I don’t understand or don’t agree with what you say. Therefore you must be mentally ill.
That’s the message some journalists have for Victorians when they suggest Stockholm Syndrome is the only explanation for why they continue to support Premier Daniel Andrews.
What IS remarkable is that the support hasn’t dropped through the floor, given he has curtailed the entire state’s liberty for months, and stalled the economy in the process.
So what’s going on? Normally, if journalists realise they are out of touch with what voters are thinking, they recognise it as a fault in themselves, not the voters.
For example, many acknowledged they didn’t adequately understand the impact of Queensland voters in the unexpected victory of the coalition at the last federal election.
But not this time, in the case of Victoria. Instead, political journalists seem to think people in Victoria must be delusional.
For those not familiar with the term, Stockholm Syndrome is a theory that hostages quickly start to identify with their captors. It’s controversial in ways I don’t have space to go into here.
The Victorians-have-Stockholm-Syndrome line had its first outing in remarks from clearly partisan commentators such as Chris Kenny and Peta Credlin on SkyNews last week.
But in the last few days it has been picked up and reflected by journalists who should know better – notably the Australian Financial Review’s Jennifer Hewett and News Corporation’s Peter van Onselen on the ABC Insiders program last Saturday.
Normally I regard both these journalists as well worth listening to and reading, so I was disappointed by the arrogance.
Imagine if this was happening in NSW or the nation as a whole. Would a journalist, surprised by public sentiment, rush to the conclusion that the problem was with the public?
Imagine: “The people of Sydney are suffering from Stockholm syndrome”. I think a journalist tempted to write such a phrase would delete and reflect.
I don’t want to overdo the Sydney-Melbourne divide here. Hewett and Credlin, for example, are both based in Melbourne.
Nevertheless, I think this demonstrates what we have lost from the collapse of the business model that pays journalists’ salaries. We have lost local journalism, and national journalism written for local audiences.
A decade ago there were separate Canberra Press Gallery offices serving The Herald Sun and The Australian, even though they were both News Corporation newspapers. There were separate Canberra offices serving the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, although they were both owned by Fairfax (now Nine).
In other words, there were reporters whose job it was to report federal politics specifically for Victorian readers.
The merging of the bureaus, together with the fact that our main media companies are Sydney based and Sydney-centric, means that Victorian audiences are less well-served.
For example, when Prime Minister Scott Morrison or Treasurer Josh Frydenberg slam Andrews for maintaining a strict lockdown, they have not been asked what seem to me to be obvious questions.
Something along the lines of: “The Burnett Institute modelling shows that opening up too quickly in Victoria would mean a 41 percent chance of a third wave of Covid. Do you still think Andrews should open up?”
Or, more recently, when Morrison suggested Victoria should behave more like NSW, a journalist could have asked: “Victoria has twice as many active cases and twice as many mystery cases as NSW. Do you still think the two are comparable?”
The Prime Minister and Treasurer may well have answers to such queries. My point is that the questions have not been asked, so far as I can determine. They surely would have been, if the reporters had Victorian audiences more clearly in mind.
None of this is to suggest that Andrews should not be held to account for significant failures. But I think the Canberra and Sydney focussed journalists are misunderstanding what is going on in Victoria.
The hotel quarantine system in Victoria failed, and the evidence before the resulting judicial inquiry suggests that there were longstanding and serious systemic issues behind that failure, which are to do with the culture of government and the public service. I have written about those elsewhere.
Senior public servants and ministers have ducked for cover and there are questions about their honesty. This, too, has happened on Andrews’ watch.
Behind this are longstanding failures to adequately resource public health, which is the story behind Victoria’s poorer job of contact tracing in the early days of the second wave.
The Andrews government should be held to account for all these things. Andrews himself was health minister for three years from 2007 and by all accounts active and engaged, but he was not a champion for public health, which continued to dwindle on his watch.
