While most Australians are not particularly interested in politics, they are interested in news. In 2001, half the adult population were spending at least one hour a day watching, listening to or reading news and current affairs (ABA 2001b). By 2008, over 80 per cent were still reporting that they would catch up with the news during their day (Phillips et al 2008). Even at the end of the 2000s, news and current affairs programs continued to top the television ratings in Australia, which was unusual by international standards. Taking just one ratings period as an example – April 2009 - demonstrates this. The most-watched television program in Australia was Seven News at primetime and four out of the top 10 were news programs. By contrast, in the US and UK no news program ranked in the top 20 in the same period (BARB 2009; OzTAM 2009; Zapit.com 2009).

General news, sport, entertainment and music were the types of news Australians said they preferred, with ‘political analysis’ ranked last (Phillips et al 2008). The more popular news products that attracted the largest audiences reflected these preferences. Sparks has argued that tabloid news journalism:

Democracy is for, and about, citizens. So too, at least in theory, is political journalism, and especially during elections. That there is a ‘public’, however conceived (and this is not always made explicit), made up of citizens in need of information is the underlying basis for all of the promises that news outlets make and the high expectations we have about what journalism can provide. This chapter concludes the book by summarising the major trends in election reporting in the 2000s, considering them in light of two major questions about ‘the public’: what do people want from political news and what does democracy need? Finally, what happens when these two principles clash?

The public and the media

The first part of this book was devoted to political news audiences, but media audiences and ‘the public’ are not the same thing – even if they do overlap at some points. Audiences develop in relation to particular media forms. They consist of individuals who consume those media – often in private – for a range of reasons including entertainment and relaxation. A ‘public’, on the other hand, is ‘people engaged in activities (and spaces) that are in some ways socially visible, that is, not private’. So while the media can construct audiences, those audiences become ‘real publics only through the processes of engagement with issues and discursive interactions among themselves’ (Dahlgren 2009:73–4).

In 2007, over a thousand candidates campaigned for office – over 60 per cent of them from outside the major parties. Interest groups, social movements, lobbyists and members of the public also proposed a large range of topics and expressed many different views. Every day of the campaign, events were held in electorates across the country. Between them, the two major parties put out over 80 separate policies and their leaders conducted more than 200 media interviews and press conferences. From this kaleidoscope of material, what was judged to be ‘newsworthy’ and included in the final product of news is an important matter.

According to agenda-setting theory, by making decisions about what stories to cover and how much prominence and space to give them, the media have great power to influence the public agenda – what people find important, what they think about, discuss with others and use as a basis for their decision-making. But if this is true, as we saw in the previous chapter, it is tempered by the power that politicians and their advisers have to influence news content. This chapter considers what is reported in election news and where those selections stem from. It tests whether politicians have ‘hijacked’ the news agenda but also whether the Australian media, as they are often accused, tend to hunt as a ‘pack’, following the same stories and interpretations.

For this study, over 10 000 media texts on the 2001, 2004 and 2007 elections were collected from television, newspapers, radio and the internet. I used a combination of methods to analyse segments of this material. Quantitative content analysis is one of the few ways of systematically classifying and describing media content and I used this method on a sample of 965 election reports (Tables i and ii). I also used qualitative analysis for specific samples, paying particular attention to discourse - words, text and talk – as well as to the visual dimension of television clips, newspaper, magazine and website photographs and graphics. The other main method was a process I called ‘media mapping’ to trace the subject and sources of media reports across each day of the 2007 election campaign. This allowed me to analyse processes of agenda-setting, news cycles and news flows (mostly outlined in Chapter 8).

Space limits prevent me from describing the methodology in its entirety but, given the quantitative basis for some of the claims I make, it is important that I outline the sample used for the content analysis. To narrow down the sample to a reasonable size appropriate for content analysis, I used a systematic sampling method often known as the ‘nth’ method or ‘constructed week’. This approach involves selecting every nth unit from the total population available.

