 Embaithanoddyd ni ow Lorde meleis, as he sees it, that is inflicting for the media, the way media reports politics in this country, at the way politicians behave in response, resulting in the in-warrant calls the sideshow syndrome. Before I run, he has attended to the podium, but I get thanks to his published ascribe for bringing him to Canberra and also to Danny Nees, Colin Steele and Catherine Piss, for the organisation of tonight's event. I mentioned to you that bookings will soon open for another free event on August 18, with German's Paul Day and photographer Mike Bowers, to talk about their new book, Armageddon, Two Men, One Man's Accurator. Before we start, please turn off your mobile phones. There will be time for questions and answers after Lindsay Kahn's talk, and it will be the federal member for Fraser and former ASU academic, who will give the vote of thanks. Book summons will cry out, and it leaves a note in Lindsay Kahn to get to the signing table and the boys as a rather tight schedule tonight, rather than hijacking anyone's right again. Now, I'd like to welcome Lindsay Kahn to start to the audience. Thanks very much, Darren. Thanks very much to ANU and the Canberra Times, to Colin and my old mate Andrew Lee, who I wanted to see be elected to the federal parliament. And thanks very much to you for coming on tonight and demonstrating, I hope, that, like me, you care about issues, you care about the future of Australia and how a political system works and how government and politics should be dealt with in the public domain. My bookside show is really something that's been incubating in me for a number of years. In fact, I started collecting material for it before we got elected to government in 2007, and so I spent several years just idly cutting things out in newspapers and noting things down and occasionally reading the obscure academic textbook about the media and so forth, knowing that I couldn't realistically ever write a book while I was Minister of Finance. I suspect I would have been rather criticised for doing so. And of course the very people who were the judge and jury about my performance were also the primary target of my criticism, so it would have been a career-threatening move. And people rightly would have described me as whinging about the umpire, so it was kind of unavoidable that I had to wait. And as it turned out, the 2010 election campaign in effect became, I think, something of a crescendo in this continuing story of public disillusion with Australian politics. So it actually was something of a happy coincidence, albeit not for the rest of the country. Because I don't think there's any doubt that there is more disillusionment in Australia now with politics, the political process and how politicians conduct themselves than there has been certainly in my adult lifetime. I started out active in politics as a teenager when I moved to Melbourne from East Gippsland to go to university in the mid-70s and I've been active in all kinds of different things prior to becoming a member of Parliament, so I've had a long involvement at various levels in the political process. I cannot remember a time when disillusionment with politics has been so extreme. We've all heard about SPIN, about politicians refusing to answer questions, about politicians using scripts endlessly to avoid answering questions, politicians behaving like robots, gimmicks and stunts. My favourite new noun, the Announceable. I hope most of you have heard of the Announceable. We used to get run up and asked, have you got the Announceables for the Sunday papers? My splenetic response to my staff when I was told this was, I'm the finance minister, I'm supposed to stop Announceables. I'm not going to give you the Announceables. So all of that is not news. What I've tried to do is to actually ask why? Why are these things happening? What's different now from 20 years ago? And I think the critical difference is the behaviour of the media. Politicians by and large from one generation to the next are not that different. They're pretty much the same as everybody else. They respond to signals saying, do this and you'll be rewarded and they try and avoid doing things that they think will be punished. So they're trying to compete, they're trying to advance their careers, they're trying to pursue objectives and the playing field that they have it heavily influences and ultimately controls how they behave. My basic argument is that the media now more than ever before distort, trivialise, personalise the content of political reporting to a point where in some instances it is so far removed from the truth that it is almost laughable. Now obviously it's a mixed picture out there. It's a nuanced picture and there are some areas of good reporting. The ABC and SBS because they're not subject to the same commercial pressures still by and large has a pretty good quality track record but they are by no means immune from these problems. Politics is reported as a sporting contest. Who's up, who's down, opinion polls, machinations, manoeuvrings. We have had eight opposition leaders in Australia in 10 years. Kim Beasley twice and six others. That is not an accident. It is a direct consequence of the way that political reporting focuses on the endless little personal contests to the exclusion of issues. So more and more the totality of the content that is delivered by our media is about everything but the actual issues, everything but the content of the matters that are being debated or considered. To this extent where in my view some sections of the media have almost become unaware of this phenomenon so it's almost got to the point where they're not making a conscious choice and saying to themselves issues are boring. People won't buy our newspaper, people won't watch our TV show if we talk about issues. It's almost to the point where they have ceased to understand how to report about the content of issues. Now there is no single bad guy here. There's no person who's or organisation or politician or editor or producer or group of people who you can pinpoint blame on. This is a collective phenomenon because what happens is that politicians respond to the signals they get from the