What a beauty!!

A jury has found former NSW MP Daryl Maguire guilty of conspiracy over his involvement in an alleged fraudulent visa scheme between 2013 and 2015 whilst he was the Member for Wagga Wagga.

It can also now be revealed Mr Maguire's conviction for giving misleading evidence to the NSW ICAC was overturned in March. 

Mr Maguire is expected to be sentenced in October. 

As he surveys the degraded and demoralised Liberal Party he presides over, Angus Taylor has two major problems – and that’s leaving aside One Nation.

The first is that his own performance is often cack-handed. The second is he is not, as the saying goes, meeting the voters where they are. He should – in theory – be able to tackle the former. The latter is more fundamental.

It always surprises how often Taylor comes out with the wrong line, or is caught out without an answer to an obvious question. Like, after his robust attack last week on One Nation, saying this week that he’d made it “with a heavy heart”. Or recently when, quizzed to the point of embarrassment, he couldn’t say whether he embraced multiculturalism. (Obvious answer: yes, but I want to improve it.)

Taylor struggles to engage properly in media encounters, appearing to think his “lines”, often slogans or cliches, will get him through. (Contrast NSW Premier Chris Minns, or Liberal senator James Paterson, who engage with questions, answer directly where they can, or make it clear if they won’t.)

But Taylor is also trying not to say anything that will put him further offside with the “base”, and that leads him into verbal mazes.

He should be able to be fully prepped and prepared for media appearances. That’s what staff are for. Those around him remark on his intelligence, and despair of his lack of political deftness.

The mismatch between where the public are and what the Liberals are expounding is a much deeper challenge – a gulf perhaps unable to be bridged, at least in the short term.

This came through in Taylor’s major economic address last week that, in addition to its attack on One Nation, critiqued Labor and set out the opposition’s alternative in broad terms. It was traditional Liberal fare of smaller government, lower taxes, and “empowering” people, and reflected the hand of respected economist Steven Hamilton, now on Taylor’s staff.

But the trouble for the Liberals is that these days the public want more from government than they did a few decades ago. They want activist government to find ways to make their lives better. They are not preoccupied with getting government out of their lives. COVID changed thinking about government spending. The threat posed by debt and deficits doesn’t strike the chord it once did. People are preoccupied with their own circumstances, rather than the bigger picture.

Election campaigns always contained promises, but now they are, at least partly, auctions. This is not just tax cuts but big spending, such as the promises in 2025 on student debt relief and Medicare. It’s notable Peter Dutton felt the need to match much of Labor’s 2025 spending.

It’s hard to see the Liberals’ more austere pitch about economic responsibility going down well, especially in such harsh times. People will take a lot of persuading, and the Liberals are not strong on persuasion.

They are very good at talking endlessly about themselves. Paul Keating would call it dogs returning to their vomit. They’ve this week put out publicly a discussion paper from one of their reviews. It’s full of useful statistics (mostly presenting problems for the Liberals) and common sense.

Trouble is, we’ve heard it all before and it just sets off a fresh round of public navel-gazing. Predictably, another squabble about female quotas erupted. The Liberal Party has spent more than a year pondering itself, to no useful effect (and it’s not finished yet).

Taylor in coming months will have to reshuffle his frontbench. It’s a team that has been repeatedly shaken up and moved around since the election. Such instability fractures continuity, both in drawing up policy and selling it.

But Jonno Duniam, home affairs spokesman and one of the better opposition performers, is quitting parliament when he finishes the immigration policy, so changes are unavoidable.

Before this, a stand-in shadow finance minister must be appointed because Claire Chandler is off on maternity leave. Finance is a key area and Chandler has been much less seen and heard than her predecessor James Paterson. Paterson should never have been moved but he was one of those instrumental in Taylor’s rise to the leadership and so could not be denied the defence post he craved.

The Liberals’ economic team in general needs to greatly improve its performance. Tim Wilson might require more time to find his feet as shadow treasurer, but should have learned that playing the jokester doesn’t work in this role. Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has a high profile – but not as small business spokeswoman. Small business is core to the Liberal constituency; the position needs someone more suited to it.

On Wednesday Taylor was glib in his first response about Albanese’s announcement of an Office of AI, located in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Just more bureaucracy, he said dismissively. He should be careful: this is a huge policy area and one the opposition should be leaning into in a very considered way.

Taylor is not just looking across the centre right spectrum at the Liberals’ rival, One Nation. He is also looking over his shoulder at leadership aspirant Andrew Hastie.

Some argue that if the Liberals are still floundering at New Year, Hastie should (or will) replace Taylor.

There is little doubt about Hastie’s ambition.

