Activist journalism sullies worthy work of your Right to Know Coalition

Kristina Keneally seems to “forget people cannot come to Australia by plane without passports and visa checks”. Picture: Kym Smith

Media wanting the public to ­support the Your Right To Know Coalition need to be careful activist reporting does not alienate public opinion.

Three issues from the past few weeks stand out for the way some reporters have abandoned dispassionate reporting for political advocacy.

The latest was reporting of last week’s Senate estimates hearings into the government’s proposed scrapping of the Medivac Bill first proposed by short-lived federal MP Kerryn Phelps late last year. The Coalition promised to scrap the bill at the May election.

Under the Medivac Bill, ­detainees on Manus and Nauru can be moved to the Australian mainland for medical treatment on the say-so of two doctors, neither of whom needs to see an applicant in person.

The government warned the bill would be used by activist doctors to get asylum seekers to the mainland, there would be no mechanism to ensure those treated here were returned to offshore detention, and lawyers would immediately launch proceedings to have claims for Australian visas heard onshore.

In my view Labor’s support for the bill was the beginning of the electorate’s reassessment of the party, which had been widely expected to win the election. Australians know Labor’s weakening of the Pacific solution under the Rudd government brought 50,000 asylum seekers by boat and 1200 deaths at sea.

Yet media advocates for Phelps’s proposals insisted there was no evidence they would water down the border protection regime introduced by then minister Scott Morrison under the ­Abbott government elected in 2013.

Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo and Australian Border Force boss Major General Craig Furini gave evidence last Monday that under the new law, 135 detainees had been brought to Australia, only 13 had been hospitalised, none is now in hospital, five had ­refused all treatment and 43 had refused pathology tests or X-rays. None had been returned.

Rather than ask if this showed the government was right to be concerned, The Guardian and New Daily bought Labor spokeswoman Kristina Keneally’s line that the 135 only came because they had been approved for transfer by Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, who does have the power to reject medical transfers but only on limited security grounds.

Mr Dutton did block the transfer of the father of an unwell Iranian girl approved for treatment in Australia. The Guardian and the New Daily used that veto as proof the bill is working properly.

Media of the left have for 20 years been captured by asylum-seeker advocates and regularly cite the support of doctors for claims by those who have arrived without papers. As if a medical degree confers understanding of people-smuggling or national security.

Many reporters have accepted Keneally’s false claim that people-smugglers now ply their trade by plane.

She and media backers seemed to forget people cannot come to Australia by plane without passports and visa checks.

This paper exposed that idea on Wednesday when it reported that “of the more than 8.8 million temporary visas granted in 2018-19, 0.00078 per cent, or 69 cases, were identified by the Australian Federal Police as potential victims of human trafficking”.

Keneally, a failed former NSW premier who led her party to its biggest defeat in history in the 2011 state election when she won only 26 per cent of the primary vote, seems to have enormous support from journalists on social media even though her claims are often wrong.

Why can’t the ALP and its media supporters understand Australians want tough borders and don’t like asylum-seekers gaming the system in the courts at taxpayers’ expense?

ISIS brides

The ABC has been pushing all year for the return to Australia of the ISIS brides and their children from detention in northern Syria.

This paper revealed in a poll last Tuesday that 59 per cent of ­respondents oppose bringing the women home and only 36 per cent support the idea.

ABC Middle East correspondent Adam Harvey has done a brilliant job reporting from the former caliphate and speaking to the detained women is certainly in the public interest.

Four Corners has also covered an Australian family’s plight and emotional upheaval in the region. It was compelling journalism. Yet just as the ABC misread the wider caliphate story four years ago when it uncritically accepted the leftist view that jihadism was a manifestation of flaws in the West rather than flaws in Wahhabist Islam, many at the national broadcaster are again misreading the issue.

While most people feel sorry for these women, Australians are right to think their return would be risky.

Turkey and battering Trump

Much of the media in the past fortnight has used the campaign by Turkey against Kurds in northern Syria as a political battering ram against US President Trump. Turkey struck after Trump decided to withdraw remaining US troops from northern Syria. Most media analysis has given little ­attention to historical facts about the Kurds in Turkey.

The Kurdish political movement, the PKK, has been a Marxist terror organisation since the 1970s. Regular visitors to Turkey know the Kurds have been behind ­attacks in the eastern border ­region of that country since 1984.

None of this is to embrace the increasingly authoritarian persona of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or to sanction the decision of President Trump to abandon the US’s Kurdish allies.

Hamish Macdonald, on ABC Radio National Mornings last Tuesday, brought a sense of balance to discussion of Trump, Turkey and the Kurds.

The Lowy Institute’s Lydia Khalil, a former political adviser to the US Department of Defence, was joined from Boston by terrorism expert and professor of political science at Northeastern University Max Abrahms and in Washington by Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former Middle East adviser for Republican and Democrat administrations.

Miller thought Trump was partly right, even if the US had ­indeed betrayed the Kurds. Syria was never vital to US interests and Democrat president Barack Obama had also been unwilling to take risks there. Russian interest was to ­secure a Mediterranean naval presence. Khalil said all US leaders since the 2002 invasion of Iraq had been determined not to repeat mistakes that triggered the rise of ISIS from the remnants of al-Qa’ida in Iraq.

Abrahms said most US failures in the Middle East had been based on an often unspoken push for ­regime change.

Many of the forces now acting on Turkey’s behalf were the same terror organisations the US had been funding against ISIS and the Assad regime. Macdonald thought this was precisely why Turkey is acting, and he is correct.

But news consumers have been given little understanding of Turkey’s motives as most ­efforts at analysis gave way to anti-Trump venting.

Miller said listeners to the concerns of Washington’s elite could be forgiven for imagining Syria was the cradle of world civilisation rather than a basket case that would present trouble for Russia for decades.

It was a long overdue injection of balance into the ABC’s reporting of the sad position in which the Kurds again find themselves.