Budget critics show double standards JANET ALBRECHTSEN THE AUSTRALIAN MAY 21, 2014 FOLLOWING the federal budget, there has been some real tosh in the media. Last Wednesday, a grumpy grandma on Channel 10’s Wake Up program protested against budget changes to the age pension. She turned out to be a former campaigner for Kevin Rudd. Then came ridiculous coverage at news.au about the cost of a dress worn on budget night by Joe Hockey’s wife, a self-made, hardworking woman. By Sunday, it was Annabel Crabb’s turn in Fairfax’s Sunday papers asserting that “firebrand conservative columnists” were hardest hit by the budget. Not only did they have to fork out for the deficit levy, wrote Crabb, they also had been stripped of two subjects — class-war taxes on the rich, and the reprehensibility of broken campaign promises — on which they had relied heavily for rhetorical ballast. It’s time for sections of the media to lift their game. Crabb’s cute persona doesn’t get her off the hook for peddling such nonsense. Yet, like a piece of recycled garbage, this line about blinkered conservatives gets regurgitated. Had Crabb paid more attention recently, she would have noticed most conservative columnists came out stridently against the deficit levy, not because some might have to pay it (Crabb, the ABC’s online political editor, will also pay it thanks to her annual taxpayer-funded salary of $217,246) but because breaking campaign promises is a political mistake for Tony Abbott. Contrary to Crabb’s disingenuous analysis, News columnist and host of The Bolt Report Andrew Bolt has been a harsh and consistent critic of the deficit levy and increasing the fuel excise — as broken promises from a Prime Minister who campaigned against Julia Gillard’s broken promises. Curiously, Crabb failed to mention Bolt’s April 30 blog where he wrote, “Abbott cannot afford to break a promise”, and his May 1 column, headed: “A broken promise could break Abbott”, and The Bolt Report on the Sunday before the budget when Bolt again criticised Abbott for breaking promises, and Bolt’s column the day after the budget that said Abbott was “dicing with political death to … break so many promises”. Similarly, Crabb failed to acknowledge that conservative columnist Miranda Devine, writing in The Daily Telegraph, said such a debt tax would be a betrayal of voters’ trust. Crabb didn’t mention the equally critical comments by my colleague Chris Kenny in The Australian. As host of Sky’s Viewpoint on Sunday evening and in radio interviews for weeks, Kenny has been an intellectually consistent critic of Abbott’s broken tax promise. In Adelaide’s Sunday Mail before the budget, he wrote: “The Abbott government looks to be playing us for mugs.” Crabb also ignored my comments on Viewpoint, on The Bolt Report and in The Australian where I have held the Abbott government to account for breaking promises after campaigning on the basis of rebuilding voters’ trust following the disaster of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years. While not all conservative commentators have been critical of Abbott’s first budget, plenty have been. Just as former prime minister John Howard copped plenty of scrutiny from conservatives for his overly generous middle-class welfare, for his expensive populism when he removed indexation on fuel excise in 2001, over the AWB scandal, the debacle surrounding Mohamed Haneef’s arrest and so on, Abbott can’t and won’t expect an easy ride from the Right. The more disappointing story is the inability of so many conservative-haters in the media to apply the same level of intellectual curiosity regardless of which party is in power. While Crabb has concocted a story that conservatives are giving Abbott a free pass on broken promises, in her 8700-word essay about Gillard in The Monthly in July 2011 Crabb includes only passing mention of Gillard’s broken carbon tax promise. Indeed, when the tax passed on October 12, 2011, Crabb lauded the broken promise as “a substantial achievement” on The Drum. Other like-minded journalists also desperately looked for signs of Gillard’s comeback instead of focusing on why voters remained cranky. The ABC’s Fran Kelly famously cheered the carbon tax legislation: “Bring on the certainty, I say.” Yet, on Insiders on Sunday, Kelly, Lenore Taylor and Laura Tingle were smoking with indignation about Abbott’s broken promises. Where was the indignation from Taylor and Tingle when Gillard broke her no-carbon tax promise? Taylor preferred to argue that Gillard never ruled out an emissions trading system. Tingle, who delighted in describing Abbott as a “negative, opportunistic and hollow man” and remonstrated against Abbott getting away with an asylum-seeker policy “that would never work”, never raged against the opportunism and hollowness of Gillard, who broke a promise solely to secure her prime ministership. Journalists Kerry-Anne Walsh and Jonathan Green also tried to help Gillard out of her carbon tax hole by asserting Gillard qualified her August 2010 promise with a commitment to put a price on carbon. As Gerard Henderson has said, neither produced evidence of this. Maybe some sections of the media are just sleepy. Or maybe they are guilty of double standards when it comes to holding governments to account. Just as this newspaper held the Howard government to account for its stuff-ups, The Australian has led the way on exposing the AWU scandal, the deaths arising out of Labor’s home insulation scheme, rorts in the former Labor government’s school halls program, failures in the national rental affordability scheme, the silliness of government handing out set-top boxes, computers in the classroom, homelessness policies that came to naught, the NBN cost blowouts and missed targets and the tragic failure of Rudd and Gillard “applying metrics” to Aboriginal disadvantage with little change to outcomes. Gillard’s broken carbon tax promise simply rubbed salt into the wounds of worn-out voters. While The Australian’s Hedley Thomas has examined the real facts around Clive Palmer’s outlandish claims and business dealings, the rest of the media has given this influential politician a free kick, presumably because he is a thorn in Abbott’s side. But by far the biggest failure has been from those in the media who, unlike this newspaper and The Australian Financial Review, have failed to scrutinise the structural disintegration of the federal budget under Labor with unfunded and unsustainable promises on Gonski, the National Disability Insurance Scheme and hospital funding beyond the forward estimates. More old-fashioned journalistic curiosity from the left-wing media about facts will enhance debate, not just about broken promises but about whether the national interest of repairing Australia’s fiscal balance sheet rises above other political considerations. Illustration: Eric Lobbecke.
Posted on: Wed, 21 May 2014 11:30:29 +0000
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