Australia's election fever leaves world cold

OVERSEAS audiences have lost interest or simply can't keep up with Australian politics.

KEVIN Rudd says the Chinese resource-driven boom is over, and Tony Abbott says we need to watch out we don't end up like Europe.

Apart from those lines, and of course the asylum-seekers, this election campaign has been pretty well foreigner-free.

It's not surprising that if we evince little interest in the rest of the world, it should be so lacking in curiosity about us. A scan of the Asia-Pacific media shows that the coverage, scant as it is, is dominated by wire stories carried by TV stations and newspapers, not just in modestly resourced countries such as Mongolia or Myanmar, but even in China and Indonesia.

The BBC, the Wall Street Journal and the New Zealand Herald are covering the campaign diligently, and the London Daily Telegraph has profiled the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader, but it's patchy or plain missing after that.

The Lowy Institute's Sam Roggeveen, who has been surveying the coverage, puts a positive spin on it: "It can be seen as a compliment: we're reliable 95 per cent of the time, we'll get along, and there's not much point in paying attention to our election, however dramatic it might seem to us."

One of the reasons for this benign media neglect is that our neighbours invested considerable attention in the emergence of new leaders for a few years. But leaders have kept churning in and out of the parties so often, that their audiences have largely lost interest, or capacity to keep up.

The arrival of Rudd caused excitement, as did that of Julia Gillard as the first woman prime minister. And the initial changes at the top in the Liberal Party were also followed. But by now, that's waned.

Gaffes inevitably gained some attention -- especially, in our Islamic neighbours Malaysia and Indonesia, the remarks in a TV interview by 27-year-old One Nation candidate Stephanie Banister describing Islam as a country, and referring to the Koran as "haram," the Arabic word for sinful. She then quit as a candidate.

The coverage via the wires tends to focus on economic issues.

Sunday's debate was widely headlined -- from China's Global Times to The Times of India -- as having "an economic focus," adding that viewers were divided.

The Japan Times ran a story headlined "Australia airs plan to tax big bank deposits."

Last week's Labor announcement of a fresh $200 million bailout of the car industry also made a widespread appearance -- with especially full coverage in the Bangkok Post, not surprising since Thailand has become an auto industry powerhouse, the chief beneficiary of any Australian decline in the sector.

The criticisms by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees of Australia's asylum-seeker policies also received unusually substantial coverage, with the Jakarta Post using its only editorial of the campaign so far to urge "both governments" -- Australia and Indonesia -- "to show compassion . . . Shifting blame simply makes them seem heartless."

Beijing-based Global Times has given space to one of its editors from overseas, David Dawson, to write two columns in the election.

In one, he says "Australia needs real leadership that puts policy ahead of personality," and in the other, lambasting "corporate interests" for "brazenly interfering with the course of Australian election campaigns."

Good on the paper for giving him the space, but no reader of the state-owned Chinese media needs reminding of the strengths of China's own election campaigns.

The Global Times also ran a nicely nuanced piece by Sydney University's Kerry Brown, one of the foremost China experts in Australia, on how "the current ambiguity toward China needs to be fixed" -- either committing to closer ties, or taking a step back. His punt is on the former, and one suspects he'll be proven right.