Politicians use media to communicate to voters with the aim of persuading them. However, media outlets and media workers are not merely a conduit for these messages or a neutral arbiter of them; they are also actors in their own right with their own strategic purposes and messages to communicate. This is not the same as saying that political reporters are ‘players’ who have specific political agendas to pursue (although this is a claim that is sometimes made). Rather, this is a much broader point: that news workers are not separate from political events but are central to them. This chapter looks at the role that journalists, especially, play in election reporting.

While journalists are often portrayed as observers and recorders of politics, in reality they often cause news to happen rather than just report it. For example, by ringing sources and asking for quotes on possible events, they can set those events in motion. When they repeatedly draw attention to a leader's poor opinion polls, they help create an environment that is ripe for a leadership challenge. They also have a crucial role to play in who the parties select as leader, because a leadership aspirant's media skills are viewed as a key criterion of their electability. Election campaigns are really the ultimate manifestation of the centrality of the media.

‘You're a joke! You're an absolute joke!’ New South Wales Treasurer Michael Costa told delegates at the state Labor Party conference on 3 May 2008. He ‘grinned and yelled at the crowd, and shook his fist in the air’ in a ‘Mussolini-like flurry’. The conference then voted 702 to 107 to oppose his plans to sell off the New South Wales electricity industry.

This scene, and Costa's transformation from a young radical into a champion of neoliberalism, tells us a lot about the Australian Labor Party today.

Michael Costa was born in Newcastle in 1956, the son of Greek-Cypriot migrants who were manual workers. His dad was a steelworker, then a railway guard; his mum was a process worker. Young Michael was politicised in the mid 1970s, in the context of intense conflicts, class confrontations and the dismissal of the Whitlam government. The level of strike action had peaked earlier in the decade, but remained high. Costa was embroiled in left wing politics from a young age. While still at high school he joined the Socialist Labour League (SLL), a Trotskyist organisation that advocated general strikes as the key to social change. He also became a member of the ALP. Later Costa switched his allegiance from the SLL to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a different Trotskyist organisation, with a more flexible political outlook.

Costa was dynamic, aggressive and bright. While a student at Wollongong University, he spent most of his time doing politics.

Political parties have to adapt or die. If a party becomes fossilised while the rest of the world evolves it will lose support. As society changes, the size, characteristics and influence of groups that once formed the party's base may also begin to change. One hundred years ago, one-half of the Australian labour force, mainly blue collar workers, was employed in manufacturing and rural industries. As the rural workforce declined in the following decades, that proportion slipped a little, but the big surge in factory production during and after World War II saw it recover. The Australian Labor Party found its core of support among these workers. Today, by contrast, manufacturing and rural industries employ only one in seven, so Labor must garner votes from outside its historic blue collar base if it is to win elections. This shift throws up a big question: Is Labor still the party it once was or has it undergone a fundamental transformation? Debate has raged over this question for years. The answer depends on what you think the Labor Party is. This chapter identifies the essential character of the ALP – what makes Labor what it is – and also outlines several important debates about the nature of the Party.

A capitalist party?

For many modern Labor leaders, the character of their organisation is obvious. There is a continuous Labor tradition that embraces governments as diverse as those of Andrew Fisher, Jim Scullin, Gough Whitlam and Kevin Rudd.

Having seen off threats from the right and left, the ALP recovered quite quickly from the split of 1917. Although Labor did not hold federal office between 1916 and 1929, the Party won every election in Queensland from 1915 until 1929, and formed governments in several other states.

Labor's recovery in New South Wales was particularly important. The defeat of the general strike was a setback for the unions but its effects were only temporary; the process of radicalisation that began in 1915 continued apace. Although repression, initiated by ALP governments, had destroyed the IWW, the syndicalist idea that the key to effective working class organisation was one big union attracted widespread support among rank and file unionists and left wing union officials. Industrial militancy soared after the war: workers in Australia struck for a total of 8 million days in 1919–20, one-quarter more than in the previous peak of 1916–17.

