The Climate Change Authority seems to have poked a very sensitive possum at News Corp with its succinct if not especially revealing report on misinformation as a “climate policy risk”.
Released with little fanfare by the CCA on August 24, it took The Australian almost a full fortnight to crank up its anger machine, leading its Friday front-page headlines with the screamer: “Bowen’s Ministry of Truth is here to tell you that energy policy is going perfectly.”
Naturally, the exaggerated protest was accompanied by a plodding commentary, entitled “Orwellian crusade to silence the critics and the naysayers.” And there was the obligatory editorial leader, warning of “the danger of shutting down dissent.”
As if.
Your correspondent has a couple of disclosures to make on this matter – see below. But it’s fair to say the absence of a grotesque editorial caricature of federal climate change and energy minister Chris Bowen as Stalin, or Mao, or Xi, did leave a sense of disappointment.
Surely Saturday’s Weekend Australian will reheat the atrocity? Guess we can expect the US-based media outlet to bleat in endless column centimetres about defending the right of free people to decry “foreign-owned” renewables investors blanketing prime Aussie farmland with their wind and solar “factories”. Etc. Etc.
Outrage, of course, is central to the business model for the 15th-most popular news website in the country in Australia. Last month’s readership was half Guardian Australia’s, which must hurt, and it even lagged The West Australian and The New York Times, according to IPSOS.
Screenshot of The Australian’s online version of its largest effort to counter criticism
At News Corp, sensitivity to discussions about “misinformation” on climate matters is raw because few organisations have so consistently campaigned over decades to stymie climate action – possibly anywhere on the planet.
That the University of New South Wales (UNSW) – one of the world’s leading universities in solar and climate research – should this week agree to a deal with News Corp to provide “access to quality journalism” surprised a few at the university. (News Corp did not respond to queries from Renew Economy.)
After all, as Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson detail in their new book, Getting Murdoched, News Corp has operated in a “climate of denial.” The authors cite research showing that, between 2004 and 2011, the ratio of articles or opinion columns published in The Australian that were unfavourable to climate action ran four to one supporting it.
No doubt fresher surveys would find a similar if not grearter ratio, even as the evidence of climate impacts grows virtually by the day, here and elsewhere.
Adding to the tally of “unfavourable” climate content is the fact that “net Zero” now serves as shorthand across News’ media outlets for everything that must be stopped lest our economy be impoverished.
Nevermind that achieving “net zero emissions across all three scopes of emissions by fiscal 2050 or earlier”, remains News Corp’s top goal in its own environmental, social and governance report.
But returning to this issue of the CCA and its “official playbook for energy right thinking,” in The Australian‘s lame attempt to channel George Orwell’s disapproval.
Bushfires near powerlines close to Batemans Bay in early January 2020. (Source: Peter Hannam)
A couple of disclosures from me. Until last month, I toiled at the Climate Change Authority as an advisor to its chair, Matt Kean, a former NSW energy minister and treasurer in a Coalition – not Labor – government.
I can’t claim much involvement in the 12-page “misinformation” report (which is only about six pages, once acknowledgments and other materials are excluded).
Contrast that with the 294-page report by the Senate’s Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy, published in March this year, covering similar issues.
(Naturally, The Australian attacked the committee’s report as descending into a “realm of censorship,” in a piece by columnist, Chris Uhlmann. Oddly enough, Uhlmann fronted the inquiry, not as a journalist but someone labelled “Community Support”. He appeared in a public session along with members of Rainforest Reserves Australia – a group that faced committee questions about its findings in a controversial report.)
Perhaps the most absurd element of The Australian‘s coverage on Friday, though, was its claims a cross-agency working to tackle climate misinformation amounted to a “Ministry of Truth.”
The Australian Public Service provisions limit me from providing specifics without prior authorisation concerning my 18 months at the CCA.
It would be clear to any casual observer that governments – frankly any entity – face a deluge of distortions that they can hardly let whistle through to the keeper.
Some come from the fringes of the internet, or get elevated onto our social media feeds by algorithms designed to harvest our attention. Or they appear in legacy “mainstream” media.
The seeds of misinformation often have a deliberate intent, which is why”disinformation” is often a more apt descriptor. Guileless or accidental errors seem to make up the minority.
To return, though, to this “Ministry of Truth” tosh.
It appears to stem from the CCA report’s not unreasonable comment that “effective responses require coordination across government, with different agencies contributing expertise, insights and actions within their respective mandates.” Silos exist, I can confirm.
Once the reader recovers from that revelation, the CCA reveals a couple of paragraphs later that the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water [DCCEEW] had “formed a cross-agency communications and stakeholder engagement working group to support a more collaborative approach to addressing climate misinformation.”
Cue, outrage.
That working group, so I understand, amounts to all of a handful of people. It’s likely they will continue to have other tasks and, in any case, will have to explain the need to extend their work, before long.
In other words, a tiny temporary sub-group within DCCEEW. A micro-Ministry of Truth, then.
But, hold your smelling salts. Why wouldn’t the government want to have a say?
Aren’t we in a once-in-a-few-generations race to replace aging fossil fuel power stations that – by dint of an investment binge 40-odd years ago – are rapidly nearing the end of their design lives?
And aren’t we seeing the effects of climate change on a daily basis with a record El Niño event brewing in the Pacific about to make more than a few things worse?
It’s not like the Albanese government invented community engagement.
Didn’t the previous Coalition government both appoint a wind farm commissioner, Andrew Dyer, and then extend his remit to try to understand and deal with quite understandable local concerns related to renewable energy?
The present government has even set up a rating scheme – after engaging in feedback from state and territory counterparts of various political stripes – to boost transparency about the track record of renewable energy developers. Another conspiracy, surely.
They even engaged in an extensive (and costly) 2023 survey of 6700 respondents by CSIRO to help understand the “challenges and opportunities for local communities and the wider public” of the energy transition.
There’s much more to be said about The Australian‘s track record on distorting climate change issues, as Renew Economy has noted over the years – watch this space.
(Such distortions have also kept journalists at the Guardian’s Temperature Check and the ABC’s Media Watch busy for years.)
As the Australian National University’s Eleanor Buckley and R.M. Colvin noted in their research paper from earlier this year, based on work in Victoria’s Wimmera Mallee, opposition to the energy transition “does not begin and end with transmission towers and turbines.”
Indeed, for some, “opposition to renewables is an extension of resistance to perceived government overreach that began with responses to COVID-19.”
Sure, some frustration and anger of governments’ handling of the energy transition is valid, but nobody is gagging public discourse. On the other hand, no responsible government should leave it solely to media and social media companies to fill the information void.
Governance is not getting easier, and as societies struggle to cope with more frequent, more severe and more disruptive weather, the challenges are going to get worse.
When those calamities arise, no doubt The Australian will misinform its readership, to paraphrase a quote from Orwell’s 1984, “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It [will be] their final, most essential command.”
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Peter Hannam is a veteran journalist whose work spans almost four decades and includes stints outside Australia, including time in China, Japan, Singapore and Mongolia. He has lately reported extensively on energy, climate and environmental issues in Australia, and also worked for the federal Climate Change Authority as a special media advisor.