A speech you won't hear in Canberra.

I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of what was, is and always will be Aboriginal land, the Ngarigu, Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, and their Elders, past and present.

I’d also like to acknowledge that, while former Prime Minister Kevin ‘selfie-doesn’t-seem-so-cute-now’ Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations was a bloody good start, it was not followed by enough action (a bit like the Southern Stars, Rabbitohs, Waratahs and every other fucking sporting team I follow) so let’s start by fixing that.

Because until we fix the relationship between our First Nations peoples and the rest of Australia we will remain a broken, dysfunctional society where, due to repeated foot-stamping and willful ignorance and neglect, if you are born Aboriginal your life-expectancy is more than 15 years less than the rest of the population and you are at least 10 times more likely to be in prison.

All research says, unlike the paternalistic intervention in the Northern Territory and the Orwellian-named Stronger Futures, the best-placed people to help Aboriginal people are Aboriginal people. So let’s ask the elected representatives of the peak Indigenous body what they want.

The National Congress of Australia’s First Nations peoples – it’s your job to tell the Government what to do, and it’s our job, as servants of the people, to do it.

Let’s also have a look at what’s working in Indigenous health – the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation and its members have been making real inroads into improving health so let’s throw a shitload more money their way.

And while we’re at it, let’s go some way to addressing the massive over-representation of Aboriginal people in our prisons. Firstly, funding to Aboriginal Legal Services is also going to get a shitload more money.

Then we’re going to implement justice reinvestment – we’re going to spend a fucking massive shitload of cash on programs for young people, encouraging, helping and supporting them in whatever ways they need so they can make an informed risk-benefit analysis about leading a productive and helpful life compared to fucking up.

Next, we’re going to make it harder to become a criminal by getting rid of some of the more bizarre and illogical criminal statutes.

We’re going to legalise marijuana and decriminalise all other drugs and tax the hell out of all of them. From now on you can make your own decisions about what you want to put in your bodies without government interference but you will pay through the nose (or gullet or vein, depending on your poison) for that privilege. If I have to deal with reality with only Socialist Chardonnay as a crutch, I don’t see why the rest of you consciousness-altering fuckers shouldn’t stump up for a fun tax too. (Obviously, we’ll need to come up with a better name than ‘fun tax’.) Anyone currently in prison for possession is to be released immediately.

But what are all these newly-emancipated people going to do for work?

Well, they’re going to look after our future. They’re going to have the option of joining the workforce for the Better World programs, where they can train to be anything from construction workers (bags being in a photo with those guys so I can borrow one of their hats) to build solar farms, plant turf on every possible roof, decommission all of Australia’s coal-powered stations and lots of other awesome ideas – to study science at uni so we can continually reprove the earth is round to make Clive Palmer finally shut the fuck up. (We will keep his dinosaurs though, as a constant reminder of how fucking stupid, yet funny, rich people can be).

And speaking of stupid – the economy.

To pay for all these programs and other awesomely good and progressive ideas as they occur to me, we’re going to tax the absolute fucking hell out of the rich. We’re going to tax those bludging born-to-rule silver-spooners so hard they’ll be sending up smoke signals of piles of burning cash on the altar of capitalism and sacrificing their first-borns to the gods of greed in the forlorn hope of making repatriations for two centuries of self-interest. We’re going to make those fuckheads yearn for the days of a mining tax on super profits.

Rich companies, rich people – I don’t fucking care, they’ve had it far too fucking good for far too fucking long and now it’s time they learned Australia is more than their own personal quarry because the minerals belong to all of us, so it’s only fair that the rest of us see at least some of the profits.

And if any one of those whinging revisionists so much as breathes in to complain they’ll be packed off to Manus Island before they can even say ‘the 457 Visa scheme was a great idea’.

And, for every whining billionaire that we export, we’ll import 10,000 refugees, building a new industry – compassionate humanity.

For that we need a smart, caring, educated populace – and thank fuck we have that. 

