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.
