We have become accustomed, not too happily, to a form of political journalism in which opinion and news have increasingly merged, blunting the essential distinction between political commentary and detached objectivity.
With journalists now routinely writing both news and opinion this distinction has become impossibly blurred, undermining the impartiality and accuracy on which political journalism depends.
Nowhere is this decline more apparent than in the response to two very different, yet equally significant, events in our election-tuned political landscape this week.
Firstly, the much-anticipated interest rate cut of 0.25 per cent, the first in four years, and second, the Albanese Labor government’s announcement of its signature health policy with the largest investment in Medicare and bulk-billing since the Hawke Labor government created Medicare 40 years ago.
Both these announcements, you might think, would be considered unalloyed good news for the Albanese government and covered extensively given their importance. Well, think again.
Interest rate cut
The interest rate cut had barely been announced, let alone acknowledged as a welcome relief for mortgage holders, before it was promptly swept away in a tide of confected media negativity.
This ‘line-ball decision’ as the Australian Financial Review (Nine) incorrectly termed it, was a unanimous Reserve Bank board decision.
It was quickly depicted as a ‘one off’ or, as the ABC proclaimed ‘miserly, as good as it gets’.
The long-awaited rate cut soon became lost in reports of the Reserve Bank Governor, Michele Bullock, having ‘ruled out another pre-election interest rate cut’ – which she had not actually said.
Bullock, quite properly, refused to be drawn on when the next interest rate cut might be. To do otherwise would have risked the markets acting in advance. If anything, Bullock’s speech left open the prospect of further interest rate cuts this year, which the markets are already pricing in. Not so for our troubled media, whose perennial fear of appearing ‘biased’ by reporting good news objectively as just that, good news, had created a negative out of a positive.
Medicare expansion
And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the media’s response to the government’s Medicare expansion announcement was even worse – perverse to the point of surreal.
The prime minister announced a centrepiece of the government’s re-election campaign, a $8.5 billion commitment to extend bulk-billing from 11 million to 26 million people, with nine out of 10 GP visits to be bulk-billed by 2030.
This is the largest investment in Medicare in its 40-year history.
The government’s policy not only expands bulk-billing rates and availability but also increases GP training and nursing scholarships. It was fully costed and articulated over the next five years. The Coalition, on the other hand, is a policy void and in health policy it had done nothing – there has been no policy development, no consultation with medical providers about best practice, and no budget details.
Nevertheless, despite the absence of policy work, the Coalition immediately claimed that it would match the government’s Medicare expansion ‘dollar for dollar’ – note the careful wording.
This reflex political response, designed only to head off the obvious electoral positive for the government in prioritising universal health care, was scarcely worth a journalistic footnote. Yet it was this, not the government’s announcement, but the Coalition’s five-word response to it, that became the story – not just in one or two media reports, but in them all.
The same framing, the same wording, and – hey presto! – the Albanese government’s Medicare announcement had been ‘neutralised’, ‘the wind taken out of its sails’, and the government’s policy on Medicare was gifted to the Coalition by a media struggling to maintain any semblance of independent thought. Peter Dutton has since promised to fund the Coalition’s Medicare expansion by sacking 36,000 public servants.
False equivalence
What should have been a day of focused media coverage and analysis of the largest financial commitment to Medicare since it was created, became instead a false equivalence between Labor’s detailed and costed policy, and the Coalition’s cheap knock-off. Little wonder that a recent opinion poll showed most people are unaware of the Albanese government’s policy achievements in office.
It was a breath of fresh air to hear an informed and engaged conversation with Anthony Albanese from an entirely unexpected quarter, radio presenter and podcaster Abbie Chatfield. Her podcast ‘It’s a lot’ is one of the most popular in Australia, and Chatfield puts every jaded, cynical, tired old legacy journalist to shame. She’s interested, she wants to hear more, she doesn’t interrupt, she’s not trying to get a gotcha moment.
At last, media worth listening to.
♦ Emeritus Professor Jenny Hocking is an historian, political scientist and award-winning biographer.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