media. The media are the oxygen of politicians. There is only one thing that is absolutely guaranteed to ensure that you will not get elected to something. Yes being an axe murderer is a disadvantage. But it's not absolutely fatal necessarily, at least not for the axe murderer. But one thing that will guarantee you won't get elected is if nobody knows who you are. That is the one thing that will guarantee you won't get elected. And how do people know who you are? How did the people in my electorate know who I was all 100,000? Did I leave them personally? Well most of them know. Every now and then I used to involve door knocking and I'd knock on somebody's door and they'd say you've been in Parliament for 10 years. How come it took you so long to get around here? I gave them a brief lesson in maths as to why this was so difficult and I actually had other parts of the role to do rather than just knock on people's doors. So the media are central. They are central to the proper functioning of democracy. And without them nobody knows what's going on. Nobody knows who politicians are, what they are saying, what they stand for, what they're proposing, what they're against. And therefore it is absolutely central for political success to be in the media. And that is why most politicians will do almost anything to get media coverage. Because without it you die. Without it you do not exist. So that's why this notion that somehow the media are the messenger of that and that we shouldn't shoot the messenger is complete garbage. They script the message. They decide what is actually going to be broadcast and what isn't. They decide what is going into the newspapers and what isn't. One of my favourite little snippets that I cite in the book is a suitably pompous editorial from the age in 2009 taking Kevin Rudd to task for intervening in the phony dispute between Gordon Ramsay and Tracy Grimshaw and Channel 9 fame which some of you may recall where there was a bit of name calling and stuff in public and of course suitably whipped up by Channel 9 to increase their ratings. And the age took Kevin Rudd to task for making comments about this. What he failed to point out is that it's not Kevin Rudd who decides whether or not these comments get reported. It's actually the editor of the age so of course the age did report the comments and lots of other things were happening that they chose not to report. So these organisations appear to be almost unaware of the power that they exercise. They are the people who determine what conduct, what statements, what behaviour, what contributions from our politicians are broadcast to the wider community. They are the ones who make the choices and yes politicians do influence that to some degree. There's no question that they are not passive participants in this process but they are very much at a mercy of the media most of the time and that's why you get the situation which you've now got. So why does spin exist? Spin is a defensive reaction by politicians to gotcha journalism. Spin is a phenomenon that has emerged as a protective device. It really first emerged in the UK in response to the most off-the-planet media in the world like the London Sun which is literally there to try and tear people apart as entertainment because that apparently sells newspapers. Spin emerged as a defensive reaction to that kind of behaviour. Refusal to answer questions. If you know that what you say is susceptible to being completely grotesquely distorted and misrepresented and made to mean the opposite of what it's intended to mean and then broadcast to a much wider audience why wouldn't you be nervous about answering a question? So there is this kind of awful symbiosis here between politicians and the media where the losers are everybody else and you get more boring content ironically because everybody's talking about nothing you get less discussion about serious issues that are actually of concern to people and of course you get the politicians no longer being able to convey a serious message to a bunch of community although as I said there are exceptions and this is not some kind of absolute thing I refer to it is a trend particularly bad over the last decade or so and I think the federal election last year was probably the most extreme the example of it and we end up with things like moving forward and standing up for Australia well I'm really pleased to hear that we're moving forward and I'm glad I didn't vote for those people out there who were proposing to move backward and I'm glad I didn't vote for the people who were proposing to stand up for some other country given that I am Australian now of course these slogans are totally meaningless but that's where the syndrome is driving us into a refusal to seriously engage with the content of issues now I am as vigorous an opponent of work choices as anybody in the labour party I was a former union secretary of union that represented mostly lower paid workers with not much industrial muscle who depended and still do depend very heavily on the safety net in ward system all those kind of things but I think it's ludicrous that Tony Abbott was put in a position at the start of the election campaign last year where in order to avoid his position being misrepresented about any agenda to bring back work choices he promised not to change a single line of any industrial relations laws or regulations for the next three years so in other words if somebody suggests that maybe the filing deadline for certain documents of the registrar should be moved from 30 days to 45 days because people are having problems for the legitimate reasons sorry we can't do that we promised faithfully not to do that that's ludicrous but that's effectively where this mad journalism ultimately drives you people are constantly being asked to guarantee things to rule things out extreme scenarios are put to them and they have to then say well I'm going to guarantee that that will never happen and therefore distort the positioning of what they're seeking to do or in order to avoid reporting that in effect will convey an impression of them doing the opposite of what they're proposing to do you might recall the debate about the resource super profits