A price to pay if we prop up populists

Media leadership is required to tell voters what policies are needed to make our country more prosperous.

I plead guilty to having edited for more than a dozen years an elitist newspaper, sceptical of populist politics and policies and with a firm news agenda: the betterment of Australia.

In the wake of Brexit, the Trump election and the second coming of One Nation, many are reading a lot into the mood of the electorate and proclaiming the repudiation of the elites. Such judgments are in the eye of the beholder.

I think conservatives who read these results as the end of elite opinion and the beginning of more democratic polity should be careful what they wish for.

After all, just as polls show popular support for the death penalty, popular political opinion is likely to favour lower taxes for all but the rich and more free money for the half of all Australians who are already paying no net tax.

This might be popular but won’t be good for the country.

If there is one lesson from the Abbott and Turnbull governments stymied by the Senate since the 2014 budget it is that political populists are bad for the country. Voters will end up ­paying dearly in lower living standards.

Conversely, progressives who regard the voters who delivered last year’s electoral upheavals as morally bankrupt are kidding themselves. Leftists advocating redistributive wealth policies should understand why the ­losers of globalisation voted for Trump.

But I believe the common ­factor in the three electoral earthquakes, as in support for Marine Le Pen in France, is less about the economy than it is about a rise in anti-immigration sentiment that coincides with the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS and increased Islamic ­terrorism in the West.

The coincident and welcome repudiation of the cultural Left’s stultifying political correctness is an unintended bonus.

The values of ordinary voters never were the social media values of Left environmentalism, feminist fundamentalism, asylum-seeker advocacy and anti-business hysteria. Voters may tolerate such enthusiasms, especially among the young, in times of prosperity, but in the low-wages growth post-GFC world they most of all want a ­better life for their children and their children’s children.

This desire reflects the mission statement of The Australian when it launched on July 15, 1964, and is why anti-elitist nonsense from populist media demagogues leaves me cold.

It is where conservatism, economic liberalism, political populism and modern polarised media coverage confront the realities of the need to achieve real results for voters. As John Howard proved with the GST and Bob Hawke with seven versions of the Accord with the trade union movement to restrain wages growth and make industry more competitive, sometimes unpopular policies are distinctly in the national interest.

It is the fashion in political journalism today for commentators to treat politics like race calling and apply the values of Twitter on the one hand, or talkback radio on the other. But ­politics is not just a game about the ambitions of individual politicians and parties. It is about the betterment of the nation.

The idea of political editors ­advocating for good policy in the national interest and judging leaders and crossbenchers on what is good for Australia rather than for a particular political party or politician still governs the work of Paul Kelly and a few others. But in the vast comment-is-cheap media pool today few ­extend themselves beyond race-call reporting.

How do so many progressive journalists swallow the idea that changing negative gearing will have no effect on the rental ­market? The history is there to read. Hawke backflipped on the issue in the 1980s when rents went through the roof as investors went on strike.

Ditto company tax cuts. How have so many swallowed Wayne Swan’s mindless rhetoric about so-called trickle-down economics, driven by the ABC and Fairfax?

Why don’t they call out Bill Shorten for supporting company tax cuts in 2013? And why don’t they look at the enormous improvements to the Australian economy from Paul Keating’s various company tax cuts? Might be too elitist to know your political and economic history?

Paul Murray on Paul Murray Live hosted an amusing discussion on the issue of populism ­between Peta Credlin and former Gillard adviser Nicholas Reece last Tuesday night.

Reece said the present energy debacle in South Australia highlighted the need for a carbon price so businesses thinking of investing in fossil fuel-fired baseload power would have some ­certainty. Credlin accused him of rejecting the electorate’s mandate for Tony Abbott’s campaign against Gillard’s unpopular $24-a-tonne carbon tax in 2013, the one she promised she would never have.

Now aside from the fact that Credlin has never respected the mandate of Abbott’s successor, this did raise the obvious policy point: what if renewable energy targets were always only going to destroy the baseload power industry? The Australian argued Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme was incompatible with the RET, and it was correct.

This is not the same as Andrew Bolt’s regular question about whether renewables do anything to lower the temperature of the planet. In my view Australia was wrong under both sides of politics — yes you too Tony — to commit to high levels of renewables without knowing what they would do to power prices or the conventional electricity industry.

As Howard articulated in his 2007 election policy, carbon trading is likely to be the least-cost way to reduce carbon emissions. Initially after the Gillard carbon tax in 2011 the Greens and Labor knew that for the first few decades the main alternative source of ­energy was to be less carbon-­intensive gas until carbon prices and scientific improvements made renewables viable.

The South Australian power debacle was entirely predictable and it will spread to Victoria, which is banning exploration for coal’s logical successor, gas. So a country with abundant supplies of high-grade coal and gas is ­deliberately destroying its competitive advantage in cheap electricity. It won’t be popular even if Twitter loves it.

Howard also made it clear in 2007 that emissions policy needed to be pegged to what major emitters were doing. What was the point of a nation with 1.4 per cent of global emissions racing ahead of China, India and the US?

Whether the threat of global warming is as serious as some say or as irrelevant as Bolt maintains, the reality is Australia, as a major exporter of fossil fuels, will never be able to escape action if the rest of the world acts.

But here the media fails badly. Progressives are regularly allowed to claim the world is way ahead of us in greenhouse gas ­reduction targets. Yet Howard met his Kyoto targets despite ­refusing to sign up and Australia will meet its Paris targets.

Some more facts? The UK is winding back wind power and Germany is building new coal-fired power stations because of concerns over the safety of ­nuclear power. Same in Japan. Germany also endured enormous power price rises because of an overly enthusiastic approach to rooftop solar that is now being wound back.

The Chinese continue to build hundreds of new coal-fired baseload power plants and will pump out increasing emissions under formal international commitments until 2030.

On green energy, corporate taxes and budget repair, federal Labor, state Labor premiers, the Greens and the populist crossbench are making rational change impossible.

Even Bolt, a critic of Paul Kelly’s analysis of the current paralysis, on Thursday lamented the blocking nihilism of the ­Senate crossbench.

And yet the ABC Left and the Sky News Right continue to give these populist wreckers platforms every day to spout nonsense that is making our nation poorer.

Media leadership is required to tell voters what policies are needed to make our country more prosperous. Some will be worse off in the short-term.

And our ham-fisted political leaders need to learn to use the media to advocate for good policy and to hold the wreckers to ­account. But after 25 years without a recession, many in the ­political and media class don’t understand the dangerous path our nation is treading.