Selective moral outrage of the media

Sturt Krygsman

ALAN Jones did the wrong thing. No question. No qualifications. Even those who admire the 2GB broadcaster can admit that his comments about Julia Gillard's father at a private dinner held by Sydney University Young Liberals late last month were awful. So awful they don't bear repeating. They were personal. They were nasty. The comments diminished our national conversation.

Jones recognised his appalling error. He apologised for his comments on Sunday morning, fronting cameras and journalists.

It goes without saying that Labor MPs were right to condemn the comments and the Labor Party was right to rally around the PM. But let's think rationally, rather than rashly, about what followed. Unfortunately, it did not take long for the political game of selectively heightened moral outrage to begin.

Jones's comments and his apology attracted a frenzied level of indignation best described as opportunistic and hypocritical.

Opportunistic, because Jones is one of the country's most effective commentators, relentlessly holding the Gillard minority government to account.

The hysterical outrage aimed at Jones was, at least in part, fuelled by his effectiveness as a political commentator. The Labor Party and the Greens dislike Jones intensely because he wields real power and influence in the public arena, voicing the concerns of many thousands of disgruntled Australians.

Contrast the silence when Labor stalwart Bob Ellis, Foreign Minister's Bob Carr's speech writer, said this about Gillard after her father's death: "She fled an important conference, and a meeting with Vladimir Putin, because her father had died at 83, and fled home weeping to Adelaide.

"Leaving a battlefield because of a dear one's death is not what she lets our soldiers do. They must stay, and fight on till battle's end. Yet she thinks she is different somehow. She is allowed her girly tears and her time off, playing hookey from her national obligations, her duty."

Jones's foes in Canberra fronted the media very speedily indeed to pull off two feats. First, they questioned whether Jones should still be on air. Labor MPs didn't really want an apology. Their aim is to silence the man by demanding an end to his career. Second, the aim is to conflate Jones's comments with a "culture of extremism and viciousness" within the Liberal Party. That's what Trade Minister Craig Emerson told ABC News Radio on Monday morning.

Attorney-General Nicola Roxon said much the same thing on ABC Radio National a few minutes later. She said Tony Abbott had sent a message that this sort of behaviour was acceptable, part of a pattern within the Liberal Party, piling indignation upon indignation.

Opportunistic? Definitely. Hypocritical? Undoubtedly, because in their haste Jones's political enemies failed to check their own history of failings on this front. If Labor MPs and some sections of the media are intent on trying to smear an entire political movement using the comments made by Jones, then are we not entitled to ask similar questions about the culture within the ALP given highly offensive remarks made by Labor MPs?

There are no perfect analogies here. And no doubt Jones's critics will hold on to that fig leaf to claim the high moral ground. But their attempt to look like sweet innocents from a Botticelli painting are doomed to fail.

When former Labor leader Mark Latham called Liberal Party president Tony Staley a "deformed character", it was a most cruel and vulgar taunt. Staley's life had hung in the balance for months after a car accident that left him crippled.

And Gillard was Latham's biggest backer during his various tirades, including especially vulgar misogynist comments aimed at political foes. She never uttered a public word against his vicious and personal attacks.

By the way, more credibility would attach to Latham's recent swipe at what he says is a trend towards "the politics of hate" if he admitted that as a Labor MP, he contributed greatly to this trend.

Remember, too, that in December 2004 Latham, again as leader of the Labor Party, launched a book by Mungo MacCallum who described then prime minister John Howard as an "unflushable turd". There was not a peep of outrage from the Left's moral guardians back then. Now, just imagine if I wrote a book describing the incumbent PM in similar terms and Abbott launched my book. It's curious that offensive remarks on one side of politics attract a special kind of enthusiastic hysteria.

In July last year, then Queensland premier Anna Bligh said: "I can give this guarantee: I won't be at any stage insulting or criticising any member of Mr Newman's family. I think that no matter what your politics are, families are precious, and I certainly regard them as off-limits." Then, during the election campaign, the ALP ran a smear campaign alleging corruption within Campbell Newman's family. The attacks were personal and despicable. The ALP's dirty election advertisements featured Newman's wife, his brother-in-law and his father-in-law. It dragged politics down to a new low and both Bligh and Labor paid the price. When the allegations came to nought for lack of evidence, no member of the Labor Party publicly criticised Bligh's personal attacks against Newman's family. Not one.

And how's this for vicious. Rebecca Mifsud, the wife of Immigration Minister Chris Bowen, retweeted this: "Alan Jones age 71. Avergae (sic) lifespan for an Australian male age 79. Patience my pretties. #auspol bahahaha."

The point is not to draw up a tedious tit-for-tat ledger of personal abuse. The point is that the Labor Party is in no position to preach a holier-than-thou message about a Liberal Party culture of viciousness. After all, it was members of the Labor Party who described Kevin Rudd, among other things, as a "psychopath". No apologies from Labor for that.

As for the media reaction against Jones, some of it has been equally hypocritical. How quickly, and conveniently, the critics of Jones forget the "vicious and extreme" comments directed at Howard by members of the media when he was PM.

Various ABC Radio networks offered endless airtime for a line-up of Labor politicians to put the boot into Jones. Hardly known as a model of fairness and balance, Monday's episode of ABC1's Q&A was an especially disgraceful and biased hate-fest aimed at Jones.

Alas, for conservatives to complain about selective moral outrage among sections of the media is like the captain of a ship complaining about the tides.

The difference is that taxpayers don't pay for the political opinions of Jones.

When we stop paying for predictable bias and confected moral indignation emanating from our national broadcaster, then the double standards won't be quite so hard to bear.