tax and the question being asked why didn't the government when it received the Henry report put it out in public and say look we're thinking about having some kind of resource super profits tax we're now going to consult with the mining industry and various other people about that and have a big discussion about the content of that well here's what would have happened we would have ended up in exactly the same position in the public domain as we were in when we announced here we're doing it because the failure to rule out that proposal instantly would have been treated by the media as an announcement that you're going to do it literally that's what would have happened and so worthy and worthwhile as consultation on an issue like that or other things is we shouldn't be naive about the notion that somehow these things can't happen in some kind of unencumbered reasonable way that's part of the problem they can't it becomes very difficult to actually have a serious public conversation about an issue without constantly being forced to rule things out and leave and to knock off particular propositions even if you've got no intention of proceeding with them but it's worthwhile having things there to have a discussion you've almost got to go to the end game straight away now I want to give a few examples that I cite in the book just for the purposes of illustration of how this problem has evolved I found it amazing that in the wake of the Queensland floods the most substantial amount of media coverage was about the question of Annabelle I crying and Julia Gillard not crying now believe it or not I have been a flood victim many many years ago when I was a kid my family in a rented rented house lost its home to flood now my memories are a bit hazy that I don't remember asking myself which politicians out there are feeling my pain or who's crying I think people are actually more interested in what government is going to do rather than who's sort of feeling their pain but of course the feel their pain sort of over a win-free show routine is okay for media presentation so the end result is you have bizarre things like a big feature article in The Australian saying that Annabelle I has set a new world gold standard in disaster response now I'm a big fan of Annabelle's and so this is not any criticism of her and I'm sure she would probably privately share my view but the bizarre thing about this article was it wasn't about the decisions that she and the Queensland government had taken to deal with the floods it was about her press conferences and how well that had been handled as if the actual reality of helping people who in many instances have had their lives seriously disrupted in some cases people died as if the reality of helping people and recovering from the floods and fixing up the economy is kind of a second reconsideration and that's an illustration of the problem is that the performance that appearances aren't taking over from content and so the one line that I use in the book to describe this is that Australian politics is now becoming like a Hollywood blockbuster all special effects and no plot and that is where the media but with politicians responding that is where we're heading now a couple of other examples you might occasionally see the magazine the good weekend that is attached to the Saturday Herald and Age and every now and then they build a big profile of a senior politician a big photo on the front whatever and beginning of last year Barnaby Joyce was briefly Shadow Finance Minister you might recall I had five Shadow Finance Ministers by office I'm claiming this as an Australian record one term five Shadow Finance Ministers but Barnaby was the subject of one of these profiles and we were there doing Q&A in the green room before and I didn't know any of this at the time but my new adviser was talking to the journalist about this profile and she was asking and I said it's got to be good gossip or does Lindsay want to say anything about Barnaby etc etc and my media adviser in the very loyal dedicated person that she is said why don't you do a profile of Lindsay and the answer was Lindsay's too normal now when I heard this subsequently I wasn't sure whether it was meant to be a compliment on the insult about discovering that I was too normal to be the subject of a major profile at the weekend but unfortunately by that stage I already had the finish line in mind so I wasn't that upset but I felt to myself well this really tells you what you need to know here that basically these days to get on in Australian politics more and more you've actually got on a freak show that's essentially where it's heading Kim Beasley when he lost the leadership to Kevin Rudd you might recall that one of the signal events was a press conference where he was expressing condolences to Rove McManus for the death of Billinder Remedy's partner and he jumbled up and expressed his condolences to Carl Rove who of course was the political psychic of George Bush and this was a signal event that led to these insidias nobody asked the question why on earth was Kim Beasley talking about Rove McManus and Billinder Remedy why none of them had anything to do with Australian politics they're completely unrelated what he was trying to do of course was insert himself into the daily leadership so what he was trying to do and that's what politicians more and more have to do is if there's minimal coverage on the serious stuff or they have to go where the light stuff or the light entertainment the sporting stuff they have to go there and that's why I went on the footy show a year or so ago and that's why you've had are you smarter than the fifth grader talking about my generation good news weakness is plethora of senior politicians turning up on these light entertainment shows because what they're doing is seeking out the oxygen of publicity which is getting harder and harder to get for serious things going where the media are on a slightly more serious note as an example my colleague and friend Nick Sherry was the subject of an article in the business age and I presume he's probably in the business herald as well a year or so ago that was full of shock horror flavour Nick Sherry assistant