Left-wingers' sound and fury signify nothing

THE Australian is relentlessly under attack from miffed media progressives.

LIKE taking a drag on a post-coital cigarette, after each election in recent years the political Left has a habit of letting off some steam after the big event. They reach for their keyboards or grab a microphone to take a swipe at the media. Make that the media with which they vehemently disagree.

After the 2007 election, progressives within the media were calling for a "cleansing" of conservatives from News Limited newspapers under the ruse that such voices were no longer required in the new left-wing era under Labor and Kevin Rudd.

It made for an amusing misread of politics: Rudd campaigned as a conservative. And a hypocritical one: there was no similar call for a purging of left-wing voices when John Howard was elected in 1996. Not to mention disingenuous: the same group complaining about a stifling of dissent during the Howard years wanted to stifle dissent in 2007.

This time left-leaning critics are busy scolding the news coverage and news analysis in The Australian with the same reckless disregard for facts. Same hypocrisy, too. Same Orwellian language about improving the national debate.

As media crimes go, the post-election accusers are guilty of committing the partisan offences they wrongly convict others of having committed. Travelling in an ideological pack, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Brown, ABC journalists at Media Watch, Insiders and Radio National, the echo chamber bloggers at Crikey and Laura Tingle in The Australian Financial Review assert The Australian has gone too far in scrutinising the record of the Rudd government and the anti-growth policies of the Greens, a party now part of the minority Gillard government. Add John Menadue to that list.

Last week, the Whitlam-era head of the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet - a self-described "grumpy old man" - accused the media of failing "almost absolutely" in examining critical issues such as the two-speed economy and Julia Gillard's citizens' assembly. Wrong on both counts.

This newspaper has reported, analysed and editorialised at length about the consequences of this country's two-speed economy and has been highly critical of the vacuous citizens' assembly.

Describing this newspaper as "the Mad Hatter's Tea Party", Menadue claimed The Australian was "pernicious" in the way it reported waste within the schools building program when in fact the Auditor-General's report showed that "Australians got very good value for money". Wrong again.

The report by the Australian National Audit Office did not audit value. It did find 82 per cent of schools that were self-managing projects - mostly private schools - believed they had received value for money compared with just 40 per cent for other schools. The Orgill interim report released last month revealed Building the Education Revolution cost premiums of 5 per cent to 6 per cent (or $800 million) and extreme variations among BER projects, with centralised systems such as those in NSW costing double those of ACT public schools and Catholic schools in Tasmania and Queensland. That is not value for money.

Indeed, The Australian has uncovered a steady stream of mismanagement, rorts and waste under the $16.2 billion stimulus program. And unashamedly so. That's the role of quality media. Other so-called quality media outlets - such as Fairfax and the ABC - dropped the ball here, picking it up late and half-heartedly.

Menadue's spray continued: "And you watch them, [The Australian] will be doing the same thing on the NBN." Yes, The Australian will continue to report, analyse and editorialise about taxpayers getting value for money under the Gillard government's latest big spending initiative, the $43bn National Broadband Network. And unashamedly so.

Menadue took particular aim at Dennis Shanahan for living off Newspoll, creating news out of Newspoll and beating up stories against the Rudd government.

Wrong again. As political editor of this newspaper, Shanahan's job is to report Newspoll results. When Labor's primary vote started to fall, he reported it.

Critics who claimed Shanahan was guilty of "playing down" Labor's two-party preferred vote were disconnected from reality. Rudd publicly admitted he was being "whacked" in the polls. Then, in June, the falling primary vote led to Rudd's removal.

Menadue was smoking some cigarette during last Wednesday morning's hissy fit. And so was ABC local radio host Deb Cameron. As Shanahan said in an email to Cameron, her failure to challenge Menadue about errors of basic facts suggested she was either ignorant about the election coverage or in complete agreement with Menadue's misinformation.

As chairman of the Centre for Policy Development, Menadue lectures about the "lack of honesty and transparency in public discourse", of holding people to account for their "mistakes and untruths". So let's do what Cameron should have done and get honest and transparent about Menadue's contribution to public discourse. Let's hold him to account for his mistakes and untruths.

Menadue is not an independent, objective observer. He is a player and his attack is political. Harbouring a long history of unhappiness with sections of the media which do not tow his leftist views, he set up the New Matilda website to provide "independent political commentary". Of course, it's just his platform to run a predictable genre of political whinge.

Menadue's philosophical leanings are diametrically opposed to those of The Australian on everything from economics to social policies. More Keynesian than Keynes, Menadue advised the worst government in Australia's history.

In fact, academic writings record that Menadue has the distinction of criticising a May 1975 cabinet submission about budget strategy by then treasurer Jim Cairns for not being Keynesian enough. (Cairns, not Menadue, was willing to consider the inflationary warnings from Milton Friedman when the economist visited Australia in April 1975.)

Menadue has been a long-time political activist, opposing the Iraq war as a signatory to the Gang of 43 letter, a vocal lobbyist for a human rights act where a handful of judges, not the Australian people, dictate social policy, and a prominent refugee advocate highly critical of the Howard government's policies, reaffirmed at election after election by the Australian people. Loved at writers' festivals and by the comrades at Workers Online, his obsession with the Murdoch papers - like that of others before him - betrays a moralising dismissal of Australians who may share this newspaper's values about smaller government, lower taxes, freer trade, economic liberalism and social polices that sit at the pragmatic centre of Australia.

Menadue, like his progressive comrades, is entitled to his political positions. But let's put those political views on the table in the interest of disclosing all relevant facts when assessing the cacophony of leftist claims that the media failed in its role at the last election.

When the facts are known, it's clear enough that Menadue has not provided serious or independent analysis of the media's performance at the last election.

Indeed, his ill-informed tirade last week - and the gushing response from Cameron - exposes the consistently shabby state of the so-called intellectual Left. By all means let's have a debate about the media, but progressives will need to lift their game if they want to make a meaningful contribution to that debate.