The election of Trump has exposed a media so incompetent, so unqualified in their important job, so blatantly ill-equipped to report news usefully to the voting public, that surely they must take a slice of the blame-pie in everything that Trump now does to a mostly unsuspecting America, and in turn, the world. Although I could write a thesis about all the media’s errors, to make this digestible, I will boil down the main problems into two buckets: false equivalency and the cookie-cutter narrative.

False Equivalency

The false equivalency error came from the media’s automatic process of treating Clinton and Trump as being ‘just the same’. From the nomination onwards, Trump was given automatic credibility. His statements were reported without analysis, his words made into headlines without question or fact-check, his soundbites and tweets given an underserved legitimacy, because he was a big powerful man running for the top job. Trump never had to gain or prove his legitimacy for the role, because he was given it, automatically, by a media institution so used to reporting political contests from this perspective, they knew no other way to do it. He was fit to be President because he said so. No questions asked.

Importantly, this automatic legitimacy gave an equal amount of legitimacy to Trump’s supporters. The media’s expectation of Trump’s behaviour was so low that when his supporters were just as low, the media shrugged and reported it all like it was perfectly acceptable. No matter how vile, how badly behaved, how racist, how unthinking, sexist, hateful, unjust, how lowest-common-denominator they went, Trump supporters’ behaviour was accepted by the media as just an example of the just-as-legitimate-as-Clinton-supporters-other-side-of-the-debate.

These decimated standards and the resulting revolting behaviour don’t just disappear now that the election is over. Trump’s win have etched a stain, an indelible mark onto the American culture forever. The legitimising of hate and division is now permanent. How many times did you see a journalist sitting politely in a Trump supporter’s living room, sipping on a cup of tea, nodding empathetically while they told them how much they looked forward to throwing out the Mexicans? The media legitimise these views through normalising them into soundbites. You normalise these views and they become accepted and legitimate. You take down the standard of respect, the values of acceptance, and these abhorrent views spread like wildfire. How did Hitler come to power? Do journalism students study history?

But it didn’t end there. No, the false equivalency extended further, to the ‘they are just as bad as each other’ narrative. How many times did you hear a news report about the election start with words something like ‘as the two most unpopular candidates battle it out…’? On the morning of the election, Australia’s SBS were one of thousands of news outlets across the world who reported from the false equivalency lens with the headline: ‘US Votes: Americans pick their next president after divisive, bitter campaign’. Hang on, hang on just one second. Divisive and bitter why? This lens implies that Hillary Clinton played just as big a part as Trump in making the campaign divisive and bitter, slotting into the idea that the two candidates were equivalent, just as much to blame, just as unqualified, just as hot-headed, rude, abusive, and offensive and racist as Trump was for every second of every day of the campaign. Clinton held her head high every day, only once calling Trump’s supporters a basket of deplorables. One slip and it’s all her fault?

Where Clinton had 24/7 coverage of her email scandal (which she had numerous times been cleared of as an error, low and behold she is human, if this is the only thing they had on her, she’s almost spotless after 30 years of service), this one scandal was given equivalency to Trump’s daily scandals, plural, which were so numerous that he got away with all of them, so regular that not one was given the full attention it deserved, so frequent that they were all swept under the carpet-of-Trump’s-election-circus-media-show, as if not one of them mattered or not one of them helped to tell the story of Trump’s illegitimacy to be leader of the free world.

Imagine trying to explain to future generations how a man who screwed over his workers and contractors, destroyed livelihoods and lives, bankrupted himself and others numerous times, boasted of sexual assault, was accused of raping his ex-wife, of assaulting a 13 year old girl, of tweeting profanities and abuse at all hours of the day and night – imagine explaining how this behaviour was framed as ‘isn’t he entertaining, doesn’t he have great news value, more please, boys-will-be-boys, there is no standard of behaviour anymore, no one is expected to behave properly ever again’. How did this happen? How did he win by lying and cheating? How did Trump, like Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption, crawl through a river of shit and come out clean on the other side? Whereas Clinton dips her toe in mud and is forever framed as dirty and untrustworthy? How did these two distortions of reality happen? The media enabled it through the false equivalency phenomenon, otherwise known as lazy, unthinking journalism.