treasurer dined with executives of McQuarrie bank a week before the government decided to give the bank guarantees at the height of the global financial crisis McQuarrie bank were significant beneficiaries of these guarantees along with many other financial institutions and although no specific allegations made the tone of the article was very clear funny business going on here all very dodgy all very incestuous this government minister who's in bed with McQuarrie bank isn't that terrible two facts one Nick Sherry was not a member of cabinet two he was not party to the decision to introduce those bank guarantees and would not have known about the decision until the decision was announced three those kind of dinners and lunches whether you like or not are routine for government ministers and not just with the McQuarrie bank all kinds of different organisations and yet what I consider to be a significant slur on the character of a guy who is a straight as a die and very knowledgeable about financial matters very knowledgeable about superannuation and all to create something titillating and exciting and interesting in passing as business news the media reaction to my book has been very interesting very interesting there had been some journalists Barry Cassidy Michelle Grafton who have responded seriously and have kind of not necessarily signed up to my argument but basically said yeah there's an issue here and let's forget about who's really to blame as a politicians and leave you whatever there's an issue we need to talk about but by and large it's been one of incomprehension of the kind of who us talking about the content of the response included issues like my appearance the school I attended my performance as finance minister my life after politics and my reasons for resigning now think for a second none of them are at all relevant to the merits of my argument they're entirely irrelevant you may like or dislike my widows peak but let me tell you it's not relevant to the question of whether the sideshow argument is right the interesting thing so far is that nobody has really joined battle and said the phenomenon I have described is not happening nobody has actually confronted the core thesis of the book and said no you were wrong the situation is no worse than it's ever been or you've simply got it wrong it's all very different nobody as far as I've seen so far has done that the main reaction from the doubters has been well it's not our fault it's all the politicians fault we're just the messengers nobody has joined battle and said no this is not correct the initial tabloid media coverage was sensational it was almost like I'd paid somebody to give living proof to the thesis so we had to do this article which got published in most of the Murdoch Sunday tabloids under titles like Tana Savage's Leaders and all this kind of stuff and had very carefully extracted surgically removed little snippets that just happened to contain key words like Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard and presented as me attacking them and criticising them and in fact of course the complete opposite was the case in fact innocent bystanders in these little things and these are just mentions and the critique is of the media so the great thing of course was that this is precisely what I predicted would happen in the books introduction where I said well this is how journalists are going to respond to in my book and with some information stepped up that played fantastically the funny thing is though that I then got criticised by columnists in the Australian Peter Van Onceland and Chris Kennedy for not attacking by former colleagues within the space of the week I've been criticised for attacking them and for not attacking them of course they felt I would have written a much better book if I had spilled beans on the Labour Government I can understand where they're coming from but that's not the book I set out to write out to set out to write even the 730 report which normally is an excellent programme had as its introductory trailer to the interview I did with Lee Sayles the words Lindsay Tannett shows or tells us what's wrong with Australian politicians no actually that's not the point of my book I'm afraid the Sunday Telegraph in an editorial described me as a man who makes no secret of his bitterness why don't my friends tell me why don't my friends tell me it's kind of like having a bad breath or something like that of course they produced absolutely no evidence to demonstrate that this was the case that's a bit beside the point I had one of my other favourites was speculation that the reason I left politics was in protest at Kevin Rudd's decision to walk away from the carbon pollution reduction scheme now I think I can't be certain of this but I think if that were true that would make me the first person in Australian political history to resign in protest about something but not tell anybody about it to me that kind of seems a bit contradictory to the notion of what the verb to protest actually is this can stop Peter Van Olsen from speculating that that may have been the reason of course the notion that I left because of my family commitments was far too normal to be absorbed and understood by some David Pimperty in a review in the Australian described me as 50 going on 75 and the basic problem here is that I was not much fun I hope that Rupert Murdoch is prepared to overlook this slight on his sense of fun given that he is actually somewhere around the 75 mark clearly in the global financial crisis what we were really missing was the finance minister who could tell better jokes but I did my best I can assure you so this is the kind of stuff that you know with literally just incomprehension defensiveness, understandable but just actually some of these people they just don't get it they are so accustomed to playing the man not the ball they are so accustomed to reporting the sport and the entertainment of politics and to pumping that up and to just ignoring or downplaying that actually affects people's lives and the future of the country that they kind of have lost sight of the serious content it's almost as if it's not so much that any longer making a