Year of upheaval ahead for the media

2019 is likely to be frenetic through digital disruption, new media ownership laws and political earthquakes.

Nine will face other challenges bedding down the Fairfax merger, writes Chris Mitchell. Picture: Hollie Adams

The year ahead for the media is likely to be frenetic as digital disruption, new ownership laws and political earthquakes accelerate the need for change.

Free-to-air television and Foxtel face challenges from quality programming available cheaply from streaming services Netflix and Stan. At least Nine can hedge its bets as owner of Stan, using its free-to-air channels and former Fairfax print assets to promote Stan’s content.

Nine will face other challenges bedding down the Fairfax merger. Relations between its print journalists and its star Macquarie Radio hosts, notably Sydney’s Alan Jones and Ray Hadley, will not improve easily. And Nine’s valuable Domain real estate classifieds investment will struggle in a soft property market without innovative former chief executive Antony ­Catalano.

Foxtel faces subscription churn, a high price point compared with the streamers and disappointing numbers in its first season broadcasting cricket. That said, for cricket tragics its coverage is terrific and the new associated cricket talk shows are good fun.

It will be an important year at our ABC, where a new chair and new MD will be appointed. It would be nice to think someone with a news background — like previous MDs David Hill or Mark Scott — could be considered, especially after the axing of Lateline and the halving of The World Today and PM by ousted MD Michelle Guthrie. Unfortunately, MBAs with no current affairs nous are more likely to tapped.

Global disrupters Facebook and Google will continue to eat the lunch of traditional advertising platforms, but at least Facebook is being brought to heel by the scandals of the past two years. Both face domestic issues, with the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s preliminary Digital Platforms Review, released on December 10, finding both exercise substantial market power.

Another driver of change will be harder to predict: the Labor Party’s expected May federal election win. This will be a challenge for conservative media and more so for conservative politics as Labor embraces the politics of envy.

Gone are the days when centre-Left leaders such as Paul Keating, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton advocated growth that floats all boats ahead of wealth redistribution.

There are risks in Labor’s reform agenda. Much of its program was shaped by a rampant domestic property market that is cooling rapidly. The Fairfax papers and the ABC have been strong advocates for Labor’s plan to make housing more affordable by changing the tax treatment of negatively geared investments and capital gains.

Neither Labor nor its media supporters seem to have thought much about the majority of Australians who already own homes. Neither has the Coalition made enough political mileage out of losses homeowners could face as property values fall faster under Labor’s plans. The politics of the issue is almost entirely driven by the idea young people cannot get into the housing market.

It has a certain “truthiness’’ about it, even though at 67 per cent, the rate of home ownership is only slightly down on the long-term average of 70 per cent. Why can conservative politicians and traditional media outlets whose readers are more likely to be hurt by Labor’s plans not break through with the facts on this and the fairness debate generally?

Australia is one of the more equal countries on global income distribution data, we have one of the most progressive taxation systems in the world, most of the income tax is paid by high-income earners and company tax rates are high by First World standards. We have a generous welfare system and almost half of all households pay no net tax after benefits.

Yet the Coalition has been unable to make the economic case since the Abbott government’s disastrous “lifters and leaners” budget by former treasurer Joe Hockey in 2014. Even business, consumed by signalling its moral virtue to social media, has been unable to convey the truth about corporate tax rates.

Aligning with the grievances of the young may make sense to a Labor Party with a clear brand ascendancy among younger demographics. But for conservative politicians, pointing to the health of our economy by world standards should be the main game rather than rehashed campaigns about asylum-seekers and Australia Day.

John Howard said six years ago that politicians needed to be able to advocate for their policy positions. Abbott was able to advocate on negatives such as stopping the boats or ending the carbon tax from opposition but was lost in office. Turnbull was worse, as his dismal 2016 election campaign showed.

Labor has been good at advocating for grievance holders. Age and Sydney Morning Herald economics writer Shane Wright last week showed how politically astute it had been. The majority of the big losers from its housing policies live in Liberal-held seats.

Many on the Right of the conservative movement believe the Coalition needs a period out of office to sort out what it stands for. I am not sure that is true, but I do think Labor has used its time in opposition wisely and will prove hard to defeat at subsequent elections because of the large constituency of people receiving free money from taxpayers.

Conservatives may rue the damage they inflicted on their own government, while mainstream media consumers will just have to hope Labor proves as good in office as the old Hawke-Keating governments did. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, while not popular with the electorate, has shown grit and cunning as Opposition Leader.

In his time as leader of the Victorian branch of the Right-wing Australian Workers Union he was sensitive to the needs of business. Remember, allegations he faced at the trade union royal commission in 2015 largely concerned deals beneficial to business at the expense of his union’s members.

But his party has been dragged by the Greens a long way to the Left, so repositioning Labor in the centre, as he should, will be difficult. Repositioning will also be difficult for sections of the media that became embroiled in the politics of the anti-Turnbull Right of the Liberal Party. This will not matter so much at Macquarie Radio where Jones’s audience of older retirees is likely to be even more engaged as he inevitably fires up against federal Labor than it was by his anti-Turnbull campaigning.

Similarly, the audience at SkyNews nights, though tiny, is likely to find a virulent anti-Labor agenda even more attractive than its previous anti-Turnbull positioning, even if advertisers and the wider public do not.

Things are trickier for mass-market products with audiences in the millions. They risk long-term brand damage and loss of relevance if their campaigns are seen to have no effect. Look at the campaign against the Daniel Andrews Labor government by sections of the media at the November election. Andrews was returned with a far bigger majority than anyone predicted.

This does not mean mass-market media organisations should roll over to a new government. Organisations on the centre-Right should stay there, but they should react to a new government by reporting it fairly, confining commentary to the comment pages and making sure those pages are open to a wide range of opinion.