For the Australian media, it seems, it’s always safe in England or America. Anyone noticed that despite a daily death toll from Covid-19 of near 500 in the UK and near 1,000 in the US, there is no talk of withdrawing correspondents.
By contrast, Australian correspondents were pulled out of south-east Asia, Papua New Guinea and India months ago with no signs of them being sent back, despite many countries having extremely low infection rates, India and Indonesia being the two main worries. Of course, the China correspondents were withdrawn for other reasons, but there is an argument for sending them back if they are willing to risk it.
We are constantly being told by media commentators and political figures that south-east Asia is where we need to build our security to counterbalance China and hedge our trade, that the Indo-Pacific strategic architecture has to acknowledge the “centrality” of ASEAN and so on.
Huge things are happening in the region. Myanmar holds its elections on Sunday, with Aung San Suu Kyi’s party accused of abandoning the ethnic minorities. In Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim edges closer to power. In Thailand, young people are defying en masse the lèse majesté laws and the army to demand constitutional reform. The Philippines are hit by super-cyclones and Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous presidency steps up its attacks on press freedom.
The stranded correspondents do their best to cover it from here, from the internet, phoning around, and gophering by local assistants. They get it right but, as the late Robert Fiske said, “you cannot get near the truth without being there.”
The risk is that managements will see this as a solution to their constant gripes about the cost of foreign coverage, and make it permanent. Already, with their appointed China correspondent waiting more than a year for a visa, Nine Entertainment has just paid off the staff in the Sydney Morning Herald–Age bureau in Beijing, opened in 1973. A minuscule saving, compared with the time lost by any future correspondent in getting started, assuming the Nine management actually intend reopening the bureau.
For the time being, Nine is considering locating its China and Southeast Asia correspondents in Singapore, rather than those troublesome places Beijing and Jakarta. A throwback to previous times, and probably not much of a cost saving either.
Fatalism rules
Another week, more trade sanctions coming from China. Today, according to what import agents in China are telling their Australian clients, Chinese customs won’t be clearing shipments of wine, barley, sugar, lobster, coal, timber and copper from Australia. The USAsia Centre in Perth estimates about $19 billion worth of annual exports are at risk.
How it works out remains to be seen, and not all is political payback. Coal imports are subject to annual quotas from different sources, and Australia has already filled this year’s allocation. But it’s clear our exporters are in for a rough ride.
The economic and trade side is being well covered by such business reporters as the Guardian’s Daniel Hurst and The Australian’s Glenda Korporaal. Political reporters are meanwhile giving an easy let-off for both Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese, neither of whom can restrain their Wolverine fringes from stirring up more friction.
China is not helping itself look anything but a prickly autocracy. It is still baulking at allowing experts from the World Health Organisation come into Wuhan to look at the source of the Covid outbreak. This week it quickly showed Jack Ma his place after he criticised Chinese banks for having a “pawn shop mentality” – calling him in for a dressing down and postponing the US$37 billion float of his e-payments venture Ant.
Still, our media analysts might question whether constant rhetoric about standing up for Australian values and sovereignty really help, what the ASIO/AFP raids on an alleged Chinese interference ring in Sydney actually found out, why the Chinese consul-general in Sydney, Gu Xiaojie, suddenly went home in June.
If Scott Morrison does soon make a trip to Tokyo to meet new prime minister Yoshihide Suga, as is apparently being organised, maybe he and accompanying media can learn from how the Japanese play things with China – maintaining a civil diplomatic discourse while quietly upholding its trade and security interests.
Beyond the fringe
The loyalty test demanded by Senator Eric Abetz of Chinese-Australian witnesses at a committee hearing has already been well covered in Pearls & Irritations, and received widespread condemnation as McCarthyism around Australia as well as overseas.
Not shared apparently by the editors of the Sydney Morning Herald. In a tepid, offend-nobody editorial on October 25 about the China relationship, it said only that Abetz had “raised the hackles of China after refusing to apologise for remarks at a government inquiry this month when he asked three witnesses with Chinese-Australian heritage to “unequivocally condemn” the Chinese Communist Party”. That was it: only the Chinese had been offended, it seems.
