Miner's Advocate

Angry truckers head for Canberra - ABC Canberra - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Angry truckers head for Canberra - ABC Canberra - Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Swanny flicks the switch

6 Mar 2012 [Peter Brent:  Mumble blog]

 

Buried in Wayne Swan’s address to the National Press Club yesterday was a “real Julia” moment.

Referring to criticism of his Monthly essay published last week, Swan acknowledged that “there was a time, when I was establishing myself in the office and part of a new Government, where I was probably concerned about this sort of criticism.”

However, “to be honest, now I welcome it.”

So look out world: the jittery, unsure treasurer is gone and there’s a new tougher Wayne in town.

Last night on the ABC1 news a Labor source was quoted as explaining that Swan’s intervention is “a campaign to convince Labor voters this is actually a Labor government”.

And a “senior Labor figure” has told the Australian that “the contest in Australian politics is essentially a contest for the blue collar vote.”

This formulation could not be more wrong. But it’s a sentiment that seems to permeate the ALP’s political behaviour.

I don’t have to tell you that the proportion of Australian “blue collar” votes has shrunk and continues to shrink. The Australian Bureau of Statistics which uses the broad definition “Technicians and Trades Workers, Machinery Operators and Drivers, and Labourers” has blue collar workers at a touch above 30 per cent of the workforce, down from around 55 per cent in the 1960s. (See graph here.)

Most “blue collar workers” already vote Labor and they live disproportionately in safe Labor seats. They are not an important demographic. Any party that relied on them exclusively for support would soon find themselves ... well, at around the ALP’s current level of primary support.

The Labor Party has a recurring neurosis which sees it, particularly in times of stress, attempt to “reconnect with battlers”. There’s a belief that electoral support begins with working men in the western suburbs of Sydney and overflows to the rest of the country. It’s why they can’t stay away from that region when their stocks are low.

But no modern Labor election victory has been due to it being seen as a “traditional” Labor. On the contrary.

And a political party wins elections when it appeals to that broad, multi-faceted, multi-ethnic demographic called “Australians”. 

Ok, that’s glib, but it’s a truer formulation than the “blue collar” one above.

Attempting to slice and dice the electorate is a recipe for irrelevance. It was this thinking that led Mark Latham into his counterproductive rhetoric about private schools.

In fact, here’s a rule of thumb in for major parties: anything or anyone that excites the party’s base is detrimental to its electoral chances. It won’t always be true but it usually will.

As exhibits I present Latham and, in the United States, Sarah Palin.

Perhaps Wayne’s adventure is about attracting members to the party. That would make more sense.

Many people seem to assume a direct positive relationship between ALP membership and electoral success but if anything (looking at history) the opposite seems to be the case.

But it’s understandable that a political party, particularly a centre-left one, frets about low membership.

After Paul Keating became prime minister in December 1991 he was true to his word and “flicked the switch to vaudeville”. The left-wing populist causes included: the fight against a great big new tax administered by a “greed is good” yuppie (John Hewson); the nasty Brits deserting Singapore in World War II; a Republic; and whacks around the ears for the banks and the superannuation funds “donkeys”.

It made him a hero among Labor activists, and probably assisted the operation of the 1993 campaign. But that election was still won where elections usually are: in the (for want of a better word) “middle”.

Maybe Wayne is after a similar kind of invigoration. But the obvious problem is that he is no Keating. In fact he is, communication-wise, Keating’s opposite.

Today, Swan’s argument largely revolves around that 2010 mining tax stoush. The problem there is that Wayne himself was central to creating the conditions that emboldened the miners to run their full-on advertising campaign.

According to reports that no one has denied, Swan and Julia Gillard (and, behind them, Karl Bitar and Mark Arbib’s market research) successfully urged Kevin Rudd to drop the CPRS in April 2010.

That decision did two main things: produce a collapse in Labor’s standing in the electorate; and signal that this was an insecure government, easily swayed by public opinion.

So when in May they announced the mining tax, the miners saw a weak, seemingly electorally vulnerable government, and one that was a soft touch, and reacted accordingly.

I’m not saying that’s the whole story, but it was a significant factor.

If the problem identified by Wayne Swan—an unprecedented degree of vested interest interference in the political process—does exist, he and the brand of timid politics he embodies is largely responsible for it.

And there is another angle. For years Swan has been trying to insert his persona into the Australian consciousness so that his name is mentioned in leadership scenarios. It must be frustrating to repeatedly watch others leapfrog into contention.

With another leadership stoush likely later this year, Wayne may be hoping his time will come—finally.

 

Team that blew up its talents

• The Advocate dares to doubt that Shanahan's prediction will prove true...results to be measured, according to Shanners, in Aug 2013.
• The Advocate suspects that commentators have not noticed that the other side has a leader elected by only one vote; and that the punters don't like that bloke.

Putting in M.B. Turnbull might work.  But he's a bloke that, once you plug him into power, you should start running immediately because you don't know how long you have before he explodes.

BY:DENNIS SHANAHAN, POLITICAL EDITOR 

• From:The Australian  February 25, 2012 12:00AM 

JULIA Gillard and Kevin Rudd have destroyed each other.

Whatever the outcome of the Labor leadership ballot on Monday at 10am, the Labor Party faces destruction at the next election, which could now come sooner rather than later.

Whoever is Labor's prime minister - Gillard or Rudd - they will be faced with hostility from a solid core of backbenchers, a poisonous cabinet that cannot work together, a rampant opposition, a voting public despairing of government instability and the prospect of another leadership challenge closer to the election.

Both face a lack of credibility and legitimacy as a result of the internal bleeding, and both would have to defend a series of unpopular policies while Labor wallows at historically low levels of polling.

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The reasons Gillard and Rudd are using to argue their opponent should not be leader and prime minister apply equally to each other.

As a team Rudd and Gillard beat Kim Beazley for the Labor leadership and then John Howard for government.

But, as the team disintegrated in government and finally broke apart, their separate talents have come nowhere near the sum of the two together.

They are now in a state of mutual destruction.

Each is saying the other is disloyal, treacherous, untrustworthy, incompetent, lying, unfit to hold the office of prime minister and incapable of winning the next election.

Gillard opened her campaign with a candour she should have used in 2010, saying: "Kevin Rudd as prime minister always had very difficult and very chaotic work patterns. In my view, Kevin Rudd is an excellent campaigner and he was an excellent campaigner in 2007.

"But government requires different skills. Government requires consistency, purpose, method, discipline, inclusion, consultation; it requires you to lead a big team and to lead it well. Kevin Rudd, as prime minister, struggled to do that and by the days of 2010 that struggle had resulted in paralysis in the government."

Rudd responded that Gillard had misled the public about the carbon tax and that the combination of trust and the carbon tax remained the government's biggest problem, saying: "In politics, as you know, trust and confidence is everything. And it's critical that whoever leads our country has this trust and confidence of the Australian people."

He concluded Gillard had lost trust and could not win the election while offering to change the impact of the carbon tax.

The ferocity of Gillard's attack on Rudd, after a long period of destabilisation from the former leader and foreign minister's supporters, and that of her coterie of ministers, is designed to destroy Rudd. The strategy is that Rudd's attempt to become leader must be crushed once and for all, humiliating him and driving the once most popular PM to the backbench, impotent and friendless.

