Fairfax

Why I ain’t gonna work today

UNDER NORMAL circumstances, today I’d be doing what I normally do: travelling down the coast to cover an AFL match for The Age. It’s something I’ve been doing for 12 years, and consider a privileged part of my job. Not only is it fun, it keeps me on a contract for five months of the year (I won’t say six because in those 12 years the Brisbane Lions have seen September action once, and the Gold Coast Suns, in six full years in the competition, haven’t made the finals yet).

As many of you may be aware, Fairfax’s decision this week to cut another quarter of its workforce – well over 100 journalists, most of them from The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age – has resulted in unprotected strike action. So I won’t be going to work today. This means forgoing a week’s pay, which I can ill afford, and we are all risking our jobs, but so it must be. Fairfax’s proposed changes include auditing contracted freelancers such as myself. Exactly what that might mean for me I’m not sure yet. They also intend to further reduce contributor rates from a per word to per article rate, targeting the arts section in particular.… Read more..

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Bayoneting the wounded

In her classic long-form essay The Journalist And The Murderer, American writer Janet Malcolm used an opening gambit that immortalised herself while throwing a bucket of corrosive acid over her profession. “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” she declared. “He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse…

“Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and the public’s ‘right to know’; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”

After one of the most traumatic weeks in the history of Australian media, perhaps now is not the kindest time to be quoting Malcolm. But I was reminded of her words last Thursday, when a nasty spat broke out over at Media and Marketing website Mumbrella after Tina Alldis, head of PR agency Mango in Sydney, penned an opinion piece for the website that seemed to do a tap-dance at the prospect of thousands of people about to hit the dole queues.… Read more..

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Gina buys the chook run

In the early part of his political career, former Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen – aka The Hillbilly Dictator – had a jaundiced attitude to the pesky officers of the press corps. “The greatest thing that could happen to the state and the nation is when we get rid of all the media,” he said. “Then we could live in peace and tranquility and no one would know anything.”

No one, maybe not even Joh, knew exactly what he meant by that – you could say that about a lot of his most famous public utterances, actually – but it’s widely suspected that he was serious at the time.

It was Joh’s press secretary, Allen Callaghan, who convinced him that the press, if manipulated effectively, could be used as a political weapon. And Joh, as reactionary a figure as any to have appeared on the Australian political landscape, proved he could adapt. Soon, he would refer to the media as his “chooks”: “I have to feed them every afternoon,” he said.

“Feeding the chooks” has long since entered Australia’s journalistic lexicon to describe the relationship between politicians and their interlocuters. But what if you simply bought the chook run?

Bjelke-Petersen’s good friend, the Western Australian iron ore baron Lang Hancock (who also donated large sums of money to Joh’s political campaigns) understood this.… Read more..

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Pokies: rent-seekers win again

The gnashing of teeth over Julia Gillard’s betrayal of Andrew Wilkie over pokies reform has been entirely predictable. Is this some kind of political masterstroke? Is it just another demonstration of Gillard’s fundamental untrustworthiness? It’s all as telegraphed as an old boxer’s jab, and irrevocably lashed to the 24-hour news cycle. About the furthest anyone’s looking into this situation is the polls, and what it does to Gillard’s chances of re-election.

The far more important point about what Gillard’s backdown says about Australia’s rotten political culture has been almost entirely overlooked. And that is that the rent-seekers have won again.

They won in 2010, when some of the world’s largest and richest mining companies saw off the Resources Super Profits Tax with a $22 million advertising campaign that, in the end, helped kill off a popularly elected Prime Minister (not that Kevin 07, perhaps soon be be known as Kevin 12, was exactly blameless in his demise, but that’s another story).

That occasion saw the likes of Gina Rinehart, Twiggy Forrest and Clive Palmer marching in the streets and carrying on like they’d all be rooned, I tells ya. The sight of Australia’s richest men and women playing the victim card – Rinehart (wealthiest of the lot) leading the chant of “Axe the tax!”… Read more..

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All about folksonomics: the intellectual recession we didn’t have to have

A week ago, a piece appeared in the Life & Style section of Fairfax’s online mastheads which depressingly illustrated the toxic spread of disinformation through once credible news outlets. Written by a freelancer, Marj Lefroy, it purported to illustrate “Vaccination’s vexed link to autism“, opening with the provocative line “for many parents, vaccinations are this century’s abortion debate” (no, I’m not aware of the abortion debate being magically resolved last century either, but let’s leave that for now).

Claiming to speak on behalf of “the voices of concerned parents and carers”, she referred to a case in the US where the federal government had conceded that vaccines had “aggravated a young girl’s mitochondrial disorder to the point that she developed autism”, with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program subsequently paying out $1.5 million upfront to the girl’s family, in addition to ongoing reimbursement of $500,000 pa.

“There are things we can and must do,” opines Ms Lefroy in conclusion, a nicely vague way of advising readers not to vaccinate their kids. “We must have the courage and maturity to listen to everyone, including the mothers and fathers dealing with the unacceptable, potentially avoidable consequences. They’re the canaries in the coal mine, and the real reason why this case is not closed.… Read more..

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