The Cookie Cutter Narrative

This morning on Radio National, journalist and experienced foreign correspondent, Hamish McDonald, hit the nail on the head in his criticism of the media’s failings in their reporting of Trump. He said Trump’s win shows the mainstream media have to ask themselves ‘serious questions’ and described their election coverage as ‘disgraceful’. McDonald explained that the newsgathering process should involve journalists going out and finding a story, and then writing the story and sending it back to the head office to be edited and published. Everyone rightly assumes this is how news reporting happens. But the way it actually happens is that, in his experience, journalists spend time in the field, then they get a message from head office, telling them what the story is. They then try to make the information they have fit that story.

As regular readers know, I am studying political narratives, so McDonald’s analysis hit me on the forehead. What he describes is a propensity for the media to make the facts fit a pre-defined narrative, rather than letting the narrative evolve from the facts. Any fact that doesn’t fit the story is excluded. The sources used for soundbites, low and behold, fit the story, and those who don’t fit are excluded.

So what was the predefined story during the US election? See above. The false-equivalency, two-horse-race, bad-candidate versus bad-candidate, divisive-campaign-both-their-fault email scandal versus Trump all-encompassing-circus story was all we heard. How often did we hear about Trump’s policy plans and the constant inconsistency on display? Was there any analysis of how much his policies might cost? How often was he called out for lying? When were voters told the impact Trump’s ‘climate change is a Chinese hoax’ position would have on the planet? When was Trump asked for any detail about how he would build a wall and why on earth would Mexico pay for it? When was he called out for the contradictory policy positions he would take within minutes of each other? It’s almost liked the journalists pretended they couldn’t understand what he was saying, or that it was all too hard to fact-check, or that he’s just a joke anyway so who cares what he’ll do, let’s just have a laugh and worry about it later?

When were voters told, in any sort of useful detail, what it would mean for poor Americans to lose Obamacare, which had only just started having a positive impact on the lives of uninsured Americans? Trump has said he wants to roll back globalisation, to reinstate closed-down-industries, to return workers to coal mines, to tear up free trade agreements. When did he ever get asked how on earth he would make any of this pie-in-the-sky roll-back-to-the-1950s actually happen? And how many of Trump’s voters are going to be completely surprised at what he actually does, and totally despairing when they find their situations made much worse by a failed lying snake-oil-salesman who was only in it for his own ego? Face palm.

It is maddening to now see, after the election, that the media are running around like headless-chooks trying to find out what exactly the Trump presidency means for the people of the world. After the election. When it’s too late. When there’s nothing anyone can do about it. The facts that come out of this post-election investigation, analysis and scrutiny of Trump didn’t fit the two-horse-narrative before the election and are all too-little-too-late now.

The media played their part in Trump’s victory by letting Trump play them like a violin. And now we’re all screwed. The moral of Trump’s win is that lying and cheating gets you to the White House. Thanks a bunch.

Even before Trump won I did a lot of reading to try to understand why he would even get one vote, let alone millions.

There is literally an avalanche of analysis pouring out of the internet with thousands of writers doing the same thing I’m doing. Racism. White supremacy. Economic anxiety. Wealth inequality. Anti-establishment and anti-political-correctness.

I won’t try to condense this down to one reason, or a dot point list, or to try to explain away something so multi-faceted that it will take years, perhaps generations, to see what really happened. But I did find one insight necessary to highlight, because I think this one thing matters.

White women. Over half of them voted for Trump*. (*Half of the white women who voted, voted for Trump). Let that one settle as you ponder the photograph below.

