Why legitimate news outlets must return to relevance

David Thodey last week gave a presentation about our economic future that once would have received saturation media coverage.

In a week bracketed by a much-publicised climate change speech by Reserve Bank deputy governor Guy Debelle on Tuesday and a more widely publicised national climate change strike by school students on Friday, former Telstra CEO and now CSIRO chairman David Thodey gave a little-reported presentation about Australia’s economic future that once would have received saturation media coverage. It was a speech the striking children should — but won’t — hear about at school.

Leading up to a May election in which a fractured, self-harming Coalition offers little in the way of forward thinking about prosperity other than possible tax cuts, and Labor makes bogus promises on wages growth and pledges huge tax rises, Thodey pointed out how poorly our country is performing and how dependent it is on mining. Not that there is anything wrong with being the world’s best miner, but it does leave us vulnerable to external shocks affecting demand.

This newspaper was created by Rupert Murdoch in 1964 with the express purpose of advocating for policies to make Australia wealthier and stronger. The Australian Financial Review has a similar mission.

But most media are now so focused on political and cultural ephemera that news about the nation’s economic prospects does not even get a run unless it can be linked, as Debelle’s restrained speech was by the Channel 9 newspapers, to climate hysteria.

Once those papers and the NewsCorp city tabloids used to report on our export industries. We all employed prominent rural editors who would report important developments in agricultural export industries, such as grain harvest volumes and prices. They regularly covered the beef, sheep meat and wool export industries. Editors understood exports pay for all the niceties their readers buy from overseas. Now the only export reporting focus is mining.

Many among the Left media confine serious political and economics reporting to the minutiae of climate change policies in a way the big media organisations of North America and Europe do not. Yet this is done in a country contributing only 1.3 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions (less than China’s average annual emissions increase).

Reporting future economic prospects was once a core responsibility of journalists. Older readers will recall the scrutiny applied to then treasurer Paul Keating and his preferred Option C supporting the GST at the Hawke government’s taxation summit in Canberra in 1985. Or the year-long coverage by all media in 1997-98 of the Howard government’s plan to introduce that tax after fighting the 1998 election on it. The media had a stake in the economy’s future and led much of the political discussion about it.

Today, driven by a puerile social media culture, that sort of focus is reserved for stories about Donald Trump, the gripes of progressive women or independents putting their hand up for formerly safe Coalition seats and ubiquitous climate change catastrophists. It’s all about clicks online. Tough reports about policies that will ensure Friday’s striking children actually get a job just don’t generate the traffic tales about the victimhood of rich white female politicians do.

Once the Nine tabloids and the ABC would have subjected the spurious and incorrect data being pumped out about wages growth and inequality by the ALP and the union movement to proper scrutiny. Now the focus is on Zali Steggall, Julian Burnside, Julia Banks and anyone else who might be able to give good quotes about challenging a Coalition minister on climate change or Coalition sexism.

Back to Thodey and his lecture at the Australian National University: “Yes, we’ve had over 25 years of uninterrupted growth. But that growth has been largely built on resources exports and we lack economic complexity, which leaves us exposed to external shocks.

“Research done at Harvard … ranks Australia 87th in the world for economic complexity, on par with Kazakhstan and Cuba … our technology adoption rate is around 50 per cent lower than leading countries. And as a percentage of GDP we invest almost 40 times less in venture capital than the US and Israel. We have world-class education and healthcare, but education outcomes have been declining over the past decade, and our ageing population poses a threat to the sustainability of government finances.”

Technological investment needed to be spread across the economy and into regional Australia: “As our population grows, our cities are becoming increasingly stratified, as highly-paid services jobs become concentrated in the inner cities and increasing house prices force more people to the periphery, where poor transport options leave them stranded from high-quality jobs.”

But haven’t the Greens and Labor promised thousands of new regional jobs from clean energy? Labor has at least been honest enough to carve out the aluminium industry from its plans to introduce 50 per cent renewables and cut emissions by 45 per cent by 2030. It knows electricity-intensive industries will simply leave Australia for places like China and India with less rigorous environmental policies if power prices are too high.

Thodey and Debelle raised questions about the future of thermal coal. Miners fearing for their jobs under Labor have been asking what will happen if coal exports collapse some time in the future under climate accord pressures.

Well, the jobs of miners in the ALP-affiliated unions such as the CFMEU and Shorten’s own AWU will disappear. But so will more than $30 billion of thermal coal exports with which the nation now pays for its imported cars and the electronic devices our striking children love. Apart from the national newspapers, the media largely ignores questions about how Australia might compete when it no longer enjoys the fruits of this long mining boom. Yet this may end up the most important question our nation has been asked since World War II.

Friday’s protesting children will say who cares about a job if we don’t have a planet. The answer is easy. As a tiny emitter Australia can and should do no more than the major northern hemisphere emitters are prepared to do, lest its jobs of the future are simply outsourced to China and India. And before journalists give Shorten’s politics of envy an easy tick because that earns them likes and retweets on social media, they need to ask some tough questions.

1. Will increasing taxes on investments simply push such investments offshore?

2. Will making life harder for self-funded retirees just encourage more to rely on the pension?

3. Isn’t the present Fair Work Commission the work of the Gillard Labor government and wasn’t Bill Shorten its responsible minister?

4. Isn’t Australia’s real minimum wage among the highest in the world? Don’t we have among the world’s most progressive tax and welfare systems so that half of all households pay no net tax after benefits?

5. Are we not enjoying near full employment and good growth by global standards? Won’t an artificial wage boost driven by government simply destroy jobs?

If your preferred media is not asking these questions, change it.