Note: 'shitload' and 'fucking shitload' are technical terms used in economics.

Dear anonymous letter-writer

Dear anonymous* letter-writer (and presumably you know who you are),

Thank you for your well-considered and thoughtful missive pointing out how wrong Feminism (your capitalisation*) is and how I must have a mental illness* for writing about it.

Thanks to the insightful and intelligent points you made, I have now seen the error of my ways and have completely revised my opinions to agree with everything you wrote, including that, in response to Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s (should I now start calling her Juliar?) misogyny speech that Tony Abbott should have said:

“Go easy on the ‘Testestone* (sic) Shots’ Prime Minister!”

Thank you also for showing me that after nearly two decades of putting my name and frequently my face to my words that it is much more honourable to attack someone personally and not say who you are* - saves all that tricky responsibility eh?

And thank you for keeping my old columns and sending me a photocopy …

Actually no, I can’t keep this up.

All I really want to say is I don’t give a flying monkey’s testicle what you think of my columns or me.

If you don’t like what I write then there’s a simple answer: don’t fucking read it. Or, if you feel the need to get yourself worked up into a right-wing, hate-filled lather about my leftie, greenie, femo viewpoints, send a letter, with your name on it, to the editor. Or comment on the website – the internet loves vitriolic, ignorant anonymous critics who meet argument with personal insult, as do professional journalists like myself, who still hang like a desperate junkie to the belief that putting your name to something means you stand by your words and have a responsibility to them.

I can see now why the column I wrote about the women I admire (notice, a personal opinion, not telling other people what they should do) so offended you: they were all brave. Pussy Riot, Julia Gillard, Malala Yousufzal, Anita Heiss, Penny Wong and Leigh Sales all stood up under fire for what they believe in – and they did it with dignity.

Only cowards hide behind the yellow cloak of anonymity.  

I want you to know this will be the last time I spare a brain cell to think of you – I have much more important things to do, like tend to the wormfarm and wash my dog’s stinky bed.

I’ve removed gunk from under my toenails that has more class than you** – get fucked you fucking fuckwit and never ever mention my daughter again.

*Indicator someone is an unbalanced nutter

**This is, indeed, a personal insult but is in response to a veiled threat to my child, not a reasoned argument, so I am not being completely hypocritical 

Things I cannot say but would really like to

I haven’t written my blog for quite a while so here’s some things I can’t say in the newspaper about things I’ve read:

If someone has won the inaugural medal, they cannot have won it two years previously.

Larva does not mean many young insects.

If you’re going to have a go at someone’s grammar, then don’t do it by writing:

‘Readers picture’ when you mean ‘Reader’s picture’ and then adding ‘Attention to detail is not Council’s criteria’ when you mean ‘priority’ and as well as using the wrong word, you used it in the wrong tense, singular would be ‘criterion’.

Don’t copy and paste from the internet.

Don’t write ‘Emmylou Harris was discovered by Gram Parsons in 1976,’ when he died in 1973.

What is it with words that end in ‘onic’? Ironic and iconic are not interchangeable, do not mean what you think they do and should never appear in your copy. A sentence I never want to see again:

‘The children wore the iconic colours of orange and grey’.

But what I’d really like to say:

“How did you ignorant, language-murdering, cliché-loving, idea-deficient drones who would have no idea what I meant if I asked, politely, to please fucking stop writing in the passive voice – how did you semi-literate, press-release-regurgitating, formula-driven pretenders ever get jobs as journalists?

“Don’t you fucking read? Don’t you know how to use a spell-check? To double check your first sentence before you file, so you don’t make basic errors like spelling ‘Darly Brathwaite’ when you mean ‘Daryl Braithwaite’ ? To check your facts? Do you know what ‘cynicism’ means? Don’t you know things happened before 2000? And we had computers in the 80s, just not ones on which tedious people would continually broadcast mindless minutiae.