After Labor has trailed the Coalition so comprehensively for so long and Gillard's chronically low voter satisfaction levels have left her trailing Tony Abbott as preferred prime minister, Gillard cannot afford anything less than a stunning victory. Even a solid core of caucus support of about 30-35 for Rudd leaves open the prospect of another leadership bid if Rudd were drafted after ruling out a challenge from the backbench.

Gillard can afford only one outcome: a crushing defeat of Rudd. Anything less, and a continuance of poor polling, would encourage another Rudd bid as well as the prospect of a third candidate.

There is speculation already within Labor ranks that a third candidate would be considered for a leadership change closer to the election which, if it is a House of Representatives and half-Senate election, has to be called between August and November next year.

To head off a Rudd victory or even a close result, Gillard, Wayne Swan, Simon Crean, Stephen Conroy and Nicola Roxon launched highly personalised attacks on Rudd and his legacy.

As a former leader and the man cited for Rudd's reason to resign as foreign minister, Crean began the attack, followed by the Treasurer; then Gillard herself launched a full assault after Rudd jumped from the ministry before she had time to sack him.

The allegations are that Rudd has been disloyal and has been destabilising the Prime Minister; that his prime ministership was chaotic and dysfunctional; he was unable to deliver key policies such as health reform, the mining tax and carbon price; his management was erratic; he didn't deal properly with colleagues and bureaucrats and was unable to negotiate with the Greens.

The genteel curtain over the chaos at the heart of the Labor government in late 2009 and early 2010 has been rent asunder in justification for tearing down - without explanation other than that he'd lost his way - the Labor leader who defeated Howard after 11 years in government.

Crean accused Rudd of hypocrisy over his complaints the 2010 coup had been conducted by faceless men and factional leaders, saying: "He's got the gall to criticise the faceless people. He's had them acting on his behalf."

Swan went hard and early: "For too long, Kevin Rudd has been putting his own self-interest ahead of the interests of the broader Labor movement and the country as a whole, and that needs to stop.

"The party has given Kevin Rudd all the opportunities in the world and he wasted them with his dysfunctional decision-making and his deeply demeaning attitude towards other people, including our caucus colleagues. He sought to tear down the 2010 campaign, deliberately risking an Abbott prime ministership, and now he undermines the government at every turn."

Swan and Gillard cited the minerals resource rent tax as a policy success where Rudd had failed with the resources super-profits tax in 2010, yet it was the Treasurer's failure to consult with the mining companies that blighted the RSPT and presaged Rudd's removal.

Swan and Gillard were also again accused of urging Rudd to drop the emissions trading scheme, a decision he said he took responsibility for but that was used as a reason to remove him. Gillard denied she'd urged Rudd to drop the carbon tax and wait until Abbott changed his mind. Rudd's response has been to continue to characterise the attacks as factional bullying by people justifying a "midnight coup" and rewriting history.

"What I see from the faceless men is the same shock-and-awe that I seem to remember being deployed during the leadership coup of June 2010," he said. "That is, you deploy a whole bunch of people to go out there and launch a massive spate of personality attacks in order to create this sense of inevitable momentum."

In short, he said the leadership must change if Labor was to win, because Gillard had misled people about the carbon tax and lost trust.

Both Rudd and Gillard have ruled out working in either's cabinet, and as the principle of cabinet confidentiality and trust has been thrown out the window it has become impossible for five or six senior ministers to work within the cabinet of either leader, given their declarations of support for Rudd or Gillard.

If Rudd wins, he will have trouble putting together a cabinet and perhaps even holding on to government. Anything but a stunning victory for Gillard will leave her politically dead. And given the damage they have inflicted on each other, it is likelier than not that neither will be leader by election time in August next year.

 

Polls don't lie...but some media just cannot read them.
ABC Newcastle Local Radio presenter asserted during the Gillard-Rudd phoney war that Labor's vote continued downward while the arguments in the media continued.

Ms Emberson should perhaps read a newspaper from time to time; seek some advice, even. She could begin with this yarn from The SMH :

NIELSEN POLL LIFELINE FOR GILLARD SMH Feb 6 2012

JULIA GILLARD has been handed a lifeline with the latest Herald/Nielsen poll showing support for the Prime Minister and her government increasing sharply.

Despite a tumultuous start to the year for the government prompting a renewed bout of leadership speculation, the poll shows Labor's primary support rising 4 percentage points to 33 per cent since December, its highest level in almost a year.

The Coalition's primary support fell 4 points to 45 per cent and its two-party preferred lead has been cut by 8 points to 53-47 but it would still win in a canter if an election were held today.
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Rising in the polls ... Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
However, the rise in Labor's support, as well as 5-point increase in Ms Gillard's approval rating and 6-point rise in her standing as prime minister, should give Ms Gillard some reprieve from growing talk of a leadership push by Kevin Rudd.

The poll shows Mr Rudd is preferred as prime minister by 57 per cent of voters compared with 35 per cent for Ms Gillard. In October, Mr Rudd led by 61 per cent to 30 per cent. About one-quarter of those who back Mr Rudd do not believe he should run for the leadership.

With Parliament to resume tomorrow, Ms Gillard tried to rally MPs at a caucus strategy session yesterday. She warned implicitly that continuing leadership speculation would benefit only the opposition.

She was quoted as saying that people did not join Labor to help the Liberals but ''one of the things that did help them was a lack of discipline''. She called for discipline for the year ahead.
Ms Gillard listed her government's achievements and said global economic change was creating public anxiety.

The ''tough decisions'' Labor made last year, such as putting a price on carbon, had caused political pain. This year, the benefits of some of those decisions would become evident, such as tax cuts and pension rises associated with the price on carbon.
Sources said a small number of MPs, including Deb O'Neill, Steve Georganas and Rob Mitchell, berated anonymous colleagues who were briefing the media on the leadership and destabilising the government.

Ms O'Neill, from NSW, was cited as telling Rudd supporters to ''suck it up and move on''.

Other MPs said the government was failing to sell its message.

The global media baron Rupert Murdoch joined the fray by using Twitter to argue against a Rudd revival. ''Gillard once good education minister, now prisoner of minority greenies. Rudd still delusional who nobody could work with. Nobody else?'' Mr Murdoch tweeted.

The Herald/Nielsen poll of 1400 people was taken from Thursday night to Saturday night, after the Australia Day fracas and at the height of leadership speculation. It found Ms Gillard's approval rose 5 points to 40 per cent and her disapproval fell 3 points to 55 per cent. These are her best figures since May.

Despite the Coalition being ahead of Labor, Tony Abbott's popularity remains on a par with Ms Gillard's. His approval rating was steady at 41 per cent and his disapproval 54 per cent.
Ms Gillard's rating as preferred prime minister rose 6 points to 48 per cent, while Mr Abbott's was steady at 46 per cent.

Labor's two-party-preferred vote of 47 per cent was its best since November 2010. This was based on how preferences flowed at the 2010 election. When those polled were asked how they would allocate preferences, the two-party vote was 52 per cent Coalition to 48 per cent Labor.

Ms Gillard told the Seven Network program Sunday last night she believed she could lead Labor to victory in the 2013 election.

