How the language of shock-jocks came to drive political debate

THE popular press stopped taking national issues seriously long before our party leaders did.

A GRUMPY Coalition heavyweight reminded me this week that I haven't subjected the Gillard government's carbon price to the same nit-picking ferocity as I had the Howard government's GST.

"You demanded every day that there be no losers," he told me.

Leaving aside the obvious difference that I was a press gallery journalist in the late 1990s with a daily reporting brief, covering a package which incorrectly promised that everyone would be a winner - something that Labor's carbon price doesn't pretend to offer - his shot at my excessive scrutiny of the past was well-aimed and taken on the chin.

The GST was the last reform that either side of politics was prepared to debate in the sort of detail, and for the length of time, that would allow policy journalists to routinely run on the front page of every newspaper and at the top of the six o'clock news. Yet the way people such as myself treated that issue altered how governments, and oppositions, approached future reforms.

We in the media helped to dumb down the debate by placing a dollar sign next to each household. I know John Howard started it, and Kim Beazley played lowest common denominator in reply, but something had shifted in the media to reduce the argument to what, in the end, was loose change.

On balance, I still largely blame the subject matter - the politicians - for the rubbish we sometimes write. But there has been an undoubted shrinking in the media attention span over the past decade that has made it harder for leaders to sustain an argument for short-term sacrifice in the long-term national interest.

The media can, of course, mean anyone you want. The Canberra press gallery is often targeted for criticism, but this is the wrong place to look when diagnosing our reform malaise. The best journalists in the business still cluster in the federal parliament and I will always defend their work, knowing much effort is involved.

The problem isn't with my former colleagues in the nation's capital but something deeper in our culture. And here is my personal epiphany: the decline started well before the internet's challenge to our business model.

It can be said safely without offending any journalist - for no offence is meant by any of this - that the era when political and economics correspondents were thought leaders in the media probably terminated soon after Paul Kelly published his seminal work, The End of Certainty in 1992.

The great reform project did run for another decade, terminating in 2001 with the bedding down of the GST. But the popular press stopped taking issues seriously before our leaders did.

Changes in political and media culture are hard to pinpoint, even with hindsight. But the collective discomfort voters feel today about our surly, small-minded debates can be traced to the mid-1990s, when the talkback radio hosts grabbed the national microphone on behalf of the losers of reform and demanded compensation.

It is to the press gallery's discredit - and I include myself here - that we missed the story of the restructure in the real economy after the 1990-91 recession.

I see now that we caught up too late, and with the wrong response after the backlash identified itself in the rise of Pauline Hanson. The Howard government's GST was reported back-to-front - as an entitlement, not a reform. Everyone had to be a winner, and every vested interest had the right to ask for more. The truth is we didn't want to miss the next loser so we chased the shock-jocks downmarket.

The white noise of 21st century reporting is, in fact, the language of the shock-jock. Even earnest print journalists such as myself sometimes type with the cap locks on because we have been bluffed into thinking that if we don't shout, we won't be read.

The paradox is that the community, and even the politicians, still crave serious, issues-based reporting. Yet the public, and through them our leaders, also insist that everything be simple enough to fit on a T-shirt. Everyone wants more for nothing.

An electorate, and a consumer, this greedy ends up killing what it wants to look up to.

But I keep coming back to the leaders. It's up to them, not the media, to snap the country out of its funk.

Julia Gillard is right to believe she has been verballed on the carbon tax.

But she can't escape responsibility for equating the arrival of a single asylum-seeker boat as a policy failure. Her joint press release with Mark Latham, made from the rock-thrower comfort of opposition in 2003, is a prime example of shock-jock politics. "Another boat on the way, another policy failure," they thundered, Gillard playing Derryn Hinch to Latham's Alan Jones.

This absence of nuance has been a feature of pretty much every debate since the GST. It booby-traps a government from the day it takes office because all the newly defeated opposition has to do is repeat the quote.

Gillard might be excused for arriving in parliament in 1998, when the media had already flipped the price signal for coverage from idea to sneer.

Tony Abbott has no such alibi. He had the vantage point of government to see how much harm shock-jock journalism can do to public policy.

The Opposition Leader condemns his very project with the false expectation that he can stop the boats, increase spending, remove taxes and cut electricity prices.

Latham wrote this week that Abbott has been given a free ride in the press. I'm not so sure about this. The media protects the leaders it respects - Hawke, Keating, Howard. Abbott is none of the above.

He and Gillard go to work each day knowing that the people rejected both of them. Another contest between them on the same banal terms as the last carries risks for not just the leaders themselves but for the political system's ability to problem solve.

The media is well aware that it let the public down in 2010. Abbott and Gillard should not underestimate that feeling. Another election like the last does not bear reporting.