“I despise your small minds and your lack of imagination. I am constantly irritated by your seemingly-random disregard for capital letters and their indiscriminate use.

“No fucking wonder the newspaper industry is in free-fall – if I were not being paid for the torturous experience of reading your excruciating copy, I would rather spend an entire day trying to make sense of Barnaby Joyce than read your meaningless words.

“Newspapers are dead. We killed them the same way we kill everything: not enough care.

“And I blame you, the last of the pretenders, you fucking idiots who wouldn’t know a decent story if Harold Holt walked in and said he killed Azaria Chamberlain because neither they nor the dingo has been on X-Factor.

“Get fucked.’’

I fucking hate working Sundays.

Death by 1000 paper cuts

This week there’s been even more than the usual sparrow-chirp of baseline chatter about the future of print media in Australia – and for good reasons.

On the North Coast of NSW two daily mastheads, The Tweed Daily News and The Coffs Coast Advocate, had their print-runs pulled by their owner, APNARM, until recently my employer.

While country papers are paid scant attention by our big-city cousins, except in the case of tragedy, even the big boys noticed. A glimpse of the future in the city?

Maybe.

The News and the Advocate won’t be the last regional newspapers to fold.

They both suffered from not changing while new competitors better understood the new readership and advertiser-market.

But the same charge can be levelled at just about every daily newspaper in Australia.

They haven’t changed; or the haven’t changed enough with the times – the times they are achanging, even if the Times has not, although the London paper has changed from broadsheet to tabloid and the Crimes is reportedly considering the same move so perhaps that isn’t a very good joke.

The Tweed Echo and the Byron Echo, all independent weeklies written by locals about locals for locals, made a huge dent into The News’ readership and advertising clients.

The Gold Coast Bully has been pushing further south at the same time, with a bigger circulation and marketing budget backed by News Ltd.

Follow that by strong, new local online publications and the country newspaper environment of monopoly that was the norm throughout the 20^th century is not so much dead as fossilised – but the attitude of newspaper-owners, managers and many editors has not really changed.

In regional papers car accidents still go on the front page as a matter of course, relegating news about actual events, despite there being very little to evidence that it actually helps casual sales.

Stories are still manufactured to suit a point of view, rather letting the subject unfold as it naturally might, for a perceived readership that is no longer there.

Campaign journalism is still trumpeted as if people are lining up to be told what to think by their daily newspaper.

And yet while the readers have spoken with their $1.50 and stopped buying their daily rag in droves, still antiquated attitudes to publishing news remain.

Cheaper, simpler, dumber is better. If it can’t be said in 200 words it shouldn’t be said at all.

The Tweed Echo is edited by a friend of mine, Luis Feliu, who was the senior reporter for the first year of my editorship at The Northern Rivers Echo, in the final days of its (I’m finally getting used to not saying ‘our’) independence. His gracious analysis of The News’ folding is here: http://www.tweedecho.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3119&Itemid=543

He treats his readers with intelligence. He gives them the facts and lets them decide. He writes detailed, intelligent editorials and has a team of excellent reporters and a strong, experienced independent publisher.

They don’t dumb things down. They go to local events. They know their readership.

I’m not as familiar with the situation in Coffs but I do know a little about their online publication, Coffs Outlook, http://coffsoutlook.com/?page_id=2 as I spoke with its founder, disgruntled journalist Hugh Saddleton. Hugh began the website because, as he puts it:

“It is quite clear that there is a dearth of investigative reporting. Many things are left unsaid for fear of losing the advertising dollar, resulting in a gently sanitised series of publications.”

He thought there might be some equally local-knowledge thirsty locals and he was right.

The Byron Echo recently launched a new daily website and it looks like one of the best news websites around.

Modern, diverse and topical, it’s managed to hang on to the Byron Echo ethos and feel while adding video grabs from locals and reporters on everything from politics to humour to the surf. And, from a taste of their recent copy, it’s expanding.