It’s easy, as a middle-class, educated, professional, white, politically engaged, feminist, left-wing working mother to assume women everywhere would unfailingly support a female Presidential candidate. When I read Barbara Kingsolver’s impassioned plea for women to reject the Trump-bully, and to reject the notion that women aren’t really people, I felt a rage and a sadness that made me want to scream. But what we have learned from Trump’s victory is that one should never assume everyone thinks like they do. And one should never assume all women feel the same way about feminism as feminists do.

A small note now about fear and the rural versus city divide. I tweeted last night that no more analysis was needed about how Trump won other than to say Trump did a good job of scaring people, telling them he’d fix everything and, because they were too scared to need details or to think very hard about what he was selling, they all fell for it all hook, line and sinker. I stick by this short-hand analysis; fear was the basis of Trump’s campaign and he was very clever at exploiting many and varied reasons for fear in all voting demographics. Women included.

The rural and city divide is also important here. This analysis of the difference between rural America and city America is crucial to understanding Trump’s success. As an Australian who has never been to America, the America I thought I knew and loved, for the most part, voted for Clinton. The Hollywood, city culture, is the only version of American culture my experience can bring to mind. The ‘fly over states’, the red states, really are a different America – they’re miserable, poor, resentful, often unemployed, left-behind and incredibly easy to scare because their lives are, well, pretty crap. When Trump came along and said ‘I’ll make your country great again’, ‘it’s going to be huge’, they were desperate for him to be right, and this wave of desperation delivered city-dwelling-Trump electoral spoils even he probably didn’t believe were possible.

Now hold that thought when it comes to scared, white, rural females. What are they scared of in particular?

They’re scared of women like Hillary Clinton.

One of the hundreds of articles I read about the election in my quest to understand was this interview with Stephanie Coontz, a gender and economics expert at Evergreen State College. You can read it for yourself, but I’ll pull out the key points. Coontz says that it’s ‘women who have the fewest opportunities to compete successfully in the labor market’ who are ‘much more likely to support the policies and values that reward a traditional division of labor in the household’. It all started to make sense for me when I saw this. She went on to say, ‘Women with more social, economic, or educational capital are much more likely to support the activities of women making their own way in the world, to be proud when they see powerful women who stand up or who are getting ahead of men in any way’. Yep. And then this: ‘Women with less economic or personal autonomy are often drawn to a culture of family values that emphasizes men’s responsibility to look after women’. Are you with me now? Suddenly the abuse of Julia Gillard by Australian women made more sense. And finally, Cootz says that when women who emphasize their role in the family as nurturer, as the one who stays home to look after the children, when they see women like Hillary promising more rights for women, equal rights for women, they are scared because ‘women having all these freedoms from male control, they believe… it actually threatens women’s entitlement to male protection’.

If Hillary can be elected President, if women can get equal rights, if women are valued in the workforce at equal rates of pay to men, then, these women fear this freedom will lead to the end of their promised role in life as homemaker. They fear equality, feminism, will cause a shift in the culture where men will no longer hold the role of breadwinner, and the women will no longer be entitled to their self-identity as home-maker.

I’m not saying this attitude is the only reason the majority of white women, mostly in rural areas, voted for Trump. I’m not saying that his misogynistic, pussy-grabbing, boys-will-be-boys persona was totally ignored by women because they were more worried about what Hillary represented than what Trump did (a male culture, in rural areas, which these women are no doubt very familiar and comfortable with). I’m just saying, there is something to this. Many women reject feminism and reject female leaders and reject the notion that women should be equal to men in all facets of life, but perhaps don’t always understand, even in themselves, why this is so. In order to understand these women, we need to know these women. Somehow, Trump got it. His promises to ‘lock Hillary up’ resonated with women who wanted her to get back in her place. Now it’s time for those, like me, who oppose everything Trump is about to do to America, to start understanding this too.

Image from heraldsun.com.au

Next time I hear someone say ‘Clinton and Trump are both terrible candidates’, or some variation on this theme, I will scream. Part of the reason I find this statement so annoying, so unhelpful, and so unfair to Clinton, is because I still have post-traumatic stress after seeing the same thing happen to Gillard, when she was painted as falsely-equivalent to Abbott.

