The debate about tax rorts in superannuation has hurried quickly into the all-too-predictable shambolic farce about politics that stands in for debate over public policy in Australia.
It’s not what we need. We need more reporting that focuses on the things governments do (you know, the stuff that affects our lives) than on the theatrics of the political interplay between the parliamentary players.
As ever, it’s less the political parties dictating the news than the press gallery doing what it’s long done: mincing policy up into the trivia of politics and stuffing the trimmings into the sausage skins of their news reporting.
By Sunday morning on Insiders the politics sausage is ready to be served. Despite the efforts of some panellists (often from the ABC’s rising generation) to steer for the deep waters of policy, the chatter is quickly tugged back into the safe both-sides imperative of the political framing, setting the “it’s all a game” news cycle up for the rest of the week.
It shows up, too, in the weekly interview. Where former host Barrie Cassidy would give space for policy explainers, teasing out contradictions and complexities, current host David Speers brings an eagerness to hurry the questioning on to banter about the political ramifications.
The all-politics-all-the-time journalism is quickly shifting modest changes to tax breaks for high-wealth individuals through superannuation accounts into one of the gallery’s most popular bangers: “superannuation upheaval”.
Modest, you say. Hold on: “Even modest change carries political risk,” warned Speers in his intro. “Super Stoush” splashed the chyron. “Tax changes always bring on a political fight,” he led with the panel before moderating through the “political consequences” of the (still unconfirmed) proposal.
As ever with policies that offer some hope of redistributive relief to the inequality crisis, it was over at the News Corp shambles — where good policy has long gone to be butchered — that the spiciest political sausages were being extruded.
Not enough policy meat? No problem. Pack it out with the rhetorical offcuts and sawdust left over from day-to-day outrage machining: “hypocrisy” over broken promises (and Albanese’s parliamentary pension), a “your super’s next” hysteria, and a head-shaking bewilderment about details.
As their best charcutiers know, the best casings for the mix is tripe.
Enter Friday’s tabloids with a sickly sweet rendering of comments by Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones on superannuation investments: “Honey, I’ll shrink your super” (Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph) and “Your money is our honey” (the Herald Sun). Rick Morton’s Substack, “Nervous Laughter”, goes deep on the making of that particular sausage under what will surely be the Walkley-winning headline of the year: “Super cagey fatalistic hex on cash that’s owed us”.
The sharpest knives were brought to the slaughtering in The Weekend Australian: “Super-sized hypocrisy over broken promises” punned Peter van Onselen’s headline. (Twenty pars down, he conceded that, yes, the policy might be a good one.)
Editor-at-large Paul Kelly turned the bread-stuffed hot dogs of a tax rort crackdown into the tastiest artisanal bratwurst of policy upheaval: “Australia now faces both an immediate and long-run policy struggle over the purposes, tax breaks and economic goals of our massive $3.3 trillion superannuation pool, with fresh battle lines drawn between the Albanese government and the Coalition.” That’s some sausage!
It was left to Sky’s Peta Credlin to wrap it all up, ready for delivery: “Labor tries for a socialist super grab by stealth.”
The opposition has been quick to fall into line, eager for the scraps of coverage they’re getting tossed from the media’s table. Teals from wealthy electorates have followed on. Next step? Watch the attempt to turn the “super upheaval” into an “acid test” at the Aston byelection.
Not everyone in the gallery is happy with the degustation on offer. Guardian Australia’s Katharine Murphy mourned “gotcha” culture as “performative accountability”. The problem isn’t new: in the 1980s, Kelly led an intellectual revolt in the gallery that, all too briefly, put policy in the centre of reporting about Bob Hawke’s government.
Maybe it’s not the journalists: Stanford’s James Hamilton argues it’s the inevitable result of the economics of mass media: policy is contentious, partisan; political by-play is, oddly, profoundly apolitical — and safe. It’s that safety that makes it so attractive to the ABC.
US media critic Margaret Sullivan says we need to rethink the job, suggesting retitling, say, “political correspondents” as “government reporters”.
At the weekend, The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner responded to The New York Times jemmying Ohio’s train crash into the favoured political frame: “People this naive should perhaps do something other than write about American politics for a living.”
It’s a willed naivete we could do with less of in Australia, too.
