Voters weren't sick of hearing about Gaza — legacy media journalists seem tired of talking about it, writes Tom Tanuki.
WHAT AN ABSOLUTE joy to listen to all the sweeping societal diagnoses from full-time salaried political correspondents in the wake of the election. Some Canberran tea leaf-reading from professional Parliament House hallway creepers.
I’m most thrilled of all to learn that the electoral defeats of the Greens were down to Australians being sick of hearing about dead kids in Gaza.
The Age’s chief political correspondent David Crowe reckons we all thought the Greens went too far, being ‘hyperbolic and offensive’ in their accusations toward Albanese of complicity in genocide and backing public protests that became ‘platforms for antisemitism’.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge has been sharing various post-election videos of him resolutely fending off similar media accusations of failing the electorate. They keep asking him if he regrets caring about the genocide. They won’t let up soon, because they’re not interested in any answer to these questions that the Greens could give. It’s a foregone conclusion for them. The results came in, they reckon, plain as day: We’re over it. The genocide lost its new car smell.
Fair play to Crowe: he identifies the fact that unseated Greens leader Adam Bandt was endangered from the get-go by the AEC’s redrawing of Melbourne’s electoral boundaries, dumping traditionally Greens voters and roping in a bunch of typically Liberal-voting areas. But he and his peers also seem disinterested in the obvious: the wealth of targeted political advertising.
Lots of pundits don’t seem to like to dwell much on this, perhaps because they think that advertising means the usual old signs and placards. And talking about advertising doesn’t lend much to punditry.
But I attribute much of the electoral failure for the Greens in particular, which we know happened despite their national vote rising, to targeted campaigning by right-wing lobby group Advance Australia. According to Crikey editorCam Wilson, Advance Australia was the biggest non-political party spender in Australia on not mere 'political advertising', but specifically on online targeted behaviour modification.
I’m talking about targeted Meta social media ads.
It’s demonstrably effective if you believe former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, who recently revealed that Facebook’s top brass all understood in 2016 that their big data and big advertising offerings were the single biggest factor in delivering the Trump campaign its presidency.
Advance aimed a little lower than that — all their members wanted to do was unseat Greens MPs like Bandt and Max Chandler-Mather.
The campaign was great. It presented as non-partisan, and it targeted swing voters in key Greens electorates with plain-speaking ‘Can’t vote Greens. Not this time’ messages.
It so happened that their ad campaign bolted into the mess of an election campaign that pitched violently mid-way toward fear of change. Everyone became spooked by Trump’s first 100 destructive, fascist and inept days in office, so their millions of dollars of targeted fear-mongering coincided with a climate of fear that paid off.
But they threw themselves off a cliff with the Greens, achieving precisely nothing for the Australian political right-wing. All they did was put Bandt out of a job, when they weren’t giving racists and neo-Nazis something to do for a while.
They’re trouting as loudly as they can about their Greens victory to make up for their damning failures. But they can’t hide it, and I trust their big donors noticed. They have shown they can deliver a negative outcome to halt change, as they did with the Voice Referendum, but they have no talent for delivering constructive change to the right.
If anything stirred my cold heart this election, it was the notion of a balance of power going to third party, minor party and independent votes (the smattering of decent left ones, that is, rather than the endless constellation of ridiculous, squawking far-right parties). And indeed, Victorian Socialists did well, and they’re building something impressive for the long-term nationally. The Greens also saw a small national vote swing to them, but all-in-all, that notion was dashed.
There was a strong swing against the Liberal Party, and for the first time in many elections, they tabled an actual, distinct point of difference that stood out to the layperson beyond differences in policy platforms that consume the political types. The distinct difference they tabled was that every woman and her dog could see how repulsive, self-serving and insincere defeated Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was.
He actually gave people convincing reasons to vote against him for once. None of them are usually that keen to stick their neck out that much.
And he did lose, because it’s easy to see that re-elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese didn’t do much to win. Cleaned up his speech and avoided gaffes, and let Dutton trip himself up, perhaps.
I know that on Gaza, Albanese and Dutton auctioned off to Australians competing opportunities to trash our democratic rights and protections to please the Israel lobby. To stifle anti-Zionism in Australia, they both either seriously discussed or actually legislated trashing academic and student freedoms, instating mass deportations, declaring martial law and mandatory minimum jail sentences for political expression.
Albanese and Dutton were both led up the garden path for months by an organised criminal who fed them orchestrated acts of violent antisemitism as a ploy to bargain with law enforcement. They were blinded in that by their eagerness to shut up pro-Palestinian activists.
Their active complicity in deflecting and drawing attention away from the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian civilians for political gain has been inexcusable.
And they were duly aided in all of this by legacy media, not least among which has been Crowe’s team of political correspondents. They’ve all been delighted to focus more on demonising protesting university students and legal, non-violent CBD rallies than the growing mountains of dying children.
Now the election is done, we’ve sat through two weeks of these hacks dissecting how Advance Australia’s campaign investment must actually show that the electorate never has cared about all those Gazan innocents. I think what their coverage shows is that they – these journalists – just don’t want to talk or think about Gaza anymore. They want us to all shut up about it.
Many of them are lifelong pundits, with decades of experience in abstracting or ignoring Arab pain through multiple bloody Western wars. Now we want them to care? Perish the thought.
Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.
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