conscious choice they have become so ingrained into a kind of today tonight a current affair way of living in the world they have lost sight of the fact that there actually is serious content and I think that's a huge problem their misuse of language is I think a dreadful problem one of the things that's occurred in two articles in response to my book that really makes me annoyed and it's not annoyed personally because I'm not directed at me I pointed out that Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan announced a business advisory councillor in opposition in mid-07 chaired by Sir John Eddington and it actually never eventuated why? because as time unfolded it just got a bit hard and a bit complicated and once we were in government questions of if you put this person on how can you avoid putting that person on all these other things it ended up being abandoned and I pointed out that the media were happy to sort of report the announcement but nobody actually noticed that it didn't happen nobody really noticed that this had not been felt wrong now this has been referred to by Sam Mayden as Kevin Rudd's deception David Pemberty asserts that I have owned up to the fact that the government lied about this now call me sort of old fashioned a pedantic but my definition of lying is making a statement you know is untrue changing your mind is actually something a bit different from lying but here we have one of many examples where politicians are basically putting in this position and say what happened from what you said 12 months ago or whatever therefore you have to hold a lie when in fact there's absolutely no evidence of that and in this instance as in many others it's completely incorrect so I want to just finish with a couple of more recent examples that I think are useful to illustrate the points the Senator David Bushby famous meow to Penny Wong the other day there was some voted editorial saying that this demonstrated that I was wrong that it's all politicians fault you know what this infantile behaviour we just kind of report what goes on well I hope you're disillusioned but how do we answer these questions why is it that one or two minutes of dozens of hours of Senate estimates hearings on all kinds of things one or two minutes gets elevated on the front page and gets huge coverage who decided that was it Penny Wong don't think so was it David Bushby wasn't Julie Gillard who decided to give huge attention and coverage to that who put microphones on the media politicians noses and said if you'd like to be in the media if you'd like people that know you exist we want you to comment on this matter ah that'd be the media not politicians making those calls yes politicians do silly things now that Bushby did something silly there you know one isolated incident one or one specific incident in hours and hours of hearings about all kinds of serious and sometimes not so serious issues it's not the politicians who choose that to be the main content it is the media who say that's exciting that's titillating that involves conflict we'll run that maes to say the ABC ABC News in my state probably wouldn't have registered much up here run a huge news item early on the news with about five different politicians giving grants about Deputy Premier Louise Asher missing a division a totally inconsequential division because she was asleep in her office at 11 o'clock at night this was a big news item got lots of coverage everywhere and the opposition presented her with an alarm clock in palm following day now here's my following rhetorical question why do you reckon the opposition presented her with an alarm clock I think because they realised that that would probably get covered by the media and that all kinds of serious things that they might have been doing on that day probably weren't going to get covered by the media so these are just yet further illustrations of what I think is really a serious sickness at the heart of our democratic process flimflam theatre posturing personalities that have always been part of politics and up to a point they actually can play a positive role of lightening things up a bit of making politics a bit more accessible a bit more interesting my concern though is that those things have taken over and that what is now happening is actually undermining our sense of a functioning democracy because we are heading to a world where literally the question of who governs Australia will be decided on matters such as whether Julie Gillard pride or not and what Tony Adam looks like in speed art thank you very much we have about 20 minutes for questions so if you could put your arms up and then we'll take questions for Lindsay first one blue here general then thanks Lizzie you talked you talked great length lots of examples of politicians politicians responding to the sort of change nature of the media and I believe that's true I think the natural question that follows is then why has the media changed and I would just like to hear your thoughts on that this this is actually dealt with in the latter part of my book which hasn't got a huge amount of coverage so it's a little bit to be honest a bit obscure and a bit reflective I think the main answer is technological change and intensified competition and so the lead way that a lot of commercial media used to have to be vaguely high minded and public spirited has got squeezed so an example I cited which I've never forgotten is years ago the guy who runs Channel I in Carrafears said to me after I'd given him the rounds of the kitchen why is it Carrafears such a lot of rubbish why do we have this endlessly greedy cycle the tenant from hell the living bureaucrat from the local council because those of you who are still watching when I'm talking about his answer was every time we have a politician on a Carrafears 100,000 people change the channel and I kind of went I think I just lost the argument there because there's a commercial organisations so in a sense I think that's a reasonable response I think it's true to say that politicians could lift their game a bit even though they're responding to external pressures and it's equally true to say the media could lift its game a bit but we shouldn't forget