Mercury in the Senate

THE Save Our Mercury campaign will be raised in the Senate by Australian Greens leader Bob Brown.

Senator Brown has joined an army of concerned Tasmanian community leaders to express outrage at plans to edit the Mercury newspaper in Melbourne.

The plan to export sub-editing jobs comes after two years of job losses at the Hobart metropolitan daily.

“The further gutting of the Mercury by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd sabotages Tasmania’s best interests,” Sen Brown said.

“News Ltd’s campaigns for transparency, openness and public accountability show up as farcical in light of this plunder of the Mercury’s wellbeing.

“On the next day of sittings, I will move for the Senate to call on News Ltd to reverse its decision.”

Sen Brown’s deputy Christine Milne, also a Tasmanian, said senior Tasmanian journalists, both reporters and sub-editors, had a better grasp of green politics because the state had been immersed in the environmental debate for decades.

“Tasmania’s unique political history, landscape and environment needs the presence of locally informed journalists and editors to produce accurate stories that Tasmanians actually want to read,” Sen Milne said. “Mainland based journalists rarely understand the history or complexity of green politics as it has evolved in Tasmania.”

The Save Our Mercury campaign has drawn support from prominent Tasmanians representing a broad spectrum of the political landscape, including from Tasmanian Liberal stalwart Michael Hodgman, a traditional monarchist and conservative, to former justice minister and attorney-general in the Keating Labor government Duncan Kerr, a republican and progressive.

Mr Kerr, who holds the record as the longest serving federal member for the Tasmanian seat of Denison (which encompasses the heartland of the Mercury’s readership), said the issue cut to the core of what a newspaper is to its community.

“Vibrant communities need local newspapers with local journalists and editors,” Mr Kerr said.

“Tasmanians hate or love what the Mercury reports because it matters to us.

“Melbourne or Sydney can’t know our issues: a newspaper dependent on people who can’t know who we are or what is important for our towns and cities will lose its reason for existence. Our news is not their news.”

Former Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Damon Thomas has also thrown his weight behind the Save Our Mercury campaign.

Mr Thomas, a former Crown Solicitor and Tasmanian Ombudsman, is disturbed by the potential impact of shipping editing offshore on the quality of the Mercury’s news coverage.

“I have serious concerns about the quality and accuracy of the coverage of Tasmanian news if sub-editing jobs are exported interstate. Accuracy is only available through local expertise. The Voice of Tasmania should be edited here,” Mr Thomas, who is also a Hobart City Council alderman, said.

Denison MP and Iraq war whistleblower Andrew Wilkie, Hobart City Council alderman Marti Zucco and Walkley award-winning journalist Wayne Crawford are among others to publicly express concerns at the plan to export Tasmanian sub-editing jobs offshore.

The Save Our Mercury social media campaign hit a snag last night when its blog (HERE) was mysteriously disabled for up to “a day or two” because it tripped Blogger’s spam tracker.

The Mercury journalists fear this may be a drawback considering it has occurred in the critical two-day lead up to a public rally featuring six high-profile speakers on Thursday, April 7, at Parliament House lawns in Hobart at 1pm. (TT, HERE)

The campaign’s Facebook page (HERE) and Twitter (HERE), however, remain online.

Earlier on Tasmanian Times:

Mercury Rising
Mercury jobs on the line. Art Deco Facade to be sold
Save Our Mercury
A Fly on The Wall: Behind the Art Deco Facade
Journos’ fury as Mercury, Voice of Tasmania, outsources editing to Melbourne