How I survived Canberra Writers Festival

Lo, I ventured into the Canberra bubble, and returned ­unharmed and unchastened.

Chris Kenny, right, with Alice Workman, centre, and Mark Kenny, left, at Canberra Writers Festival.

Lo, I ventured into the Canberra bubble, pricked at the denial from within and returned ­unharmed and unchastened. Truth is, even at the Canberra Writers Festival, most of us found some common ground.

On the Canberra bubble effect — or the deepening chasm ­between the political/media class and the mainstream — one crucial point of concord was that the public square is greatly diminished, our national debate is ­increasingly polarised, people ­increasingly seek, find and keep their views within separate silos or echo chambers, and this is a bad thing for the contest of ideas.

MORE: Trying to burst green-left bubble

This is the unforeseen downside of the digital revolution. Media upheaval that was supposed to democratise public ­debate has segregated, corrupted and undercut it.

But from this point there is sharp divergence. The green left zeitgeist, represented by journalists, academics and most of the audiences at my festival events, departs from reality and imposes a prescription that would only make the situation worse.

What the left wants is not more diversity and plurality across the ideological silos; they just want to shut down the views that don’t accord with their own. It was put to me by more than one of my fellow media commentators and by more than one of the audience questioners that the culprits in our polarised public debate are this newspaper and Sky News “after dark”.

In other words, the green left, including — incredibly — press gallery journalists, argues that the sclerosis in our public debate can be blamed on commercial media that includes open and honest right-of-centre content and survives only by dint of its connection with paying cus­tomers. Depressingly, this ideological, illogical and illiberal position drew applause.

Despite dabbling in these ­debates for years, it still leaves me a little incredulous that educated and informed adults can view the world in this way — it is an ominous and insidious form of groupthink fostered by our political/media class, often through the misuse of our tax dollars, and damaging to freedom of speech.

My off-the-cuff response can be distilled into three key points, any one of which is enough to put the lie to the left’s position and force a reassessment of the way forward. They advocate silencing or reining in commercial media when the required cure is to ­demand public media upholds its obligation to provide objectivity and plurality.

The first point is on diversity. While Sky News “after dark” opinion hosts are forthrightly conservative — Peta Credlin, ­Andrew Bolt, Paul Murray and Alan Jones — all present a range of perspectives in their discussions that puts the public broadcasters to shame. From Graham Richardson to Nicholas Reece, Michael Costa to Stephen Conroy, Dee Madigan to Linda Scott and so on, even the most right-of-centre panel programs on Sky include left-of-centre views as a counterpoint. Compare this to the ABC, where the legal obligation is for balance, yet on Q&A or Insiders there is sometimes no right-of-centre view to be found and, typically, left-of-centre perspectives will out­number the mainstream by three to one.

Yet they pretend to be impartial. This is dishonest.

Besides, views of Sky News hosts tend to be fiercely principled rather than partisan — Malcolm Turnbull, for instance, faced no stronger critics for straying from the conservative agenda. This is not partisan cheerleading but consistent advocacy — right up until election day most left-of-centre pundits assumed that by criticising Turnbull these conservative commentators had ­fuelled a leadership trauma and helped to deliver another Labor/Greens government.

At The Australian there is no shrinking from the proud positioning since its inception — a commitment to national advance­ment and economic ­development. It is a non-partisan commitment that has seen the paper support Labor and Liberal agendas for economic and social reform. It is hardly surprising that a media organisation committed to national advancement might find fault in a $400 billion program of additional taxation and uncosted and reckless plans to further disrupt our energy grid.

Still, The Australian ventilates all perspectives and regularly hosts a diversity of views on its opinion pages that is not seen in the former Fairfax newspapers or on the ABC opinion platforms. News Corp diversity outshines the Love Media day in and day out.

The second point is so blindingly obvious that it is shameful it needs to be made — the views of the centre right, the mainstream, deserve to be heard. Through News Corp publications and Sky News — and through Nine Media’s Macquarie Radio Network — mainstream perspectives always receive an airing.

We know they are given the voice they deserve because these outfits operate commercially and rely on the audiences they cultivate. They have never survived on the back of classified advertising, as the former Fairfax papers once did, nor on the generosity of taxpayers, and unless they resonate with large slices of the population they won’t survive.

The antagonism surely cannot be that right-of-centre views are ventilated through self-sustaining media. The scandal should be that such views are routinely and unethically shunned on publicly funded media that is obliged, under the law, to reflect all of ­Australia.

The ABC and SBS seem happy to take taxpayers’ money under the false pretence of serving all Australians but using it to fund a green-left support network ­instead.

The third point is about the ­direct connection to reality. The proof of the much-maligned right-of-centre media is in its ­performance.

The critics — who usually, of course, would not subscribe to The Australian or Sky News, so comment based on misrepresentations through social media and the ABC — often suggest News Corp media ought to be silenced or shut down. (The Greens took an Orwellian policy to do that to the election and escaped any proper scrutiny.)

But without the media they despise, who would have told these people what was likely to happen in May’s federal election? Did any of the hundreds of journalists and commentators within the $1.5bn public broadcasting ­behemoths make a case for how and why the Coalition might win? Did anyone at Nine Media newspapers or The Guardian Australia provide that analysis?

Wasn’t it only News Corp people at places like The Australian and Sky News that assessed this correctly? Wasn’t it the same with the US election and Brexit? Hasn’t it also been the same, ­repeatedly, on crucial issues such as border protection and climate change?

The green left only wants media that agrees with them, no matter if they’re wrong. They would silence or neuter News Corp newspapers and Sky News so the Australian media could be a boring monoculture of ­perpetual agreement, free from the prevailing views of mainstream Australians, and consistently getting things wrong. And they wonder.

• Watch: ‘Inside the bubble’ session of the Canberra Writers Festival on Sky News Extra 1, Foxtel Channel 604, at 6.25pm tonight