It’s funny how few journalists who tweet about speaking truth to power find the ticker to hold Labor politicians accountable. They hold conservative governments to account but apologise for Labor’s failures.
Look how meekly most media fall in behind the Labor states no matter how badly they handle COVID-19. Consider the lack of follow-up from prominent journalists campaigning on the safety of women at Parliament House in Canberra when the issue moved to the ALP via a Labor women’s Facebook page revealing dreadful behaviour by some Labor men.
It took the release last week of a book by former Labor minister Kate Ellis to force some reporters to confront the fact that shabby treatment of women is not a partisan issue.
Left-wing male journalists who have been tweeting praise for Julia Gillard and her 2012 misogyny speech surely know the sources of most criticism of our first female prime minister were the male Labor MPs who were supporters of deposed PM Kevin Rudd.
This column has argued the News Corp papers and Sky News are more willing to criticise Coalition governments, including Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s, than the ABC and Guardian are to criticise the federal Labor opposition or state Labor governments.
This reached ridiculous levels last year, when many Labor-leaning journalists sought to defend the Andrews government’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis.
Even “look at me” Rudd must be surprised how strongly the News Corp papers and websites have taken up the push for better behaviour by male politicians. Samantha Maiden broke the story of the alleged rape of Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins for news.com.au and exclusively revealed the Labor women’s Facebook page, including publishing a piece from one of the abused Labor women, Anna Jabour.
This newspaper quoted Jabour, 29, on March 16 about behaviours by Labor men in 2013 in the Rudd and Gillard governments. Not much follow-up anywhere, after that.
Rudd might also be surprised at how strongly his local paper, The Courier-Mail, backed Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s three-day lockdown. The Courier editorial on Tuesday said the state’s chief health officer, Jeannette Young, “has proven to be the best at her job in the nation, if not the world”.
It was a big call given Queensland has recorded barely any cases of COVID-19, had shut its borders and locked down in January over a single case, and has taken only a trickle of returning travellers into hotel quarantine.
The newspaper rethought its praise the following day when its editorial mentioned what many interstate critics had been saying: there is little logic behind three-day lockdowns other than to ease the burden of contact tracers. As the ANU’s Peter Collignon pointed out on ABC’s 7.30 on March 29, the disease is infectious only after five days. Most experts resist lockdowns unless absolutely necessary, but if they are required then 28-day lockdowns — two full COVID-19 infection cycles — are usually recommended.
The Courier’s Wednesday editorial also pointed out that on March 14, Dr Young had said she believed there would be no need for further Queensland lockdowns: “Just a fortnight ago, she made the very reassuring point that check-in apps were now being so widely used that any future clusters could be effectively controlled by simply locking down the most vulnerable.”
Add to that the fact NSW Health says it has taken 155,000 returning travellers, including many Queenslanders, through hotel quarantine since March 2020, while Queensland will now take about 600 a week.
It’s standard practice for the state newspapers in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart to play a parochial hand.
The national papers and those in two-paper markets tend to offer a more balanced view of federal-state issues.
The Australian’s experienced Brisbane-based associate editor Jamie Walker nailed Queensland’s failure on Wednesday, under the headline: “Zero confidence in hapless Queensland health authority”.
The lockdown of three million people just before Easter was down to “the failure of managers at Brisbane’s second-largest teaching hospital and their masters at Queensland Health to ensure that those who should have been at the very front of the vaccine queue — doctors and nurses treating COVID-19 patients — actually got the jab”, Walker wrote.
Remember, this hospital was the source of two separate clusters, one related to a doctor who tested positive on March 12 and the other to a nurse who took the virus to Byron Bay for a hens’ party the weekend before last.
The Queensland lockdown quickly disintegrated into a federal-state turf war over vaccines. Queensland Health Minister Yvette D’Ath insisted on Tuesday that the state was doing the right thing to hold back stocks of the Pfizer vaccine to allow people to receive their second jabs. Federal officials made it clear they had told national cabinet that the federal government would be withholding supplies for second vaccinations, due within three weeks for Pfizer.
The Courier reported on Thursday that the Premier had denied the state was holding back Pfizer supplies, but D’Ath again said it was and would continue to maintain a two-week stockpile. State Deputy Premier Steven Miles said Queensland “needed to reserve doses due to a lack of certainty of supply”.
David Crowe in Friday’s SMH reported the truth, quoting Dr Young on vaccine supply problems: “The issue is supply. We cannot as a nation rely on supply until we can get those doses from CSL (those made in Melbourne).”
But journalists driven by Twitter’s baying for instant blame turned on the Morrison government for failing to meet its predicted four million vaccinations by the end of March. As Dr Young implied, Morrison could not have known the EU would block the export of 3.8 million doses to Australia. And don’t expect the left media to acknowledge the wisdom of contracting to buy 50 million Astra Zeneca doses made here.
Journalists who have been smarting for two years that Morrison won an election they had expected Labor to dominate will not give him credit for Australia’s world-class pandemic performance, which is down to his government’s decision to lock the nation’s borders, and his economic rescue package.
These reporters use the politics of vaccines and sexual assault to damage Morrison. They portray this Christian, married family man — without a hint of scandal in his past — as a far-right reactionary rather than the pragmatic centrist he is.
The Newspoll figures released last Monday suggest the PM is indeed damaged but has plenty of time to set both issues straight before an election a year away.
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