Pearls and Irritations

As if crafting rural policy were not already difficult, the advent of Sky News Regional in 2021 is likely to render it much more difficult. Given its past performance, Sky News is likely to spread its commentators’ bigoted worldview to millions of Australians who don’t already suffer access to it; and via its website to potentially tens or hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

As if crafting rural policy in the public interest were not already difficult, the advent of Sky News Regional on 1 August 2021 is likely to render it much more difficult. Past performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance, but given its past performance, Sky News is likely to spread its commentators’ divisive and bigoted worldview to millions of Australians who don’t already suffer access to it; and via its website to potentially tens or hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

To buttress this claim, I first identify some of the talking heads who populate Sky News; then sketch their idiosyncratic worldview and explain why it is so corrosive to rural policy; then outline the process by which Sky News has gained a commanding position in rural and regional news.

The clones

At the date of drafting this article, Sky News’s website made the following remarkable claim, italics added:

Hear all sides of the debate with insights and opinions from Australia’s leading commentators including Peta Credlin, Andrew Bolt, Paul Murray, Chris Kenny, Cory Bernardi, Chris Smith, Rita Panahi, James Morrow, Rowan Dean and Joe Hildebrand.

Nothing even-handed here: this group of clones are right-wing culture warriors, some obsessively so.

Worldviews

The group’s ideology can be summarised as relentlessly anti-Left, but the Left that they rail against is a caricature of the richly diverse breadth of thought in the progressive side of politics, the group’s self-created enemy. The clones’ views are anti-intellectual and anti-environmental; and therein lies the danger they pose to sensible rural policy.

Rural Australians have traditionally held a distinctive worldview. It is socially conservative, infused with pride in their role in feeding and clothing the rest of the population, dismissive of remote government officials who don’t set foot outside the cities and defensive of their traditional self-reliance. Self-reliance, however, has taken a hammering during years of drought, rising costs and uncertain commodity prices.

Rural resentment has been building in recent years, through a combination of factors that have not yet coalesced into a coherent alternative policy platform. Issues include lack of producers’ influence over prices, free trade, free foreign investment, environmental regulation, absence of job creation programs that would entice the younger generation to stay, desertion by their political representatives in service of the mining companies and a raft of economic rationalist measures such as the chronic failure to supply doctors and closure of railways, bank branches and district advisory services of the state departments.

Rural Australia is a fertile field for commentators who sow mistrust and victimhood as their stock-in-trade. Their tactic is to apply the label ‘remote elites’ to the progressive Left rather than the economic rationalist elites who are the real class enemies of family farmers. They gather up within their definition of the Left anyone that the Murdoch patriarchy dislikes – scientists, unions, the ALP, environmentalists and especially the Greens – and attribute to them an invented cause, a snobbish disdain of the socially conservative or less educated rural population.

Yes, it is possible to discern a cleavage between ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘parochials’ in participants in Australian public affairs, but that distinction doesn’t map onto the ‘condescending Left versus condescended salt-of-the-earths’ dichotomy that the Sky News clones claim. Condescension is a feature of the neoliberal economic globalists with their ‘get big or get out’ mindset towards unprofitable family farms. It is also a feature of News Corp itself, which bought up regional newspapers and then closed them down. The hypocrites.

To anyone tracking the partisan anger and mistrust fostered by Sky’s stablemate Fox News in the rural hinterlands of the USA, anger that has rendered the USA next-to-ungovernable, the call to arms by a ranter on Sky News for a resistance to the recently elected Labor Government – “One thousand days to ‘take the country back from the mad left’” – should generate alarm. The politically aware in the cities may chuckle at polemic like this, but hinting that the election result was illegitimate is not funny.

At first glance, the political strategy promulgated in the post-mortems on Sky After Dark by the clones – urging the Liberal Party to abandon its traditional homelands in the wealthy electorates and chase outer-urban and regional voters – seems curious.

No, it is not curious; a strategy is coming into focus. Not willing to concede that the hated environmental movement may have been correct about climate change after all, the clones have given up on the educated who can assess and accept scientific evidence and now seek to recruit the more credulous in regional areas. What theme might appeal to these disaffected? Changing economic policy settings to relieve rural financial distress would also be a bridge too far for Murdoch’s economic rationalist managers and editors, hence a campaign to de-legitimise the progressive winners in the recent election. Charming isn’t it.

How to undermine rural policy

Here is how a foreign oligarch might dominate rural policy and steer it into an anti-government, anti-environmental direction.

First bribe governments with the prospect of favourable coverage if they amend media ownership laws to favour the company.

Next, seek to destroy public broadcasting. Stoke parliamentarians to undermine the ABC, a public institution which has been entrusted to their stewardship, with vexatious complaints of bias. Cripple its budgets so that it has to centralise its newsgathering to the detriment of rural-based journalists.

Then collude with the Nine media network to destroy Australian Associated Press which is particularly useful to the smaller outlets and the ABC because of its economies of scale in generalist reporting.

Next, cease distributing print newspapers in regional areas. Now convince the regulators that purchasing rural newspapers is somehow not anti-competitive. Once rural newspapers are in its stable, turn them digital or close them down.

Now launch Sky News Regional to broadcast to those catchments.

Reach a contractual agreement with Streem to stream Sky News into government and corporate offices as a new media semi-monopoly.

What can be done?
In a previous column^[i], I argued that funding the ABC adequately could counter misinformation from the Murdoch media. It would be the simplest of simple steps to fund the ABC to recruit a cadet journalist into every regional town. What a fillip that would give to building communities of interest, interpreting the wider world to the local community, feeding intelligence back to the centre and training the journalists of the future.

But another step is necessary. Parliamentarians should deny Sky News legitimacy by declining to appear on its tainted platform. Without the capacity to interview parliamentarians directly, the channel would be reduced to regurgitating their commentators’ personal opinions which will be exposed as being just what they are. Why on earth do politicians nourish this cancer of the body politic by feeding it real news? The channel should be disconnected from all public buildings, as Victoria did on its railway stations. Further, subscriptions to the now foreign-owned media service Streem should be cancelled.

Politicians of all stripes in rural Australia: remember that the enemies that Sky News is working to create are your constituents.

Dr Geoff Edwards is educated in science and public administration. After a career in national parks, Crown land and reserve administration and metropolitan parks in Victoria and Port Moresby, he moved to Queensland’s Department of Lands in 1990, with responsibilities for a range of aspects of land and energy policy. He was a local government Councillor and Shire President in Sherbrooke, Victoria. He retired in 2011. From 2013-2019 he was President of The Royal Society of Queensland. He is Adjunct Professor, Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University.