About 80 of the 103-strong caucus attended yesterday's strategy session. Later, MPs went to The Lodge for a barbecue and a pep talk by the former prime minister Bob Hawke.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/poll-throws-gillard-a-lifeline-20120205-1qzum.html#ixzz1ndI9TK2a

The outstanding thing about the ALP is that its members are incurably romantic.
The last time I wrote for the Herald at its request I could support former Minister John Faulkner in pursuing unity within the ALP nationally, putting aside faction for a wider and greater goal.
Faulkner’s speech on the subject resonated throughout the party, but it is clear that it fell on at least one deaf ear.
In 1992, when I was a new boy in the Prime Minister’s office, I went a step too far in talking to one of the ‘god correspondents’ in the Press Gallery, who took my comment as a threat.
I was forgiven my naiveté but given some advice: “When you want to take someone off at the knees in this business, don’t tell him you’re coming; and when you do come, take him off at the shoulders.” It was my first bollocking and, in any job, you remember that.
In 2010, the elected Federal Labor members did not have the blood to take Mr Rudd out in a ballot that would have humiliated him. He was, after all, the man who led the party back into office from opposition, and that is the most difficult achievement in Federal politics.
Oceans of ink were wasted in newspapers of that period on “Captain Chaos” and his rule by fear – as Barrie Cassidy put it in the Canberra Times. Rowan Callick called him, in The Australian, a “control freak”.
John Lyons, of The Australian, wrote that the problem was the absence of anyone with the strength to say “no” to him. Lyons was correct in citing the strongmen who had to stand up to Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard: people like Barrie Cassidy, Don Russell and – another Newcastle boy – Arthur Sinodinos; and me, once in a while ... but I had learned to deflect rather than clashing head on.
Mr Rudd appeared to have put all his eggs in the basket of a climate change meeting in Copenhagen. When it failed – the meeting, that is; not Mr Rudd – the machinery of government seemed to freeze.
The most senior person after Mr Rudd was Ms Gillard. She won not only the prime ministership but the first hung parliament since World War II. She must be the unluckiest PM in our history.
Still, she had the negotiating skills to forge a government, skills that few in the ALP would expect from Mr Rudd.
Last week we had the Australian Foreign Minister resign, in front of the all the Foreign Ministers of the G20, then cut out of his appointment in London to discuss the dire situation in Syria to rescue Australia from its Prime Minister.
Ms Gillard’s office has bright young staff, eager, thorough, even aggressive, but without long memories.
In the last days of the 2010 election campaign, Robert French, Chief Justice of the High Court, overturned decisions going back to King in 1972 in relation to the enrolment of 18-year old voters, struck out laws changed by Prime Minister Howard, and permitted some 100,000 new voters to enrol. Great excitement followed.
One might have expected everyone in that office to remember Chief Justice French.
Yet, when the “Malaysian solution” rolled around, despite all legal opinions, gathered by the office and beyond, even from Ministers, none anticipated the Chief Justice’s capacities.
This week we have the former Prime Minister and former Foreign Minister saying that he wants to finish what he did not finish. One question he has to face must be how it came to this: why did he not finish it when he had the power to do so?
By his own choice, however, he is no longer a minister. The romantics of the ALP will still accommodate him in the party room.
The hard heads know that this ballot is not an end; it’s the beginning of the next campaign, which must be directed not at Labor’s opponents but towards the hopes of all Australians.

Silent menace

Silent menace

PUBLISHED: 11 FEB 2012 00:04:00 | UPDATED: 15 FEB 2012 17:54:45

TONY WALKER

Paul Keating delivered the best lines of a gathering at the Crown Palladium in Melbourne on Wednesday that could reasonably be described as the power event of the year – the American Australian Association gala dinner.

Keating reminded his audience that resurrection is possible in politics. After all, he had dragged his party back from a 26 per cent primary vote in the polls to overwhelm John Hewson in the “unloseable’’ election of 1993.

Keating made no swiping reference to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, locked as they are in a death march, or to the Labor Party more generally, which finds itself in circumstances not dissimilar from the Sartre play No Exit in which there is no escape for the participants.

Keating didn’t need to. His meaning was clear: politics is a fickle business in which opportunity needs to be seized, boldness is rewarded and dumb luck, including the mistakes of one’s opponents, is important.

Above all, a leader needs clear air, something denied Gillard in the sulphurous atmosphere that prevails within her ranks.

As Keating spoke, you sensed the audience’s attention in that vast palladium auditorium, part Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, part Stardust Room in New York, shifting towards Canberra where a political class obsesses night and day over a Labor leadership that is both dysfunctional and damaged goods.

The Gillard-Rudd rivalry – so putrid you can’t believe the depth of dislike that prevails – is a huge distraction and unsustainable short of a leadership challenge, or an armistice – or an election; leaving aside a prime ministerial gag order on ministers talking to newspaper editors aimed squarely at Rudd.

You would probably have to go back a century to the era of William Morris Hughes, who ratted on his party over conscription to find a moment in Labor history when personality differences scarred the party to such a degree, and less explicably now because issues are petty by comparison.

Gillard this week steadied her leadership, a slightly better Neilsen poll on Monday helped, and so did mistakes by the Coalition which behaves raggedly when it comes under pressure over its economic policymaking.

But if Gillard believed that a less bad week for her politically would enable her to put the Rudd issue to rest, if only for a moment, she would have been reminded on Thursday of the costs to Labor and the country of Rudd’s silent menace – as if he’s stalking her prime ministership via the media.

On the 7.30 Report, Chris Uhlmann asked three pertinent questions which are worth paraphrasing. They were, 1. Why don’t you just tell Kevin Rudd to stop briefing the media against you? 2. Why don’t you ask him to stop briefing journalists because clearly he is? 3. Why don’t you ask him to have a press conference and say he won’t challenge?

What could Gillard do beyond obfuscate because the fact is she’s trapped by circumstances in the political equivalent of a very bad marriage, one that some might regard as abusive.

If you ask one of Gillard’s people why they don’t act against the Prime Minister’s tormentor – dress him down, demote him, send him to the back bench, or frog-march him out of the party room – responses vary.

Among them is an observation that Rudd is adept at “walking up to the line and not crossing it’’ in a way that suggests the Rudd tactic against John Howard of “playing with his mind’’ is also being deployed against Gillard.

How this will end is unclear beyond the near certainty that if Labor continues to bleed, it will suffer awful retribution at the hands of an Australian people whose tolerance is being stretched by the shenanigans in Canberra.

Key to all this are Rudd’s own intentions, and game-plan insofar as he has a strategy to enable him to engage in a redemptive process, assuming he remains unwilling to make his peace with Gillard.

Readers can judge for themselves whether we are talking in Rudd’s case about redemption or vindication, or something darker such as vengeance.

Over some months the Weekend Australian Financial Review interviewed Rudd’s cabinet colleagues, former staff members, backers, enemies, those who proclaim neutrality, bureaucrats who interacted with him, and party elders who have drifted out of day-to-day politics.

These conversations took place on background given the sensitivities involved and yielded many cutting personal observations that flowed both ways in which all sides briefed against each other, including anecdotes about truly idiosyncratic behaviour on the part of the former prime minister.

Of dozens of anecdotes, one stands out and relates to an episode that occurred when Rudd was opposition leader and had just finished a press conference at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices in Sydney. In an ante-room afterwards, the aspiring prime minister lost it.

Apparently it had gone one question too long, prompting an extraordinary outburst from Rudd who, in the words of one of his then staff, “went mental and started kicking the wall and banging his head against it”.

“What the staff were worried about was security cameras,’’ the staff member recalls. “We thought ‘shit, what if the Australian Federal Police give the tapes to [John] Howard’.’’