those external pressures and behind all of that is I think enormous complacency in this country to allow us to be a product of 20 years of no serious economic downturns but there's a whole lot of complicated things there which really are the subject for another another book or somebody's PhD or whatever but I think that's a real problem one of the reasons why political debate was very highly charged and very serious and quite accessible in the 1980s and why you've been so many big serious reforms that were often quite unpopular through was there was a widespread community on these about the state of Australia about the state of the economy about our position in the world so people were up for a bit of a serious discussion I think we've been in an era recently which has been very different so everybody's in the picture to some degree you talked about just now the commercial imperative and also in the book a bit about the psychological reasons why people disengage from politics and focus on the trivial so how do we fix it one of the things the book has been criticised for I think not unreasonably is not enough solutions so I do explore some of the possible things I think there are some modest things that governments can do I'm a huge fan of community broadcasting for example community radio is a much undervalued asset I think radio generally is the side here commercial radio just as much as the ABC and community radio so just as one small thing the government putting in more than 6 or 7 million bucks a year in community radio I think it's immediately positive but it's not a magic book or anything like that but naturally because you're often dealing with issues of freedom of speech we need to be very careful about any serious government intervention there are countries in Europe that are only for this kind of reason to guarantee that there remains a reasonable public discussion about more serious issues I think it'd be pretty unlikely that people would cop that in Australia and I think there were legitimate reasons why they'd be very doubtful about it I'm hopeful that believe it or not that market forces are already starting to push back a bit I believe that the big swing to the Greens in the last election which of course gave them a mile or electorate was was largely driven by more politically aware educated voters saying we are sick of being taught to as if we were children and although we don't necessarily sign up to all the Greens policies and some of them are wacky or whatever at least they're talking about serious things now that's my interpretation I can't prove it, others will have different opinions but I think there is a bit of an initial trend pushing back and I'm hopeful that my book makes a bit of a contribution to that it just makes a lot of people a little bit more aware of it and therefore maybe just go to that extra 5% which in aggregate might make a difference but it is a very difficult sort of puzzling thing there's no simple way prodding people in the chest and saying this is serious you idiot stop playing around you can't do it, you're dealing with millions of people who if I want to switch off, I'll switch off In your book you talk very slightly about New Media and New Media and you dismiss them because they're not mainstreaming but at the same time you seem to ignore that parties themselves had more control over the message that they could convey out to the public and so when just the people were looking for information they'd go to like the little body website or the green's body website and just there was a peculiarity that there was no policy really being put forward how much can you blame the media for not reporting on policy when the policy wasn't there in the first one Well there is inevitably a chicken and egg question here I'm putting forward my view but it's not a physics experiment to prove that my perspective is literally true I would suggest to you as my co-incidence that there's an increasing birth of detailed policy I would suggest to you that the primary reason for that is that the only time that kind of thing ever gets reported and talk to the Greens about this the only time that kind of evidence reported is some kind of shock horror tabloid Greens want to make drugs compulsory kind of story that's the only time that kind of stuff gets reported so guess what political parties go I don't think we'll go there anyway now like I said you can put with that different views but I think that's an unfortunate thing but there are other factors in play too the world has got so much more complex that was say 20 or 30 years ago therefore it's coming harder and harder to go through the processes I think many years ago have been part of policy formulation processes where you might be in effect making calls today about something that might happen in five years time that's getting harder and harder because the world is changing so rapidly and it's becoming so much more complex so there's a lot of other factors in play there but I can't say that I haven't much of a look at the various websites at last election but I can't say that your comment is probably true you talked about the need for politicians within media to say oxygen are there any issues that you can share like the horror story came through and the media said we really don't like you even if you kill a guy we're not going to mention you at all has that ever happened look off the top of head I don't think so I don't think this is the thing is there are no conspiracies here the media are internally pretty competitive so it's not reasonable to suggest for example the FIN review and the Australian and the Herald and the Age and the Herald Sun and the Dalai Telegraph all get together and say it's all agreed we're not going to give any coverage to the person X clearly that kind of thing doesn't happen so I don't think I can think of any example of that kind I I think in a sense the it's not so much that there is a conscious decision saying you know this person is too boring we're not covering them it is more that that's what happens by default one of the things I'm mentioning in my book is that the adjective I attracted more than any other during my political career was the