Yesterday the government announced it was handing $1.5 billion to its fossil fuel donors, gratis.
Labor backed the handout — it too is a recipient of fossil fuel donations — and the media didn’t bat an eyelid.
David Crowe in Nine newspapers at least reported it, noting that it was part of the government’s campaign to wrest Solomon from Labor and that Barnaby Joyce made a false claim about the funding — not to mention that the government had approved the sale of the existing Darwin port to a Chinese company in 2015, which now looks like a major strategic blunder given the subsequent deterioration of relations with China.
That was far better reporting than an effort from Seven News that was simply a rehash of Joyce’s media release. But at least it covered it. Guardian Australia covered the Joyce gaffe angle as well. Otherwise, crickets.
The media silence is state capture in action. Indeed the whole handout is a cracking example of why Australia is a carbon state, not a democracy.
Leaving aside the fossil fuel aspect, the handout is simple pork-barrelling. Despite Joyce’s effort to pretend the project has been somehow approved by Infrastructure Australia, it isn’t even at the stage where it can be assessed. Not merely does no one know the costs and benefits of the project, no one knows what it will cost because it lacks any detail. All to try to win Solomon — a possibility now undermined by Labor, within hours, saying it would back the project.
Bipartisan pork-barrelling it still pork-barrelling.
If the project follows the same course as other large projects funded by the government, like the disastrous inland rail project, it will double in cost and more — even before factoring in the cost blowouts going on across major infrastructure projects in Australia due to a lack of appropriately skilled engineers.
But the project is principally for the gas industry, which is keen to begin exploiting NT gas reserves and ship them into burgeoning world markets where Russian gas is suddenly no longer wanted. In normal circumstances, the gas industry would pay for the construction of the infrastructure it will use to earn billions in export revenue (and on which it pays little to no tax or resource rents). Fortunately Liberal and Labor are queueing up to hand it the money to do it.
The beneficiaries will be Australia’s big gas companies — Woodside, Santos, Origin Energy. Santos and Origin are big proponents of fracking in the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory, which the government is also subsidising. All three also have strong financial and personal ties with both sides of politics — though they’re stronger with the Coalition.
But as with so many other government handouts to the fossil fuel industry, the Joyce announcement has received minimal media coverage. The Beetaloo Basin handouts, the constantly ballooning budget for the inland rail project — which is in essence a subsidy for coal transport, and its extension to Gladstone to enable coal exports through that port — all received much the same coverage as the Darwin port statement. The lack of any rigorous assessment of the funding and the provision of subsidies to major political donors goes unremarked.
Indeed, given the Darwin port funding and the Gladstone inland rail extension were both given to the Nationals for not jacking up too much about Scott Morrison’s risible net zero by 2050 target (which, like climate change itself, has vanished as an election issue), the irony of subsidies for fossil fuel industries being the price for a useless net zero target would appear to be media-worthy, but so far only Crikey has pointed it out.
This is a crucial part of the process of state capture — when the mainstream media becomes part of the process. Far from being watchdogs, the media end up, as Seven did, acting as stenographers and propagandists for fossil fuel interests. Or, like the rest, they simple ignore it.
What would in other countries be fairly blatant corruption of government by fossil fuel companies is treated here as business as usual. Because, tragically, it is.
