Finding facts: the left often ignores the story to create its own narrative

The left of politics used to be about a hand-up for the less privileged.

Media personalities Kerri-Anne Kennerley and Yumi Stynes (pictured) have clashed on race issues. Picture: Studio 10

Where the left of politics used to be about a hand-up for the less privileged it is now often about a put-down by the privileged of ­people who disagree with them.

Apart from recoiling at the easy assumption of moral superiority by abusive commenters who ­assume superior knowledge, there is a serious risk here. Racism as a word means something, and if the wider community is to continue to accept that it does, people need to be careful not to throw it around just to silence those with whom they disagree.

There is nothing racist about supporting the retention of January 26 as Australia Day, and many Aboriginal people do. Many ­others would support a change but ­regard it as a second-order issue compared with fixing the violence and substance abuse wreaking havoc in remote Australia.

Some metropolitan self-identifying Aboriginal people think changing the date is a first-order issue and reject discussion by anyone other than Aborigines of ­Aboriginal violence. They try to maintain the fiction that more symbolism and more apologising by white Australians will fix the Aboriginal world.

Aboriginal leaders Warren Mundine and Marcia Langton told me in 2015 that total spending on Aboriginal programs exceeded $50 billion a year. Not much was improving the Aboriginal world despite decades of reconciliation activism and former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations.

Progressive media and many in the Aboriginal service provision area do not really care about what is happening in remote Australia. It’s really about keeping bureaucrats happy for governments and politicians, while in media, editors seldom send reporters to remote communities, apart from this newspaper and Sky News.

Fairfax — now owned by Nine Entertainment Co — The Guardian and the ABC are more interested in building audiences cheaply among groups that like to feel good about their values. That is an easier journalistic exercise than trying to report dysfunction such as that outlined in the 2007 Little Children Are Sacred report by the Northern Territory government.

FM radio host Yumi Stynes was foolish on Monday morning to throw the accusation of racism at Kerri-Anne Kennerley on Network Ten’s Studio 10 during a discussion of the previous weekend’s anti-Australia Day marches. Kennerley was speaking the truth.

As co-presenter Joe Hildebrand pointed out eloquently on News.com.au on Wednesday, three Aboriginal women leaders — Langton, Jacinta Price and ­Josephine Cashman — had given a searing presentation at the ­National Press Club in Canberra on December 5, 2016, making the same point as Kennerley. Does Stynes think those three are racists too? Langton said rates of sexual assault against women in Aboriginal communities nationally were 32 times the average, and in some areas 80 times.

Caroline Marcus got it right on Paul Murray Live on Sky News on Wednesday night. The white sisterhood had its big marches for equality in the 1960s and ’70s. Why no marches today for all the Aboriginal women and children still being raped and assaulted in the bush? And where are the feminists standing up for Price after she was viciously abused online this week over her position on Australia Day? Or is it OK to abuse a conservative woman?

It is not just on race that the left shows disdain for the views of ordinary Australians. In climate change, the politics of President Donald Trump’s America, the UK Brexit vote, on organised Christian ­religion and on reporting the conservative side of federal politics, generally the left media loves to ­accuse those dissenting from fashionable views of being stupid.

People on social media do it to get “likes” from the other sheep on Twitter and Facebook. But for thought leaders in the left it is a deliberate tactic, known in politics and the media as de-legitimising. Don’t deal with facts that might prove hard to undermine, just try to damage the moral and intellectual standing of your opponent.

Why, for example, all the publicity for challengers to sitting Liberals at the next election? Many in the left media accept the idea former prime minister Tony Abbott, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Health Minister Greg Hunt are stupid because of their government’s position on climate change.

In this narrative, Abbott, who used to write editorials for this newspaper and is a former Rhodes Scholar, a volunteer lifesaver and Rural Fire Service member whose charity bike rides have raised millions for the Manly Women’s Shelter, is a poor local member ­because of his position on climate change.

But Zali Steggall, an Olympic bronze medal skier and lawyer with a restaurant named after her in Manly, now running against Abbott as a GetUp-backed independent, is the solution?

At least The Sydney Morning Herald was smart enough to publish a piece by John Ruddick on Wednesday pointing out why ­Abbott will win.

Why so much publicity on our ABC for failed one-term Liberal MP Julia Banks who has decided to challenge Hunt, an excellent Health Minister and former minister for the environment? This is the same Banks who claimed she was being bullied by the Right of her party in the lead-up to the overthrow of Malcolm Turnbull last year, but later told The Australian Women’s Weekly it was Scott Morrison’s supporters rather than Peter Dutton’s backers who had bullied her. Our ABC apparently does not think sorting out the truth of Banks’s self-serving allegation is a story.

Herald Sun political editor James Campbell and former Gillard chief of staff Nicholas Reece told Paul Murray on Sky News on Thursday night that Banks could not win the seat but could preference Labor to oust Hunt. It is ­another GetUp ploy, but why no real interest at the ABC or the Nine newspapers about GetUp’s role as a front for the ALP in these challenges? And why no mention in a long report on The World Today last Wednesday that Oliver Yates, the former Liberal appointed by Labor in 2012 as CEO of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, who is challenging Frydenberg in his Victorian electorate of Kooyong, also over climate change, was a board member of a company that sold the Indian company Adani its coal tenements? It was in this paper that morning.

Why did left commenters last week on the work of this newspaper’s environment editor ­Graham Lloyd and columnist Nick Cater resort to insults about both men’s intelligence when they simply pointed out the facts of power generation costs highlighted by last week’s grid response to two hot days in Victoria and South Australia? And why so little interest at the ABC and Nine/Fairfax in pursuing the reasons for the power costs blowout?

The ABC took the cake for moral posturing on Wednesday when ABC local radio’s Country Hour carried a report saying farmers needed federal subsidies to plant trees on grazing land to provide shade for livestock. Within 15 years stock would not be able to withstand the heat on outback farms. What does the science say? ­Average temperatures in Australia have risen 0.7C since the start of the 20th century?

Reporters who privilege feelings about the climate to the ­exclusion of facts about the cost of renewables just prove that ordinary Australians are pretty smart.

Chris Mitchell is an ambassador for the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation