Three years ago today, the editorial leadership of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age wilfully and dangerously misled the communities of Sydney and Melbourne into believing that at or by today, 7 March 2026, Australia would face the prospect of a direct attack by China and its military on the mainland of Australia.

Today, three years have elapsed since that irresponsible prediction, for neither city has been attacked by China – as the authors of that extravagant untruth knew at the time of the claim.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age ‘Red Alert’ series, replete with lurid images of Chinese military aircraft descending upon Australia, represents one of the most shameful episodes in the history of Australian journalism.

Newspapers of supposed record take, for the most part, a century to establish their bona fides as both a reputable and reliable source of information for the communities they serve. But having established a reputation for reliability and believability, the same newspapers then carry a concomitant responsibility to maintain the same reliability and communal trust which their otherwise long fidelity to truth had engendered. But this is not what the editorial leadership of the Herald and the Age did on 7 March 2023.

The Herald editor at the time, Bevan Shields, authorised its international editor Peter Hartcher, to concoct a China-threat story aided by a group of handpicked anti-China accomplices, to produce the most egregious and provocative news presentation I have witnessed in over fifty years of active public life. The accomplices in this sham exercise were none other than a writhing bunch of formerly well-identified China critics. Their conclusion in the story was that ‘Australia faces the prospect of war with China within three years, and our defence force is unprepared’ – that ‘the overwhelming source of danger to Australia is from China’. None of the claims have materialised.

The so-called Red Alert ‘panellists’ went on to say, ‘the recent decades of tranquillity were not the norm in human affairs but an aberration’ and that ‘Australia’s holiday from history is over’.

In fact, in the period since the series appeared, it has been the United States, not China, that has attacked other countries, as last weekend’s premeditated attack on Iran attests. Apart from a brief border conflict with Vietnam in 1979, China has not attacked any state in just on half a century.

But notwithstanding this delinquent and wilful episode, Peter Hartcher to this day, remains the international editor of both papers. How maladroit do you have to be before the management decides your copy has no value – before management is obliged to drop you? I am hoping that the new editor of the SMH may decide that amoral standards of journalism have no place in a paper which, these days, apart from the need of truth and accuracy, is struggling to keep its head above the rising tide of instant news and boundless self-expression.