Obsessed media gets it wrong

THIS blog was incorrectly published under another journalist's name due to a production error. It was not written by Stephen Corby, as was earlier claimed. Following is a republished version of the same blog. The Sunday Telegraph apologises for the error.WHEN the ABC favourably quotes conservative columnists, alarm bells should begin to ring. But the flagship evening radio current affairs program PM began its end-of-the-week wrap-up on Friday by noting that The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen and The Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt had questioned whether Prime Minister John Howard should abdicate.

It’s not the first time Melbourne-based Bolt has pushed for a change of leadership but it was a first for Sydney-dweller Albrechtsen - though, disappointingly, their arguments boiled down to not very much at all. While it is patently obvious that the polls are looking very bleak for the Coalition, cooler heads examining all the data are not convinced that all is lost and that it is time to jettison Howard as leader in a final throw of the dice. Anyone who has really put in the yards observing Australian politics would be well aware of the very poor record members of the Canberra press pack, and many others who count themselves as members of the commentariat, have with their prognostications. For the most part, they might be more accurately informed if they studied tea leaves, or perhaps the lees in their wine glasses. They have jumped behind almost every bandwagon the ALP has rolled out, lending their voices and column inches in the process. It is a matter of dismal fact that they were, almost to a man and a woman, embarrassingly shrill in their support for the man who last led Labor to defeat, Mark Latham, though his human frailties were never hidden. Yet they constantly fail to understand the person they are perhaps most engaged in interpreting for their audience, John Howard. This is really a reflection upon them and their egos, for with Howard, probably more than any other politician in Canberra, it really is a case of what you see is what you get. Opposition leader Kevin Rudd misinterprets Howard for his own Machiavellian political purposes, but the media should not be playing the same game. Howard has stuck to a mantra about the leadership ever since the question was first raised. He has steadfastly repeated that he will remain leader for as long as his party wishes him to remain. The commentariat, however, seems psychologically incapable of taking him at his word. Rudd accuses Howard of being clever but he speaks from the perspective of the Labor Party which has had to put up with leaders who make secret leadership deals in front of third-party witnesses which they nevertheless still go on to break. Clever in Rudd’s utterance is a derisory term, yet surely there is nothing to be derided about honesty? Howard has said he will go when his party wants him to, and he put it to the party room earlier this year. There was no move against him then and there would be no move against him tomorrow. He is not being smart, as in cute, when he recites his mantra. The evaluation of his leadership is for his colleagues to make. This is not to say that the man is not equipped with ultra-sensitive political antennae. He is. And while there are a few whose political acumen he respects enough to take into account, he essentially weighs such matters in his own mind while listening to the opinions of those others. Howard’s leadership is not only weighing on the collective mind of the media, it is also at the forefront of the ALP’s election strategy. The Labor Party knows that he represents the greatest obstacle to their sweep to power. (Not that everyone in the ALP is as assured of victory as Rudd, and his Shadow Treasurer Wayne Swan. As a seat-by-seat analysis in the Financial Review on Friday demonstrated, Labor still has its work cut out mustering enough seats to win government.) While Howard is Labor’s greatest threat, he is the Coalition’s best bet and the backbenchers know that. Political commentary in Australia reached new abysses during APEC, with grown men and women paid by The Sydney Morning Herald to write about the number of pieces of pasta on US President George W. Bush’s plate (Annabel Crabb), and provide descriptions of the necessary security outside the Supreme Court as chilling (David Marr). (Chilling, as NSW District Court Judge Peter Berman more accurately noted in another part of the same newspaper, was the systematic abuse and even torture and rape of a 16-year-old boy with a rolling pin.) But to hang a new leadership headline on a comment from a backbencher who suggested that Howard share the limelight with other frontbenchers is pretty thin stuff, indeed. The public may well vote the Coalition out but, if it does, it will not be out of boredom, but for real or perceived grievances. Despite the fervent wishes of the media and the ALP, the Coalition shows no sign of disintegrating despite being storm-tossed. Mariners who recall the 1979 Fastnet yacht race - the worst in history _ will also remember that of those who abandoned their vessels in panic and took to the life rafts, 17 lost their lives. Those who mustered the courage to stay with their boats and weather the storm came through safely.