ABC 7.30’s Leigh Sales fluffs showpiece budget interviews by missing the thread

The ABC's Leigh Sales missed an opportunity at the Budget. Picture: Supplied.

Great political interviewers don’t need a sledgehammer to get the best from their subjects.

But at our ABC, the interviewing house style has evolved into confrontation, interruption and sarcasm. It’s the interviewer — rather than the subject — front and centre. ABC 7.30 host Leigh Sales took no prisoners in her interview with Prime Minister Scott Morrison last Wednesday.

The Twitter left loved it; yet Sales did not get to the heart of the political and economic strategy underpinning Tuesday’s federal budget. Thursday night’s 7.30 interview with Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese was much gentler, but again Sales missed the central economic and political strategies of Labor’s response to the Coalition’s mammoth deficit spending plans.

Sales’s interview style is much less about bias than technique, and she has often been criticised for going too hard in Labor interviews. Retired Nine Network political editor Laurie Oakes and his successor Chris Uhlmann, a former ABC 7.30 political correspondent, don’t take a backward step but are masters at following the trail of an interview.

Sales cops a lot of abuse on social media, unfairly. Yet so do conservative male television hosts such as Andrew Bolt, who receives regular death threats and has been physically attacked by critics in public. It’s the nature of the “dunny door graffiti” that passes for political commentary — on Twitter, especially. Uhlmann, who has correctly defended Sales against viciously partisan attacks on social media, branded such Twitter campaigners “sewer rats” earlier this year.

.@leighsales asks @ScottMorrisonMP: “You've been PM now for nearly 3 years & so Australians have had a chance to observe how you've responded to various things … Doesn’t all that taken together add up to a tendency to blame shift & duck responsibility wherever possible?” #abc730pic.twitter.com/9Odb3dvzo7

— abc730 (@abc730) May 12, 2021

I first met Sales not long after her excellent 2007 book, Detainee 002: The Case of David Hicks. She had been the ABC’s Washington correspondent at the time of Hicks’s incarceration.

The book, a compelling account of Hicks’s involvement with al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan, won Sales few friends at the ABC which — apart from Four Corners’ Sally Neighbour — has shown little interest in the crimes of local supporters of al-Qa’ida and ISIS.

Maintaining independence of thought can be difficult in that sort of censorious journalistic environment. The social media left punishes any deviation by the ABC from its agenda.

An example was the outcry three years ago about The Drum using people from the Institute of Public Affairs. Host Julia Baird even wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald in July 2018, explaining how hard it was for The Drum to attract conservatives. Baird argued correctly that the IPA should have an occasional presence on the show in the interests of debate.

Despite Baird’s efforts the IPA disappeared from the program, which is now much more likely to feature three or four guests who all agree on every issue. This makes boring viewing but it’s what the social media left loves. Interestingly, Sky News — so hated by Twitter — hosts many Labor and Greens guests, most of whom make for more interesting debate.

Back to Sales and Morrison. She was right to throw tough questions at the PM after such a big spending budget. But the interview got off to a false start when Sales focused on vaccination rates rather than the wider budget strategy. This line of questioning and her later focus on what Morrison knew about the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins were, unfortunately, lifted straight from Labor’s attacks in Question Time that afternoon.

Underpinning Sales’s first questions was the idea Australia’s economic recovery depends on opening up international tourism and achieving herd immunity. It is, at best, only partly true.

While closed borders have hurt tourism and higher education exports, high rates of government and private spending have boosted employment and economic growth. Even Guardian Australia columnist Greg Jericho conceded the point in a piece on Thursday headlined: “The secret of the budget? The big help is we’re stuck in Australia.”

It’s a phenomenon many economists have been writing about. Household consumption is up as people cancel overseas holidays. This column noted a year ago that Australian tourists spend more overseas than foreign tourists spend here.

Sales would not be deterred by Morrison’s factual responses and missed an opportunity to ask budget-related questions. After spending so much on COVID-19 last calendar year, shouldn’t Treasurer Josh Frydenberg have used higher revenue from iron ore exports to start paying down debt forecast to reach $1 trillion within three years? Nor was the PM pressed on the political nature of much of his deficit spending, obviously budgeted with an eye to an election. The following night, Sales failed to engage with the politics of Labor’s response.

Labor has been snookered by the Coalition’s big social spending and can’t criticise the government for it. The people most unhappy with the budget are the Coalition’s core supporters. It would have been fascinating for 7.30 to use the two interviews to flesh out the politics of this role reversal and the inflationary dangers of baking in so much future debt.

.@leighsales: "A huge number of Australians were kept afloat thanks to JobKeeper & their firsthand experience is of the Morrison Gov squarely on their side."@AlboMP: "It was Labor who put forward the idea of wage subsidies & Morrison called it a dangerous idea." #abc730#auspolpic.twitter.com/b7p6U51puu

— abc730 (@abc730) May 13, 2021

The ABC 7.30 prime ministerial budget interview is traditionally one of the showpieces of the political year. Sales wasted time on political lines about vaccines, quarantine, the bushfires of two years ago and rape allegations. She interrupted the PM each time he tried to get back to the budget: “I just made the point”, “That is right, Prime Minister, but ...”, “As I point out”, “I’ve spelt out the facts here” — these are not questions.

The ABC has got a lot wrong over the past year and is under political pressure for it. ABC radio has been the main media driver of vaccine hesitancy with early unbalanced reporting of rare Astra Zeneca blood clot risks. For months, the ABC campaigned against the withdrawal of JobKeeper last March, wrongly forecasting the economy would go over a cliff.

Now it pursues unsophisticated lines about vaccination and quarantine. As epidemiologists have said, Australia is in a different position from the US and Britain, where vaccination rates are high because COVID is rampant. Picking up on ALP lines that quarantine is a federal responsibility ignores the decision by national cabinet that the states should manage quarantine in hotels under state health orders.

Most people support the ABC, but they should expect it to be ­better.