Press Statement

The media could barely wait for the Prime Minister to finish his Press Club speech so they could tell him what he should have said. By Nick Cater

The first National Press Club lunch of the year is the occasion for shaping the political agenda. After a lengthy introduction by the Prime Minister, the Canberra press gallery seized the opportunity to set out its vision.

First the former minister for sport needed to be sacked. The integrity of our democracy must be restored by putting the bureaucrats back in charge.

Second, the government should act on the advice of fire chiefs, state government energy ministers and scientists by doing “more” about climate change, whatever that more might be.

Third, and this is a weird one, the commonwealth must support the legalisation of cannabis in the ACT by telling the federal cops to chill out and not enforce commonwealth law.

Finally, the PM must show leadership. A true leader would stop carrying on like a Liberal. A true leader would embrace the ­accepted wisdom of all of the experts listed above, chief among whom are the commentators.

Having delivered their four-point plan, journalists filed their stories. These, in the manner of modern journalism, were not accounts of what the PM had said, but what the writer thought about the things he hadn’t said and his foolishness in not saying them.

“Upbeat, but stubbornly lightweight,” was the verdict of The Canberra Times representative at the lunch under the head: “Scott Morrison’s non-agenda agenda”.

Such generalisations about the Canberra press gallery can overlook the diligence of an experienced few who call the game without fear or favour.

We should acknowledge, for example, the pursuit of Bill Shorten last year over the missing details of his climate policy that turned it into an electoral liability. The smell of blood to a journalist is still more important than its hue.

Yet it would be fair to say the gallery was less than delighted that Scott Morrison had cheated the political death they had predicted and was opening the batting again.

Whether the criticism of Morrison is more rabid than that experienced by John Howard is an open question. The more colourful descriptions of Howard by some of the commentators on the gallery’s fringes are too crude to print on these pages.

There is certainly a greater quantity of criticism. However, Howard had the luxury of being the last pre-Facebook prime minister and the last to be customarily addressed as “Mr”, “Prime Minister” or, occasionally if one felt a ­little cheeky, merely as “PM”.

Morrison, like Howard, rarely allows his frustration to show, to the infuriation of those who predicted heated questioning at the lunch. The grilling of the Prime Minister, as it turned out, was even less spectacular than the grilling of the beef.

One change from the Howard years, at least the early ones, is the marked lack of interest in policy detail. It was not always so. As Paul Kelly has recalled, political coverage was transformed from the late 1960s by a coterie of economically literate and aggressive journalists led by Alan Wood, Ken Davidson and Max Walsh.

Their passion for intelligent reform goaded governments into action, setting the groundwork for the achievements of the 1980s and 1990s. The little regard for economics outside the pages of this newspaper and the AFR is the principle weakness of today’s policy discussion. The repetitive calls for stronger action on climate change, with precious little attempt to identify the means to achieve it, suggest that the lessons from Shorten’s energy policy failure have not been fully grasped.

A 50 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030 is a pipe dream, not policy. Policy requires a practical course of action to achieve a target, and there is no feasible way of halving emissions in such a short space of time without damaging the economy.

That much was clear from Brian Fisher’s work before the last election, using the most reliable modelling available. Shorten’s tactic was to attack the credibility of Fisher’s modelling. Anthony Albanese’s recent concession that Labor’s election proposal was unfeasible, however, is tacit acceptance that Fisher was right.

Yet, since the election, the debate has returned from economics to emotion. The casual conflation of bushfires, drought and emissions reduction has been unhelpful. Each demands a serious policy response in its own right.

It meant that the substantial policy announcement on gas was largely missed in the coverage of the PM’s speech. Cheaper, available gas in the southern states is the key to plugging gaps in the power grid and, counterintuitively, increasing the penetration of renewables by providing an efficient form of back-up.

This is the “more” the government’s armchair critics are demanding, though few of them recognise it.

A thriving gas market would price out coal in a short amount of time. Gas produces half the emissions of coal, and since it is chiefly required at peak points — rather than as a source of baseload — the actual reduction in emissions over time would end up being considerably greater.

The announcement of the first bilateral energy agreement ­between NSW and the federal government late last week — which guaranteed the provision of additional gas — had been foreshadowed in the PM’s speech. It is a breakthrough of considerable importance that will increase the amount of gas in the NSW market by more than half.

Yet the intricacies of energy pricing being a matter about which few journalists are curious, its ­importance was missed by Morrison’s youthful critic in The Canberra Times report.

Morrison’s “determination to bluff his way through and his tendency to greet serious issues with dismissiveness and slogans is unsettling and leaves him looking shallow”, she wrote.

The article’s author, we note, was the same reporter who had pressed the Prime Minister on the cannabis question.