Federal Budget 2017- Two Views

Mark Di Stefano is BuzzFeed’s political editor based in Australia. He is a former ABC News reporter. Mark regularly appears as a political commentator on ABC’s Insiders, Channel 10’s The Project and on Sky News. He is the author of What a Time to Be Alive: That and Other Lies of the 2016 Campaign. With a growing background of electoral backlash against wealth and the gap between haves and have-nots, the Coalition Budget for 2017 has been heralded as a Labor-lite mix of taxes and spending. On Monday 22 May 2017, Mark Di Stefano joined National Political Editor for The Daily Telegraph Sharri Markson to share some of the media statistics on what the budget means for Australia and the government.

 

FEDERAL BUDGET 2017 – TWO VIEWS

MARK DI STEFANO

 

Thank you Anne for the invitation to speak today. It’s an honour and a bit weird. Three years ago, I was a TV reporter up at ABC News in Darwin, chuckling about Gerard and Anne’s dog writing a weekly email — now here we are, life comes at you fast.

I thought I’d talk about what I know best – the internet. It should not be breaking news to anyone in this room that more and more Australians are primarily consuming news through this device: Their phone. To find the latest news from trusted journalists and mastheads, we open Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Apple News.

We can argue about whether Facebook and aggregators like Google and Apple are GOOD for journalism – I’d need a lot more to drink and that’s for another night. But with collapsing newspaper sales and flat TV figures, those in the media know that the mass audience is online and it’s BIG. The latest data suggests about 14 million Australians use Facebook, every. single. month. It’s an astronomical number for a population of 24 million. They’re not just communicating with each other in the comments of dachshund videos – like me and my fiance do. Millions are gobbling up news and sharing links.

I wanted to answer a question for The Sydney Institute: What were the most shared stories about the Budget? And… what can that tell us about how the government sold the budget, what was in the budget and the media itself?

To do that, I spent yesterday pulling the 100 most viral federal political news stories. The timeframe was the week before, budget week, and the week after. I used a social media monitoring tool using BuzzSumo. I promise you, though it sounds like BuzzFeed, it’s got nothing to do with us, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest,

This was the most popular story in the last three weeks in Australia.

 

 

It’s from ABC News, published the morning after the Budget: “Lambie welcomes welfare drug tests, calls for same regime for politicians”. It was shared across the Internet, 33,800 times. That’s a lot. Now remember that’s not SEEN by 33,000 people. That’s 33,000 people around Australia have put it on their Facebook feed, or Twitter timeline and shared it with hundreds or even thousands more people.

That’s one single story. In my three years working at BuzzFeed, trust me, for an Australian political story… that’s batshit insane.

Ok, want to see the top ten? Here are the top ten most popular federal political stories in the last three weeks.

 She actually appears three times in the top ten, for Fairfax and ABC News.

Take a bit of time to digest. What have we got:

• At 2… we’ve got a NYTimes report into Australia’s NBN, shared 21,000 times
• At 3… we’ve got The Daily Mail’s report into Greens senator Larissa Waters becoming the first Aussie politician to ever breastfeed in parliament. She actually appears three times in the top ten, for Fairfax and ABC News.
• We’ve got another drug testing for welfare story; this time on Nine News, yanking in 15,600 shares
• Rounding out the ten you have the AMA’s recent call for same sex marriage and federal Labor wavering on Adani

Because a lot of these figures are clumped, let me show you the next ten most popular stories. Digest a bit on this also:

• The big universities announcement from Fairfax, thousands of shares.
• Then welfare, drug testing, drug testing, drug testing, welfare, a bit of Trump talks with Turnbull and another breastfeeding story.

Now there’s a lot we can parse from the data – especially the top 100, which is in a spreadsheet I’ve posted online before this speech. I don’t even want to make this one of the points… but I’ll make it anyway: The Larissa Waters story was absurdly popular. Men in this room, don’t get in the way of Mum Facebook. It’s wild.

My first point is that the drug testing for welfare trial story was easily the most popular, widely shared story from federal politics in the last three weeks. In fact, 15 of the top 100 were stories, reports and commentary from different media outlets about the drug testing trial. That’s 15 per cent. Not just that… if you add all of those stories up – the story was shared about 130,000 times. It’s 20 per cent of all the shares on this list.

If you’re a member of Social Services Minister Christian Porter’s office, the very best thing that happened this Budget would have been watching Jacqui Lambie on a stool on Sunrise telling Kochie that we should test politicians for drugs, also.

My second point (an extension of the first) is that the drug testing for welfare recipients story was very popular. We reported on a YouGov poll of 1,000 people last week. It found two thirds supported the idea of drug testing welfare recipients. This is a victory for the government. The one Budget item that was truly mainstreamed, has wide support.

My third point is that the welfare crackdown story was everywhere. In the months leading up to the Budget, Social Services Minister Christian Porter and Human Services Minister Alan Tudge had been leaving breadcrumbs, that bit-by-bit amounted to a widely shared welfare crackdown narrative.

If you remember, 15 of the top 100 stories were about drug testing. Another 11 were about other welfare measures, like what Sharri reported about on the eve of the Budget – a demerit system – and restrictions on single person payments. Almost a quarter of the popular stories in the last three weeks have been about welfare.

My fourth point is that people paid attention to policy. The government’s big announcements of university cuts AND Gonski funding AND changes to healthcare led to very popular news reports. On universities and Gonski, the government owned their news cycles.

But think about this. Probably the biggest story in the wake of the Budget was the banking tax – just in terms of column inches and TV bulletins… and it’s also been stoked by party divisions and the banks themselves.

Note, not one story about banking tax broke through on this list.

My fifth point is that Labor was nowhere.

 

 

I went through and added a column to the spreadsheet. It was who was the lead element of the story. Was it Lambie, or the Greens, or the government leading the story? Labor, despite getting their Budget reply, had just five of the top 100.

If you cast mind your mind back two weeks, you’ll remember Bill Shorten had a bad day on the eve of the Budget. He released that racist, Australians first ad. Our BuzzFeed report on that ad, made this list.

My sixth point is that ABC News is the free, dominant news service.

 

I thought there’s no point in coming to Gerard’s house unless you’re going to take a jab at Aunty. Last week Fairfax’s Greg Hywood had a whinge to the Senate’s journalism inquiry about ABC News undermining commercial news services. I assume this is what he was talking about. Remember Fairfax was on a strike for a week during this period. ABC News has become a trusted source for political news and people share their stories big time.

My seventh point is that fake news is not a thing. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that I’ve been banging on for a while about this. Unlike the US, or in some European countries, Australia does not suffer from the problem of manufactured news acting as propaganda. There are only mainstream news outlets on this list.

As I said, I’ve posted the top 100 list online… and I think importantly we’ve already moved on to other issues – the banking tax being a flashpoint.

It’s always important to look at the stories that have had real cut through. The water cooler stories. This year it was about universities, Gonski and everyone was talking about drug testing for welfare recipients.