As a female leader or candidate, and as a progressive, there is a double layer of expectation. That expectation is that you are P-E-R-F-E-C-T in every way. So, for instance, if you, like Gillard, roll out over 300 pieces of perfectly legitimate, progressive and good-for-society policies and legislation, but there are one, two, maybe three things that you did which many progressives don’t agree with, you’re DEAD TO THEM.

For Gillard, it was one of her decisions about asylum seekers, a change to single-parent welfare and/or opposition to gay marriage which are the only policy decisions some progressives seem to talk about, remember, hold against her, and cause them to say Gillard is just as bad as Abbott. For Clinton, it’s her email scandal. Or her ties to Wall Street. Apparently there is no leeway to say ‘oh well, Clinton’s not the perfect progressive candidate’, or ‘Gillard’s not the perfect progressive Prime Minister’, but also to accept they are still a good progressive leader. And far preferable to their loony right-wing contender. For the ‘they’re dead to me’ crowd, there is no grey in the black-white judgement about whether either is a legitimate candidate or leader. No matter what policies Clinton puts forward, her quest to continue Obama’s legacy in most policy areas, and in some to improve them, is ignored. Her haters just focus on the areas where they don’t agree with her. It’s incredible how all the good policies, ideas, hard-work, commitment and leadership ability that Clinton and Gillard bring to the table, counts for nothing for some people.

There’s also the standard that ‘the woman did ok’ as long as she didn’t stuff up, such as many appraisals of Clinton’s debate performances. But for Trump, if he doesn’t stuff up, he’s the winner. The bar is just set lower for men.

Now, I’m not saying it’s all a female thing, but I am saying females have encountered this problem before. For example, the expectation that female news readers are immaculate, thin, covered in make-up and definitely should not have grey hair. But men? Anything goes really. And what about the fact that Australian women are increasingly working just as many hours as men, but are still, in most families, doing the vast bulk of child care and household chores? Is this just a woman’s lot? For our female politicians, is it just their lot to be judged to be perfect or terrible, with no continuum, no balanced perspective, nothing in between?

It’s impossible to ignore the gendered part of this equation. But there is also a ‘progressive versus conservative’ element. Put bluntly, most right-wing voters don’t give a crap about the policies right-wing candidates serve up, as long as they promise to reduce taxes. But for left-wingers, you’re not just expected to have a policy for every-occasion, pushing the boundaries of progress every second of the day, and also to know every detail of these thousands of policies, and how much they will cost, at a moment’s notice. When you try to explain policy details, you’re called ‘beige’ and ‘uninspiring’.

Progressive leaders are also meant to live up to the hugely unrealistic expectation that they’ll win elections without making friends with business interests, while competing against the war-chest of business interests funding the neoliberal candidate on the right. So, for instance, Clinton is evil because she’s had paid speaking gigs for Wall Street bankers. No matter that she’s vowed to close tax-loopholes which see billions lost in corporate tax-evasion. No matter that she’s made wealth inequality the centrepiece of her ‘stronger together’ narrative. Because a New York Senator low and behold has some rich Wall Street supporters backing her campaign, she’s DEAD to many progressives. Sad, isn’t it?

I adored Julia Gillard as Prime Minister, and still count her as my number one hero. I didn’t always agree with her, but I’m not naïve to think there will ever be a politician who I could possibly always agree with. It is so disappointing to now be watching Clinton, who, like Gillard, will never be perfect, but shouldn’t be expected to be, written off as ‘just as bad as Trump’. Comparing Gillard and Clinton to Abbott and Trump, for a progressive, is like comparing a slightly blemished apple with a rotten, maggot-filled orange. Those saying ‘Clinton and Trump are just as bad as each other’, apparently, would throw both pieces of fruit in the bin and go hungry in another act of counterproductive, Abbott-electing ridiculousness, rather than give Clinton, or Gillard, the credit they deserve.

I will be excited when Clinton is elected as the first female US President. I will be critical of her decisions when justified, and appreciative of her good work when justified. As it should be.

