En Passant

The Canberra Times is engaged in a ding-dong battle with the ACT Chief Minister, and if you believe the letters to the editor page, it has staggering levels of support. John Passant in New Matilda is not so sure.

I thought I would include some of my unpublished Canberra Times’ letters to show the degeneration of the newspaper from the Fyshwick Pravda (always an overstated claim by hyperventilating conservative politicians) to a liberal’s version of The Australian.  Of course it is not just the refusal to publish my letters. That is but a symptom of a greater disease – both the narrowing down of opinion in the paper  and a stampede to the right reflected in its conversion to tabloid form and much tabloid content, or  regurgitated Age and Sydney Morning Herald articles.

Australia’s mainstream media is a bit like Australia’s politics. It gives the impression of difference but in reality the two major newspaper outlets – News and Fairfax – disagree only on the detail. They agree on the overriding message and practice of neoliberalism and austerity. They agree too on creating a distraction from austerity. For Fairfax disguised and now not so disguised Islamophobia and liberal racism are good ways to do that.

This is the link to my article in Independent Australia about The Canberra Times and its whitewashing of Invasion Day. It starts off:

John Passant asks why the whitewash of the Invasion Day protest in Canberra by The Canberra Times.

UP TO 500 people attended the Invasion Day Protest in Garema Place in Canberra on 26 January to highlight the genocide then and now against Aboriginal people. There was not one mention, not one photo of the protest in The Canberra Times.

To read the whole article click here. Why didn’t The Canberra Times report on the Invasion Day protest?

In an article in the Canberra Times on our anti-Reclaim Australia rally on Sunday at Parliament House, Christopher Knaus quotes me. The report itself doesn’t mention the strong Aboriginal Tent Embassy presence at the anti-Reclaim rally. Here is one of my poor photos of the 25 or so Aboriginal comrades at the beginning of the protest against racism.

As the Canberra Times continues its conversion to conservatism and its cost driven agenda of regurgitation, the time approaches when, if my current mood survives, I will bid it farewell and return to The Australian and the battle against that newspaper’s various opinions and ideas. It at least is a more worthy opponent. And for revolutionary socialist analysis there is always Solidarity.

Let’s hope your decision to publish Kuhn’s article is a light bulb moment for Fairfax owners and senior managers that there is a big audience for left wing ideas in your newspapers, driven by the desire of millions of Australians for a social democratic country. Who knows, printing more of such articles might actually help address the disastrous decline in the Canberra Times’ readership numbers.

This is a letter I sent to the Canberra Times on Thursday. John It appears that in the pre-selection process Minister Simon Corbell has lost support among many ACT Labor Party Left faction members. (Kirsten Lawson, ‘Ructions over Corbell exit’ The Canberra Times 27 August page 1.) I have some suggestions to Simon to help […]

It was disappointing to see Jack Waterford repeat the tired Tory tropes about the CFMEU’s ‘manipulation’ of safety issues as a justification for an ICAC in the ACT. (‘Clearly the ACT needs its own ICAC’ Forum page 1 The Canberra Times Saturday 1 August.) While the ACT does need its own ICAC, deaths and serious injuries on building sites across the Territory show in fact that what we need to save lives is a safety regime run by the unions, the only people with an overriding interest in building workers’ health and safety. The Royal Commission witch-hunt into the CFMEU is designed to destroy them precisely because the union does win better wages and campaign for safety. Jack has fallen for the bosses’ lies.

The declining Australian economy means that whoever is in government in Australia will adopt and ratchet up attacks on wages, jobs, conditions, and social spending. To try to hide this reality the attacks on the manufactured ‘enemy within’ will intensify and broaden to more welfare recipients and perhaps on to the left. The terrorist threat will dominate our news when the biggest terrorists sit in Canberra and Washington.

The mainstream media will cheer on the multitude of attacks on the working class. Nowhere among the reams and reams of ’analysis’ of the economic issues facing ‘the nation’ will there be published alternative voices that identify capitalism as the problem and production organised democratically to satisfy human need rather than make a profit as the solution. This article will never see the light of day in the mainstream media.