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You might remember that the Greens complained that the West Australian ignored them during throughout the election campaign. Now their complaint has extended to another newspaper. In a report about a Kalgoorlie campaign breakfast, “the Greens candidate, Peter Burger, has been excluded from the group photo, despite being present at the breakfast and having his photograph taken several times by the Kalgoorlie Miner.” The Miner, like the West, is owned by WA News.
The Liberals have never really liked Colin Barnett, and now it’s really starting to show. At a public meeting in Broome yesterday, the Liberal candidate for the Kimberley (where Colin’s Canal will start) says, “There is no secret that Barnett and myself are at loggerheads over the canal project and how he has gone about it.”
Today, the Liberal candidate for Roe told Channel 7 that he was sick of Colin Barnett making policy on the run — in particular, caving in to the National Party on something or other. Apparently, Barnett signed up to the $100 million policy last night, and it was announced today. I’ll fill in the details when I find an online source.
Update: Still nothing online, but this is from p9 of today’s West:
The Liberals’ candidate in Roe, Graham Jacobs, has claimed “underhanded tactics” by the National Party have forced Mr Barnett into making rash decisions and policy on the run.
“Policy on the run does not work and will never work … I am disgusted by the manipulative, underhand tactics of the National Party that they are using on the people of Roe,” Dr Jacobs said.
Last week, Dan Sullivan flew down to Albany to launch the centrepiece of the Coalition’s regional health policy — a brand new hospital for the southern town.
The Labor MP for Albany, Peter Watson, immediately questioned the policy:
“I’ve been door-knocking Albany for four years and I’ve never heard one person say we need a new hospital,” he said.
“Nowhere in the media has there been anything about a new hospital and 10 days out from an election the Liberal and National parties say we’re going to put $40 million into a new hospital.
“Now I just think it smacks of desperation and and maybe the polling they’ve done in Albany shows they need to be seen to make a big decision and they’ve come up with this out of thin air.”
Now, this is the sort of tit-for-tat you expect in an election. The Opposition makes an announcement, the Government dismisses it as unnecessary.
But what if Peter Watson is right?
And what if the Nationals candidate contradicts Dan Sullivan and admits Peter Watson is right?
[Beverley] Ford now says a new hospital is unnecessary and the money could be better spent elsewhere.
Mrs Ford says she was not consulted by her Coalition colleagues before they made the decision to commit to a new hospital, and it has put her in an awkward position.
Whoops.
The Australian’s Mark Day has an interesting run-down on the West Australian and its “erratic, brash, cocky, naive, bullying, rash, immature, raw, aggressive, suburban, self-absorbed and biased” editor, Paul Armstrong.
Among the more serious claims are that he directly interferes with the work of his journalists, “changing their copy without reference to them”.
And many Perth journalists join the chorus. Former West business editor John McGlue: “A newspaper has to get its facts right, has to report all relevant facts, and has to give both sides of a story. Sometimes, those rules are not being followed.” Brett McCarthy, editor of the rival weekly Sunday Times: “His news judgments are often bizarre, and he has no full sense of West Australian community.” Former West reporter, Trevor Robb on ABC radio: “I can tell you, categorically, that there were days when Paul was actually writing headlines and then telling reporters to go and get a story to match the headline.”
He boasts that the West is no longer a paper of record, and revels in the fact that the paper does not report both sides of issues: “Terrific. Isn’t that what papers are meant to do?”
The journos’ union complains that Armstrong bullies his staff:
The MEAA’s Sinclair-Jones brands Armstrong as a bully. At last year’s West Australian Newspapers annual general meeting he asked if the company’s board condoned Armstrong’s abuse of a young female reporter as “a waste of fucking oxygen”. He says Armstrong launched a two-minute tirade against the reporter late at night when it was discovered she had a fact wrong in a story. Armstrong says the reporter was not present when he made the comment, and rejects the charge of bullying.
Maybe she was there, maybe she wasn’t, but the female staff at the West don’t seem to like his style — Crikey reports that three (more) are resigning, and says, “With reports from the Swamp that the only way to join the inner circle is to wear pants, vote Liberal and drive a souped-up Holden, who can blame the women for bailing.”