When the Byron and Northern Rivers Echoes were truly sister papers, with two separate but independent owners’ groups, we had a gentle-person’s agreement about territory. We didn’t fuck with theirs and they didn’t give a fuck about ours. In case that was ever in doubt there were loose boundaries based on council borders, us Lismore and Richmond Valley, them Byron and Ballina a kind of grey area. They always wanted Rosebank but were nice enough to not intrude.

Now, it’s a different Frisbee game entirely.

Experienced reporter Chris Dobney, Echonet Daily’s editor, has a wider remit and has filed pieces on Lismore events and went to Lismore City Council’s November meeting. Definitely a former no-go zone but absolutely within the new publication’s right and a smart move. Seems like they have a smart strategy of toe by toe to expand their footprint – and that’s what a good innovative publisher does. Gets more readers by using their judgement about what people want to read.

Echonet Daily is well-placed to fill some of the gap that will be left by The Tweed Daily News for those who don’t want their information delivered by the Murdoch stable.

It’s the journalists for both The News and The Advocate for whom I feel an immense amount of sympathy.

Making a living as a journalist in the country isn’t an easy gig but it’s one that many of us love dearly – and it just got a hell of a lot harder for the 36 journos who no longer have a masthead.

They did the hard slog: the car-accidents, the tragic deaths, the long meetings at Council, the interminable awards nights that stretched on longer than a Kubrick movie and were even more painful and boring; and they also did the fun stuff: the young people enthusiastically spruiking their environmental initiative; the chats with favourite musos who were doing one side gig on their way to somewhere bigger; the interviews with pollies who actually said something because they thought country journos were too dumb to understand; the community events where people pull together and the better side of human nature is revealed… and all sorts of weird and wonderful tales in between and they wrote about it all so people – some, at least - would read the stories of the area.

That’s the nature of writing news in the country: it runs a much broader canvas than that of our smug big-city cousins who would sneer at us for covering chook shows, without understanding that, if it mattered to one person then, if you’re a decent journo, you can write a good story about it.

I am sad to see two mastheads no longer printing. The region will be poorer for it. 

Ticking all the boxes

Former ABC journalist Madonna King told Crikey when hosing down speculation about a political future that: "Indeed, because I'm a working journalist, I don't even vote."

Well I, too, am a journalist and I live in the northern NSW state electorate of Clarence, where there’s a by-election this Saturday and I will definitely be making the trip to the ballot box at Coraki Primary School this weekend.

In my career as a newspaper journalist I’ve worked in a fairly broad variety of roles from the small end of the print run, for an independent newspaper based in country NSW, to the larger end, for the national newspaper and all sorts of interesting roles in between. I’ve worked under some really great editors and section editors, all of whom have been professional and ethical. I’ve worked with dozens of committed, clever, experienced and interesting journos and I’ve been a party to some pretty heated conversations about the nature of journalism, ethics and our role in society.

Not once have I ever heard a working journalist say they thought our profession should rule us out of having our democratic say at the ballot box.

The more I think about it, the more ridiculous that statement becomes.

To see if I was on my lonesome I put King’s quote on my facebook page, where I sporadically keep in contact with many of my journalistic colleagues. One abc journo suggested King must have been joking, alluding to the rigours and strictures of the abc’s policy on comment and bias. I can’t rule out that possibility but the context of the quote makes it unlikely:

"I'd never join any political party, and never run for a political party. It's much more fun reporting on them. Indeed, because I'm a working journalist, I don't even vote."

I couldn’t agree more with King’s first two sentences but her third?

It’s ridiculous. What about sports journos? We've heard biased sports commentating but should they vote? How about sub-editors? Fashion writers?

The six comments under the brief piece on Crikey all expressed differing levels of dismay (and one, also, the possibility that King may have been joking).

Compulsory voting is an extremely important facet of Australian democracy and those of us who report on politics are not exempted from participation. We are journalists but we’re also citizens – and we’re no different to people of any other profession or to those with no profession at all in regards to our obligation to our society.