Softly, softly
With our intelligence chiefs increasingly coming out with public comment – who can forget former ASIO director Duncan Lewis’s warning a year back that China was trying to “take over” our political system – the director-general of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Paul Symon, is the latest to front the camera.
It’s happening in the carefully controlled setting of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, where Symon has recorded a four-part interview, with questions by the retired ABC correspondent Graeme Dobell, who now works at ASPI. In the two episodes released so far, we’ve had the history of ASIS since its founding in 1952, its relinquishment to the defence forces of commando-type special operations, the re-arming of its officers in the field after 9/11 and so on.
Whatever ASIS got up to overseas — “whether it was disrupting a terrorist plot or some type of activity where there is an action that occurs” — it had to be authorised by the foreign minister with the knowledge of the prime minister.
Such operations were risky, but ASIS was not “cavalier”, said Symon, previously an army general. “Every activity we do is written in considerable detail, and planned in considerable detail. The vast majority of those activities in the planning stage contain the risk-management plan.”
ASPI website viewers will have to wait for Sunday’s instalment, or perhaps the final one a week later, for Dobell to address the elephant in the recording studio: So what was the risk assessment about the 2004 operation to bug the Timor-Leste government officers? And can we assume then that Alexander Downer and John Howard gave the OK?
No doubt Symon will say it’s all sub judice and indeed in camera, if Attorney-General Christian Porter has his way with the cases against Bernard Collaery and Witness K, but it will be interesting to see the question put and the body language at least in the reply.
Hamish McDonald has been a correspondent in Jakarta, Tokyo, New Delhi and Beijing, and was Regional Editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong and Foreign Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. He has won two Walkley Awards for reporting from Asia and was made an Inaugural Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.
Comments
7 responses to “Media in the Asian Century: upheaval all around but no Australian perspective”
It’s hardly surprising when one considers how former PM Howard seemed have some antipathy towards the Asian region, apart from being a lucrative destination for Australian exports, and continues where we do not see diversity amongst our own political, media, business, sporting and entertainment elites.
Although previous to Howard the zeitgeist was about the Asian century, our hollowed out conservative and monocultural media shows little if any interest in Asia, and elsewhere, while insulating Australians from the outside world (even NZ, Ireland and Canada?!) …. makes for easier focus on and manipulation of perceptions round (limited) key issues.
This also includes developing antipathy towards all things non American and/or non British through ignoring media content that can inform society about the outside world including Asia, Africa, Americas, ME and Europe; the latter is negatively conflated with the EU and dog whistled, bit like Asia…..
Andrew, I concur. The doses of trollop we get served up’ adnaurasium’ on our TV and Foxtel , and Cable services almost makes us part of the U.S. but then Murdoch owns most of the media! So much news comes courtesy of Fox, and the two big players .With the demise of local news rooms and journos, the result is disheartening. Too much ‘news ‘ from the UK and US for my taste!
Western media allege that China is baulking at allowing experts from the World Health Organisation but, even if that were so (there is no evidence that it is) why are the media more suspicious about America’s complete withdrawal from the WHO? Covid-19 was circulating in the US from mid-2019, so that should set off alarms. But, crickets.
As to showing Jack Ma his place, that’s just post hoc reasoning.
Remember the fiasco after the launch of the Shanghai Stock Exchange? That almost cost PM Li his job. The Chinese know that they are babes in the wood when it comes to stock manipulation, and they have also released a raft of new lending legislation that will materially affect Ant Financial (which, btw, the average Chinese does not admire).
“Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous presidency”. Just for balance Duterte has a current popularity rating of 91% which is an increase of 4% in the last three months. The Philippines murder rate has fallen by 26.4% under Duterte since 2016. If the suppression of press freedom allegation refers to the recent decision of Judge Rainelda Estacio-Montesa in a civil court criminal libel decision against Ressa and Santos that had nothing to with the Duterte government. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported the six months jail sentence as a six year sentence. We need a comitteee to protect readers against anti-Duterte propaganda.
