Extract from The Guardian
But Australians also seemed to resume their lives with a resolve that some things should change.
They voted for a new federal government and a parliament that would finally get serious about the climate crisis. Victorians resoundingly returned a premier, while ignoring the once-powerful voices that insisted was he was divisive and disliked.Curious exploration of different points of view is more possible if the contending parties are not shouting
It was a year of resetting what’s important and recalibrating how we live and interact. To some extent, it was because of choices made during the long inward-focused pandemic years. To some extent, recalibration was imposed on us, by the rising costs of daily life.
It was a year of taking stock, a year when the outrage machine seemed to quieten a bit, where a new government mostly just got on with the job of governing, and voters responded positively to the reduction in political noise.
And despite challenges, including stretched household budgets and a virus that has not gone away, Australians are looking to 2023 with optimism. Forty per cent think it will be better than 2022, according to the latest Guardian Essential poll.
The change in the tenor of the national discourse, however long it lasts, makes it easier for Guardian Australia to do what we have done from the outset. Factual reporting and analysis lands better when public debate stays broadly within the guardrails of truth, and curious exploration of different points of view is more possible if the contending parties are not shouting.
In 2023 we will scrutinise the implementation of the Albanese government’s climate policies against what the science demands must be done and we will watch and measure the new national anti-corruption commission against the expectations of an electorate thoroughly disgusted by rorts, pork barrelling and insufficient accountability. Indigenous affairs editor Lorena Allam and I were at Garma to hear the new prime minister swing his political capital behind the constitutional enshrinement of Indigenous voice and Guardian Australia will play an active and constructive role in that debate.
We will judge state and federal policies to address the housing and cost-of-living crises against the people whose stories we tell, the families living in tents, the working families using food banks, or those who aren’t using lights because electricity costs are so high.
We will remain alert to the shifting geopolitics of our region and the resetting of foreign affairs and defence policy in response. And our culture, lifestyle and sport desks will continue to report on the things that bring joy and richness and meaning to our lives.
We have new reporting projects up and running: the rural and regional network bringing informed news from outside the capital cities, the state desks in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria adding voices and viewpoints to state-based news and an expanded multimedia team presenting our journalism to audiences in different ways, including through our award-winning Full Story podcast.
We are also entering our 10th birthday year in 2023 and we have big plans to celebrate the fact that we’ve become an influential voice in the Australian media in just one decade with the readers and supporters who made it happen.
Information and considered debate could chart our post-pandemic course for the better
Way back in the early days of lockdown in 2020 I wrote an essay for an anthology entitled Fire, Flood and Plague which concluded with the following thought.
“When we are finally able to resume our lives, information and considered debate could chart our post-pandemic course for the better. We might manage to reinstate facts to our consideration of climate policy and abandon the notion that caring about the future of the planet is a partisan issue … If we call out lies, are curious and open-minded to different points of view and ideas, can return to politics as reasonable means of brokering differing views, and can brace ourselves against those who would turn everything into some kind of ‘war’, we might help nurse civic debate back to something constructive, as we try to recover and rebuild.”
Two years ago that notion was a tentative hope, a wish cast towards an unknown future like a dandelion seed on a breeze. But now it seems within grasp, and Guardian Australia enters 2023 intent on doing all we can to make it a reality.
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