Rudd himself declined to be interviewed on – or off – the record on these and other matters. His chief of staff did not return phone calls.

Seeking a conclusion that was both fair to Rudd’s reputation and to the narrative of a party in turmoil due to his omnivorous ambitions, I turned to a former senior colleague who has known him over a long period inside and outside federal Parliament.

This individual is prepared to accept that Rudd may have learned from his experiences and that, indeed, redemption is possible, but he remains dubious. He arrives for our conversation with a list of five questions that would need to be addressed before Rudd could expect to be given another chance.

1.Can he work with colleagues collaboratively? 2. Can he tolerate advisers in his office who might be smarter than him? 3. Can he focus on an agenda that is limited to a manageable list of important issues and not set “100 policy ships sailing in Lake Burley Griffin?’’ 4. Can he work with colleagues who were instrumental in his downfall? 5. Can he switch the agenda to the government’s positives and in the process roll-up Tony Abbott?

The answer to all these questions is “don’t know’’ or “he didn’t manage to do so previously’’ so why would you believe it would be possible this time round. “Unless they believe he can do those things, why swallow all the problems that beset them before,’’ this individual says.

In the end Rudd’s personality as much as his intellect and political skills will be judged by those who might consider putting their trust in him again, and in this regard the former prime minister will encounter headwinds.

“Kevin Rudd is very high on rationality and very low on intuitive ability,’’ was how one of those who worked closely with him put it by way of contrast with Rudd’s predecessors Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, who more or less maintained a balance between rationality and intuition.

This individual also described as Labor’s “modern tragedy’’ Gillard’s and Rudd’s inability to work together. “Her strengths complement his weaknesses and vice-versa,’’ he said. “Together they would be unstoppable. It’s a tragedy for modern Labor they failed.’’

In the Rudd game plan, among arguments being advanced on his behalf is the “changed man’’ rationale. The former prime minister has accepted the error of his ways, including a litany of questionable behaviour – towards staff, colleagues and processes.

Astonishingly, he did not speak to Terry Moran, the head of his department, for three months in the last year of his prime ministership.

The redemptive Rudd was on display in The Sydney Morning Herald last year when he told the newspaper his loss of the prime ministership enabled him to “reflect and learn”.

“For me it’s been good to open discussion of what went right and what went wrong,’’ he said. Conversations with colleagues about his managerial style were “sometimes painful”, he added.

The question for Rudd’s colleagues, no less for the electorate itself, is whether it is possible for a difficult – by his own admission – personality to learn from his mistakes. Many of Rudd’s colleagues doubt it, including staff members who retired – or were retired – from battle experiencing a Canberra version of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“The key question is can he learn from his mistakes and character flaws? I doubt it,’’ says a former staffer who endured a tempestuous period during the Rudd years characterised by a high churn rate among employees.

Among more perceptive observations, a senior Canberra official who was close to Rudd likens him to a recovering alcoholic who attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings but also “needs to have people around him to help sustain the right sort of behaviour’’.

More perhaps than any other leadership conflict in Labor’s history, including the flash-fire bitterness engendered in the Bob Hawke/Bill Hayden contest, the angst surrounding the Gillard-Rudd standoff is like a gangrenous limb that defies all remedies short of amputation.

Indeed, one of Rudd’s principal backers likened the situation to one of those “old saw movies’’ in which limbs are progressively hacked away as the film progresses to the point where not much is left in the end apart from severed torsos.

A picture emerged from these interviews that is both extraordinarily complex and relatively simple at the same time. Rudd wants his old job back. Gillard has no intention of yielding. In the meantime, Labor’s prospects drift to hell in a hand-basket.

The complication arises from how Rudd plans to convert his own desire for redemption, vindication and vengeance, his relatively better (than Gillard) standing in the polls, Labor’s disastrous primary vote, and looming panic in the Caucus into the 52 votes needed to secure a plurality of 103 Caucus members.

Until such time as fate intervenes in the form of another bad run of polls, or loss of a pencil thin majority in the hung parliament due to something unforeseen, or a prime ministerial miscalculation, or force majeure in the form of a cataclysmic event, Rudd is being counselled to be patient.

Near certain is that something unpredictable will happen to upset whatever calculus represents prevailing wisdom.

This waiting game is imposing on the former prime minister the sort of discipline that has eluded him in the past. It remains to be seen whether he can keep it up, but his backers are urging him to remember that “less is more’’.

Rudd’s Trappist phase, in which he restricts himself to discreet conversations with selected journalists, will be dictated by the timing of leadership developments, and here there is no clear blueprint. His supporters say they expect him to move before mid-year, after having predicted an earlier thrust.

The Foreign Minister does not have the numbers for a “one-hit’’ challenge at this stage, and may find them hard to come by, but testimony to the hair trigger environment that prevails within the Labor Party is that all sorts of benchmarks and datelines are finding their way into speculation about timing, including the arrival of Rudd’s first grandchild in April.

Grandpa Rudd is something his supporters hope will contribute to a more avuncular image. AWomen’s Weekly spread awaits.

Among arguments in the arsenal of those promoting Rudd’s wares is the “inevitability’’ of his succession, that change is inevitable and in the end Caucus will come to its senses and conclude “there is no alternative but Rudd’’.

As one of his more prominent supporters puts it: “It’s now got to the stage where the gods have decided. In my view it [a leadership change] is inevitable.’’

Or as another prominent supporter observed: “It’s a choice between political rivals, not a beauty contest.’’

That is true in the sense that there is not much that is pretty about Labor’s leadership machinations that bring forth a high level of paranoia on all sides, and merely serve to reinforce whatever ill-will exists.

The latest example of this has to do with an ABC Four Corners program that is due to be screened on Monday and is occasioning anxiety in both the Gillard and Rudd camps because of concerns the program will play into leadership tensions.

Gillard’s people fear the program will reopen old wounds on circumstances surrounding Rudd’s removal, including particularly claims she colluded with the big miners to bring her predecessor unstuck over the mining tax that was a principal cause of his downfall.

At this stage Four Corners has been circumspect about the program which remains a work in progress, but it is a measure of Labor’s skittishness that worries about possible fallout from the segment are prompting an exercise in damage limitation on the part of the Prime Minister’s office.

What this tells you is there is not much that happens in the national discourse these days that avoids scrutiny through the prism of Labor leadership tensions.

The Australian Financial Review

TONY WALKER

 

What really ails Labor?

By Chris Wallace

Political parties are prone to flux. The conservative and liberal forces in Australian politics have formed, re-formed and re-formed again in various party permutations over the course of the last one hundred years in Australia. And while the Australian Labor Party projects itself as a century-old monolith, it suffered three profound fractures during the same period – over conscription in 1916, over economic strategy during the Great Depression in the early 1930s, and over communism in 1955. Each time the fractures healed but not before generating a plethora of prognostications and prescriptions for how one of the world’s original social democratic parties should be fixed.

Troy Bramston’s Looking for the Light on the Hill: Modern Labor’s Challenges is the latest in the decades’ long series of books angsting over the party that even an elephant gun can’t kill. Each cycle of concern has its own particularities but they all share this: a sweaty, desperate fear that this time the party really could be over. Yet to the frustration of Labor’s federal political opponents who themselves have been through more rebadgings over the past century than some soap powders, it never is.

