GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG – ISSUE NO. 4
27 MARCH 2009
NANCY’S PICK-OF-THE-WEEK
In this brand new segment, MWD’s very own Nancy gets to choose the journalistic highlights of the media week that was. The inaugural award is shared between two of the ABC’s finest – namely Deborah Cameron and Fran Kelly.
Deb Cameron is perhaps the public broadcaster’s leading eco-catastrophist – although she has some challengers for this particular title. During her morning program on ABC Radio 702 on Thursday 26 March, Ms Cameron was in normal barracking mode – this time she was barracking for President Barack Obama’s financial stimulus package. During a discussion with the 7.30 Report’s political editor Michael Brissenden, Brissenden mentioned that the Czech prime minister Mirek Topolanek had described President Obama’s plan to spend US$2 trillion as “the road to hell”. An indignant Cameron immediately interjected that what she called “Czechoslovakia” was hardly entitled to provide economic prescriptions.
It was as if Cameron believes that foreigners, like the Czechs, have no right to criticise the wisdom of the saintly Barack. In her agitation to defend President Obama, Cameron overlooked the fact that Czechoslovakia went out of existence in 1992 and was replaced by the Czech Republic and Slovakia. She also seemed unaware that the Czech criticism of the Obama administration’s spending policies is shared by the leadership of many nations in Europe – including Germany.
Meanwhile on Radio National Breakfast last Wednesday, Fran Kelly gave Special Minister of State John Faulkner a soft interview while he announced the Rudd Government’s commitment to freedom of information. Ms Kelly did not see fit to raise the delicate point that such a commitment to open government had not prevented China’s propaganda chief Li Changchun being literally smuggled into The Lodge for a meeting with the Prime Minister. This was a big story on Tuesday – with sections of the media implying that Mr Li might have been smuggled in to see the Prime Minister while covered by a blanket on the back seat of a limousine. But the very next morning, Fran Kelly was prepared to accept Senator Faulkner’s assurances that Labor would preside over the most open government in the world.
“STREWTH!” BARKS ON. AND ON
Thank Rupert for The Australian’s “Strewth!” team – D.D. McNicoll and James Jeffrey (as in J.J.). Just when Nancy was concerned that she may go unnoticed by sections of the media, “Strewth!” came to the rescue. First up, D.D. – who is apparently still aggrieved that MWD had the temerity to criticise something his old man David McNicoll did some three decades ago – weighed in with a suggestion that Nancy should return to her kennel. Or something like that. Then, last weekend, J.J. wrote a piece titled “Lay off the dog” where he claimed that Nancy was genuinely concerned about being labelled a “mongrel” and a “bitch” by London based part-time comedian, and full-time leftist, Guy Rundle. See Issue 3.
God knows what Mr Jeffrey and his colleague would do if he came across real irony – such as Jonathan Swift’s 1729 tract A Modest Proposal. No doubt D.D. and J.J. would pass the story over to the editor on the grounds that a proposal to eat the children of Ireland (so that they did not become a burden on their parents) should be a page-one lead and was not appropriate in a satirical gossip column like “Strewth!”. Strewth.
THE POET – AND GUINNESS
While on the topic of Ireland and all that, MWD was moved by Barry Oakley’s piece in The Weekend Australian last Saturday about Vincent Buckley (1925-1988). Educated in the Catholic school system, Buckley enrolled at the University of Melbourne in 1946, following military service, and obtained a job in his alma mater’s English Department in 1951. He spent his entire professional life at Melbourne University – teaching, writing poetry and prose and, according to Oakley, drinking. Oh yes – he was also a member of the Catholic intelligentsia who belonged to what was termed the Apostolate (with a capital “A”), which was part of the Newman Society and who seemed to regard Archbishop Daniel Mannix and B.A. Santamaria as greater dangers than Satan himself (or herself). How did V.B. get time to undertake all these Catholic intellectual endeavours and still have time to go to the pub? By not going to Mass on Sunday – that’s how.
The occasion for Barry Oakley’s reminiscences was the publication of John McLaren’s biography of Buckley titled Journey Without Arrival (Australian Scholarly Publishing). This complements V.B.’s own memoirs Cutting Green Hay: Friendships, movements and cultural conflicts in Australia’s great decades (Penguin Books) which was published in 1983, four years before the author’s death.
MWD was particularly taken by the following paragraph in Oakley’s article:
As McLaren describes it in his excellent opening chapters, Buckley was a Catholic from a rural Irish family, which gave the Oxbridgeans of the English department three reasons to look down on him. He was an outsider, but he wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was a belief he maintained even when he wasn’t.
