It’s been 10 years since Kevin Rudd led Labor to victory in Canberra, tipping John Howard out of Bennelong in the process.
Rudd’s arrival not only heralded the first change of government in Canberra in more than a decade, it coincided with a permanent change in the tempo of Australian politics.
Part of this was Rudd, and how the youthful backroom orbiting around him liked to operate – pedal to the metal, plenty of time to sleep when you are dead.
Part of the change was technological. The internet had arrived and its disruptive power was transforming politics into what Michael Bloomberg has called the era of the instant referendum, turning an orderly daily media cycle into a caterwauling cacophony.
In the past 10 years, our politics has become faster, more combative, more volatile. We’ve also seen the rise of Canberra’s lethal coup culture, which has eroded trust inside the major parties, and plunged Australian politicians into a permanent state of fight or flight.
Running alongside that is a structural transformation in the Australian media. There are fewer journalists producing more content, feeding a hungry 24/7 beast.
As well as significant work intensification, media coverage is more polarised. Outrage generally trumps nuance because media outlets, in the relentless drive for eyeballs, are intent on inculcating their own, loyal tribes.
The rolling news cycle also imposes a revised implicit hierarchy, where the new development often trumps the important development, which is the opposite of the mores which defined the print era.
The sum total of this, from the vantage point of the voter, is noise, much of it unpleasant.
It’s worth taking a minute to set this scene before we plunge into the here and now, because setting the scene underscores a foundational point.
Governing, here in Australia, and pretty much everywhere, is now very difficult, and the factors which make it difficult are unlikely to change.
While it is impossible for politicians to restore the pre-internet order or negotiate more favourable terms with the most profound disruption to the public discourse since the arrival of the printing press – I think it is possible for politicians and the media to learn some lessons from their immediate past.
The most astonishing thing about the gathering disintegration of the Turnbull government is the sheer obduracy of the collective self-destruction.
Here are a bunch of people who had a ringside seat on Labor’s civil war, who understand full well that ego, ill-discipline and inveterate intrigue costs you government, just as sure as night follows day – and yet ego and intrigue apparently trumps basic self-preservation.
Let’s diagnose the immediate problems. Anyone watching politics knows the prime minister is in deep trouble, and that discipline inside the government is shot.
Rebel Nationals want their banking inquiry. Conservatives want to indulge a last public tantrum over marriage equality.
Julie Bishop is shining on, crazy diamond, and doesn’t seem to mind who notices. Scott Morrison is openly courting favour with the right faction and with media pals, trying to restore the bark he lost with conservatives when he didn’t help Tony Abbott hold out Malcolm Turnbull from the leadership.
Drum roll please ... everyone be calm, Scott has returned. Apparently we are all supposed to forget his mostly underwhelming performance in the treasury, and focus on his hitherto undetected talents in miracle working.
Now, does anybody, seriously, apart from the fanboys and fangirls (bless them), think that either Bishop, or Morrison, has the capacity to turn around the Coalition’s political fortunes?
Even if either suddenly developed the ability to pierce the daily chaos and clutter with their charisma – let’s assume for the purposes of this thought experiment that they obviously had the X-factor – do either possess the magic formula to stop the corrosive internal consequences of yet another change of leader?
How does a change of leader result in people who can’t stand one another now suddenly developing the level of trust required for competent government? And how does a government conducting the second public referendum on its chronic underperformance, installing the third leader in four years, tell the public to do anything apart from vote them out at the first available opportunity?
It’s not only politicians who seem incapable of learning from recent history, we political journalists also have to examine our own choices.
During the toxic Rudd/Gillard period, reporters were thrust into an entirely new paradigm, covering an internal party civil war in real time, literally minute by minute.
This dynamic was new for the politicians, and it was new for us. We were developing new forms of engagement in front of a live audience, and anyone who says no mistakes or misjudgments were made during that period isn’t telling the truth. Anyone who says journalists weren’t played, at least on some occasions, during that period, has done no self reflection at all.
If there’s an overarching lesson to be learned from that period, it’s that we must take a big step back when the politics attempt to grab the apparatus and the daily coverage becomes either the hostage of, or worse, a party to, emerging plots and schemes.
I’m not arrogant enough to speak for others – everyone processes professional experience in their own way, and takes away different learnings – but here’s my own inclination after close to a decade of watching the coup culture settle in Canberra like a lethal cancer: when that mood hits, when the leaks and the brinkmanship starts, step right back.
Take just one small example from the week. A couple of days back, a thunderclap from Andrew Bolt, who had spoken to someone who was thinking about quitting the party room if Malcolm Turnbull didn’t come to his senses and become more appealing to conservative voters.
The evening rant shift on Sky News is its own little bubble, and Bolt will do as he does. But because chaos has descended, both as media motif and as lived daily reality in Canberra, Andrew’s insight then developed wide currency.
Secondary reports bobbed up about the existential threat to the government from this unknown person who had spoken to Bolt – as if this was something just innately worth recording.
Somebody quitting the government to sit on the cross bench is obviously a huge development, in the event that it happens. Obviously the Bolt insight, which went off like a small bomb inside the government, necessitated a bunch of basic journalistic checks: who might this be? Is this real or just some passing whimsy?
But it did not require blanket coverage in the absence of an actual person actually fronting up, and owning their own cunning plot.
It really didn’t.
So the bottom line is simple. If we don’t apply some basic judgments, if we don’t draw some hard lines, we fall into a trap.
We become stenographers in an echo chamber, and if that’s all we now are, if that’s the bitter reality of disrupted journalism, then the public has every right to ask: what is the point of that?
