Media blames Scott Morrison for floods, but voters won’t

Illustration: Johannes Leak

The politicisation of natural disasters by some journalists may prove self-defeating if intelligent voters see through recent reporting.

ABC radio provided plenty of airtime last week to any politician or citizen wanting to blame Scott Morrison for what they claimed was a slow federal response to flooding in northern NSW. Many reporters seemed unaware disaster relief is largely a state responsibility – just like planning laws that allow building on flood-prone sites near rivers.

Defence Minister Peter Dutton was asked on the ABC on Tuesday morning, and later by David Koch on Sunrise, why residents of the northern NSW town of Lismore were still doing much of the work to clean up their flood-ravaged town. It was as if communities pitching in after a natural disaster was some new thing.

Such questions reflect a change in attitudes, at least in parts of the media. Regional and state newspapers still put pictures of local heroes on front pages and vision of their work led the 6pm television news. But in much of the 24-hour electronic media, on-the-ground reporting is being replaced by cheap shots from the comfort of the studio, usually informed by a culture of complaint and blame.

Also new in disaster reporting is the idea every fire, flood, health crisis or drought is the responsibility of the federal government, and that it is up to the Australian Defence Force to fix every situation.

As Andrew Bolt said on Sky News, our soldiers are paid to fight, kill and die for their country, not to be a backup for the state emergency services.

The army does have a history of pitching in, but the PM and Defence Minister cannot simply send in the army. Requests to the federal government for military assistance come from the premiers and chief ministers.

On Tuesday, Dutton made a good point to RN Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas, after she kicked off the interview thus: “The defence force is fending off claims it has been too slow to act, with growing complaints residents in flood devastated towns such as Lismore and Mullumbimby have been left to fend for themselves.”

Dutton said 113 people had been rescued by Defence helicopters. He said soldiers could not simply be dropped in to flooded areas “at the same time they are pulling people out”. The military had been prepared for the flooding and had its planes and road transport ready to go when safe to do so. Defence would have close to 5000 personnel on the ground in NSW by Wednesday, Dutton said.

Yet on Thursday, RN was still banging the drum about the military. In a very soft interview, federal Labor member for Richmond, Justine Elliot, claimed it was the army’s job to be dropped in to natural disasters at short notice.

Peak media hysteria had hit the day before when protesters greeted Morrison’s arrival in Lismore.

The PM had been criticised for days for not showing up earlier and for the slow declaration of a national emergency. Too few reporters mentioned Morrison had been sick with Covid-19. As PM, he never receives courtesy or fairness from some quarters of the press.

There are two reasons: many journalists want more action on climate change and many are lazy, so simply run Labor’s “Slo-Mo” line – that Morrison messed up his responses to the 2019-20 bushfire crisis, the pandemic, the vaccine rollout and now the floods.

It’s all pretty shallow and in parts wrong – closing the national border quickly saved thousands of lives in 2020.

Patricia Karvelas at Radio National. Picture: Aaron Francis

Yet Morrison does seem to have a problem dealing with disasters quickly.

Karvelas gave Guardian political editor Katharine Murphy about half of her six-minute slot on Thursday to make the climate change point. After acknowledging Morrison had announced substantial disaster funding on Wednesday, Murphy said much more needed to be done but “one of the barriers at the federal level … is the government’s continuing inability to face up to the threat of a warming planet. Scott Morrison … continues to minimise the risk to Australia from a changing climate and also Australia’s responsibility to take action in order to mitigate that risk.”

Just half an hour later, Karvelas interviewed former ADF Chief Admiral Chris Barrie to discuss the government’s failure to act on climate change. Karvelas did not follow up when Barrie said the military should not be relied on for disaster roles, though this was a page lead story in The Australian Financial Review on Friday.

Nor did Karvelas point out that Australia is ahead of most of the world on its 2030 Paris emissions reduction targets, has the highest penetration of rooftop solar panels on the planet and has reached about 30 per cent renewables across its electricity grid.

Nor has the ABC done enough to explain the role of the La Nina system driving this year’s rain.

While the IPCC makes clear warming oceans will probably increase rainfall because of increased evaporation, it does not find a high probability any individual flood event can be linked to global warming.

Yet we know the science of weather does show La Nina events are a predictor of cooler, wetter summers in eastern Australia and that they usually follow closely after El Nino events. This is the case now, and was in the 2010-12 La Nina floods.

Chris Kenny was right about the floods on Tuesday night on Sky News. “Natural disasters and their aftermath are, by their very nature, chaotic. The same factors, in this case floods and rain, that cause the damage hamper the rescues and the recovery.” Australians traditionally pitch in, he said.

“There isn’t a fire truck outside every house, an SES crew for every block or a military helicopter for every farm. There never will be but that doesn’t stop some people in politics and the media trying to make this the government’s fault.”

Niki Savva, former columnist at this newspaper, has been a relentless Morrison critic since moving to the Nine newspapers. On Thursday, she wrote that she was sure voters will not forgive Morrison for his performance on the floods.

I am not convinced. The protesters in Lismore on Wednesday looked like Greens activists. Their signs read like that. The demographics of the electorates of Page and Richmond have changed – what were once farm communities have now been settled by people looking for lifestyle change.

Residents of western Sydney are also more likely to change their votes than previously. The area is increasingly populated by aspirational tradies who were conspicuous by their lack of complaint last week during a second inundation in consecutive summers.

Voters in much of suburban Australia won’t hold Morrison personally responsible for disasters they know would have happened whichever party was in power.

On polling day in May, many will focus on economic recovery and falling unemployment.

At a time of military threats from Russia and China, Morrison’s strength in standing up to Xi Jinping’s bullying might count for more than the present polling suggests.