word thoughtful most of you I hope think that's a compliment unfortunately it's a journalist word that means boring there are other journalist words like maverick which means delivers good copy I like what I enjoy charismatic which means sells newspapers so words sometimes mean a little bit different from what you and I think they mean but I don't as much doubt that you've got to be more and more of a crowd pleasing show party to to at least be in the top national on those days who's the captain of that with the beard how much do you think is back the other way from politicians especially in terms of of the two party system that individual MPs don't need to articulate their views on issues they can hide behind the party lines and in terms of the Labour Party look Ben the starting point is there's no perfect system so whatever kind of arrangements you've got we do pretty well in this country in my view I can point to deficiencies in the constitutional arrangements I'm not a big fan of state governments and so forth but I think by and large we do okay but it's really important in criticising these things remember that most of the time you change things you're kind of swapping one set of problems for another set so that is a preliminary thing I'm a bit of a fan of party discipline and clear collective groups of MPs for a simple reason that is consumer awareness for what a better term for all of the crap that is written and spoken about independence and consciences and all this other stuff the truth is that no matter how engaged and interested the electorate is going to be of the $100,000 people who are electing an individual MP a very large proportion of those people who vote for that person who's successful know one crucial thing about that person only that is their party affiliation and through that knowledge a whole range of other knowledge comes to them about roughly how this person might behave as their representative it's not perfect but at least it gives them some information about the product they're buying if somebody votes for me because of my conscience I could do anything they've got no idea about what I might then do as a representative whereas the reason I was elected six times was because I had the words to straighten in the Labor Party after my name on the ballot paper and however great I might think I am there's no doubt that the vast bulk of people who are voting for me were actually voting because they wanted a Labor Member of Parliament and they wanted a Labor Government so to me although political parties can misbehave they can get a bit too descriptive or a bit too paranoid about the message and I'd like to see a loosening of that I confess but I'd urge people not to be drawn in by the mirage of independence and noble individuals and so forth because the truth is that where that takes you is I think ultimately less representative and less democratic Lady in the red It's probably better to say that Kevin Donne had a particular knack for feeding the beast and when Julie Gillard became Prime Minister I think she was really clear in terms of feeding the beast less and wanting to press conferences and that sort of thing Do you think there's any chance for reform of the beast in the long term and just a quick second question you've paid so impressively going behind pay balls do you think that would change in term at all? To pay balls one's a very interesting question I think there's a lot of people out there who may answer that because they'd make large amounts of money begging right away I don't want to answer that but you're dead right that that's a I think a very significant swing or potential swing factor and I don't think there's going to be any individual or sudden change of behaviour or whatever that's going to solve for those problems I think really a bit of more community awareness a bit more pressure from the consumers which as I said I think will help to change things also events we've been very fortunate for 20 years no serious economic downturn we've broadly managed to miss the worst the global global financial crisis there's no guarantee that circumstances will be as benign in the next 5 years or whatever so clearly if circumstances change that can change the mood the new media angle is quite interesting I think because I'm to be honest I'm a bit ambivalent you can look at the new media thing and say the problem is that you are not going to get the equivalent of a mass media most people in the community are connected to it conversation about the new media and I kind of suspect that's why because you've got all these fantastic niche products that people who are already engaged are already aware and interested gravitate to but they tend to be relatively modestly sized minorities and you've got things like Twitter which are great for kind of gossip and scuttle button one off the occurrences but not exactly the appropriate location for a serious political debate about an issue and of course we don't know what new technological advances are going to flow as well so I think the jury is still out about it but there's a fantastic guy called Marcus Prior who was a researcher in the US that I drew on from a few pages talking about American television in the 50s and 60s and his argument is that because everybody watched TV and because they had all the stations with their news on at the same time and a large number of people basically watched whatever was on and because there was a degree of public service obligation to have vaguely serious news what that meant was that a whole lot of people who normally would opt not to plug in to serious news about politics did so and that you had this period because of the nature of the media in the US and the equivalent of Australia in the 60s and 70s that you had a higher than usual kind of mass connection with the world of politics but what effectively happened in the US was the emergence of cable TV his argument was put it very succinctly people didn't change, they just changed the channel and so people who suddenly had entertainment options they didn't have to watch the news, stop watching the news so to me that's quite a talent thing about how the technologies do influence behaviour but of course