And that includes voting.

One of the (many) aspects of journalism that really gets me shaking newspaper pages and lecturing to the written word (and, yes, I do realise that does about as much good as shouting at the television) is the frequently inflated sense of importance. It leads to false assumptions and bad writing.

Just because we comment on events it doesn’t make our opinions more important than anyone else’s. It’s a privilege to have the access to people that we do – and a crying shame that media management is so pervasive that many are too coached to say anything meaningful on the record any more – and it’s our job to distill what we learn to others.

It’s a great job and I love it. I reported on the reasons for the Clarence by-election, with the Nationals’ Steve Cansdell resigning after he admitted to falsifying a statutory declaration to save his driver’s licence (pity about his career). http://www.echonews.com.au/story/2011/09/22/cansdell-quits-more-allegations-surface/

I've even been attempting to profit off the by-election by pitching on-the-ground pieces to Sydney-based newspapers, although with no luck so far.

But I’d have to be strapped down with my computer cables and phone cords to my desk chair before I’d let that stop me walking through the aisle of Christian Democrats, Nationals, Country Labor, Greens and Democrats supporters so I can participate in our democracy.

Festival etiquette

I’ve been to a few music festivals in my time, some of which I even remember, but Easter’s Bluesfest had me questioning the sanity of a fair proportion of ticket-holders.

Firstly: people with newborn babies.

What are you doing at a music festival? Your baby doesn’t like wet weather, cold nights, loud noises, people smoking, people being unpredictable or rain. If you can’t be apart from your little darling for a few hours, here’s an idea: don’t come to a music festival. If you can’t find a baby-sitter for a few hours here’s an idea: don’t bring your baby to a music festival. I want to hear blues guitars wailing, not your baby; I want to hear tortured roots singers screaming, not your baby; I want to snigger at young adults throwing up, not your baby – and I don’t want to move up off the ground for your huge, oversized, pram that cost more than my car and doesn’t fit through the aisles. It doesn’t fit and it’s difficult to push them because music festivals weren’t designed for prams. I judge you people who bring babies to festivals. I saw one parent who encouraged their toddler to play with the completely off-their-head eccy-ed out space traveller who had just been practising ninja moves with a lit cigarette. There are many places where I feel immense sympathy for parents of young babies: planes, any form of public transport, supermarkets, weddings. But not music festivals. If you can’t see that taking a newborn to an outdoor festival where there are going to be lots of people drinking and smoking is going to cause trouble for yourself, have a thought for everyone else; people have paid good money to listen to music, not young children who are justifiably upset at being somewhere unsuitable. Yummy mummys bugger off – I can deal with you looking fabulous at cafes while your offspring sticks its filthy fingers in my butter but festivals should be one last bastion of baby-free space.

People who wear thongs or any other type of open-toed shoe including Birkenstocks.

I know it’s impossible to be warm and sexy but thongs aren’t sexy anyway. Why would you want to wear open-toed shoes to an outdoor venue where there’s complete certainty that someone who isn’t wearing thongs is going to be next to you and try out their funky moves on your feet? Also there’s going to be mud. Even if it doesn’t rain, people spill drinks (expensive drinks) and drunk blokes empty their bladders wherever they feel like it – do you really want that on your toes? Rank amateurs. Just because it’s a tea tree farm, it doesn’t make you immune from fungus, and quite frankly you deserve any festy thing you pick up.

People who take photos of every single bloody thing with their mobile phones or who talk really loudly on their phones and give you dirty looks for listening.

We’ve all taken dud photos but are you really ever going to look at pictures of the sky again? Yes, I know part of it is people who have taken mind-altering substances finding the beauty in ordinary things (like gravel) but do they have to stand for hours in the way? And if you spend more time on your phone boasting to your friends that ‘Washington is like, the awesomest performer, like you’ve ever seen’, you’re missing the performance and being a poser.