There’s a tedious familiarity to cries of war on democracy

Nine’s chief political correspondent Chris Uhlmann.

This past week signals something more critical than the demise of Malcolm Turnbull. Far more fundamental to our future is the longstanding disagreement over the meaning of democracy in Australia. It is one thing to point out that Turnbull’s leadership attracted belligerent criticism in the media. It is quite another to paint this as a sinister development that threatens the fabric of our democracy.

In the week that Turnbull was removed, the Nine Network’s Chris Uhlmann claimed that Sky News, Sydney radio station 2GB and News Corp Australia newspapers were “waging a war” against the Prime Minister. He said some media folk had become players and people needed to know this ­“because it’s the Australian country that’s at stake”. This was a debate we must have, he said, even if some had a glass jaw and would get their knickers in a twist.

In the spirit of a debate, minus twisted knickers, here is an alternative account to Uhlmann’s theory. First, we have been here before. More than a decade ago, when politics was not going their way, many so-called progressives cried foul. Squillions of column inches, long books and laborious essays pursued a common theme: there was a war on democracy during the Howard years.

In Niall Lucy and Steve Mick­ler’s The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press, I was outed along with ­others as a soldier in an army of conservative columnists who had launched a war on democracy. Why? Because our views differed from theirs. A year later came Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison’s Silencing Dissent: How the Australian Government is Controlling Public Opinion and Stifling ­Debate. The democracy-is-dying drumbeat continued with David Marr’s 2007 Quarterly Essay, His Master’s Voice: The Corrup­tion of Public Debate under Howard. Marr said that How­ard had “cowed his critics” and “muffled the press”, which must have been news to the Howard haters at Fairfax who wrote frenzied weekly critiques of the Howard government.

Robert Manne added his own take with The Barren Years: John Howard and Australian Political Culture. He fondly recalled the ­period between the rise of Gough Whitlam and the fall of Paul Keating when the Australian commentariat was “overwhelmingly of a mildly left-liberal disposition”.

Hamilton and Mad­dison summed up the orthodoxy on the Left back then: a “right-wing syndicate” of media commentators, in synch with the Howard government, was systematically targeting “independent, critical and dissenting voices … to ensure that its values are the only values heard in public debate”. Again, the claim was preposterous because bookstore shelves heaved under the weight of anti-Howard books and magazines freely espousing a different set of values.

Who can forget The History Wars, a book in which historians Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark delivered an emotional polemic about conservative writers? We were described as the bullies who “intimidate” and “impugn ­motives”, who wrote with “the ring of a Stalinist ideologue”. We were couched as the “history war crusaders” who handed down “arbitrary edicts” and “ridicule and abuse” their opponents, launching “pre-emptive strikes” and using “weapons of mass destruction”.

Macintyre and Clark were ­affronted by people with different views about Australian history, those who did not subscribe holus-bolus to the black-armband version. Undoubtedly, the debate was brutal for the historians because they were more accustomed to the warm breeze of orthodoxy. New voices and healthy debates in the public square — a breath of fresh air to others — were hard for Macintyre and his fellow travellers to process. Their reaction was to conjure up the imagery of war. Something illegitimate and immoral was threatening Australian democracy. And according to this bizarre version of democracy, the most articulate and persuasive voices were the biggest threats.

Another curious definition of democracy was put forward within days of the Rudd government coming to power. Crikey’s Guy Rundle and the ABC’s Jon Faine suggested we needed to purge conservative columnists at The Australian. Rundle said it was time to “clean house” because conservatives “have no dialogue with the times”. That purge sentiment wasn’t aired by members of green-left media — or anyone else — when Howard was elected in 1996, 1998, 2001 or 2004.

Greens leader Bob Brown labelled The Australian the “hate media” because this newspaper dared to scrutinise his policies forensically. When Julia Gillard’s performance as prime minister was critiqued, Labor senator Doug Cameron claimed “the biggest problem for democracy is the behaviour of The Australian and the Murdoch press”. Gillard’s communications minister, Stephen Conroy, described The Daily Telegraph as the “worst example” of a campaigning media, best read only for its sports pages. Gillard and Conroy tried to license the print media — a move more common in dictatorships than ­democracies.

Against that history, Uhlmann’s claims about a war on democracy are hard to take seriously. Or Kevin Rudd’s ridiculous claim last week that the Murdoch press is a cancer on democracy. Rudd courted News Corp papers assiduously when it suited him. He is nothing if not a political chameleon. And this newspaper has done more to ­defend freedom of speech than any other newspaper or politician.

The most curious thing about Uhlmann’s claim is that he made it. The former ABC journalist is usually less prone to repeating the talking points of a disgruntled politician. It is no surprise that Turnbull would cast his removal as a campaign orchestrated by bullies in the media; his natural home is among people who routinely make these claims. When things don’t go their way, their default lever has long been to bellow about bullies who threaten democracy.

And among the so-called progressives, what constitutes a robust democracy depends on who is in power. When large swathes of the left-wing media mercilessly criticised Tony Abbott as prime minister, that was freedom of the press in a thriving democracy. His removal was not put down to relentless media criticism and there was no mention of threats to democracy. But when sections of the centre-right media critiqued Turnbull’s performance, it was cast as the reason for his ­removal and a toxic erosion of democracy.

This glaring hypocrisy is inevitable because many so-called progressives are regressive on the freedom front. They do not care for different voices, especially not ones more influential than them. By contrast, those who adhere to more liberal values respect a ­robust marketplace of ideas as the place were ideas are tested and have a steady definition of democracy that does not hinge on politics or personalities.

The hypocrisy of the progressive classes is matched only by their paternalism. Pitching some parts of the media as a threat to democracy is the same as saying readers, listeners, viewers and MPs are too daft to think for themselves. They seem to prefer the idea of a guided democracy — guided by them.

The other problem with the war-on-democracy mob in the media is they keep missing the real stories. As colleague Chris Kenny wrote this week: “Turnbull’s problem was not (admittedly aggressive and relentless) conservative commentators polluting the minds of MPs but green-left journalists insulating him from reality” over climate change and energy policies.

The same thing has happened in the days since Turnbull’s ­removal. Rather than offer serious analysis, many of his fans in the media are quietly grieving and some are crying about threats to democracy. Has the ABC offered even perfunctory coverage of the political truth that if you live by the sword, you will likely die by the sword? No. Has it explored ­whether Turnbull’s complaint about disloyalty and a deliberate insurg­ency is hypocritical kvetching given that he was a most disloyal and deliberate insurgent who toppled Brendan Nelson as Liberal leader and Abbott as prime minister? No.

Not for nothing, Warren Entsch wrote “(for Brendan Nelson)” when he signed his name — the 43rd signature — to the petition for a leadership spill. Turnbull’s bullying treatment of Nelson and Abbott jars with his sooky claims that his removal was “shocking and shameful”.

Members of the Left have cried wolf about a war on democracy one too many times. They did it long before the rise of social media and Sky News. The demise of Turnbull is a ­reminder that they are not just sore losers but illiberal ones at that. And that is surely worth pointing out if we are to have a debate about threats to democracy.