Julia Gillard exclusive interview: the timid ABC is rewarding Tony Abbott

 Extract from The Guardian

Former Labor prime minister tells Guardian Australia that attacks by Tony Abbott’s government led to a ‘pulling of punches’ by the national broadcaster

Julia Gillard as prime minister in 2012. She insists she has not watched the ABC’s The Killing Season documentary series but took part because she believes it would have been made with or without her participation. Photograph: Morne de Klerk/Getty Images

Lenore Taylor Political editor

@lenoretaylor

Tuesday 23 June 2015 12.01 AEST 

Julia Gillard has delivered a biting critique of the modern media for shallow, policy-light reporting, bias, inaccuracy and succumbing to “bullying”, accusing the Daily Telegraph of “integrated bias” and the ABC of “pulling its punches” for fear of more attacks by the Abbott government.

Julia Gillard book exclusive: how the bullying, biased media hurts Australia

In a new chapter of her autobiography, My Story, and an exclusive interview with Guardian Australia, the former Labor prime minister contends that the media and Australia’s preoccupation with leadership destabilisation contribute to politicians’ difficulties in arguing for increasingly necessary policy changes.
The leader who in 2010 vowed to start showing Australian voters “the real Julia” describes what she calls a “vicious cycle” of media preoccupation with gaffes or peripheral stumbles, leading to ever more tightly staged public appearances and even deeper voter disillusion.
“The very thing the public would most like to see – spontaneity, deep ideas, a focus on the longer term – is often the stuff least easy to portray in modern politics due to the nature of the media cycle,” she told Guardian Australia.

The thing the public would like to see – spontaneity, ideas – is the stuff least easy to portray in modern politics

Julia Gillard

“So the public ends up feeling deprived, the media chides the politician for spin and hollowness, but the media is very rarely self-reflective about how its own practice may well be drawing out the spin and hollowness as opposed to the alternatives.”
The new media cycle also rewards political negativity, she claims, benefiting Tony Abbott’s calculation in opposition to “go hard negative”.
“That kind of political calibration could have been easily made in an earlier age, but the political rewards for going simple and negative are greater in an accelerated media age that likes schlock and horror ... I think Tony Abbott’s style profits more easily in this time.”
Freed from concerns about the “indignant harrumphing” of her media targets, Gillard is also open in her opinions about different media outlets.

The ABC’s flagship Q&A program. Gillard says the Coalition’s ‘bullying’ of the ABC has ‘paid off’ for the government. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

She writes that the Coalition’s “bullying” of the ABC has “paid off” and the broadcaster frequently “pussyfoots around potential criticism of the government”.
In an interview from London, she told Guardian Australia she believed the Coalition’s early fierce attacks on the ABC’s news gathering had changed its approach.
“I think there is such a sensitivity at the ABC to becoming the subject of more hard-hitting criticism from the government that there is a pulling of punches and I do think you can see that on the news … I watch it from time to time and I think there are clear occasions where there is not the sort of hard-hitting analysis that would have happened in different circumstances,” she says.
Without passing judgment on the facts behind reports that asylum seekers had been burned while on a boat being turned back to Indonesia in 2014, Gillard says “the way in which the government hit hard at the ABC at that point, the way in which the ABC felt cowed enough to apologise effectively to the government, I thought that was telling you a story about the psychology in the ABC”.
The former prime minister was also scathing about how quickly the radio broadcaster Alan Jones had been able to recover from the widespread condemnation of his remark that her father had “died of shame” – for which Jones was forced to apologise – saying it sent a message to young journalists that there were no limits to what could be said.
“Alan Jones’ comments did get a huge reaction, as they should, and it created a crisis for him and his show and the radio network, as it should, but here we are precious few years later and he is still on the radio, still earning considerable money to be on the radio, and the most senior politicians in the country regularly appear on his radio program, so it’s telling you there really is no line that you can’t cross and still be there in the media.
“And so for any young cub reporter looking at that, what’s the lesson to be learned – you might get a sharp reaction in the first instance but it will all be all right in the long term.”

Julia Gillard with Michelle Obama at a conference in London. Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters

She cites the Daily Telegraph’s front-page headline on the first day of the 2013 election campaign, “Kick This Mob Out”, and the paper’s subsequent reporting, as an example of “the preparedness to integrate bias so fully into a newspaper that it ceases to play in any meaningful way the role of objectively bringing facts and balanced coverage to the attention of voters. Rather the paper is a vehicle for pushing a pre-established view.”
And she writes that in Australia’s heavily concentrated media market, “bias matters more, simply because there is less capacity to contest arguments and less diversity of commentary”.
Gillard applauds comedy and the “larrikinism” that allows Australians to laugh at themselves, but questions whether constant ridicule invites voters not to take politicians seriously and asks why some types of ridicule appeared reserved for her – like the ABC comedy series At Home with Julia in which actors playing her and her partner, Tim Mathieson, were portrayed having sex under an Australian flag.
“I’ve said I think the ABC crossed the line with that comedy series about me. I tried to take that as one that should be laughed through, but I thought where it got itself to was gratuitous and disrespectful and interestingly there has been no suggestion that the ABC would be producing such a comedy about the current prime minister so people might want to muse on that, why it was a Labor prime minister and the first woman and why it’s not the current prime minister.”
Gillard also warned that the Abbott government’s pattern of holding royal commissions to inquire into their political opponents – the royal commission into trade unions that called her to give evidence and has now called the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, and the royal commission into the pink batts program before which Kevin Rudd appeared – set a dangerous precedent that could be used against the Coalition in the future.

