Unprincipled decisions are really no decisions at all: but they resurface before too long, to present their embarrassing conundrums again, floating bodies.
After five years of the experiment of the 25-seat House of Assembly, it’s time to re-assess whether the particular unprincipled decision to reduce the number of MPs has actually delivered better government for Tasmania.
We are now faced with a rampant government, self-assured, and pursuing with devastating single-mindedness, a regimen to co-opt the media where necessary and threaten and intimidate where co-option fails.
The process of Parliamentary reform is not over, and wide-ranging debate should begin afresh as to how the Hare-Clark electoral system should be altered to stay true to its original intentions.
Of the many losers from the most recent changes, it is the Tasmanian media and the press gallery in particular which is most at risk of permanent damage.
My view is that the decline of the Tasmanian media gallery began in its reaction to, and reporting of, the period after the 1996 election.
You will recall the election returned a balance-of-power parliament with the Rundle Liberal Government elected in minority.
That was the moment when the utmost maturity and leadership was required of the Tasmanian media and the Tasmanian press gallery in particular, because journalists needed to understand the result was not an aberration, but a normal part of Tasmania’s electoral system. They needed to be able to sensibly assess the changes in power and report with maturity and sobriety, to encourage co-operation between all three parties towards the solving of Tasmania’s problems. That collectively they failed to do this - and it is possible to speak of a press gallery as a collective because of the enormous influence senior journalists have over newcomers - allowed the development of a climate of deadlock, which enabled the Labor and Liberal parties to rush through a dramatic change to the Hare-Clark electoral system without a plebiscite. This has delivered the dysfunctional electoral system we have today.
The 1996 election result was received with dismay by the Liberals, who for two months refused to publicly acknowledge the role they had to play – to find a fair accommodation with the cross-benches to enable the Rundle government to govern in minority.
I have a very clear recollection of the acute fear of Tony Rundle to be seen in public with Christine Milne. This paranoia extended even to the arrangement between the three leaders. At the first formal meeting of all parties, a post-election forum to discuss party resources and chamber working arrangements, a complicated choreography had to be put in place at the Liberal’s insistence so that the Labor leader would go into the room first – such was the fear of government minders that Milne and Rundle would be photographed together.
For a short time, despite the efforts of the Labor Party and sectors of the media receptive to their spin, the balance-of-power Parliament worked – for 18 months, Tasmania had stable, positive minority government. Indeed on the first anniversary of the 1996 election, Tony Rundle, Ray Groom and the Speaker Frank Madill were all vocal in praise of the balance-of-power parliament. Ken Jeffries (then ABC Radio, now Jim Bacon’s media director) was too, on Graeme Denmead’s ABC radio programme I recall. Perhaps it was most powerfully bought into focus during the aftermath of the Port Arthur shootings in April 1996 – when the three sides put aside their political point-scoring and passed the strongest firearms laws in Australia – setting the bar high and leading the country.
But what went wrong? Amid the chance for a different way of doing politics the old guard within both the Labor and Liberal parties, hollow men, ignorant and fearful of the future, could not grasp the opportunity in front of them. Incapable of adapting, they co-operated in 1998 to change the Hare-Clark system virtually overnight, without a public debate. I still cannot believe that such major change was foisted on the Tasmanian public without a referendum, and the media by its silence, allowed it to happen.
Let me remind you: Tony Rundle, aware that he was facing an election result that would be at best for him, minority government, and at worst, a Labor minority government, reneged on his pledges of parliamentary harmony and reduced the size of the Tasmanian Parliament from 35 to 25 seats.
Where was the press gallery at this time? Where was its spirited defence of the Hare-Clark system that had been so pronounced in 1994 when Ray Groom had proposed a reduction in numbers in parliament? Many of the journalists were the same. But their interest in the integrity of the Tasmanian electoral system seems to have dissipated in the ensuing years. In 1994, The Australian, The Mercury, The Examiner and The Advocate all warned against Ray Groom’s changes to the electoral system, but in 1998 they were largely silent. Why did the gallery sit by and do nothing? Were the senior journalists just tired of it all? Had reporting on the Hare-Clark system and the other issues of the day – notably Tasmania’s ongoing forestry debate - just become too hard? Too boring?
Multi-party government needed a new language and new way of reporting which framed debate differently, it needed a maturity of discussion beyond a reporting based on ‘fury, ‘clashes’ and ‘backlashes’.
Speaking as someone who has worked in the press gallery as a journalist for both The Mercury and The Advocate, and in the Parliament itself as a media adviser to the Greens, it is plain to me that the fourth estate has failed in its duty to protect that most fundamental of institutions: our democratic system. And that of course is where the right to be called the ‘fourth estate’ comes from – and incidentally, why journalists enjoy the privileges they do within the environs of the parliamentary chamber.