But, muses one Liberal greybeard, would that be very sensible – from Hastie’s point of view? It’s about as safe a bet as you’ll get that the Coalition won’t win the next election. Indeed, given the uncertainty created by One Nation, the map of the centre right after that election could be all over the place.

If Hastie stepped up before the election and had a bad loss, that would burn him for the next term (assuming he held off One Nation in his own seat). It would be better for Hastie, on the greybeard’s reckoning, to leave the 2028 election to Taylor and then take over as opposition leader – provided there’s still a viable Coalition opposition to take over.

One of the oldest tropes in journalism is that it should be balanced; that journalists have a responsibility to present all sides of a given issue with equal weight. This view also holds that appearing to be critical of one side and sympathetic to another amounts to “bias”.

That notion of balance sounds ideal. After all, journalists should be neutral observers who favour nobody, so if anybody feels as though their side is not presented with equal measure, the journalist has somehow failed.

That failure was what Jillian Segal accused the ABC of in her evidence to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion last week. In her evidence, the antisemitism envoy lamented that the ABC’s reporting on Gaza “created an impression of great negativity about Israel”.

“It’s the perception of the Jewish community feeling constantly that they are being faced with reporting about the Middle East, about Gaza, and about Israel in a way that paints Israel constantly in a negative light,” she said.

For the country’s supporters, that is understandable. As Segal went on to point out, there has been a “disproportionate” number of stories critical of Israel.

And Liberal MP and prominent member of the Jewish community Julian Leeser told ABC Radio National:

But the term “balance” implies finding equivalence between the two competing positions. Sometimes journalists cover stories where achieving balance amounts to a serious distortion of what is actually taking place.

The pitfalls of both-sideism

A standard, if lazy, tactic for avoiding accusations of bias is to give equal space to opponents in an issue, presenting them as equally valid.

If you give five minutes to a vaccine researcher, you must give the same time to a sceptic. It is something journalists sometimes dub “both-sideism”.

The media grappled with that challenge in covering climate change. In the early heated stages of the debate, news organisations would often place a climate sceptic next to a climate scientist in the name of “balance”.

By 2018, the BBC’s news director Fran Unsworth had had enough. She circulated a briefing note that acknowledged, “Climate change has been a difficult subject for the BBC, and we get coverage of it wrong too often”.

The briefing went on to say, “Manmade climate change exists: if the science proves it we should report it.” And in a section on balance, the note said:

As journalism academic Jonathan Foster of Sheffield University used to tell his students, "If someone tells you it’s raining and another tells you it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. It’s your job to look out the f—ing window and find out which is true.”

Who has the power?

The conflicts between Israel and its neighbours (in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran) are not football matches, and journalists are not referees.

But any journalist thinking about how to fairly cover the crises is likely to spend far more time looking at the human cost of Israeli bombs and tanks, than the impact on Israeli civilians.

That is simply because the greater impact of the conflict is felt outside Israel’s borders.

Any reporting that suggests an equivalence of experience between Israelis suffering Hamas rockets, and the Palestinians in Gaza bearing the weight of the Israeli military assault would be plainly disingenuous. Hardliners on both sides are calling for annihilation of the other, but only one side has tanks, fighter jets and control of food, water and medical supplies over the border.

That raises another journalistic cliche: “holding power to account”. It is rooted in the idea that the media’s job is to expose the impact of power on those who have none.

Israel has indisputably been projecting its might well beyond its borders, and correspondents in the region who failed to cover the consequences on ordinary civilians would be rightly criticised.

None of this is to suggest the experience of Israelis or the government’s arguments should be ignored.

But in a world of competing perspectives, the job of journalists is not to make everyone happy. Their job is to accurately and fairly represent the views of everyone involved and on that score, the ABC has been succeeding.

Imperfect, but largely accurate

The national broadcaster has not been perfect of course. The ombudsman found five breaches of editorial standards (out of more than seven thousand complaints).

Its own editorial director Gavin Fang acknowledged they were far too slow to correct a United Nations report that falsely claimed 14,000 children could die of starvation in Gaza within two days.

In her testimony to the Royal Commission, Jillian Segal conceded the government’s broadcast regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, had not “found a great deal of inaccuracy” in the ABC’s reporting.

But she argued she’s trying to achieve “the more complex, nuanced issues of prioritisation, impartiality and objectivity and balance”.

“They could run positive stories about other things Israel is doing,” she said. “The amazing startup nation, things like that. They very rarely do that. There is no attempt at that part of the agenda.”

Perhaps she is right. But positive stories explicitly designed to cancel out the negative start to look like propaganda. And that is something journalists should never accept.