No wonder The Gruen Nation and The Chaser’s Yes We Canberra are rating so well. This is not because the election campaign is so easy to satirise. Rather, it’s because the commentary on the campaign is insightful and revealing.
It is often more insightful and revealing than most of the stuff served up by the journalists travelling with the Gillard and Abbott caravans or by senior journalists who reckon there’s no point in being out there with Gillard or Abbott because the campaigns are so controlled and scripted. They remain ensconced in Canberra from where they judge who’s up and who’s down and who’s possibly out.
The election campaign can become a sort of game, with rules that most people don’t know. And the game, for many journalists, can be boring and predictable, except when one of the main players makes a major mistake or when, to use a football term, there’s an own goal.
The people doing The Gruen Transfer and Yes We Canberra are many things, but they never adopt a sort of bored and world-weary attitude to political reporting. It would not be at all surprising if for young Australians these two programs and perhaps Channel 10’s The 7pm Project were their sources of information about this election campaign.
In America, the major source of news and political commentary for people aged between 18 and 30 is The Daily Show, a fake news show which satirises America’s cable news channels, and that usually means Fox News. Jon Stewart, the show’s host, has become one of America’s most influential political commentators.
Which brings us to Julia Gillard’s announcement about her decision to channel the real as opposed to the manufactured Julia for the rest of the campaign and Tony Abbott’s response that Australians need to know who’s the real Julia and who’s the fake Julia.
All of this is just mind-numbingly stupid. Gillard’s announcement was silly and politically inept and Abbott’s response was transparently rehearsed and insincere. And the journalists reported all this as if it all really, really mattered. They pondered the consequence for the Gillard campaign, whether she could pull it off, whether this would force the real Abbott to emerge and yes, whether Gillard simply had kicked another own goal.
Meanwhile, Gillard announced policies that would have real consequences for many Australians. One of her policies will give families on modest incomes support for teenagers aged 16 to 18 at school or in training programs. The other was a plan to give more authority in decision-making, including the hiring and firing of teachers, to school principals. This decentralisation of power away from the state education bureaucracies has already happened in Victoria and Western Australia.
These were important announcements, but how do they fit the over-arching education policies of the Gillard government? The cost of these programs taken together is a little over $1 billion. The Building the Education Revolution, put together in haste, without any real consideration of need and with no means test, has a price tag of $16 billion.
There have been fundamental changes in the structure of education in Australia. In the past 10 years, student numbers in private schools have grown by almost 22 per cent while numbers in state schools grew by just over 1 per cent. John Howard once told a group of editors invited to the Lodge that perhaps his greatest achievement was that he had made private school education affordable for families on modest incomes. And that no Labor government would ever dare to try to reverse this achievement.
The last Labor leader to suggest that perhaps it was time to look at the federal funding formula for schools was Mark Latham. Does Gillard believe it’s too late and too hard to do anything about the trend away from state schools? A free universal state education for all was once considered to be the bedrock of secular, liberal democracies.
There were no big policy announcements from the small target Tony Abbott.
…