Working class radicalisation and industrial militancy pushed the ALP further to the left. In 1919, militant unions, led by the Miners Federation, set up the Industrial Socialist Labour Party and succeeded in getting Percy Brookfield elected as the MLA for Broken Hill. Under pressure from below, the federal Labor Party adopted ‘the socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange’ as an objective in 1921. The ALP was now formally committed to socialism, albeit only as a distant goal – it was not included in the Fighting Platform on which Labor contested elections.

The ALP was born out of a period of prolonged economic boom followed by a devastating crash. The boom and subsequent bust and the social turmoil that went with it put a definite stamp on the character of the Party. In this chapter we describe the circumstances of the Party's formation, its initial electoral success, consolidation and early record in office, before turning to the tumultuous years of World War I when Labor experienced and survived its first convulsive split.

In the 30 years leading up to the Party's formation in 1891, the Australian colonies expanded at an unprecedented rate. Population increased by more than two and a half times while gross domestic product more than tripled. Medium and large businesses began to appear in the major cities and regional towns. These processes had a dramatic impact on the workforce and class divisions became more sharply defined. As the size of businesses grew, the scope for skilled workers and artisans to climb into the employer class declined and the proportion of self-employed people fell. In 1891 almost two-thirds of breadwinners in New South Wales were employees.

With the sharpening of class distinctions, trade unions began to grow rapidly. Not only skilled workers – including those in urban trades and shearers – but also the semiskilled and unskilled – such as miners, most railway workers, urban and rural labourers – organised in large numbers in the Australian colonies.

During its first 70 years, the ALP became one of Australia's two main parliamentary forces, went through three major and other minor splits, and held office federally for six periods. For long stretches, Queensland, Tasmania and New South Wales almost seemed to be one party Labor states. In comparison with labour or social democratic parties in other countries, the ALP was remarkably successful. Had its years in office changed it significantly? To answer this question and to provide a point of comparison when we come to consider the Party in the 21st century in Chapter 10, this chapter assesses important features of the ALP around the time of its 70th birthday. We focus on the three most powerful elements within the organisation: the union officials, the parliamentarians and the Party machines; we also consider the rank and file members, branches and Labor voters.

Union officials

Trade unions established the Labor Party in the 1890s; 70 years later the relationship between unions and the Party was still very close. Before considering this relationship, it is worth making two points about the nature of the union movement in the early 1960s. First, workers affiliated with the Labor Party through the unions were at this time still overwhelmingly members of blue collar unions. The exceptions, in states where they remained affiliated after the 1955 Split, were mainly members of the private sector clerks' and shop assistants' unions.

If the Whitlam government is upheld by many ALP supporters as the shining example of postwar social democracy, the Hawke and Keating governments evoke a much more ambiguous response. There are their defenders, such as former New South Wales Premier Neville Wran, and there are those, such as long time ALP member and academic Graham Maddox, who lamented in his 1989 book The Hawke Government and the Labor Tradition that Hawke

Then there is the fact that, between them, Hawke and Keating won five successive elections, a Labor record. Set against that achievement is the stunningly low Labor vote in 1996, when the Party lost office with its lowest primary vote in 65 years.

The Howard government quickly put aside the comforting words it had used to win the 1996 election. Public service jobs were slashed. New industrial relations laws were passed to wind back the award system, attack union rights, and introduce statutory individual contracts. Public sympathy for the Coalition dropped sharply; its primary support, according to Newspoll, fell from 55 per cent in May 1996 to 40 per cent one year later. Yet Labor failed to capitalise on the Coalition's slide, its poll results rising from 36 per cent to only 39 per cent.

