2 weeks Ago By Roger Franklin
C hoice is a good thing, so it was nice that until a few years ago Melbourne still had two decent newspapers. The Herald Sun , then as now, treated the city it served as if it were an overgrown country town, so lots of footy, local heroes and much cranking of the parish pump. The Age , well it was of the left — left but sane back in the day — and, full disclosure, a paper to which I contributed hundreds of Sunday columns.
That old relationship of ours, it makes it hard to witness what the shrunken broadsheet has become. It’s like finding out your ex has turned the formerly respectable family home into a hoarders’ hovel with an overload of trash and nonsense spilling defiantly into the front yard. It makes you want to look away, to ignore the demented wailing coming from inside, and to wonder if it might be a good idea to call the authorities and suggest a welfare check.
Once the Age was a must read, now a daily bulletin of news and views from the Goat Cheese Triangle, that narrow body of greenish virtue between Northcote, St Kilda and Yarraville. That particular, port-heeled sympathy, it’s not hard to find. “Right-wing lobby group in donations probe over anti-Greens push in Prahran”, reads the headline, suggesting at a glance that Advance, the conservative lobby group with ambitions to be the GetUp! of the right, has been playing fast and loose with the electoral laws.
Those bastards! Four paragraphs into the report, however, and there is this: “State donations greater than $1210 need to be declared on the disclosure log within 21 days. Social media ads specifically targeting Prahran [byelection] only began in the past fortnight, meaning Advance has time to declare the funding behind them.” So no story, just the Greens being given a 48-point podium to kvetch about how hard done by they are.
It must be tempting for a party that delights in discerning the oppression of others — trannies, trees, Indigenes, cuddly bushland creatures, women (but not $6-an-hour au pairs ), drug addicts and carbonphobic public nuisances — not to crave a little taste of that delicious victimhood for itself. And who can doubt that forces of reaction are forever plotting and scheming to rob the public of rights and dignity? Certainly not the Age ‘s back-bench editors (if the latter still exist) responsible for another headline (below) on today’s homepage. Apparently, as the story informs by way of backround about the Athenaeum Club , “John Howard and Alexander Downer negotiated a bloodless coup there over dinner”, which rather stretcheswhat happened over their 1995 lunch when one man, Downer, recognised he had no hope of attaining The Lodge and handed his opposition leader’s job by agreement and relatively amicable arrangement to another, Howard.
Some plot! Still, as a marketing ploy, burnishing Age readers’ impressions of themselves as wise, enlightened and thoroughly good people, unlike those beastly conservative, makes sense after a fashion. Confirming to the satisfaction of its remaining readers they are not alone in their self-satisfaction and supercilious smuggery is evidenced in the Letters column, whose missives the paper presents as “erudite, insightful and quite often surprising”. Surprising? Not really.
The real surprise would be if correspondents ever ventured beyond echoing what they have read elsewhere in the Age ‘s pages. Thus does “Helen Moss, Croydon” know for a certainty that floods in Queensland and fires in LA are Gaia’s death rattle, “Chris Pearson, Kyneton” is certain the voters’ overwhelming rejection of the Voice “legitimised the bullying of minorities” and “April Baragwanath, Geelong” joins “Tony Lenten, Glen Waverley” in agreeing that Donald Trump is guilty of “great irresponsibility” and that his presidency, after just two weeks, is a “car crash”. But then how could the poor dears think otherwise, given the ideological filters through which the Age — and sister-clone Silly Moaning Herald , let us not forget — strains copy from the wire services and its own correspondents through the filter of preconception, removing all indications Orange Man might be anything other than bad to the bone.
Another consistently missing element is any acknowledgement that contributors from the US are likely to be financial supporters of the democrats — Michelle Goldberg, for example, who is today rabbiting on about the general wretchedness of Donald Trump but is nowhere acknowledged as a generous backer of Obama and others. Take as one example today’s report from newly arrived US correspondent Michael Koziol, who writes of Trump pulling the rug out from under USAID and State Department. The story is illustrated with a snapshot of grateful Ugandans cooking up big pots of American-supplied gruel.
What’s missing, and what might have helped readers accept that the billions dispensed by Washington in the cause of uplifting the world’s poor and benighted are not always wisely spent, a category that surely includes underwriting “a transgender opera in Columbia”, drag shows in Peru, and promoting atheism in Nepal, that last budget item to the tune of half a million dollars. Perhaps hindsight comes with a rosy tinge, but even so it’s hard to believe the Age of old would ever have countenanced such omissions, being as they are vital to understanding why Elon Musk’s DOGE squad is slashing and burning. It’s sad, really sad for the Age, for Melbourne and, most of all for the cause of unspun truth.
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