wanted to honour its charter and address market failures, it would seek not to provide the kind of shallow continuous coverage that, intermittent, “event” stories aside, characterises 24-hour news services and freely available online alternatives.

Instead, they’d be going for that more elusive quality in the contemporary information landscape: depth. By renewing the investigative remit of 4 Corners in order that it might pursue a greater number of important, complex national stories, the ABC would be providing something that simply doesn’t exist elsewhere — and which Australian democracy urgently needs.

And if Kerry O’Brien had the support of an investigative team, he might be able to confront politicians with new information and curly questions, instead of leading all comers through the same, tired pas de deux. If additional resources were provided to local radio, collapsing local public spheres might be revivified. A continuous news service will not address these entrenched difficulties, which are problems for Australia’s democracy as much as they are for the ABC.

True thought leadership from Mr Scott might recognise that what’s lacking in Australia’s public sphere is not another source of basic news coverage, but a commitment to providing new information, context, synthesis, analysis, and tough questions. More information on the new channel will reveal the extent of his awareness of these problems.

But really, Devine’s column isn’t there to express a view shared by real people, but rather to disagree with a particular group. The column is aimed at cyclists, and those who are prepared to get angry on their behalf. Anyone who — like Devine — uses Twitter will have seen the outrage cranking up as soon as the column was posted. Along with the expressions of anger come links to the online version of the column, where metrics are collected and advertising hosted. In a fragmented media marketplace augmented by real-time social media, networked irritation drives traffic. Devine’s columns look more and more like linkbaiting, pure and simple.

I’ve rarely seen a better analysis of just why exactly all this ranting and raving is the lifeblood of a declining media than Wilson’s. But it does beg the question – what is it, precisely, about our culture that fosters the desire to be indignant? One wouldn’t want to credit the “trollumnist” with too much originality. The ground has to be prepared.

The notion that News Corp’s proposed paywall “won’t work” is in danger of becoming common sense. The problem with this is that, on the contrary, I can see how it might well work.

While some of the caveats Wilson enters about the received narrative are no doubt valid, I don’t know that he is actually providing “facts” that have been “overlooked” – as the tag line says (though that may be a bit of sub-editing, rather than Wilson’s opinion). Among other points, he argues that bundling selected niche content might find a market, in a similar way to Foxtel style channels.

I can (just) believe that there’s a chance that people might pay for sport, but I think if there was a huge paying market for right wing opinionistas, they wouldn’t be giving Quadrant away free to so many libraries.

The missing question that needs answering is how much of the content News generates is actually stuff people want at all, and then how much do they want it… I suspect MX is a better representation of what most people want to read, but I doubt anyone would pay for it. You can bundle up celebrity stories with a heap of other stuff and make a magazine that will be purchased at the check out, but I’m still not sure that most of this ‘content’ has any market value online – in part because the way people read online is very different from print.

Elsewhere: Debra Adams.

Judge Madden rejected the claims by the blogger’s lawyer that the comments were mere opinion or “trash talk”, and that only factual assertions could be considered libellous.

“The thrust of the blog is that the petitioner is a sexually promiscuous woman,” Judge Madden wrote in her judgment, noting that the comments were run alongside photos of Cohen in suggestive poses.

The blog, which was shut down in March, was almost entirely devoted to slagging off Cohen. It contained just five entries, all of which were published on August 21 last year.

It’s interesting to ponder how some of the comments on prominent blogs hosted by mainstream media organisations might fare if this precedent were followed in Australia. We all know what I’m talking about, but for a sample of the sort of bilge that is far too blithely published, see the quotes in Jason Wilson’s piece yesterday at New Matilda.

To some degree, bloggers on MSM sites have a practical, if not legal, immunity because of the deep pockets of their employers. But those who effectively make money for those mastheads, as Wilson argues, by eagerly responding to the elicitation of grossly offensive and personalised comments, might pause and consider whether they’d individually be prepared to defend them in court. I doubt the bloggers who foster attack speech would offer anything other than rhetorical support.

Some comments threads on independent blogs might also be problematic. I can think of some blogs where the comments consist almost entirely of vilification and abuse of individuals.

It’s also well worth noting that misogynistic slurs were the basis for this court decision.

Elsewhere: Mashable.

Update: Bronwen Clune.

Update: Legal Eagle.

Update: Kate Harding at The Guardian‘s Comment is Free.

This might, of course, be dismissed as a set of metropolitan concerns. I doubt that’s true. Cities such as Toowoomba, Ipswich, Townsville, Rockhampton and others are increasingly promoting themselves as university towns, as creative and educational hubs. Some of the Brisbane v. the regions and elite v. populist stereotypes beloved of just about everyone on either side of the purported dividing line may be false, or at least much blurrier than usually conceived.

Still, the geographical and cultural spread of Queensland makes elections here hard to read – or rather, for those sitting in Brisbane, harder to read as the crow flies further. There are real gaps between social and cultural and economic interests in this big state which are difficult to bridge. Whether we end up with an LNP government holding fewer metropolitan seats than Labor, or a Labor government with a much diminished regional representation (or a minority government whose complexion is determined by rural and regional independents), the next state administration is going to find it more challenging to govern in the interests of all Queenslanders.

That’s particularly because – on both sides – the vision has been so barren.

In this context, it’s interesting to point to Jason Wilson’s take – as someone whose perception of state politics continues to be shaped by his North Queensland origins. I’d recommend reading his whole article, but I’d also wholeheartedly endorse his conclusion:

There is a larger issue here that goes to the heart of our federation — people are rightly confused about what state governments are for, and what they represent, at a time when the central government is seizing the initiative in more and more areas but is itself confronted with enormous difficulties in steering the country through its current economic problems. The original federation was created to recognise not only different jurisdictions and different responsibilites, but different histories and identities. So what does it mean to be a Queenslander now? Neither of Queensland’s major parties seem to offer much of a clue on this score either.

If Queenslanders saw evidence of leadership, capability and bona fides among the candidates, their attention might be focused a little bit more on this contest. As it is, faced with disaster on several fronts, and no solutions, they might be forgiven for devoting their energies elsewhere. When ships are spewing filth over Queensland’s pride — its beaches — why waste time rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic?

Cross-posted at Pineapple Party Time.