Bramston tips his hat to his handwringing forebears, then distinguishes his book from theirs as the one which shows “how Labor can get its mojo back with new ideas, a new strategy, and a refreshing of the party’s values”. It’s readable and well-intended but suffers serious problems concerning the credibility of Bramston as a party prognosticator, the fact that much of his critique applies equally to the Coalition and finally the narrowness of his search for reasons explaining Labor’s current troubles.

Firstly, the credibility problem – and I’m not referring to the fact that Bramston is either a Bright Young Thing or the Spawn of the Devil depending on whom you talk to in the party. (Either way I give him points for sitting down and writing a book.) Rather it’s that if you purport to tell an organization as significant as the ALP what to do and expect to be taken seriously, you don’t cast it in terms of “how Labor can get its mojo back”. It’s hard to get past page 11 of Looking for the Light on the Hill where Bramston says this without expecting cornflake-weight thinking on the pages following. 

The early pages where Bramston positions himself within the Labor firmament only reinforce the impression of marginality. He was Rudd’s speechwriter in Opposition but the leader interactions he catalogues are slight at best. Rudd’s failure to make a family friendly spot on his large prime ministerial staff for Bramston, whose wife had one small baby and another on the way by the 2007 election, underlines the impression he unintentionally conveys that the PM wasn’t exactly hanging on his every word. So, the thought goes through the reader’s head, why should I? (Bramston worked on Tony Burke’s staff instead.)

There is one absolute pearl, though, for which historians must thank Bramston: his revelation that in a brief exchange on election night, Kevin Rudd revealed he already had prime ministerial failure on his mind. “In my diary,” Bramston says, “I wrote that Rudd said to me, ‘Well, I hope I don’t end up like Jim Scullin in 1929.’ Fascinating!

The second problem with Bramston’s book is that a significant chunk of his analysis applies as much to the Liberal and National parties as it does to the ALP, namely that the party organization:

…has lost its close links with the community, and does little to facilitate or encourage activism in the party’s affairs. The party is hollow at its core… Membership is in long-term decline, branches are closing at a rapid rate, and quality candidates for parliament are few and far between. 

This is a serious issue but no convincing case is made for it being a bigger problem for Labor than it is for the Coalition parties, so it’s not much use as part of the explanation for Labor’s declining electoral fortunes.

The third problem is the narrowness of Bramston’s search for factors that do separate Labor’s trajectory from that of the Coalition parties and are capable of explaining its malaise in the polls. “Leadership anxiety”, “no animating vision”, “the party stands for little”… Bramston leaves no stock standard cliché of catastrophe unused as he rolls out one generalization after another in relation to recent Labor history.

Here’s a thought teaser for Bramston. How do you think any leader – Labor, Liberal or Calathumpian – would fare when their party’s political capital had been squandered by their failed predecessor, where that predecessor sabotaged an election campaign with leaks, and where the predecessor’s predecessor but one decided to throw some election bombs in for good measure? And how do you think their polling would look after somehow miraculously patching together, and holding together, a minority government subjected to continual post-election internal sabotage by that predecessor, aided and abetted by a hostile media oligopoly? And as for standing for nothing - what about carbon pricing, the mining tax, NBN, paid maternity leave and the best economic policy results in the developed world?

There’ll always be a market in Australia for books by Labor handwringers. One day we’ll get one worthy of the challenge the party really faces.

This first appeared in the Australian Spectator, 17 December 2011

 

No there there

No there there

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Mumble Blog | 06February 2012|57 Comments

Why do swinging voters vote they way they do?

One way to attempt to answer this is to put yourself in the mind of a “typical” one. Easier said than done of course; there is not just one type but many, with many different mindsets. 

 

More importantly our own personal biases will inevitably influence this exercise.

Still, my basic model starts with the voter not being interested in politics. They are keen on economic security, wealth accumulation. They tend to be risk-averse.

In this template, governments get elected and then win a couple of elections and then people start thinking it might be worth the other side having a go. Then the voter’s question becomes: is the Opposition up to it?

Most important is economic security. Will the alternative make a mess of things? Do they seem safe? Or a bit wild-eyed, like they might embark on a mad experiment? (Hullo Mark Latham.)

This equation doesn’t seem to apply today. We’re only in the second term. Several commentators have noted that this government has “aged prematurely”. But I don’t believe that happens.

One could have said that about the Howard government at various times in its first two terms.

Think of Mr & Mrs Suburbs and think of all prime ministers in living memory. The “average voter” might like them or not like them, they might want to have a beer with them or they couldn’t think of anything worse.  They might think they’re the biggest shit to ever walk the Earth, or quite a nice person. (They usually end up being closer to the former.)

But that person is Prime Minister and has the demeanour of one. And if aliens from outer space attacked, people know the Prime Minister would pull out all stops to defend us.

Julia Gillard is the first in living memory not to enjoy that authority. And it’s not because she’s a woman. It’s her own fault.

Upon becoming Prime Minister in 2010 she evidently thought the election would be a charm contest. She tried to be the girl next door, someone folks can relate to. Not up herself.

She succeeded in this, and in the process made Tony Abbott look Prime Ministerial.

After the election she persisted, for example disclosing her lack of enthusiasm for foreign affairs. Some people, including no doubt the odd party insider, thought that was “clever politics”. She was going over the head of the “elites”, speaking directly to ordinary Australians.

People may tell party pollsters they want someone like that to be Prime Minister, but they don’t really.

Why is Labor in the doldrums? I don’t believe it’s policy, much less the party structure. I reckon it’s Gillard’s fault.

And Wayne Swan’s. When Swan’s on the telly people see a Treasurer who has learnt his lines but never seems to believe what he’s saying.

How scary is that?

If Labor is to be competitive at the next election, Gillard and Swan need to leave their positions.

There are many reasons not to go back to Kevin Rudd. If Gillard is the most woeful politician to serve as Australian Prime Minister in a long time, Rudd was the most gutless. His polling numbers floated around the stratosphere but he was terrified of the electorate.

He treated his colleagues appallingly and big-noted himself at their expense. He and Swan refused to talk economics, leaving a vacuum which the Opposition happily filled with tales of monstrous debt.

Perhaps worst of all he felt the obligation to always be in the news cycle.

But Rudd did have that Prime Ministerial authority. He was not the boy next door.

The best reason to bring back Rudd would be the public repudiation it would deliver to the 2010 coup and the people behind it.

And Swanny would surely go—a necessary condition for a Labor recovery.

The only other contender with considering, Stephen Smith, would probably keep Swan as Treasurer. The two are close.

In fact little would change apart from the leader.  It would be another win for the machinemen, a sign to voters that this self-indulgent party still doesn’t get it.

Only Rudd would guarantee big changes at the top.

I believe if the party hadn’t toppled Rudd it would have won the 2010 election with a majority similar to that of 2007. Then continuing dysfunction and poor behaviour would probably have led them to knife him this term.

And despite Australia weathering the global financial crisis these are probably not conditions conducive to long term governments. A third term was always going to be tough.

But the party is not in the dire straits everyone (including the parliamentary party) seems to believe. Surviving the next election is very achievable under a decent leader.

Replacing Gillard with Simon Crean or Bill Shorten would be the third and fourth best options. The idea of a political “night watchman” is preposterous, but some MPs are seriously considering it.

Labor has a habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Let’s see if they can break it.