Alan Jones, who was forced to apologise for his remark that Julia Gillard’s father had ‘died of shame’. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

“This is a shift in our political culture that’s been brought by the Abbott government, it’s an Americanisation – intertwining judicial processes and political processes – and, as is the way of politics, new weaponry does end up being adopted by all sides, so I suspect these won’t be the only royal commissions we see that look back at past government policy.”
She says the development could deter people from becoming political advisers, given the cost of buying legal defence. “I think it would be a very bad circumstance in our politics if going to serve as a political staffer meant you were at risk of getting ensnared in various royal commissions and other processes and come out bankrupt. The government would say there is some legal aid support for people who are required to go before these commissions, but I know from my own experience that it is insufficient.
“I don’t complain for myself, I am a person of means. But I am concerned what it might mean for others.”
Gillard cites the former Victorian premier Ted Baillieu as a “real-world example” of a politician who tried to ignore the demands of the media cycle.
“He deliberately decided to try to slow it down and ended up being chastised for not doing anything ... ultimately what happened to Premier Baillieu had a set of other explanations. It wasn’t solely a result of that, but I think the fact he ended up with a reputation as a do-nothing premier because he deliberately tried to slow down the cycle fed into issues about his leadership.”
In her new chapter, 2015: Reflections on reform, she also:

• Points to a global loss of faith in democracy, citing the pace of economic change as one of the reasons, the “shrieking” nature of the media and a tendency for readers to “turn inward” in response.

I didn’t want the issues about leadership in the last Labor government to distract from my current colleagues’ efforts

Julia Gillard on her doubts about The Killing Season

• Attacks journalists for criticising politicians’ inability to mount a case for policy reform without assessing their own role in the process. “Amid all this bellowing comes the unedifying spectacle of newspaper columnists pontificating on the opinion page about the flaws of visionless, reform-shy politicians while the front page splashes gory headlines and drama-filled articles that degrade the ability of governments to reform. The ultimate irony presents when the same person, a reporter who also writes opinion pieces, smashes a reform conversation in a news piece and then, in their column, smashes politicians for not reforming. Overall it seems columnists are obsessed by the speck in a politician’s eye, ignoring the log in their own.”

• Criticises conservative commentators for “cynically” misrepresenting the legacy of the Hawke and Keating governments to justify their own ideological preferences about future change, especially the deregulation of labour laws and “to sneer at contemporary Labor being the enemy of reform”.

• Yearns for the day when “a publication only extends the benefits of off-the-record quotes or views appearing in print to sources that genuinely would otherwise face some persecution or payback, not people who are using a cloak of anonymity for their own reasons”, for example backbenchers trying to stir leadership tensions. “One ill-tempered comment from an anonymous backbencher is the easiest and quickest of content,” she says.

Paul Keating with Julia Gillard at the funeral of another former Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser. Gillard accuses conservative commentators of ‘cynically’ misrepresenting Keating’s and Bob Hawke’s achievements. Photograph: Theo Karanikos/AP

But despite all her criticism, Gillard said in her interview she was “long-term positive” about the capacity of the political system to achieve policy change, because of the “pent up” need for reform and because she believes media consumers will emerge from the current era of “click freneticism … and say, ‘I am over the quick click now. I might do that for reports on Kim Kardashian or celebrity culture but, for things that really matter in the political culture I am going to look for more authoritative news sources.’ ”
“I think there will be a demand build up for deeper analysis, I think it will take some time for the market to sort itself out that way, but that will help us to bust out and find places to have deeper debate.”
Gillard claims not to have watched the ABC’s The Killing Season series, which has included claims she could have done more to dissuade those plotting against Kevin Rudd and in favour of her before the leadership coup in 2010. She says she agreed to be interviewed for the series because she believed it would have been made with or without her participation.
“I think for everyone who took part it was a difficult decision. I didn’t want the issues about leadership in the last Labor government to distract from my current colleagues’ efforts … I thought about that very deeply, but the ABC was crystal clear that it would be made whether I participated or not.
“Once it’s crystal clear there is going to be that kind of show on air it becomes a question of whether you have your voice in it or not, on balance and in some ways with a bit of a heavy heart because I knew it would cause a distraction to the current colleagues, I thought it was better to have my voice in it than not, but it was a very difficult judgment.”