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REVIEW: THE TELECARD AFFAIR: DIARY OF A MEDIA LYNCHING
WHO RODE IN REITH’S LYNCH PARTY?
By Jack Waterford (Editor-in-Chief of The Canberra Times)
Addendum, The Canberra Times, July 2001
Aha, I thought, as I saw the book. Another tome on the infamy of the media, this, perhaps, with ourselves on centre stage.
Gerard Charles, some sort of political philosopher, has written The Telecard Affair: Diary of a Media Lynching, dealing with last year’s story of how Peter Reith, then Minister for Workplace Relations, was embarrassed about the misuse of his government-issued Telecard.
It was an episode that looked like ending the career of one of the most talented and effective ministers in the Howard Government, Charles says.
‘While Peter Reith was undergoing a sort of medieval torture ritual at the hands of the media, the Labor Party could not believe what was flowing their way,’ he writes.
Now while the media and the Labor Party have Peter Reith battered and strung up as a public warning, I am going to argue that the Telecard Affair is not about Workplace Relations Minister, Peter Reith. It is not about Parliamentary entitlements. It is not about MPs’ rorts. It is not about the usual “snouts in the trough”.
It is essentially about the media as the sharpest corrupting influence in our social and political life. It is about those media groups who function as amoral commercial enterprises. It is about those journalists who betray their calling and are seduced, or coerced, by people who rule themselves according to their materialist objectives. It’s about the slow death of the processes of public justice.
That all sounds very promising, but I don’t think he develops his thesis very far, or that the reader will find it anything but a piece of nitpicking advocacy, at every stage of the way, for a person in Reith’s position, based on the assumption that he is a brave and decent man and that he should not be held responsible for the consequences of errors of judgment that he made. At one stage Charles gets close to arguing that since many ordinary Australians rort their expenses, it’s not such a big deal anyway.
One reason I particularly interested was that this was a story originally broken by Emma MacDonald in The Canberra Times – a fact that Gerard Charles mentions in his first sentence. Alas, neither The Canberra Times nor MacDonald rates a subsequent mention as Charles turns immediately to parsing every sentence written or spoken afterwards by the Australian and the Sydney Daily Telegraph, as well as to television commentary [sic] by Laurie Oakes.
Perhaps we were not part of the conspiracy. Or perhaps it would not greatly suit his thesis to show that the range of information, commentary and opinion on the subject was such that it was hardly like to have been coordinated, whether in the Press Gallery or with the evil empire of Rupert Murdoch or elsewhere.
Reith’s recent announcement that he will not be standing at the next election was in part a reflection of the fact that, after the damage of the Telecard Affair, his prospects of going any further in the Liberal Party were extremely limited. In some respects, however, his survival through the actual affair was a measure of the fact that, once it was clearly going to come out, he ‘fessed up.
But probably he did not ‘fess up enough (or perhaps did not at that stage know enough about what had occurred) because, as the days wore on, fresh, embarrassing information seemed to come out every day. The Government might then hose that down but always seemed to be on the back foot.
In fact Reith had known about the time bomb ticking over him for at least a year before it became public knowledge. His first attack of candour was when, via MacDonald, it became obvious that it was not unimportant because if there are two things that nurture a story, and inspire a public and media feeding frenzy, they tend to be suggestions of hypocrisy and of a cover-up. There was nothing Reith, or even self-appointed champions such as Charles, could do about the former; had the other been there too, it is doubtful that Reith would have been able to survive.
Was Reith a hypocrite? To be able to be accused of it, one has to be on record as being opposed to the sort of conduct in question. More often than not, this involves some form of sex scandal: a conservative MP who publicly tells people how they should live is always much more vulnerable when caught in the wrong bed than one who is not on the record of opposing it.
Reith might almost have preferred a sex scandal, as being more likely to humanise him. One might never have heard him specifically on the subject of Telecards, but it was Reith who coined the phrase ‘a rort a day’ in relation to the waterside workers, and he was a member of a government that had been making some mean and tricky mileage from welfare cheating. On top of that, Charles and I might agree, he was particularly detested by people in the labour movement because of his effectiveness as a minister.
There was not only a personal vulnerability, but a more general one. Reith was never implicated in any of the many scandals about rorting by MPs or MPs’ perks and entitlements, but he would have had to be a big mug not to realise that it was an important issue, not least out of the electorate, and any suggestion of special deals, arrangement negotiated behind closed doors, or blatant use of entitlements for other than public purposes was political dynamite.
It is also far worse, as many a politician will attest, if it involves relatively simple things well within the ken of ordinary voters. At the end of the day, we punters might admit that we do not know much about submarine contracts, or the outsourcing of major government operations, and thus that resolving whether a minister has been competent is a matter of judgment. But most of us know what happens if one gives someone else the PIN. And most of us know that our bank is not going to be as forgiving as the Solicitor-General about liability for fraudulent charges racked up as a result of one’s own carelessness or misfeasance.
What was killing Reith through the affair was not the condemnation of journalists but the fact that the talk-back lines on the radio were full of people often incoherent with rage at the pathetic excuses being made. This was damaging not only Reith but the Government and politicians generally.
In some respects, one might deplore government by talk-back radio – of which there has been too much over the past decade. But this was not so much an interesting relationship between populist newspapers and radio demagogues to manipulate public opinion. The third party – the public – were playing too, and all the evidence was that what people were saying on air was much the same as was being said in ordinary lounge rooms. In that sense, it is hardly surprising that the press stayed with the story. Reith lynched himself. Gerard Charles Wilson replies
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