 

Australian Labor News - Let's move Australia forward

Australian Labor News - Let's move Australia forward.

The Absence of Trust (by James Murdoch: MacTaggart Lecture 2009, Edinburgh)

2009 Edinburgh International Television Festival
MacTaggart Lecture
James Murdoch
28 August 2009

THE ABSENCE OF TRUST

Good evening and thank you for having me here tonight. Thanks also to Tim for those kind words of welcome.

I think this is the first time that someone who has delivered the alternative MacTaggart has graduated – if that’s the right word – to the real thing.

So I am both proud and honoured to be paving the way for Ant and Dec, who should be standing here tonight in 2018 if this trend continues.

Of course I’m flattered to be asked, but I am also a little worried. Does this finally mark my invitation to join the British broadcasting establishment?

While that thought does terrify me, I am comforted in the knowledge that after my remarks my membership will have been a brief one…

And it also occurred to me that I qualified for the invitation only after I gave up my executive role at Sky. I now spend most of my time engaged in other parts of the world and other parts of the media industry. Perhaps that means I am regarded as being safely at a bit of a distance.

But I do welcome the opportunity to talk to you all about the media in the UK – and a slight distancing might help.

You can be the judges of that.

When we gather as an industry, it’s natural for us to talk about the future. I’d like to do something different tonight: to turn our focus firmly to the present. Because the path we are already on is a dangerous one.

In particular, what I want to discuss is our digital present that is right here – it has been here for a while, in fact. A digital present that ought to compel us to make some urgent choices about where we want to go as an industry and as a society: choices which, I will argue tonight, we are currently either avoiding or mishandling.

It’s easy to lose sight of how digital we already are.

The inescapable thing about the present is that everything in it is already digital. Even if part of the consumption of media remains in the analogue world – opening a newspaper or a book, going to see a film in a cinema – the production of those creative works is already wholly digital, and the proportion that is consumed by digital means is growing all the time.

So talking about a coming digital future, or a digital transformation, is to ignore the evidence that it has already happened.

Why do I think we are getting this wrong? Why do I believe we need to change direction as a matter of urgency? It’s quite simple.

Because we have analogue attitudes in a digital age.

We have business models and a policy framework based on spectrum scarcity.

We have limited choice, and we have central planning.

The result is lost opportunities for enterprise, free choice and commercial investment.

If we recognise that truth and change in the right way, the opportunities and benefits for all of us and – more importantly – for consumers and society are powerful and attractive.

We know we have to change: the digital present is forcing us to make urgent choices.

First, the velocity of the transformation of our industry has radically increased. You know this and I don’t need to dwell on it.

Second, in this rapidly changing world the boundaries between media have broken down.

People consume content in a very fluid way, and that is reflected in the way we provide it. What were once separate forms of communication, or separate media, are now increasingly interconnected and exchangeable. So we no longer have a TV market, a newspaper market, a publishing market. We have, indisputably, an all-media market.

Third, the boundaries of what we mean by media are themselves expanding. In Japan, you can now buy your granny a mobile phone called a ‘raku raku’ – which means ‘easy easy’ – designed specifically for the elderly. It has a built-in pedometer to track how many steps she is taking each day. And you can set that so that it sends a daily e-mail to your inbox, letting you know your granny is still up and about and getting the right amount of exercise. There might be an advertisement attached. Is that media? Or health-care provision? Or is it both?

This all sounds like a dynamic, exciting, thriving sector to be part of. Moving faster, being more interconnected, expanding its scope. And in some ways it is.

But the present is not as great as we tell ourselves.

You don’t need to scratch the surface very hard to see that opportunities for media businesses are limited, investment and innovation are constrained, and creativity is reduced.

This is bad for customers and society.

This year is the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

It argued that the most dramatic evolutionary changes can occur through an  entirely natural process. Darwin proved that evolution is unmanaged.

These views were an enormous challenge to Victorian religious orthodoxy.
They remain a provocation to many people today. The number who reject Darwin and cling to the concept of creationism is substantial. And it crops up in some surprising places.

For example, right here in the broadcasting sector in the UK.

The consensus appears to be that creationism – the belief in a managed process with an omniscient authority – is the only way to achieve successful outcomes. There is general agreement that the natural operation of the market is inadequate, and that a better outcome can be achieved through the wisdom and activity of governments and regulators.

This creationist approach is similar to the industrial planning which went out of fashion in other sectors in the 1970s. It failed then. It’s failing now.

When I say this I feel like a crazy relative who everyone is a little embarrassed by and for sure is not to be taken too seriously. But tonight you have invited me to join the party and I am going to have a crack at persuading you that we can’t go on like this.

Tonight I will argue that while creationism may provide a comfortable illusion of certainty in the short-term, its harmful effects are real and they are significant.

Creationism penalises the poorest in our society with regressive taxes and policies – like the licence fee and digital switchover; It promotes inefficient infrastructure in the shape of digital terrestrial television; It creates unaccountable institutions – like the BBC Trust, Channel 4 and Ofcom; And now, in the all-media marketplace,it threatens significant damage to important spheres of human enterprise and endeavour – the provision of  independent news, investment in professional journalism, and the innovation and growth of the creative industries.

We are on the wrong path – but we can find the right one.

The right path is all about trusting and empowering consumers. It is about embracing private enterprise and profit as a driver of investment, innovation and independence. And the dramatic reduction of the activities of the state in our sector.

If we do take that better way, then we – all of us in this room and in our wider industry – will make a genuine contribution to a better-informed society; one in which trust in people and their freedom to choose is central to the way we behave.

Often the unique position that the business of ideas enjoys in a free society is used as a justification for greater intrusion and control. On the contrary, its very specialness demands an unusual and vigorous… stillness.

Let’s explore the role of creationism in our sector by asking a few basic
questions.

First question. How do the authorities currently approach intervening in and regulating the media industries?

With relish, is the answer.

In the past five years Ofcom launched nearly 450 consultations – nearly two every week. It has produced three Public Service Broadcasting annual reports, and two Public Service Broadcasting reviews in five phases. These alone have in total – including appendices, special reports and other related material – amounted to over five thousand pages and spawned another 18,000 pages of responses. And those reports have been only a small proportion of the total activity by the regulator. For any of you who missed  them this has included science fiction – a report on ‘Entertainment in the UK in 2028′, and the no doubt vital guide on ‘How to Download’, which teenagers across the land could barely have survived without.

Second question. Is it rational for the authorities to try to manage the media industry in this way? Not at all.

The study of evolution reminds us that it is very difficult to predict the outcomes of events. Interventions can have unforeseen consequences, even when dealing with organisations or marketplaces which seem very easy to understand.

Witness the international banana market. In the 1950s the banana export industry faced a problem: the then dominant Gros Michel – or ‘Big Mike’ – variety was being wiped out by a fungus called Panama Disease. The industry took the decision to replace the entire world export crop with a supposedly disease-resistant variety called the Cavendish banana – the one  we eat today. Unfortunately it now appears that these bananas may themselves be vulnerable to a different kind of Panama Disease. Since Cavendish bananas are genetically identical sterile clones, they cannot build up any resistance.

There are important lessons here: attempts to manage natural diversity have unpredictable consequences and are more likely than not to fail over the long-term.

Talking of bananas brings me neatly to our own authorities and their interventions in the all-media marketplace. Some of these looked, even without the benefit of hindsight, pretty difficult to justify at the time.

