Medivac legislation highlights media’s great Left-Right divide

No issue better highlights the split personality of Australian media than the government’s defeat on the floor of parliament last week.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaks to the media last week. Picture: Getty Images

No issue better highlights the split personality of Australian media than last week’s defeat of the government on the floor of parliament on a bill sponsored originally by independent Member for Wentworth, Dr Kerryn Phelps.

On our ABC, in the Nine Network newspapers and the Guardian and on Twitter this was reported as a historic government defeat and a return of compassion to politics. In the News Corp press and on talkback radio, the Coalition’s loss was seen as its first shaft of light in the lead-up to the May election.

Wise political heads were astounded that after 5½ years of rigid discipline, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten was prepared to play on the Coalition’s turf. Former Coalition staffer Niki Savva even chided Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Thursday morning for not taking advantage of Shorten’s genuflection to his Green-Left flank by calling an election.

Two assessments highlighted the essence of the media split. On Wednesday night on SkyNews’s Paul Murray Live, Herald-Sun political editor James Campbell said that around the world social democrat governments were being destroyed by cross-border flows of asylum-seekers. Next morning in The Sydney Morning Herald Jessica Irvine wrote: “It is a difficult task, indeed, to diagnose the precise cause of the unique hysteria that grips Australians over the issue of asylum-seekers.’’ Unique?

Campbell, working for the nation’s most popular tabloid, got it right. Visitors to Germany, Italy, Greece and Turkey since Angela Merkel decided in September 2015 to admit refugees from Syria will have seen it for themselves. My cousin, a political staffer in Berlin, said over lunch there in 2017: “The refugee crisis is destroying our social harmony, but as Germans we can do nothing but keep on paying. We must always pay.”

Worse than not seeing a worldwide problem, journalists — many on big salaries — criticising community attitudes to asylum-seekers show they don’t understand what drives fellow Australians. Even among citizens who fled the Middle East, the issue is not race but concern at spending billions of dollars on self-selecting refugees who pay people-smugglers thousands of dollars to get here.

Australia is a generous country with a strong welfare net. It takes, per capita, the second-highest number of refugees of any of the 28 countries worldwide that run refugee resettlement programs, remembering 160 countries do not.

But Australians in the outer suburbs of our cities and in provincial towns and rural areas do not enjoy great medical care, are racked by high unemployment and poor transport and do not live the privileged lives voters in Phelps’s electorate do. They know about the generous housing and welfare arrangements asylum-seekers receive here.

Left-wingers from inner city suburbs like to believe they are solving a medical emergency. The AMA’s paediatric representative Dr Paul Bauert last week claimed refugees on Manus and Nauru “are in a worse situation than Jews in Auschwitz”. In fact they are mainly healthy young males. The Guardian has claimed Morrison has not stopped deaths at sea because 12 died in detention. But two died in road accidents, two drowned swimming, one died from a fall after a seizure, one died of sepsis, one was murdered, one had a series of heart attacks after a suspected drug overdose and four committed suicide.

Suicide is also prevalent in drought-hit rural Australia where few citizen taxpayers have as much medical attention as the asylum-seekers on Nauru, where there is an Australian doctor for every seven refugees and a mental health professional for every 14.

The Guardian regularly reports extreme medical claims about Manus and Nauru. Yet Labor put 2000 children into detention under the second Rudd government and all have been resettled. All refugees there are free to roam the islands like Nauruan and PNG citizens. More than 60 refugees have chosen to settle in PNG.

I sent this newspaper’s Chris Kenny to Nauru in 2015. He was pilloried by Left-wing journalists for reporting what he saw: people living not much differently from Nauruans.

Caroline Marcus made a similar point on Sky News on Wednesday night. She had travelled to Nauru for the Nine network and wondered why many journalists would not report a story about asylum-seekers unless it had been given to them by refugee or medical activists, most of whom had never set foot on Manus or Nauru.

This reminds me of another series of Kenny stories: about the false narratives of Fairfax and the ABC back in 2012 and 2013 when political reporters were regularly forecasting the imminent polling recovery of then Labor PM Julia Gillard. At the time, Labor was bombarding this newspaper with information about Gillard’s role in the AWU slush fund affair, a story progressive media essentially refused to cover. Gillard lost the leadership and left politics.

The asylum-seeker story is largely a false narrative. Of course The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy and the ABC’s Laura Tingle are right when they argue the bill that Labor supported is designed only to apply to the present crop of asylum-seekers and Shorten has promised strong borders. Yet it is a big leap of journalistic faith to believe Labor in government would not extend the same medical provisions to future asylum-seekers.

Journalists need memory and scepticism rather than just Labor and Green friends to brief them. Their editors should judge their work by whether the calls they make prove correct rather than win social media applause. On asylum-seekers many have been wrong for almost two decades.

Rudd told this paper before winning the 2007 election that he would turn back boats if necessary. He did not, so ABC and Fairfax journalists argued turnbacks at sea would be impossible. They were wrong, just as they had been wrong about Howard, the Tampa and the Pacific Solution.

Journalists criticising Morrison’s rhetoric for overstating the risk of the people-smuggling trade to Australia resuming need to remember an important fact. As Paul Kelly wrote here on Wednesday, Labor’s position defies formal Department of Home Affairs advice: “The effect of this bill will undermine the Australian government’s regional processing arrangements.”

Some reporters were quick to deny other departmental advice: “It is expected that within four weeks of Royal Assent most of the 1000 individuals (on Manus and Nauru) would be in contact with ‘treating doctors’ willing to recommend their transfer to Australia.”

They said this was a slur on the medical profession. By Thursday morning this newspaper was reporting doctors had already signed the paperwork for the first 300.

Media critics are right when they complain some in the Coalition have exaggerated the idea these asylum-seekers are a criminal threat. But as David Crowe wrote for Fairfax on Thursday morning, “Shorten should know what to expect. His ‘privatising Medicare’ scare campaign at the last election set the benchmark …”