Growing up politically
With a minority Labor Government finally installed in Australia, we immediately see conservative partisans and media begin to lob destabilising mortars at it, before they’ve even gotten started. ENOUGH ALREADY!!
To their credit, some of the more broad-minded journalists are openly critical of some of their peers, suggesting that exaggerating conflict and polarising issues should not be acceptable reportage.
I couldn’t agree more, especially after seeing the media pour flaming oil on Labor’s proposed Citizens’ Assembly for climate policy. Read any newspaper story and you will find adjectives that carry judgement rather than fact. Most readers would not distinguish between Michelle Grattan the journalist and Michelle Grattan the influential political editor for the Age Newspaper, for example, so accept all her pronouncements as fact, when the only fact is that they are her opinion. While her commentary can be astute (although not regarding the CA), others are quite malevolently irresponsible.
In a democratic system that protects us well from the worst excesses of power in government, we don’t need media that messes it up like spoilt children.
My PhD supervisor Lyn Carson has just written a piece for Australian Policy Online entitled Growing up politically: conducting a national conversation on climate change. She spells out how the announcement of the Citizens’ Assembly during the election campaign was done so very poorly, feeding directly into the opinionated ignorance and divisiveness of the so-called reporters.
Most of the caustic commentary was about “failure of leadership”. De-constructing the commentary, one finds an almost universal [media] expectation that politicians should exercise power in a liberal democratic tradition that provides them with that mandate…. However, leadership is easy if everyone agrees or if the leader does [only] what the stakeholders want. Involving voters in difficult decisions is one way to diffuse that anger by sharing ownership of those decisions. Furthermore, experts alone will not resolve this issue…. Parliaments certainly cannot.
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