To use an example I am familiar with, take the decision of the European Commission to require the broadcasting rights to Premier League football to be divided up so that no one company could buy all the rights. The consequences of that move were predictable enough: customers having to pay more for the same thing because they’d need two subscriptions. However, in defiance of common sense, the Commission apparently believed that prices would instead fall.

Here, the repeated assertion by Ofcom of its bias against intervention is becoming impossible to believe in the face of so much evidence of the exact opposite.

A radical reorientation of the regulatory approach is necessary if dynamism and innovation is going to be central to the UK media industry.

The discipline required is to contemplate intervention only on the evidence of actual and serious harm to the interests of consumers: not merely because a regulator armed with a set of prejudices and a spreadsheet believes that a bit of tinkering here and there could make the world a better place.

Third question. What do the results of these interventions actually look like? Let’s judge by results.

According to the authorities – and I paraphrase – we should have a diverse broadcasting ecology with many PSB providers; a BBC that is not too dominant; growing investment in content of high quality; and high levels of UK production.

Now I invite you to take a look around you. Decades of ever-increasing planning and intervention have produced very different outcomes.

The BBC is dominant. Other organisations might rise and fall but the BBC’s income is guaranteed and growing.

In stark contrast, the other terrestrial networks are struggling.

Channel 4 has cut its programme budget by 10%, Five by 25%. Spending on original British children’s programming has fallen by nearly 40% since 2004, including, inexplicably, a 21% fall at the BBC at a time when the Corporation has been able to spend £100m a year out-bidding commercial channels for US programming – a figure which has increased by a quarter in the past two years.

The problems of the terrestrial broadcasters are not about the economic downturn, although it has thrown the issue into sharp relief.

It is not a coincidence that Google has a higher percentage of advertising spending in the UK than anywhere else in the world: it is a consequence of a tightly restricted commercial television sector.

That money will not come back. It is not that ad-funded television is dead: it is just a permanently smaller fish in a bigger pond.

Fourth question. Is this creationism good for investment? No. A heavily regulated environment with a large public sector crowds out the opportunity for profit, hinders the creation of new jobs, and dampens innovation in our sector.

We don’t even have the basics in place to protect creative work. Whether it’s shoplifting at HMV or pirating the same movie online, theft is theft. They are both crimes and should be treated accordingly. The government dithers – dimly aware of what it has to do but afraid to do it.

The investment climate in media in the UK reminds me of Tolstoy’s dictum that all happy families resemble one another, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. True, none of the markets I have experience of is completely happy, but there are things to welcome – the regulatory professionalism of Germany, the growth opportunities of India – even France outdoes us in its robust defence of intellectual property. The problem with the
UK is that it is unhappy in every way: it’s the Addams family of world media.

If such determined efforts to manage the marketplace are failing, it might be useful to look at alternative approaches.

One such approach might be to trust people.

Consider Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman – who discovered that reducing the amount of signs and traffic markings in towns and villages does not make roads more dangerous, as you might imagine. On the contrary, people drive more safely and there are fewer accidents. As Monderman said: “If you treat drivers like idiots, they act as idiots. Never treat anyone in the
public realm as an idiot, always assume they have intelligence.”

In contrast, the authorities in the UK and their clients: those dependent agencies, entities and enterprises, which one way or the other have been made to rely on the largesse of the state – have refused to trust the people who matter – the people who pay the bills as customers and as tax-payers.

Indeed, the defining characteristic of the UK broadcasting consensus is the absence of trust.

Yet there is an example right on our doorstep of the positive developments that come about when we encourage a world of trust and free choice.

Within the next few months, the number of homes in the UK that enjoy some form of television that they freely choose to pay for will top fifty percent. This steady growth of choice-driven television has nothing to do with public policy.

In fact, the authorities have consistently favoured so called free-to-air broadcasting. Yet, as you might expect, people who are used to paying for films, books, internet access and other quality content, do not see anything strange in paying for quality television too.

When pay-television began in this country, it did so largely by providing programmes in genres which public service broadcasting served inadequately: such as 24-hour news, and a broad choice of sport and the latest films.

As originally with news and sport, so now with the arts and drama. Sky now offers four dedicated arts channels. Original commissioning by channels that customers choose to pay for is expanding and will continue to do so, not just from Sky but from the likes of National Geographic, History, MTV and the Disney Channel, to name a few. Sky alone now invests over £1 billion a year in UK content.

And it is this sector which has delivered so many innovations: from multichannel television in the first place, to the launch of digital, personal video recorders, high definition and soon 3D TV in the home.

All this – despite the dampening effect of a massive state-funded intervention which reduces the scope for programme investment and commissioning from independent production companies by private broadcasters. That is a major missed opportunity for the creative industries. And yet the authorities in the UK continue to seek more control and greater intervention.

There are many examples. First, the amount of detailed content regulation in UK broadcasting is astonishing.

Two or three times a month, Ofcom publishes a Broadcasting Bulletin – a recent version weighed in at 119 pages. Adjudications included judgments on whether it is fair to describe Middlesbrough as the worst place to live in the UK; and 20 pages on whether a BBC documentary on climate change was fair to two of the participants. Every year, roughly half-a-million words are being devoted to telling broadcasters what they can and cannot say.

Next, the UK and EU regulatory system also tightly controls advertising: the amount of advertising per hour, the availability of product placement, the distinction between advertising and editorial and so forth.

These rules often seem to have little connection with protecting people from real harm. As an example, Star Plus – one of News Corp’s Hindi language entertainment channels – has been unable to show in the UK the Indian version of ‘Are you smarter than a ten-year old?’ because the logo of an Indian mobile phone company, which does not even operate in this country, appears on the set. What exactly are they afraid of?

Excessive regulation can also have more serious consequences. The latest EU-inspired rules on scheduling of advertising restrict the number of ad breaks permitted in news programming. Television news is already a tough enough business. If implemented, these proposals could undermine the commercial viability of news broadcasting even further.

In addition, the system is concerned with imposing what it calls impartiality in broadcast news. It should hardly be necessary to point out that the mere selection of stories and their place in the running order is itself a process full of unacknowledged partiality.

The effect of the system is not to curb bias – bias is present in all news media – but simply to disguise it.

We should be honest about this: it is an impingement on freedom of speech and on the right of people to choose what kind of news to watch. How in an all-media marketplace can we justify this degree of control in one place and not in others?

Content control, advertising regulation and restrictions on freedom of speech. We have been brought up in this system. It probably seems as natural and inevitable as rainfall. But is it really necessary? Is there no alternative?

Other areas of the media have been able to get by without it. There is a strong alternative tradition with at least four centuries behind it – first of pamphlets and books, later of magazines and newspapers. From the broadsides of the Levellers, to the thundering 19th century Times, to The Sun fighting for the rights of veterans today – it is a tradition of free comment, of investigative reporting, of satirizing and exposing the behaviour of one’s betters.

Yes, the free press is fairly near the knuckle on occasion – it is noisy, disrespectful, raucous and quite capable of affronting people – it is frequently the despair of judges and it gets up the noses of politicians on a regular basis. But it is driven by the daily demand and choices of millions of people. It has had the profits to enable it to be fearless and independent. Great journalism does not get enough credit in our society, but it holds the powerful to account and plays a vital part in a functioning democracy.

Would we welcome a world in which The Times was told by the government how much religious coverage it had to carry?