Paul,
I don’t know what your connection, if any, is with the Philippines, but I can write that I have been there frequently since 1983 when on my third visit to this unlucky country, I arrived hours after Marcos had Aquino assassinated at Manila International Airport. I am in regular contact with friends and family in the Philippines so feel I am abreast of the situation.I am not sure who runs Duterte’s popularity contests but I seriously doubt their accuracy .While the poverty stricken population has always relied on strongman leaders to “solve their problems” .Unlike Duterte, they have been usually from powerful family dynasties. The educated people of the Philippines think quite differently, but hey are in the minority.They can’t be brought off by bribes or payments amounting to a few Dollars in our money, but valuable when you dont have a job and need to feed your family !
The closure of the biggest broadcasting company by the Philippines Government , by failing to renew its licence, now means that the broadcast media is effectively controlled by the Government.It lost its licence because it was fearlessly reporting the “drug war”( as I witnessed first hand when watching the T.V. News each day).The latest disaster last week on Catanduanes, caused by Super Typhoon Rolly (International Name “Goni”) received scant reporting on Australian Media despite the urgent need by the affected populace of supplies of food and clean water. It may have been as powerful as Super Typhoon Haiyan which caused great loss of life in Tacloban , Lyete some years ago. Public warnings failed to reach the affected areas because of the previous closure of radio and television stations in the affected area . The loss of Radio Australia’s short wave service to Asia was a disaster for Australian foreign policy, so the closures of Media bureaus will only increase our isolation from Asia and Asia’s isolation from Australia. Not a good look?
Gavin,
I have been in Mindanao recently and will be living there when i can fly out of Australia. I live in a small village of Coblablan near General Santos City. The support for Duterte i can comment on in Mindanao. I dont think its fair or accurate to characterise the support for Duterte as being a bribe of a few dollars. The US aligned elites, specifically the Aquinos, much loved by the left here in Australia, have failed abysmally to improve the lives of workers and farmers in the Philippines.Duterte is not a “strongman” in the tradition of Marcos. He is threatened daily by the US aligned Phillipines military with a coup. He brilliantly negotiated peace in Mindanao with MILF and has a model of a decentralised Federal system that distributes power to the ignored Vicayas. He challenged successfully the Catholic Church, when in 2017 (completely ignored by the pro-Aquino Australian media), he signed an executive order to ensure access to reproductive health and sexual education, allowing everyone to obtain free contraceptives by 2018. There is a lot to discuss on both sides. I agree with you about Australia media ignoring the disaster in Cataduanes and our isolation from Asia. There needs to be a sincere conversation in Australia about the new Philippines emerging from US domination. Duterte refused to allow the Philippines Navy to exercise with the US Navy. But Morrison has the gunboats of Australia steaming in the West Philippine Sea. Go figure. Duterte has tilted courageously the Philippines to an independent direction. Stay safe and go well wherever you are.
Hi Paul,
My wife’s family is from the Illocos Region , living on the west coast of Luzon below Baguio City. I have to agree with you that the average Filipino has not benefited at all over the time I have been going there, mores the pity. i did read Manila papers on line for quite a long time but gave up as the ‘news’ was not worth reading. As Duterte is from Mindanao, he was very much an unknown quantity in the North and his anti drug policy didn’t gain him too many friends in ‘our part’ of the Philippines. Duterte certainly ruffled feathers in both Canberra and Washington with his neutralist policy towards China, but that is not too surprising when you have a big bully boy across the other side of the South China Sea !
It is very sad that we don’t have a closer relationship with the Philippines . I have very little faith in the current Ambassador to Australia. The Embassy is very much a closed shop compared to the “Corey” years . Then the Morrison government shows nil interest too.
On a sadder note yet another Typhoon on its way to impact the battered Bicol and Tagalog region later this week. That I think is the third in a month!
I have been as far north as Vigan and Loag, south to Legaspi and Masbate and east to the Cagayan Valley. Still much to see,when I can travel back again. I always feel at home when we return to ‘our town’. I guess as a ‘westerner’ , one does stand out. I used to prickle (inwardly) when called ‘Joe’! But with the departure of the Americans from Clark AFB and other bases in the North, now much less so.
Take care.I know you will love the Philippines, I do when I can get there . I go up to Baguio City (2,000 metres) when the heat and humidity gets too much for me.