Stalking George. The Australian's Megamind.

With the demise of Fairfax's print-based media, the opprobrium being heaped on Gina Rinehart for her tilt at its board and the general whiff of sleaze emanating from the inquiry into phone hacking by News Ltd's tabloids, you'd be forgiven for thinking journalism of the old-fashioned well-written, print-based, long-form kind is on the way out. Add to this the rise of social media, blogs, e-zines, RSS feeds and assorted other electronic-based communications, a great deal of the content of which is (with a few noticeable exceptions) shrill, unreliable, conspiracy-driven, poorly researched and written, it's easy to be left wondering - where have all the good (Aussie) journos gone?

Don't despair. We have some good ones in Australia. Big picture thinkers and analytical essayists like Laura Tingle, Lenore Taylor, Brian Toohey, and Shaun Carney to name but a few. But none hold a candle to the inestimable George Megalogenis, senior writer for News Ltd's The Australian, author and moderator of the news blog Meganomics, and author of three of the most lucid, clear-eyed and impartial books (plus one extended essay) ever written about the nexus between Australia's major economic reforms and the collective impact of these on Australian society and identity.

Billed as The Australian's resident nit-picker, George Megalogenis is my favourite journalist for the single fact that although I have been following his work religiously for five years, have stalked him at almost every public appearance he's ever made and hung on his every word when he's been on ABC TV's Insiders, I have absolutely no way of ideologically pigeon-holing him. He is a Richmond supporter - read “tragic” - a music and cricket buff, the forty-something son of Greek migrants and a very handsome, very tall man with a beautiful speaking voice. 

That's all I know for certain.

Unlike culture warriors Andrew Bolt, David Marr, Miranda Devine or Robert Manne, George Megalogenis is a truly impartial, non-partisan observer of Australia's economy and cultural identity. This makes him an enigma. It is a measure of how well-regarded he is by both political camps that upon its publication The Longest Decade was launched by both Paul Keating (then ex-PM) and John Howard (then current-PM), and its re-issue by Kevin Rudd (then and now - all-purpose fuckwit).

In his books and articles and blogs, he does not start with an ideological or moral assertion and then cherry-pick the facts to bolster his argument. Like a good economics graduate with a sturdy grasp of both the micro- and macro- and a thirst for facts, George Megalogenis is first and foremost a data miner. He digs and he sifts through the numbers, looking for meaning and the stories they contain. He looks carefully at decades’ worth of Census population data, polls, focus group responses, immigration data and all the hard core figures that come out of Treasury. As fellow journalist Annabel Crabb says about Megalogenis, ‘George, you have a beautiful mind.’

Faultlines, as the title suggests, looks at the source of our divisions and contradictions as a society. Our fissures are not based on the old divisions of Right vs Left, but rather, Old vs New Australia, City vs Bush, Inner City vs everyone else. He coins the term Generation W. "Women and wogs" a demographic largely unnoticed by others, but one which he identifies as a group deserving special attention – the people who have both driven and benefited from the reform era and who are best placed to enjoy the society it has created – unlike the other Generation W which deregulation has left behind – Whitebread and on Welfare. You know, Pauline Hanson's people.

In Faultlines, George surveys a cohort of Gen Xs who'd graduated from Ringwood High in the late eighties - gauging the attitudes of residents of Australia's most marginal electoral seat Deakin. The variety of experience, expectations, political opinion and lifestyle choice expressed in this group paints a far more interesting, complex and muddy picture of Australian society than politicians who love a bit of wedge politics and the shrill, lazy dolts and poltroons of the screeching media would want us to believe.

In The Longest Decade, a book I have foisted on various family and friends, he examines the deregulation era under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and John Howard. Tampa, the children overboard affair, Hansonism, the GST, the baby-bonus, Victoria's Kennett era and Generation W all come under George's relentlessly clear-eyed scrutiny. He challenges our memories of that time because he has at his disposal the results, the facts and the figures of deregulation.

His Quarterly Essay - Trivial Pursuit - examines and skewers the 24 hour news spin cycle and the decline in the national conversation between politicians and voters. 

The Australian Moment is a broad-brush canvas of Australia's reforms, starting with Gough Whitlam's golden ascendancy and spectacular demise (mirrored in Kevin Rudd some thirty years later), Malcolm Fraser's inertia and the Hawke-Keating reform era which, as far as George is concerned more or less ended with John Howard.

In short, George Megalogenis is no culture warrior. Though he sees modern Australia through the prism of the Greek-Australian migrant experience, he is first and foremost a numbers cruncher, a recogniser of patterns, an analyst and story-teller beholden to no one opinion-shaper, even through Rupert Murdoch pays his wages. He treats the reader with respect. He leaves you to make your own judgements.

And whilst he looks like a handsome, olive-skinned Thunderbird, you can be sure there is no Gerry Anderson pulling his strings.

Do yourself a favour and read him.