Left media exposed on Covid, climate and China

Covid restrictions have eased in NSW and the state looks certain to achieve world-leading 90 per cent vaccination rates before Christmas. Picture: Getty Images

The green-left media campaign against the Morrison government may backfire, just as it did in the 2019 election.

Journalists at the ABC and the Guardian do not report what is actually happening in climate change talks, but what they and the environment movement think should happen. Much reporting of the Covid pandemic has been partisan.

On both issues and on China’s role in them, much of the media is more in touch with Twitter than mainstream opinion.

Some political commentators, especially at the ABC, have spent the past two-and-a-half years smarting about their misreading of the last election. They have responded by doubling down on Labor and Greens lines about the Morrison government.

On Covid, this column on August 23 concluded: “Nor should journalists expecting Labor to win next year’s federal election feel confident. How will voters feel by then about a Labor Party still wedded to lockdowns?”

We know the answer now. Labor is shifting in most states, and federally. Victoria’s opening up last Friday, after a fortnight of case numbers running in the vicinity of 2000 a day, suggests Premier Daniel Andrews, facing an election in just over 12 months, realises the ALP cannot afford to be seen as the party of lockdowns.

ABC critics who fired up against Gladys Berejiklian’s September promises of opening up at 70 and 80 per cent double-dose vaccination rates have been silent about Andrews’ reopening strategy with higher case numbers than NSW ever recorded.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk last Monday promised to open her state’s borders to vaccinated residents of NSW and Victoria before Christmas.

Palaszczuk and Queensland’s chief health officer Jeanette Young stoked vaccine hesitancy in the Sunshine State and are now battling to restore confidence. The state’s vaccination rate is lagging behind NSW and Victoria.

Smart federal Labor figures such as deputy leader Richard Marles have seen this coming. Marles on September 3 urged Palaszczuk to stick to the national reopening plan after the premier defied global evidence to claim reopening her borders would risk the health of Queensland schoolchildren under 12. Politically, it was even more craven than the incorrect comments she and Dr Young had made earlier in the pandemic about the risks of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Having largely ignored the northern hemisphere’s month-long energy crisis and surging prices for fossil fuels, the Nine newspapers at least reported NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was not even going to Glasgow. Picture: Getty Images

Federal Labor last week abandoned its six-month mantra that Morrison had failed at his only two jobs — vaccination and quarantine. As Dennis Shanahan pointed out in this newspaper last Thursday, observing the Opposition’s change of tactics in parliament: “A policy of backing failure for Morrison on vaccination has left Labor nowhere to go.”

NSW looks certain to achieve world-leading 90 per cent vaccination rates before Christmas. The issue will not help the ALP at an election that is likely less than six months away.

Journalistic climate campaigners will be similarly disappointed given their hysterical coverage ahead of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow starting October 31. Having largely ignored the northern hemisphere’s month-long energy crisis and surging prices for fossil fuels, the Nine newspapers at least reported NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was not even going to Glasgow.

Media consumers who have watched the pre-Glasgow vilification of Morrison and National Party leader Barnaby Joyce should ask themselves why the ABC and Guardian have said so little about the emissions failures of Ardern and Canada’s Justin Trudeau.

As Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told Fran Kelly on Thursday, Australia has achieved 20 per cent emissions reductions and is heading for 35 per cent by 2030, beating its agreed Paris commitment of 26-28 per cent. He said NZ was sitting at 5 per cent below 2005 emission levels and Canada only 1 per cent down. Kelly let that go through to the ‘keeper.

More importantly, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is not going to Glasgow and he and Russian President Vladimir Putin are ramping up coal and gas production. The Times in London and the BBC reported last Wednesday on a UN Environment Program report showing despite all the net-zero talk, government plans in train around the world would “lead to about 240 per cent more coal, 57 per cent more oil and 71 per cent more gas produced in 2030 than would be consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5C”.

This is why this column has argued for four months COP26 will fail. Don’t expect any contrition from reporters who are advocates rather than journalists when the whole show falls apart, as most newspapers in the UK are openly predicting.

Environment writers misunderstand the public on green energy. They make much of polling that shows people support greener power. The latest example was a poll commissioned by the Australian Conservation Foundation of 15,000 people across all 151 federal electorates and published in the Nine newspapers on August 30.

What it did not say, and what polls globally have found for decades, is voters support greener power but are not prepared to pay much more for it. No surprise the ACF did not ask the question.

A more important issue at election time will be economic growth after the reopening of NSW and Victoria. A strong La Nina rain pattern is emerging for summer so memories of bushfires will have receded.

The Coalition is behind in the polling and may be vulnerable in some wealthy capital city seats where the cost of electricity is not an issue. But many working class seats on the edges of our cities and in the NSW Hunter Valley and central Queensland could be more difficult for Labor.

The Coalition is expected to lose seats in WA and Queensland, yet Labor’s stronger stance on climate might cost it in mining seats in the Hunter and in central Queensland.

Anthony Albanese is as honest a leader as I have met in politics. He dumped the policies that made Bill Shorten’s tax program the main issue in 2019. And despite the trap Morrison thinks he is laying for Labor about calls for more ambitious 2030 emissions targets, Albanese will most likely back Morrison’s revised 2030 Paris commitment.

Labor needs a uniform swing of 3.1 per cent to reach 76 seats. It has several marginal seats in outer Sydney and Melbourne where the pandemic may yet play to the Coalition and climate will not be a vote changer. Labor has 13 seats on less that 3 per cent margins.

Finally to China. Australians are angry at its treatment of our exporters, shocked the regime has stonewalled investigations of the origins of Covid in Wuhan and support Morrison’s closer ties with the US and UK through the new AUKUS alliance.

They are not impressed by the constant pro-China media lobbying of former Labor heavyweights such as Paul Keating and Bob Carr. They support Morrison’s tough stance on the issue.

Yet Morrison has been risk averse and slow to lead. He could sew up his base and hurt Labor in its heartland by rejecting business demands for higher immigration, by raising doubts about the reliability and costs of renewables and by painting the ALP as too close to Xi Jinping and his repressive regime.