ABC has one eye closed on climate

While energy policy modelling and border protection complications played out in this newspaper and elsewhere, the ABC was more interested in the “perceptions” issue of the Helloworld travel kerfuffle and nebulous claims about the company providing security on Manus Island.

Two of the most crucial issues for this nation’s ongoing economic and national security — which happen also to be two of the most volatile policies for the upcoming federal election — dominated the public debate last week. But the national broadcaster’s audiences were oblivious.

While energy policy modelling and border protection complications played out in this newspaper and elsewhere, the ABC was more interested in the “perceptions” issue of the Helloworld travel kerfuffle and nebulous claims about the company providing security services on Manus Island.

The ABC’s Media Watch program even got in on the act, downplaying the importance of border protection and once more falling into line with the so-called compassionate side of the borders argument that has been wrong for every one of the past 19 years. Slow learners.

More blatant was the ABC’s censorship of the important story carried on this newspaper’s front page last Thursday.

“Our carbon cut apocalypse” was the bracing headline to an exclusive from national affairs editor Simon Benson.

The story revealed extensive economic modelling of both the government’s and the opposition’s climate and energy settings. Given how prominent this policy area has been and is set to remain until polling day — and how vital energy policies are to our national economy — there could hardly be a worthier subject for coverage and debate.

And this modelling carries some weight. It was compiled by Brian Fisher, who now works as an economic consultant but formerly ran the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics and served the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments as an adviser on climate policy.

The findings, unsurprisingly, showed the Coalition’s current policies are costly but that Labor’s plans to more than double the renewable energy target and almost double the emissions reduction target will cost much more ($472 billion over a decade). You might think most voters would be interested in seeing real and credible estimates about the costs of these policy prescriptions. And you would think every journalist would be interested in providing them.

As Fisher told Peta Credlin on Sky News, the policy responses to meet the Paris climate agreement commitments and more are an attempt to transform what has historically been an internationally competitive economy based on cheap energy.

“Economic transformation is not a costless process,” said Fisher, “and this modelling is really trying to explore the consequences of moving the … economy off that old trajectory onto a new trajectory, and as a consequence of that there are economic costs that we have to bear. Now there are going to be jobs lost, for instance, there are going to be families that have to move; all of those costs need to be accounted for and properly debated.”

Labor, for the record, rejects the Fisher modelling.

That is the nature of such debates — modelling is always contested (except climate modelling on the ABC).

Critics might question the use of “apocalypse” in the headline — they probably prefer to reserve such emotive words for climate scares rather than real people facing actual difficulties such as unemployment.

But the main point here was the way the ABC just ignored this crucial addition of information to a vital national debate.

All is not lost, however.

Over on the ABC’s Triple J website they have published an article about “ecoanxiety” and given readers tips on how to deal with the stress that might be created by reading their alarmist climate reports. At the end of the story they posted the Lifeline number.