What we have now in Tasmania is a mal-formed electoral system that favours stagnation – God only knows what Tony Rundle was thinking when he agreed to it. The Labor Party was in a state of disbelief right up to the moment when the legislation was passed. I sat next to Jim Bacon when the legislation went through – at his right elbow in fact - and there was no mistaking the mix of disbelief and careful elation in his countenance, not matched, I recall by Tony Rundle. Everyone in the building knew that the 25-seat house would deliver Labor Government after Labor government into the future – until either the south of the state becomes substantially more conservative, or until the North-West Coast is discovered as a seachange destination.
So many good ideas are languishing now. Tasmania’s clean and green image was cutting edge in 1996. Now every local community on the eastern seaboard of Australia is using the term. Jim Bacon was handed the best tourism and business marketing tool and he has squibbed the opportunity –because he hasn’t known what to do with it. And why not? Because he didn’t come up with the idea in the first place, and doesn’t understand it, and so he doesn’t know what to do next. It is akin to the sensation of getting a new computer for the first time: one knows it’s important, knows it can be put to good use, but what to type into that damned blinking cursor to make it go? The answer of course is staring the Premier in the face, and was delivered succinctly by the Tasmania Together process: end old-growth logging. ‘Clean and Green’ is lip service for his government while he allows the travesty of five million tonnes of woodchipping to continue, an apocalyptic volume that future generations will marvel at, in the same way we marvel today at the death of the last captive Thylacine, the stone heads on treeless Easter Island, or at the Roman Caesars and their lead pipes.
This state of affairs has been delivered by the self-interested scheming of the Labor and Liberal Paries, and an under-resourced, exhausted press gallery that failed Tasmanians when courage and innovation was needed the most.
For Bacon’s government, the agenda all along has been to control the electoral system (Witness its recent upper house efforts), co-opt the media by poaching the most senior and most respected into government employment, and crush all remaining dissidence. The regimen bears repeating:control, co-opt, and crush.
The unheralded danger that now faces the state is the loss of the experienced, professional memory of the press gallery. With such a turn-over of personnel in the gallery and, I might add, among the MPs of the opposition parties, it is all the harder to defend the procedures of the institution of Parliament. The rewriting of time-honoured practices of the House can be achieved by the Bacon Government without fear of contradiction.
As a fifth-generation Tasmanian, I fear for my state and the direction it is heading. I fear it will take a corruption scandal of the highest magnitude, of the order of Queensland’s The Moonlight State, before the media is re-invigorated, and before Tasmanians have the opportunity to speak freely about the direction the state is headed.
What is needed is for the press gallery and the media generally to encourage dissidence and welcome debate, without playing the worn cards of bigotry and prejudice. That after all is the historical role of a free press – earned at a time when being an editor or a political reporter was dangerous. Instead, Tasmania’s media seems to cherish the idea of encouraging Tasmanians to view themselves as a somewhat dull, backward bunch, in which a mix of beer, woodchips and a variety of moustaches is allowed to summarise the quintessentially Tasmanian, while all else is dangerous and un-Tasmanian. But it can’t go on. What is needed is a popular campaign of dissent. Such a campaign already has a ready-made image: the white gag that has been applied to us all. Tasmanians must be allowed to remove the gag, and that goes for the media as well. I propose it now and encourage the wider use of it: Wear a strip of white cloth as an arm band, pin a white ribbon to your suit-coat, carry it as a mental image whenever you read the letters-to-the-editor. Let “I shall not be silenced” be a catch-cry for greater scrutiny of the Bacon Government and – dare I say it – further democratic parliamentary reform.
In my time in the Tasmanian Parliament - nine years, all up – I witnessed the ever increasing sophistication of the government media machine. Now, alarmingly, it is coupled with a sinister brutality towards the truth that includes playing favourites, bullying, and intimidation of honestly and reasonably held belief, such as those bravely expressed in the Tasmanian Times. How much paranoid concern does the Bacon Government’s media machine have that it would bully a web-zine such as the Tasmanian Times? The effort has already greatly increased its readership and its influence.
I know Michael Lester and I know Rick Snell. I have worked in the same gallery with Michael and I have sat through Rick’s law classes. I’ve read both their articles in other parts of the Times, and I prefer Rick’s because it conveys to me more strongly a sense of respect for the Tasmanian people, a healthy suspicion of Government, a concern for the future of Tasmanian journalism based on its raison d’être, and a plea for the Tasmanian media to more meaningfully challenge the exercise of power in this state.
Russell Kelly is a former editor of Island magazine.
He is currently completing a Masters in Journalism at Southern Cross University.
Contact:
kellyfranklin@ozemail.com.au
Tasmanian media ... on the outside looking in ...
Saturday, June 14, 2003