CHARLES WOOLEY
Like everyone else, I got it wrong. There is a God after all. Miracles do happen. The sun revolves around the earth and not vice versa. Coal won’t hurt you. Climate change really is “BS” as the former member for Warringah Tony Abbott said. The “Messiah from the Shire” ScoMo has been taken up in the rapture, at least all the way to the Lodge for probably another six years. Maybe longer, because looking around I can’t see a credible Labor leader anywhere in sight.
It may be that the next Labor Prime Minister of Australia is not yet even in the Parliament. But don’t take my word for it. After five decades of reporting on these matters, I now know that I know nothing, absolutely nothing: zero, zilch, nada. Nor do I know many journalists in this country who predicted a ScoMo victory.
It is true that few of us much liked Bill Shorten. At first this was probably because we were mostly beguiled by and in love with Malcolm Turnbull. He had the chutzpah of Bob Hawke, the gravitas of Gough Whitlam and, when needed, the cruelty of Paul Keating. A self-made multimillionaire who had once been a journalist, my mob fell for Malcolm big time. Finally, here was a Prime Minister we could be proud of in the wider world. He was articulate, looked good, dressed well and didn’t embarrass us abroad as our chief of state. And he was a progressive small ‘l’ Liberal as are most journos.
So when Malcolm lambasted Shorten in Parliament the press gallery loved it. “There was never a union leader in Melbourne who tucked his knees under more billionaires’ tables than the Leader of the Opposition,” Malcolm declared. Malcolm’s scorn was terrible. “There has never been a more sycophantic leader of the Labor Party, and he comes here and poses as a tribune of the people. Harbourside mansions — he is yearning for one. He is yearning for one! He is yearning to get into Kirribilli House.”
A lot of journalists have long seen Shorten that way; as a chancer, as a man on the make who would do whatever it took to achieve his ambitions.
That mightn’t be entirely fair, but that’s how so many saw him. At the Beaconsfield mining disaster Shorten first rose to national prominence, and it was from there, as the national secretary of the AWU, he began his long and ambitious climb towards the Lodge.
An acerbic old Canberra journo said to me back in 2006 at Beaconsfield: “Look at that. Bill Shorten would do anything to get to the top.”
We could always see what Bill was up to, and we didn’t always personally approve because, unlike Bob Hawke, Bill was hard to love. His role in the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd debacle saw him wading to leadership through the blood of colleagues.
But we thought you didn’t care. Didn’t the polls say he was the man? The polls always showed that Australians didn’t like Bill, so I guess it was passing strange that the seers still prophesied we would elect a man we disliked. But still we believed them. Poll after poll the two-party-preferred results appeared incontrovertible. Even some Libs were deserting the sinking ship.
To most journalists the science of polling seemed almost as indisputable as climate science. Labor was going to win by as little as eight seats or as many as 28. We all believed it, and so did Bill. By the last day of the campaign he was even announcing intentions for his first days in office.
A world away up on Mount Olympus the ancient Greek Gods might have looked down and measured the extent of their impending punishment for “hubris”. That’s a Greek expression for getting too big for your boots.
In Britain after the Brexit vote and in the US after the Trump victory, journalists, pollsters and commentators were mostly left with egg on their faces, just as journalists have been this week here in Australia.
It’s not that we missed anything in particular. We noted during the Adani debate that what Bill told miners up in the Queensland electorate of Herbert (which Labor lost) wasn’t necessarily what he told the latte set down in Melbourne.
Perhaps journalists really are a cynical mob, but we didn’t think you would notice, nor much care.
Perhaps for too long our text book in these matters has been Graham Richardson’s Whatever it Takes,a Machiavellian guidebook to the making and breaking of PMs. Essentially the argument is that ends justify the means, and there is a world of difference between truth and perception. Perception is, of course, more important than truth. Both parties play by these precepts so, in the fullness of time, perhaps you will inflict a similar reckoning on ScoMo’s Liberals.
Late in the campaign Sydney’s Daily Telegraph revealed that Bill had underestimated his mum’s eventual success in life when he told her battler story to a gullible Q&A on the ABC. When Bill shed a public tear about the report, the journalistic consensus was that the Tele had gone too far. We agreed that Bill had gilded the lily but you don’t go a bloke about his mum. We even concluded that the anti-Bill forces might have scored an own goal. Apparently you saw it differently.
The real lesson for me in this unexpected election result is that it should not have been unexpected. Somehow my trade has got too close to the political classes and too distant from you, the people.
Next time around I will hang out in the pubs, the cafes and the supermarkets. Never again will I listen to the opinion polls. Sorry about that.