The date for the federal election has not been set but that hasn’t stopped the Seven network from unveiling its Election Needle, a gimmick resembling a car’s speedometer which they say will predict whether Anthony Albanese or Peter Dutton is winning the election.
The network that brought you the “Screen of Dreams” and “The Panic Station” during the 2022 race between Scott Morrison and Albanese rolled out the Election Needle’s first prediction this week.
“The federal election remains a ‘toss-up’ but with a slight lean towards Anthony Albanese to remain as prime minister,” Seven News said.
The idea appears to have been borrowed from the New York Times Needle, which launched in 2016, and was popular on the night of the US poll which saw Donald Trump elected as president.
The commercial networks have always tried to make election broadcasts more inviting for viewers by introducing shiny tools and 3D graphics, including the Worm, the Shredder, the Boot and the Crusher.
The ABC relies instead on big screens of statistics and its election analyst Antony Green, but is keen to get to the real set piece of an election campaign: the leadership debate.
Last time around Morrison accepted invitations to debate the Labor leader on two commercial TV networks and Sky News Australia but refused to appear on the ABC.
The ABC told Weekly Beast it has proposed “a prime-time debate that would be available to all Australians, including in regional and remote areas, across our television, radio and streaming platforms”.
Last Friday at the National Press Club Albanese challenged Dutton to election debates at the club during the campaign, joking: “I’ll even offer to give Peter Dutton a lift down from Parliament House in case he can’t find it.”
The networks’ approach to debates can be an emotive issue for political journalists and in 2022 former Nine political editor Chris Uhlmann objected to a critique of his network’s shambolic debate written by former Guardian Australia political editor Katharine Murphy.
“It’s hard to find words for how terrible that second leaders’ debate was,” Murphy, now a Labor adviser, wrote. “A genuine shit blizzard. It was the Jerry Springer of leaders’ debates.”
Uhlmann returned fire with a piece in the Nine papers, describing the Guardian as “angrily post-Christian”.
Creative maths
The Daily Telegraph splashed with an exclusive front-page story on Tuesday, “All Aboard”, quoting the opposition home affairs spokesman, James Paterson, saying Labor had opened the door to illegal boat arrivals and their families.
The online version, by federal political editor Jade Gailberger and headlined “Labor opens door to partners, families of illegal asylum seekers”, said: “More than 21,000 partners and family members of asylum seekers who arrived by boat have been granted permanent Australian visas, new figures show.”
The story was on the front page of the Herald Sun too, and was mentioned more than a dozen times across Channel Nine and Seven’s news programs, Sky News Australia and 3AW. Paterson popped up throughout the day to criticise Labor for the figure, which he said was 21,581.
The story was based on answers to a question on notice from the Greens: “Between 13 February 2023 and 30 September 2024, a total of 2,158 partner and other family stream permanent visas have been granted where the applicant’s sponsor held a resolution of status visa”.
The news took off and Channel Seven was among those who reported “more than 20,000 partners and family members of the asylum seekers who arrived in Australia illegally have been granted new permanent Australian visas”.
Sky News said the figures were evidence “that Labor is soft on borders”.
Nine Radio host Tom Elliott on 3AW interviewed Paterson on 3AW asking if this might “sort of turn on the green light for the people smugglers again?”
Paterson: “This is exactly what I’m worried about, Tom … they’ve allowed those people to bring in their family members, up to 21,500 of them.”
The Tele’s story spilled on to page 2 and an editorial called it Labor’s “immigration debacle”, again quoting the 21,500 figure.
But the News Corp numbers were out by a factor of 10. The Tele had somehow bumped the figure up from 2,168 to 21,581.
After being told by Labor the figure was wrong, the Tele amended the online copy and added a note to the end: “An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that 21,581 visas were granted to partners and family members of asylum seekers. This has been amended in the above copy with the correct figure of 2158.”
On Wednesday the Tele printed a correction of sorts on the letters page, page 20, in the smallest font available. It didn’t say “correction”. Under the headline “For the Record” it said: “A story published on Tuesday incorrectly reported that between February 2023 and September 2024 the federal government granted 21,581 visas to partners and family members of asylum seekers who previously arrived by boat. The correct figure was 2158.”
Elliott told his listeners on Thursday morning that the figure in the Herald Sun was incorrect.
Behind closed doors
In order to avoid what he said would be a “blizzard of bad press” a federal court judge has suppressed for five years the details of a Fair Work case brought by a former Seven journalist Amelia Saw.
The Spotlight reporter took legal action against Seven last year, alleging in her statement of claim that the program, which famously secured exclusive interviews with Bruce Lehrmann, created a hostile working environment for women.
She settled out of court in November but the judge reserved his decision on extending the suppression orders. Seven claimed there was “salacious” evidence in the “extraordinary and unprecedented” application by Saw that it wanted to keep private.
The federal court judge, Justice Nye Perram, ruled in favour of Seven on Thursday: “If suppression and non-publication orders are not made, it would mean that in future cases of this kind a settlement could not be achieved because the respondent would have no incentive to settle where it was going to be exposed to a blizzard of bad press even if it did.”
Mine, all mine
Once a press secretary to prime minister Scott Morrison, Andrew Carswell found a home for himself a year ago as a columnist for billionaire Kerry Stokes’ new online venture the Nightly. Carswell announced he was “back on the tools” on LinkedIn in between posts about the excellent work of the Minerals Council of Australia, which is a client of his lobbying firm Headline Advisory.
The Nightly is funded largely by Western Australian resources interests, including billionaire Gina Rinehart.
Carswell usually discloses in his column that he used to work for Morrison but never that his firm Headline Advisory is a registered lobbyist for the Minerals Council of Australia: “Andrew Carswell is a political strategist and former adviser to the Morrison government.”
While lobbyist and commentator are quite different roles, in Carswell’s case the talking points have at times been similar to those promoted by the MCA.
“Its reckless industrial relations agenda artificially inflated wages without an associated increase in productivity, giving businesses no alternatives to increase prices,” Carswell wrote in October about the Labor government and the cost-of-living crisis.
A few months earlier the Minerals Council chief executive, Tania Constable, warned of “the imminent danger to Australia’s highly productive mining sector and the broader economy, courtesy of the Albanese government’s reckless industrial relations changes.”
In August, Carswell condemned Tania Plibersek for “killing off the $1 billion Regis Resources’ McPhillamys Gold Project in Central West NSW”, arguing it “confirms voters’ growing belief that the Albanese Government gives only a fleeting consideration to the best economic outcomes”.
The Minerals Council also expressed its disappointment in the decision, which it said was “a significant opportunity for economic development”.
We asked Carswell and the Seven West Media editor-in-chief, Anthony De Ceglie, why his lobbing role wasn’t disclosed to readers but they did not respond.