What tosh. Come off it. And so on. Vincent Buckley was born in 1925 in the Victorian town of Romsey to Australian-born parents (whose own parents were born in Australia) and was educated as a boarder at St Patrick’s College in East Melbourne. Both places are a long way from Tipperary, as the saying goes. In short, Buckley was an Australian from an Australian family. It’s just that V.B. liked to think of himself as Irish – it facilitated his sense of persecution and it provided rationalisation to call for (yet) another pint. At Melbourne University in the 1960s, some of Buckley’s associates used to refer to him as “the poet and martyr” – and this well before his death. Some achievement, when you think about it. [Attention “Strewth!” – if you are still reading – this is a JOKE.]
And what’s this about Professor Buckley being an “outsider” even though he wasn’t? And what were the three reasons why your man Buckley was looked down on by his colleagues who had graduated from Oxford and Cambridge? Apart from his diminutive stature, of course. Alas, Barry Oakley did not tell us. But he did tell us the following:
Buckley’s emotional life was as complex as his intellectual one. He married Edna Forbes in 1948 and had two children. Later he became deeply involved with one of his students, Penelope Curtis, then only 17. After one of their meetings, Edna found two love poems addressed to Curtis in his briefcase. She was devastated and had a breakdown. Edna took years to recover and showed great fortitude in trying to restore their marriage. But Buckley, as usual, took refuge in drink: “When his children heard a taxi draw up outside, they would wonder whether the cabbie would have to carry him in.” The strain of living with one woman and loving another proved too much and by 1967 he was falling apart.
So, how did Melbourne University respond to the fact that, by 1967, Vincent Buckley was falling apart. Well, it gave him a personal chair. Arise Professor Buckley. Those were the days.
MWD only attended one V.B. lecture on the Apostolate (with a capital “A”) – when V.B. was in his Catholic intelligentsia mode. It was completely unintelligible. So much so that, maybe, it was spoken in the Gaelic that McLaren and Oakley would have us believe he learnt while growing up in rural Australia. Or perhaps it was the Guinness speaking. MWD wasn’t sure then – is not sure now.
In Cutting Green Hay, V.B. acknowledged that, following an address he gave to a Catholic conference in 1968, both the poet James McAuley and the philosopher Max Charlesworth indicated that they “could not follow what I was saying”. McAuley was a critic of V.B.’s approach to the Apostolate but Charlesworth was a supporter. Yet, both were in the dark about what your man, with his personal chair, was on about. You get the idea what V.B. was on about – or not on about – from one of his speeches at the time, which he quoted in his memoirs. Here’s a snippet:
The “new” doctinal attitudes (which, God knows, are really as old as the gospels) come not from any desire to innovate because “the age demanded an accelerated grimace” but simply from a felt need to interpret our own experience as citizens of the world.
Yeah, right on. In his piece last Saturday, Barry Oakley regretted that “there are now Catholic universities but no intelligentsia”. But MWD says: “Let’s drink to that – ambulances/carriages at 2 am.”
STEVE KEEN’S PROPERTY REVISIONMENT
Apart from Barry Oakley’s reflections on the poet and martyr Vincent Buckley, the other bad news from the weekend turned on the re-appearance of the University of Western Sydney academic, economist and soothsayer Steve Keen. On 22 March 2009, the Sunday Telegraph led with a “House Price Crisis Looms” story by Nick Gardner. It commenced as follows:
Record low interest rates and first home buyers’ grants have created a price bubble that could lead to a US-style housing crash, economists warn. Thousands of first-home buyers have been lured into the market with payments of up to $24,000 in NSW, plus as much as $18,000 in stamp-duty relief. But economists say this has artificially inflated prices, which are set to plunge as the financial crisis hits home.
Professor Steve Keen, of the University of Western Sydney, warns falls of 20 per cent, as in the US and Britain, are likely over the next two years.
On Sunday night (22 March 2009), ABC 1 News also carried Professor Keen’s prediction that property values will fall by 20 per cent over the next two years. Hang on a minute. Is this the same Professor Keen who told the same Nick Gardner in September 2008 that the price of housing “is going to fall by 40 per cent or so in the next few years” (Sunday Telegraph, 21 September 2008). Sure is. At the time, Steve Keen was photographed – in colour – with his partner Melina Forrest. He was looking at the camera – dressed in a white tee-shirt with a white-on-blue quotation from John Maynard Keynes attached. She in a blue-on-white dress, looking adoringly into the prophet’s eyes. At the time Keen was flogging his apartment in inner city Surry Hills. Seldom before has a couple facing a 40 per cent drop in the value of their abode looked so content.