He is far from alone in that failing. Across the western world and certainly in Australia, the non-glamorous business of public health has been neglected.
There is a reason our national border is closed. It is because none of our state public health systems are up to the challenge of having the border open during a pandemic.
The same is true for every other nation that has closed its borders – and many that have not or cannot and are paying the price.
But back to the more immediate politics.
Why aren’t more Victorian voters itching to punish Daniel Andrews? Why is there apparently majority acceptance that the extended lockdown is broadly necessary?
I have taken some soundings this week from people outside my normal bubble. It has taken an effort. As we say in Victoria these days, I haven’t been getting out much.
I have spoken to a middle manager from Dan Murphy’s, an allied health professional who has lost 20 per cent of his business, a clothing retailer on the edge of bankruptcy and a bank teller. Not scientific, but the views I have heard are in accord with what the public opinion polls suggest.
First, Daniel Andrews’ technique of showing up every day for a media conference and taking all questions buys him respect, even if it is grudging.
In these encounters he speaks directly to the public, with the journalists being props and prompts – a secondary audience. It is working for him. The often hostile questioning of journalists briefed from Sydney doesn’t change that, because they focus on politics and past events, which is not what Victorians are chiefly concerned with.
Second, his clear statement at the beginning of the second wave – reiterated periodically since then – that mistakes have been made and that he is responsible for them, has been heard and appreciated. To some extent it inoculates him against the evasions and lack of transparency also in display within the government. He is not seen as personally dodging responsibility – or not yet.
Third, and probably most important, most Victorians are not thinking about the politics. They just want to get through this as best they can.
When Frydenberg and Morrison make it into a political attack, the response is irritation.
Lastly, people were frightened, back in late July and early August, to see the state’s daily Covid numbers soaring into the 700s. When the hard lockdown was announced there was horror, but also for many a sense of grim acceptance and even relief the government was taking action – arguably too slowly.
None of this is to deny the challenge of Victoria’s experience, and how devastating it has been. This last fortnight, I have had a sense that the mental health of too many friends is falling off a cliff. Living through this has been a longstanding dreary trauma, worst for those who have lost family members, jobs and businesses.
But the media, including the local media, has shown few signs of being on the side of Victorians. There has been a lack of empathy.
I am also sick of all those comparisons between NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Andrews. Different problems, different states. Attempts to compare miss the point and look out of touch.
As Victoria emerges from lockdown, having beaten the second wave, there seems to have been a odd reluctance to acknowledge the scale of the achievement.
An exception was Samantha Maiden on news.com.au who reported that having “lived a grim existence that few Australians outside of the state can understand” Victoria was regarded by experts as having made history as one of the only cities across the globe to bring a second wave under control and return daily case numbers to near zero.
You'd think there would be more celebration of this by media - of the people's achievement, if not that of Daniel Andrews.
Journalists don’t have to congratulate Andrews. They should acknowledge and make common cause with their readers.
There will be a reckoning for Daniel Andrews.
Labor may lose the next election, and Andrews may be forced to resign before then, depending partly on the findings of the hotel quarantine inquiry.
But I think it equally possible that, if the Covid numbers continue to fall, the promised “unprecedented” spending effort in the state budget might buy him longevity.
In the meantime, understanding Victoria entails an ability to think beyond a binary, and to hold two ideas in one’s head at the same time.
Andrews has serious, devastating errors to account for. He has also shown exceptional leadership in countering a second wave.
Both things are true. He has both failed and succeeded.
Meanwhile Victorians have shown remarkable stoicism for which they deserve acknowledgement, not insults.
As for the political journalists, if they don’t understand what’s happening in Victoria, that’s on them. We need them to lift their game because when people are in crisis, good journalism matters even more than usual.
Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of many books and numerous articles and essays. She is also a journalism academic and Honorary Principal Fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne. She has won the Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism, a Foreign Press Association Award and a number of Quill Awards, including for her reporting from the Philippines with photojournalist Dave Tacon.
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