Matthew Abraham: In journalism, battery cables and COVID tests, negatives can actually be positives

In journalism, COVID tests and car battery cables, negatives can actually be positives, writes Matthew Abraham.

Lucy of Paradise sure knows how to hurt a guy. “Oh what a joy Matthew Abraham must be to live with! I cannot remember ever reading a positive article he has written. How sad!”

That was her pithy text message as published in this newspaper’s Discussion pages last Sunday. It’s possible Lucy of Paradise is in fact Lionel of Lameroo, but that shouldn’t diminish her message.

Besides, I’ve tweeted 43,710 messages to date on Twitter under the name of my alter ego Kevin Corduroy, so it’d be a bit rich to quibble over questions of identity.

Lucy can’t remember ever reading a positive article from yours truly.

This doesn’t mean I’ve never written a positive article, just that she can’t remember one.

What makes an opinion “positive” or “negative” and is one more desirable than the other? On a car battery, the positive terminal is connected to the red wire that delivers the charge to the starter motor, the headlights and every other geegaw on the vehicle.

The negative terminal is hooked up to a boring black wire. That sounds bad, doesn’t it?

John Bannon and wife Angela walk through the garden at Government House for his swearing-in as Premier on November 10, 1982. That’s a very young Mike Rann on the right.

But the negative wire’s job is to complete the circuit. Without the negative, the positive is useless.

All basic electrical circuits work this way, with the positive and negative wires making the juice go round. Before you dismiss an opinion as negative, it’s worth remembering that without the dreary black wires you’d be stumbling around in the dark.

The Marshall government has hundreds of highly-paid “media advisers”, or spin doctors, whose sole job is to portray the government in a positive light, particularly if it does something stupid.

These taxpayer-funded media advisers coat every government department or agency like a thick, sticky layer of hundreds and thousands.

Back around 1980, I was strolling the carpet in Parliament House with then Labor opposition leader and soon-to-be premier the late John Bannon and his spin doctor Mike Rann, later to become premier himself, and the physically fearsome “policy adviser”, the late Geoff Anderson.

“When we’ve had a bad day in Question Time, I send Mike out to tell the press gallery how brilliantly we went,” Bannon said with some pride.

It wasn’t until many years later that I fully realised to my eternal embarrassment that this wasn’t just a job for Rann, it was his super power. Sadly.

Anderson also took his job as “policy adviser” seriously, once shoving former Labor treasurer Kevin Foley, then an adviser, up against a wall in the Cabinet room for daring to challenge Bannon.

None of this means it’s the job of a journalist to be negative, but it is the job of a journalist to keep politicians accountable even if it makes the sparks fly.

Whether this makes a person a joy to live with is quite another question, but over the past fortnight I’ve had a run of joyful moments.

My wife and I enjoyed an affordable afternoon tea on the front veranda of Gamble Cottage in Blackwood, built in 1902 for orchardist Joseph Gamble and his wife Harriet and home to two of their four daughters, Clara and Edith, for most of their long, frugal, single lives.

Gamble Cottage, where you can enjoy a piping hot mug of tea and a vanilla slice and there’s nothing negative about that.

National Trust of SA volunteers do a tremendous job maintaining the cottage and historic gardens and produce an excellent vanilla slice, piping hot mugs of tea and sell jars of homemade Coromandel pink grapefruit and orange marmalade.

With the grandies, we’ve visited Morialta Falls and its brilliant adventure playground and spent a magical hour exploring the Story Book Trail at Carrick Hill.

With a cold in the family home, however, on the Anzac Day holiday Monday we dutifully took the advice of our chief medical officer Professor Saint Nicola Spurrier and headed into the big and almost empty COVID-19 drive-through testing station in Victoria Park.

This was my first COVID test since the beginning of this dreadful pandemic and it was an eye-opener.

The masked-up SA Health medical people are friendly and run the whole procedure with impressive efficiency.

The swab up the nose is only mildly annoying and you’re then sent home with an SA Pathology slip including a QR code to fast-track any future tests. If only they gave AstraZeneca jabs at the same time.

We were swabbed at around 3 pm and barely six hours later received text messages with the results. “Hi MATTHEW, your COVID-19 test ... is NEGATIVE,” mine read. Ditto for my wife. Which just goes to show you, Lucy of Paradise, that a negative can be a big positive.