Mark Day and Matt Price brush off the bullying and bias claims by pointing out that at least the West is interesting. So is a mugging, but the fact that people stand and watch doesn’t justify it happening in the first place.
Day concludes by asking:
As for the allegations of political bias, if The West were to endorse the return of the Gallop government in its editorial on Saturday, they’d all go away, wouldn’t they?
To which I reply: No. Bias is bias, and a last-ditch effort to redress the balance (or jump on the bandwagon) doesn’t change a thing.
Update: Elsewhere, Day defends Armstrong, reminding us that his behaviour is no worse than “the feudal atmosphere of newsrooms in the early 1960s”. Oh, that’s okay then.
Day also says “it is impossible to believe the Copyright Act was framed in order to give first-year cadets the right to tell the boss they’ll run off to court if their intros are re-cast.” However, people like Trevor Robb, who quit over Armstrong’s interference, could hardly be described as first-year cadets.
Not the West interprets the Christian Democratic Party platform: “5. CARE FOR THE ELDERLY AND FRAIL as long as they’re not homosexual.”
Anthony certainly knows how to introduce a teriyaki recipe:
Were a copy of our daily newspaper to blow eastwards over the nullarbor to people who only knew of Western Australia as the place where soapie characters go to never return, they might think that the state was filled with cranks and bigots who had to wait in line in darkened hospitals while their houses were being burgled and that poorly thought out acts of largesse to private companies for Stalinist style grand engineering projects were good ideas.
Thursday’s Australian is all canal, and none of it is good news for Colin Barnett. We’re told that John Howard still can’t endorse it:
Howard believes the giant trench is an interesting concept, something worth talking about – if the uber canal were a girl you’d bet the PM would surmise she had a “nice personality”.
But if willing to flirt with Barnett’s baby, the PM is way too wily to commit.
PM: We are sympathetic to the concept, very keen to sit down and discuss it …
Bartlett: In the world of politics, I mean, that’s nothing.
PM: In the world of politics, if I were to say this a crazy, harebrained idea, then you’d know we’d reject it.
In the world of Colin, this was sufficient endorsement.
We read that the Liberals’ Econtech analysis (which didn’t investigate the $2 billion price tag’s accuracy) is not much more than an elaborate joke:
Even Mr Barnett’s paid guns are struggling to find anything especially positive about the project. Consultants Econtech estimate the canal would create 3000 construction jobs and add $475 million a year to West Australia’s north. Good, but building pyramids would also boost the regional economy for a while as the impact of construction expenditure multiplied through the economy.
Meanwhile, a real attempt to conduct an economic analysis of the project raises serious questions about its viability:
The costing, by leading engineering firm GHD, concluded that it was not competitive with desalination, which could plug the gap in Perth’s water supply for the medium term for $350 million.
[...]
Tenix says the costs of construction for the canal and the pipelines would be $1.6 billion, which works out at $440,000 a kilometre.
The Alice Springs to Darwin rail link, for the sake of comparison, cost $1.2 million per kilometre.
The GHD costing of the pipeline project put the pipeline construction costs alone at $2 million a kilometre.
GHD’s $4 billion price tag does not include land acquisition or environmental costs. Then again, neither do the Liberals, but that doesn’t stop them running ads claiming the canal has been “fully costed.”
We heard yesterday that land acquisition will not be straightforward due to native title considerations (a fact acknowledged by Tenix but ignored by Barnett), and the Australian raises concerns about the environmental impact of the canal:
Conservation Council director Chris Tallentire said the presence of protected fish life would trigger an environmental assessment that could blow out the Coalition’s construction timetable.
Murdoch University researcher David Morgan, who has studied the Fitzroy River for the past five years, said it contained a number of endangered or vulnerable fish species, including the freshwater sawfish, freshwater whipray, northern river shark and dwarf sawfish. “There have been 17 northern river sharks recorded in the world and 10 of them were recorded in the Fitzroy River,” he said.
So we’ve got no federal funding, serious doubts about the cost, dubious economic benefits, no land to build it on, and concerns about its environmental impact.
Don’t let that stop you, Colin.
Howard’s decision to send more troops to Iraq must have annoyed Colin Barnett, as it’s dulling his halo and wasting precious time in the media:
While WA Premier Geoff Gallop was given a rousing reception from employees at a Perth engineering firm, Mr Howard was greeted by a noisy protest over a plan to send more troops to Iraq.
