Fairfax guilty of their own fake news

SO-CALLED “fake news” is supposed to have been invented either by or around Donald Trump and in the fervid swamp of social media, writes Terry McCrann.

Two Fairfax papers, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, on Monday gave us classic examples of ‘fake news’.

SO-CALLED “fake news” is supposed to have been invented either by or around Donald Trump and in the fervid swamp of social media. That’s complete nonsense.

The far-left mainstream media — in the US that’s the CBS, NBC and ABC TV networks, along with the Washington Post and especially the New York Times; and in Australia the Fairfax newspapers and their ABC — have been peddling wall-to-wall fake news for decades.

They have done so by a combination of exaggeration, retailing and amplifying outright falsehoods, endless repetition of politically correct memes, and also deliberate omission of unacceptable countervailing facts.

We got an A1 classic example in the two Fairfax papers, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, on Monday.

Thundering across their front pages was the “exclusive” revelation Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had been told in “confidential public service advice” that South Australia’s heavy reliance on windpower had not been the cause of its statewide power blackout last September.

The “exclusive” was specifically and deliberately handed to Fairfax by the extremist left-wing lobby group and agitator, the Australia Institute, confident in the knowledge that the Fairfax papers as rusted-on enthusiasts for windpower would broadcast it loud and uncritically.

The story sought to kill two birds with one stone (or should that be, turbine).

To blunt the government’s campaign against the ludicrous renewable energy targets of both state Labor governments and the federal Labor Opposition.

And to bury any suggestion that a heavy reliance on windpower, like SA has, would inevitably and irresistibly compromise electricity reliability and indeed basic electricity supply.

And boy, was the AI’s faith rewarded as Fairfax’s Canberra chief, Mark Kenny, breathlessly and authoritatively — as in, ponderously and pompously — detailed the revelation.

Fairfax revealed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had been told in ‘confidential public service advice’ that South Australia’s heavy reliance on windpower had not been the cause of its statewide power blackout last September.

It came down to this: that on September 29 — the day after SA “went black” – “confidential public service advice” in an email to Turnbull’s office said advice from AEMO, the Australian Energy Market Operator, was that the generation mix (renewable or fossil fuel) was not to blame.

AEMO’s advice was that the loss of power was caused by unprecedented damage to the network with the collapse of 20-plus transmission towers.

Big “revelation?” Confidential? Hardly. That is exactly what AEMO said in a public statement on that same day, September 29.

And I quote: “Initial investigations have identified the root cause of the event is likely to be the multiple loss of 275 kilovolt (kV) power lines (the 20-plus towers falling over) during severe storm activity in the state”.

Indeed, that is exactly the line that was being pushed by SA premier Jay Weather-dill in a desperate effort to avoid any suggestion SA had been ambushed by its own stupidity in putting all its electricity eggs in the windpower basket.

And he was doing so from the very middle of the blackout on September 28 itself.

It all seemed so obvious. There was the visual evidence of the fallen towers — something Fairfax papers, the ABC and indeed all other media ran so uncritically from the get go.

Nothing to see here. Nothing to do with those wind turbines.

What Fairfax’s fake news on Monday didn’t tell their readers was that this was AEMO’S first assessment. But when it actually did the full analysis, it concluded that in fact, yes, it was all about the wind turbines.

Hazelwood is casually but deliberately cited as the “dirtiest” power station in Australia. Picture: AFP

A WEEK later in a far more detailed report, AEMO noted that, yes, three major transmission lines had been lost. But that, and I quote, “Generation initially rode through the faults”.

But then 315MW of wind generation shut down and, I quote again, “the uncontrolled reduction in generation resulted in increased flow on the main Victorian interconnector (Heywood) to make up the deficit”.

Heywood overloaded and it then cut off SA. The state went black.

In later reports AEMO identified that the turbines had shut down because, essentially, the wind was blowing too hard.

So yes, it was all due to the wind turbines. Perhaps Kenny and the broader collective at Fairfax don’t understand that coal-fired power stations generally don’t shut down when the wind is blowing “too hard”. They also keep generating electricity when the “wind don’t blow”.

It was also “all about wind” in a more fundamental sense.

Just before it all happened SA was getting nearly 50 per cent of its power from its own wind turbines. It was also getting around one-third of its power from Victoria — via that “long extension cord” into Victoria’s coal-fired power stations.

When 315MW of wind shut down, SA “asked” – “demanded” — reliable Victorian coal-fired power stations to instantaneously provide the extra supply. That’s what happens with so-called windpower. It jumps up and down — reliable, real, power generation has to instantly either make up the difference or stop to make way for the wind.

So in sum we’ve got Fairfax and AI peddling the fake — indeed outright false — news of September 29 — “conveniently” omitting the fuller facts from AEMO that subsequently emerged to precisely rebut their own story. And doing so, months later.

This is precisely what Fairfax and the ABC have been doing for decades, most specifically in relation to so-called “climate change” and the false fantasies of equally so-called “renewable energy”.

The biggest of their big lies is attaching the word “pollution” to coal-fired power generation. It is done to deliberately conflate the little bits of grit of real pollution to the emission of carbon dioxide.

So Hazelwood is casually but deliberately cited as the “dirtiest” power station in Australia.

Richard Goyder is arguably the ‘nicest’ chief executive we’ve seen in Australia in the past 20-30 years.

RETAIL : PAST AND FUTURE

SO, the baton is being passed at Australia’s biggest retail group Wesfarmers. Outgoing CEO Richard Goyder will be forever identified — and judged, both in timing and substance — for the momentous strategic decision to spend $20 billion buying the Coles Group in 2008.

The timing could not have been worse as we then ran smack bang into the GFC. Arguably, he and Wesfarmers were saved by his choice of CEO for Coles — Ian McLeod. They were also saved by the unchecked ever-upward performance of their existing retail operation, Bunnings, under longtime CEO John Gillam.

McLeod is now long gone; and after initially performing well under his successor, John Durkan, there is now a serious question mark over its continued momentum. We are also about to find out how Bunnings goes without Gillam, especially as it pushes into the UK.

Goyder is arguably the “nicest” CEO we’ve seen in Australia in the past 20-30 years. But the fact remains that in 2007 the pre-Coles Wesfarmers was earning a 25 per cent return on its shareholder equity. Last year it earned just 9.6 per cent.

The takeover was an exercise not just in valueless growth but outright value destruction. Goyder should thank his lucky stars for McLeod and Gillam at least.

In one sense, Rob Scott couldn’t be starting from a better place. The clock on him starts from that 9.6 per cent return.

But the big question mark over his future goes back to the bigger question of timing. Was a $20 billion push into bricks and mortar retailing in 2008 wrong because of the online explosion that was in the process of erupting?

Scott persisted with the absurd claim on Tuesday that Wesfarmers was a “conglomerate”. I can understand he was paying due deference to the “Wesfarmers meme” of his two predecessors.

But no, it’s not, it’s a retailer. The success or otherwise of his tenure will be decided by how good he proves at, well, retailing.

Originally published as Fairfax guilty of their own fake news