Poor reporting slips through the net

Three recent stories have been poorly told because of group think.

The rise of curated journalism — young journalists left to their own devices without strong news ­editors — not only tests the bond of trust upon which media vehicles rely, it can have perverse results based on social media group think.

After all, how many young reporters are brave enough to stand strong in the face of a full-scale Twitter pile-on when even many senior members of the Canberra press gallery prefer to run with the pack rather than stand up and ­report the truth?

Three recent stories have been poorly told because of group think: the mad global reaction to Bernard Salt’s “smashed avocado” piece a fortnight ago, the inability of most media, especially TV news, to state the incontrovertible facts about shark nets and the ­failure of almost every part of the media apart from exceptions on this paper to state the truth about former solicitor-general Justin Gleeson.

As Salt wrote in response to the great avocado social media twitstorm, the young journalists who responded on social media a fortnight ago seemed to miss the whole point of his piece in The Weekend Australian Magazine. The piece was actually taking the mickey out of Baby Boomers struggling to look cool in hipster cafes. In a single paragraph near the end Salt suggested Gen Ys and millennials might do well to save the $22 cost of their smashed avo on toast and put the money towards a deposit on a house. The ­social media outcry made headlines around the world.

Salt was saying what every Baby Boomer parent thinks. Yet much of the analysis about ­housing affordability since has missed the point.

Only six years ago the property market was in trouble and economist Professor Steve Keen famously lost a bet about how much property would fall when he unloaded his Sydney Surry Hills home unit. He bet Macquarie Bank interest rate strategist Rory Robertson falls would exceed 40 per cent and if not he would walk to Mount Kosciuszko. No one seems to remember, even though Keen was given prime-time 7.30 Report coverage and was all over the Fairfax papers.

Said Keen in April 2010: “The irony is I’m marching uphill and house prices will start marching down because as you’ve seen in the lending figures the trend (down) seems to be very strong.” The market began really surging just a couple of years after that.

In fact, Fairfax has been predicting the collapse of the property market for the past two years, always wrongly. Markets rise and fall, but property seldom crashes in this country. Prices can stagnate for several years as they did in Sydney between 2007 and 2011 when the house price action was all in the mining states.

The main issue driving prices this cycle has been missed by everyone, including Treasurer Scott Morrison and thousands of unhappy Gen Ys who think they will never be able to buy. Sure state land release policies produce scarcity and overpricing, negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount have distorting effects on investment and there are more Chinese buying than ever before. Yet as we saw in the 1980s that foreign buying (it was Japanese then) can dry up quickly, leaving bargains when capital is repatriated by overseas investors.

The real issue in the past ­couple of years is low interest rates around the world. Investors, particularly retirees, have piled into property and fully franked bank shares because the share market has been flat and it is hard to get better than 3 per cent on fixed ­interest. Boomers who have saved hard to support themselves in ­retirement are now struggling to live on their super.

My wife and I have eight children in a blended family aged up to 40. Only one owns a house or a car. My eldest two are better ­travelled than I will ever be. They think saving means trying to pay down their credit cards.

I bought in Redfern in the early 1980s when it was profoundly ­pre-trendy, cafe-free, troubled by crime and one of the cheapest ­suburbs in Sydney. The very ­run-down inner-city suburbs of ­Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane were colonised by boomers ­looking for a cheap start. Those suburbs are now more expensive than the middle ring dormitory suburbs the Boomers left to buy their first homes.

So guess what Gen Y needs to do? Buy in profoundly pre-trendy suburbs further from town where there is a bit more crime and the local dining scene does not stretch past a steak at the pub. And rather than buy old terrace houses, they might have to consider run-down units near transport hubs. They should also remember many of their parents bought when rates were 8 per cent, only to see rates soar to 18 per cent in the mid-1980s. Their kids can borrow at 4 per cent.

Similarly much reporting of the shark netting debate in the wake of a spate of attacks on surfers in the past year in northern NSW lacks any real connection with reality. Conservation groups, environmental scientists and Greens politicians are given airtime to warn nets are not a failsafe barrier. So what? Reporters should always point to the most powerful reason to support nets. There has been only one fatal attack at a netted beach in Queensland since 1962. There were 20 fatal attacks before netting between 1919 and 1961 at the same beaches.

And why are so many jour­nalists unable to state the facts about the resignation of solicitor-general Justin Gleeson last week? Gleeson was a Labor appointee by Mark Dreyfus shortly before Labor lost office.

He is the son of a prominent Wran Labor bureaucrat, Gerry Gleeson, and is married to academic Frank Brennan’s sister. His daughter Madeline wrote a book about asylum-seekers at the launch of which activist lawyer Julian Burnside called for the imprisonment of Liberal Party immigration ministers Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton.

Imagine if John Howard in 2007 had appointed a conservative solicitor-general, say Ian Callinan as an example, and then in the lead-up to the 2010 election Labor discovered Callinan had consulted secretly with the conservative ­attorney-general spokesman. Can anyone imagine a single jour­nalist or lawyer saying that was ­acceptable?