A rowdy group of around 30 protesters surrounded Mr Howard on his arrival at a morning tea in the marginal seat of Riverton, chanting and waving placards bearing slogans including: “Iraq – Arabic for Vietnam”.
Manas was there; she’s in red:
Ross Gittins sets out the reason I’ll be voting against retail trading deregulation on the weekend: “Slowly but steadily, without any of us quite realising what’s happening, the weekend is being abolished — and all in the name of progress.”
Miss Piss is investigating iPod ownership in Ozblogistan, which provides her an excuse to post the last ten songs she listened to on hers. Here’s my list:
From today’s Crikey email:
Political advertising, WA style
Political correspondent Christian Kerr writes:
OK, so the Greens ad in The West Australian on Saturday was pretty bl**dy good — say “far canal” out loud slowly — but can it match the effort from One Nation candidate Brian Burns.
He’s taken out space in The Albany paper to proclaim the promise to:
STOP selling OFF state assets to WORLD ORGANISED GLOBAL STEALTH
That’s yampy — but the layout isn’t. Instead, it seems to be very calculated. The first letter of every word is bold, so the subliminal message is:
Stop selling assets to W*GS
If One Nation have finally discovered subtlety, the Liberals seem to be embracing management speak.
Colin Barnett knows how to “action decisions”, according to one of their TV spots.
That’s odd. They’re big on traditional values when it comes to issues like homosexuality — so why not grammar?
Published in the Worst last Saturday:
To everyone who reads this “newspaper” — you may be starting to believe that the Greens are not running in this election.
The West hass apparently decided it’s not worth covering much of what the Greens are up to, so we’ve had to pay them to print this ad.
Nic White is angry about Labor’s plan to make community service a high-school graduation requirement. Not afraid of hyperbole, he says the policy “borders on insanity.”
Puh-lease.
At my high-school, we had to do 40 hours of community service in Year 11. It appears that the program worked so well that the school now requires 15 hours in Year 8, 20 hours in Year 10, a week in Year 11 and another 40 hours in Year 11/12. I did mine at a respite home for the elderly, and got a lot out of it — without compromising my academic results.
Even the Liberals accept “that most students through their school activities right from primary school through to secondary school have some activities of this type at the moment”.
Democrats Senator Andrew Murray wrote a piece for Crikey arguing that a federal takeover of industrial relations is inevitable. The only option, he says, is for States to give up and demand concessions:
So what cards can the Premiers still play? Like with the Corporations Law they could sign an inter-Governmental agreement to give up their IR powers, and create a unitary system. Perhaps in return for some payment to ease the pain and an agreement to keep the federal system largely intact, with only modest change until after the next federal election.
However, this paragraph provides a clue as to the Premiers’ strongest bargaining chip. Howard will rely on the corporations power to force his IR reforms on the States. He has that power because the States have agreed — but they’ve done so with strings attached.
The referral of power was made by identical legislation passed by every State. The Corporations (Commonwealth Powers) Act 2001 (WA) makes clear that:
Nothing in this Act is intended to enable the making of a law pursuant to the amendment reference with the sole or main underlying purpose or object of regulating industrial relations matters…
This leaves the High Court open as an option to the Premiers, though it would be expensive and risky given that the bench has been stacked against them.
But the legislation also provides a more aggressive option. The States retain the right to withdraw their referral of power. All they have to do is give six months’ notice. Such action could not be taken lightly (the corporations power was referred to the Commonwealth for a reason, and business would be up in arms), but with coast-to-coast Labor Governments, it does give them significant leverage.
Note: This post is based on a cursory reading of the referring legislation. If you think I’m wrong, let me know why in the comments.
Update: I knew I shouldn’t post on things like this while struggling to keep my eyelids open (hence the disclaimer above). Anthony reminds that the Commonwealth’s corporations power under s51(xx) is already quite broad enough to cover IR without the States’ conferral of additional power. But that raises a question: why would the States include the limitation on using the referred power to regulate IR? Was it purely symbolic?
Update: The restriction on IR doesn’t form part of the legislation, and is therefore non-binding. But if the referral was withdrawn, the Commonwealth’s reach would be significantly curtailed — not to mention the disruption it would cause.