In which there were a state newspaper with more money than the rest of the sector put together and 50% of the market?

In which cinemas were instructed how many ads they were allowed to put before the main feature?

In which Bloomsbury had to publish an equal number of pro-capitalist and pro- socialist books?

And, of course, we had to pay for an Ofpress to make sure all these rules were observed?

No, of course we would not. So why do we continue to assume that this approach is appropriate for broadcasting: especially as one communications medium is now barely distinguishable from another?

There is a word for this.

It’s not one that the system likes to hear, but let’s be honest: the right word is authoritarianism and it has always been part of our system.

It is hardly a secret that the early years of British broadcasting were dominated by concern about the potential of the new technology for creating social disruption. To deal with that perceived threat, there were two responses: to nationalise broadcasting through the BBC, and to ensure that any other provider was closely controlled and appropriately incentivised.

The greatest divergence between the rest of the media and broadcasting is the unspoken approach to the customer. In the regulated world of Public Service Broadcasting the customer does not exist: he or she is a passive creature – a viewer – in need of protection. In other parts of the media world – including pay television and newspapers – the customer is just that: someone whose very freedom to choose makes them important. And because they have power they are treated with great seriousness and respect, as people who are perfectly capable of making informed judgements about what to buy, read, and go and see.

The all-media world offers great opportunities for our society. We could take the approach of trust and freedom and apply it through the whole of the media, broadcasting included. But we are doing the opposite. We are using the interconnectedness of the media as a way of opening the door to the expansion of control.

This is already happening. There is a land-grab, pure and simple, going on – and in the interests of a free society it should be sternly resisted.

The land grab is spear-headed by the BBC. The scale and scope of its current activities and future ambitions is chilling.

Being funded by a universal hypothecated tax, the BBC feels empowered and obliged to try and offer something for everyone, even in areas well served by the market.

This whole approach is based on a mistaken view of the rationale behind state intervention and it produces bizarre and perverse outcomes. Rather than concentrating on areas where the market is not delivering, the BBC seeks to compete head-on for audiences with commercial providers to try and shore up support – or more accurately dampen opposition – to a compulsory licence fee.

Take Radio 2 as an example. A few years back, the BBC observed that it was losing share of listening among the 25-45 age-group, who were well served by commercial stations. Instead of stepping back and allowing the market to do its job, the BBC decided to reposition Radio 2 to go after this same group. Performers like Jonathan Ross were recruited on salaries no commercial competitor could afford, and audiences for Radio 2 have grown steadily as a result.

No doubt the BBC celebrates the fact that it now has well over half of all radio listening. But the consequent impoverishment of the once-successful commercial sector is testament to the Corporation’s inability to distinguish between what is good for it, and what is good for the country.

Of course, this problem is compounded by the fact that there is no real oversight of this £4.6 billion intervention in the market, as the abysmal record of the BBC Trust demonstrates. So the breadth of intervention is striking and it is continuing to expand unchecked.

The negative consequences of this expansion for innovation and development in the creative industries are serious.

The nationalisation of the Lonely Planet travel guide business was a particularly egregious example of the expansion of the state into providing magazines and websites on a commercial basis. It stood out for its overt recklessness and for the total failure of the BBC Trust to ask tough questions about what management was up to.

Others in other sectors can tell similar stories: and they observe that if the BBC suffers any setback in expansion, it is merely temporary: there will soon be another initiative requiring yet more management time to fight off.

As new entrants like Joost discovered, operating alongside the BBC, without access to its content or cross-promotional power, is not a task for the faint hearted. You need deep pockets, sheer bloody-mindedness and an army of lawyers just to make the BBC Trust sit up and pay attention.

Most importantly, in this all-media marketplace, the expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision, which are so important for our democracy.

Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly
difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet.

Yet it is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it.

We seem to have decided as a society to let independence and plurality wither. To let the BBC throttle the news market and then get bigger to compensate.

Most policy-making is however pre-occupied with the supposed malign intervention of capitalists focused on profit, and is blind to the growth of the state.

Nearly all local authorities already publish their own newspapers with flattering accounts of their doings. Over 60% of these pocket-Pravdas carry advertising, weakening the local presence of more critical voices. I saw recently an article in which the editor of the Guardian suggested that the government should fund local news coverage of court proceedings and council meetings, a profoundly undemocratic and ruinous idea.

Just ask yourself whether Camilla Cavendish’s award-winning campaign to open up the family courts would have occurred in a state-funded newspaper? The investigation would never have been allowed to take place.

For hundreds of years people have fought for the right to publish what they think.

Yet today the threat to independent news provision is serious and imminent.

More broadly, it must serve as a warning of what happens when state intervention and regulatory micro-management are allowed to go unchecked in the all-media marketplace. For the future health of our industry and our society, we must not allow these creationist tendencies to go on limiting the opportunities for independent commercial businesses, whether in journalism or any other form of content.

The private sector is a source of investment, talent, creativity and innovation in UK media.

But it will never fulfil its full potential unless we adopt a policy framework that recognises the centrality of commercial incentives.

This means accepting the simple truth that the ability to generate a profitable return is fundamental to the continuation of the quality, plurality and independence that we value so highly.

For that to happen our politicians and regulators need to have the courage to leave behind their analogue attitudes and choose a path for the digital present. So far, they have shown little inclination to do so.

Thanks to Darwin we understand that the evolution of a successful species is an unmanaged process. I have tried to show tonight that interventionist management of what is sometimes called the broadcasting ecology is not helping it – it is exhausting it.

Broadcasting is now part of a single all-media market. It brings two very different stories to that bigger market. On the one hand authoritarianism: endless intervention, regulation and control. On the other, the free part of the market where success has been achieved by a determined resistance to the constant efforts of the authorities to interfere.

I have argued tonight that this success is based on a very simple principle: trust people.

People are very good at making choices: choices about what media to consume; whether to pay for it and how much; what they think is acceptable to watch, read and hear; and the result of their billions of choices is that good companies survive, prosper, and proliferate.

That is a great story and it has been powerfully positive for our society.

But we are not learning from that. Governments and regulators are wonderfully crafted machines for mission creep. For them, the abolition of media boundaries is a trumpet call to expansion: to do more, regulate more, control more.

Sixty years ago George Orwell published 1984. Its message is more relevant now than ever.

As Orwell foretold, to let the state enjoy a near-monopoly of information is to
guarantee manipulation and distortion.

We must have a plurality of voices and they must be independent. Yet we have a system in which state-sponsored media – the BBC in particular – grow ever more dominant.

That process has to be reversed.

If we are to have that state sponsorship at all, then it is fundamental to the health of the creative industries, independent production, and professional journalism that it exists on a far, far smaller scale.

Above all we must have genuine independence in news media. Genuine independence is a rare thing. No amount of governance in the form of committees, regulators, trusts or advisory bodies is truly sufficient as a guarantor of independence. In fact, they curb speech.

On the contrary, independence is characterised by the absence of the apparatus of supervision and dependency.

Independence of faction, industrial or political.

Independence of subsidy, gift and patronage.

Independence is sustained by true accountability – the accountability owed to customers. People who buy the newspapers, open the application, decide to take out the television subscription – people who deliberately and willingly choose a service which they value.

And people value honest, fearless, and above all independent news coverage that challenges the consensus.

There is an inescapable conclusion that we must reach if we are to have a better society.

The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.