Last September, Keen’s “we’re all ruined” approach attracted immediate media attention. He was interviewed by Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 Report on 8 October 2008. Keen told O’Brien that his worst case scenario for the Australian economy was “somethng up to the level of the Great Depression which was 20 per cent unemployment and lasting up to a decade”. Then on 16 October 2008 Keen was interviewed by Liz Hayes on 60 Minutes and declared that Australia was facing a “depression” with “at least a 10 to 15 per cent level of unemployment. Then, on 27 January 2009, in Crikey he declared that the global financial crisis “is worse than the Great Depression” – i.e. he was predicting an unemployment rate of around 30 per cent.
In view of Dr Keen’s deep pessimism and his prophesy that housing would fall by 40 per cent in October 2008, MWD offered to purchase his inner-city apartment for 40 per cent off the reserve price. Alas, this offer was declined. Keen told the Sunday Telegraph last week that he has sold his digs. You can only assume that the purchaser does not believe the vendor’s economic analysis.
Steven Keen is quite a media performer. He has upgraded his assessment of the down-side of the global financial crisis from up to the level of the Great Depression (with up to 15 per cent unemployment) to worse than the Great Depression (with presumably unemployment at close to 30 per cent). However, it seems that coverage about domestic property in the Sunday Telegraph requires a softer message. So Keen has dropped his claim that house prices will fall by 40 per cent and now claims that the decline will be 20 per cent. Still, what’s a 20 per cent revision when you can get a newspaper headline on a Sunday morning and get a run the same evening on the telly – especially when you can return to your taxpayer funded academic post around morning-tea time on Monday.
STOP PRESS: GUY PEARSE – ONCE A LIBERAL, NOW A GREEN
Guy Pearse is getting lotsa publicity following the publication of his Quarterly Essay (Issue 33, 2009) titled Quarry Vision: Coal, Climate Change and the End of the Resources Boom.
Quarterly Essay is published by Morry Schwartz’s Black Inc – see Issue 1. The back cover of the current issue of Quarterly Essay says this about Guy Pearse:
Guy Pearse is a former member of the Liberal Party and was a speech-writer for former environment minister Robert Hill. He has also been an industry lobbyist, consultant and spin doctor. In 2007 he exposed the politics behind Australia’s response to climate change on Four Corners and in his book High & Dry.
This is consistent with Dr Pearse’s own website, which contains the following information:
Guy Pearse is an Australian author, environmental advocate and consultant based near Bungendore, New South Wales. He grew up in Townsville and was educated at James Cook University (BA Hons), Harvard (MPP), and the ANU (Ph.D). Pearse was a member of the Liberal Party for 19 years and worked for various Liberal politicians. He was speechwriter for former environment minister, Robert Hill.
There is no doubt that Guy Pearse’s past Liberal Party connections have given special authority to his views on climate change. This was especially the case when he published High & Dry in the lead-up to the 2007 election – his views and background were used by many journalsits who were campaigning against the Howard Government’s approach to climate change and the book’s blurb described him as a “former Howard-government advisor”. So it is important that Pearse’s political connections are accurately recorded.
MWD can reveal that the blurb on the cover of Quarterly Essay is both inadequate and misleading. Sure, Guy Pearse was once a member of the Liberal Party. But he is now a member of the Greens. Also, Pearse did work on the personal staff of Liberal Senator Ian McDonald. But he was never employed on the parliamentary or ministerial staff of Senator Robert Hill and he was never an adviser to the Howard Government. Rather Pearse was engaged as a consultant to the Department of Environment and, in this capacity, he drafted speeches for Hill, when Hill was Environment Minister, as well as for senior officers of the Environment Department.
There is nothing to be ashamed of in any of the above. So it is far from clear why Quarterly Essay’s job-description of Guy Pearse is inadequate and misleading. MWD also notes that, despite his high profile in the climate change debate, Dr Pearse has no qualifications in science or in a science related discipline.
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LOOKING FOR MS DEVENY
That’s all for now. MWD hopes that Nancy’s campaign to give Catherine Deveny her column back is successful. Right now there is a notable lack of inner-city leftists sneering at the suburbs in The Age. Meanwhile, MWD needs copy. “Bring back Ms Deveny as a snobbish content provider” – says Nancy. We’ll keep you posted.