As had occurred during the Fraser government, the trade unions were initially the real opposition to the conservatives. They mounted a series of one day strikes and rallies to protest against the government's harsh budget cuts and anti-union legislation that culminated in a large and angry demonstration outside Parliament House in Canberra on 19 August 1996. Militant unionists and Aborigines forced their way into the building. Labor and trade union leaders turned this impressive demonstration of widespread outrage against the Coalition's policies into a rout by tailing the government and conservative media in denouncing damage to the building's doors and souvenir shop. Even left wing union leaders distanced themselves from the event.

Although the government prevailed against the unions in 1996, it was pushed back on the nation's waterfront two years later when many thousands of workers and union supporters joined the Maritime Union of Australia's (MUA) picket lines all around the country, shutting down the operations of Patrick Stevedores, which had sacked its entire unionised workforce of 1400 and replaced it with scabs.

In this book we have argued that the Australian Labor Party can best be understood as a capitalist workers' party, working class in its supporters and union origins, capitalist in the policies that it has pursued. In chapter 5 we reviewed the material constitution of the ALP as it stood 70 years after its formation. We concluded that the party was still very much a capitalist workers' party at that time, but, alongside a fundamental continuity, there were also changes. Over the following 50 years further major changes have become apparent. The Party is obviously much older and has greater experience of holding office and, as a result, has become much more integrated into Australian capitalism.

These changes have to be situated within changes in the broader political economy. Capital itself has undergone substantial restructuring. The competitiveness and viability of Australian capitalism today depend much more on closer integration with international flows of finance and production than was the case five decades ago. Most importantly, the end of the postwar global boom in the early 1970s has affected the long term economic dynamism of Australian capitalism. Labor's approach to managing the economy has contributed and adjusted to these changes. Furthermore, the working class is more urban and larger than ever before. White collar workers are now a larger proportion of the working class, as industries such as education, hospitality, tourism, retail, and banking and finance have become much more significant employers. Union coverage has slumped, as has union militancy.

If many Labor supporters regard the Curtin and Chifley governments as a period of great achievements and greater ambitions frustrated by conservative forces, their illusions in the Whitlam government are even more heroic. After nearly a quarter of a century of stagnant conservative rule during which Australia seemed to be a backward looking outpost of the British empire run by monarchists and reactionaries, Gough Whitlam, the Mighty Gough, broke through and during his first 12 months in office remade Australia forever. Then, as in a Victorian melodrama, the forces of evil began to organise and eventually brought down the Whitlam government through a dastardly anti-constitutional conspiracy that involved the Liberals, the High Court, the governor-general and the Melbourne Club, all backed by, if not working at the behest of, the CIA. After just three years of Labor in power, Australia was once again thrown back into the dark days of Liberal government, now led by Malcolm Fraser, grazier from the Western Districts and prime exemplar of the born to rule set.

There is of course a germ of truth in this heroic myth. The December 1972 election was a watershed in Australian electoral history, and the Whitlam government did represent a break from the past in important respects. No matter the demonisation of the Whitlam government by the conservatives and many ALP leaders since its defeat, it left behind a legacy of reforms that its more conservative successors have never tried to eliminate completely.

The new Labor government, elected on Rudd's promise of ‘an alternative, not an echo’, for the most part improvised on themes played by the Howard government over the preceding 13 years. There were some exceptions, but continuity in policy was far more evident than any clean break. Continuity, not just with the Howard government but with the Hawke and Keating governments before that. Adherence to orthodox economics, privatisation and the use of market mechanisms backed by coercive centralised control in the delivery of public services, employer friendly industrial relations reform, firm support for the US alliance, racism towards Aborigines and asylum seekers, and lack of action on climate change all characterised the Labor government of 2007–10. The interests of capitalists prevailed over those of Labor's working class supporters.

From neoliberalism to Keynesianism and back again

The exact content of Labor's economic agenda shifted dramatically during the 2008–9 global financial crisis, the defining event of the period – from neoliberalism to massive government intervention – but in both cases Labor's policy was entirely in accord with the dominant trend endorsed and promoted by the OECD. At the outset, Labor was determined to establish itself as a fiscally conservative government.