none of us can predict where the new media goes I have different views on different days that sometimes are quite optimistic about and other days are not time for one last question ladies in the white ladies there on the left hand side right of hand oh it's dead now it's dead it's the world class of sex change my question is touching on something I think he talked a lot about the relationship between the media and politicians but I think one thing that really needs to be thought of has to be decline in membership of mainstream political parties and also the trade union so essentially organisations and individuals who engage with people on a daily basis about politics the amount of people has essentially declined so it's actually made me more important as the only way that politicians who made a community and I just wanted to get your thoughts on that that is absolutely correct and I do talk about that in the book admittedly in passing but I do acknowledge that as a very significant element of course it's really been happening for probably 40 years but effectively what's occurred now is that that process of intermediation that I referred to whereby the rest of the country becomes aware of who the politicians are and vaguely what they stand for and what they're about and what their positions are and things that used to be a reasonably crowded space and it had a lot of organisations like trade unions churches service organisations all kinds of organisations there that in effect are crucial intermediaries the media were there as well though very powerful and significant but what you've had is a substantial decline in active participation in those organisations and although it's true to say we still have very substantial trade union membership as a former union secretary I think I can safely say that the extent of active participation by union members and outside the very day-to-day bread and butter arguments about their workplace has diminished dramatically in the past 40 years or so I think that is quite a crucial thing so that the media are no longer competing anywhere near as much with the kind of different versions of reality being put out by trusted organisations to their memberships that are large and have a mass base so that there is an emerging an emerging group of NGOs and organisations like Get Up that are swinging the pendulum back a bit so that is one area where I think it is possible to be a bit optimistic about the future where although it won't be perhaps quite on the same mass scale although who knows there are signs of a swing back with different kinds of organisations Get Up than the obvious example but in a sense there is a very percipient point made by one of the many books I have read about that helps to explain this problem talking very much about the issue raised and pointing out that of all those intermediaries the one that's left standing is the one that's driven by the profit motive so that you have this array of intermediaries in the political space between the ordinary citizens and the politicians the others, whether they be service clubs trade unions, churches, whatever are all actually service to their members driven whereas the one that's kind of ultimately drier, ultimately triumphed is the one that's actually commercially driven now I'm not saying that's a good thing but that is I think a significant element that's trying to understand why we have got to where we are and the bottom line is that we all want to be entertained not all of us want to be informed so in a strict commercial frame entertainment will always try information and that's a problem and that is a human reality that I know nobody thinks is going to change so there's the dilemma is that how do we somehow underneath that reality just try and push the pendulum back a little bit so that information and serious discussion kind of gets a slightly bigger place in the song than the place it currently has I'm hopeful that like I say that just public demand market forces, rising education levels will help to do that but it is important that people here tonight if you think you're getting crap don't put up with it try and express your view and try and whether it's to the local paper or with a politician or whatever even in small ways it's amazing how much a few individuals can actually have an impact on those things thank you very much it's my pleasure to just say a few words to Lindsay Tannett for that extraordinary talk Lindsay is a great intellectual in politics and of course the role of intellectuals in politics has always been a bit contested Lenin was never quite sure whether intellectuals should be put with the good proletarians or put up against the wall with the bourgeoisie William Buckley famously said that he'd rather be ruled by the first 2000 names from the Boston phone book or the fire faculty of Harvard University and when you think of the notion of an entire parliament of book writers I don't know about you but it kind of makes me shudder a little but parliament is clearly far better for Lindsay's nearly two decades in it and Australia is clearly the better for it as well like one of my other heroes, Ken Henry Lindsay thinks about the world through systems and through incentives not through thinking about individuals actually now I think about it there's a few similarities between Lindsay and Ken Henry they're both brilliant handsome naturally full of roughed voice but don't suffer fools very easily as you would have seen from Ken in Senate Estimates and Lindsay on some of his recent TV interviews they both give great speeches but Lindsay may not be a show pony but you certainly managed to please this crowd and they did both resign in the middle of last year which brings me to an actual question don't answer this if you've ever worked in Treasury, Finance or Parliament House but has anyone actually seen Ken Henry and Lindsay Tanner in the same room together? Is Ken Henry here this evening? So please join me in thanking the Henry Tanner this evening in his Lindsay Tanner manifestation for a greatly engaging and stimulating conversation and one that hopefully all of us can take on board to go out there and tackle the problems that Lindsay's identified