There seems to be a residual myth in the Australian political establishment that the real Malcolm Turnbull stills exists. You see this myth cropping up alongside all kinds of sideways excuses for why Turnbull is missing. For instance, Katharine Murphy implies the centrist-Malcolm is being held captive by the far right of his party: ‘If Turnbull moved decisively in the direction of centrist cooperation, various charges would be levelled against him in predictable quarters. He’d be thumbing his nose at the base. He’d be provoking Ray Hadley. He’d be emboldening Tony Abbott’. Michelle Grattan says he needs some more runs on the board, and to better define his narrative. I think it’s time we all grew up and come to terms with the sad reality. Santa Claus isn’t real. Never was real. Never will be. And he’s not coming over to your house to bring an iPad, a credible renewable energy policy or to make gay marriage a reality. The truth is, old Malcolm doesn’t exist. It was all just a con to make him palatable enough for first the seat of Wentworth, and then the job of Prime Minister. The fact is, the real Malcolm is exactly the Malcolm you see in front of you. The Abbott pig wearing lipstick. Malcolm’s narrative is just the same as Abbott’s. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’ll give you a moment to let this sad reality sink in before I make you truly depressed with a description of the Prime Minister we’ve all ended up with, while being played and teased with the idea he was something different. You see, the thing is, when we desperately want to believe something, us humans are very good at ignoring all evidence against it. That’s why people didn’t hear Malcolm when he said, in his first speech as Prime Minister, that he would lead a ‘thoroughly Liberal Government committed to freedom, the individual and the market’. A free-market. This stood out to me because I can see the neoliberal-wolf wearing the social-progressive-sheep’s clothing. But after the harrowing experience of Abbott, it’s no wonder the hopeful souls of Australia wanted so badly to follow the Pied-Point-Piper of Vaucluse over the edge of the neoliberal cliff. The fact is, ideologically, Abbott is a social-conservative who also happens to enjoy the support of neoliberal donors. Turnbull is a neoliberal warrior who doesn’t think social is a thing unless there’s profit in it for his Panama tax havens.

The one-seat majority, and the herd of angry Abbott-supporting backbenchers has actually been a gift to Turnbull. He’s using the slimy creeps, the George Christensens, the Eric Abetzs, the Cory Bernardis, as an alibi to say ‘I’m only doing stuff most people don’t agree with because I’m hamstrung by the right-wing of my party’. This idea works so nicely with the ‘it’s not my fault and I can’t help it’ fairy tale that it’s no wonder the myth of the old-Malcolm-will-return is still alive. But the thing is, in order to believe this myth, you would have to also believe that Malcolm cares more about hanging onto his job as Prime Minister than he does about doing the things he apparently believes in, such as addressing climate change and promoting marriage equality. But if this is true, this behaviour is a complete contradiction to the theory that Turnbull is an honourable man who has been side-tracked by the politics of his situation. Think of it this way; if the real Malcolm is siding with Bernardi to keep his job, doesn’t that make the real-Malcolm a real-bastard anyway? The whole point of Santa is that people want him to turn up. Who wants the bastard-Malcolm? Nobody.

But no, there really are myths within myths. The truth is, Malcolm talks about agility and innovation, while walking Abbott’s school and higher education policy which makes user-pays education less accessible, and the nation less agile and innovative. Malcolm talks about the moral challenge of climate change, when the real Malcolm wants the State’s to stop with their silly-renewable energy targets and to go back to coal like the good old miners-said-so-days. Malcolm could have scrapped Abbott’s 2014 budget welfare ‘reforms’, which aim to make it harder for young people to use the social safety net they need to stop themselves sliding into possibly-lifelong-poverty, but he has chosen to make this first order of business for his government. As it slowly dawns on everyone that Malcolm is neoliberal to the core, that he would sell off Parliament House to the highest bidder and rent it back to the government if he could get away with it, who would rather walk on hot coals than have a banking Royal Commission, who, if the apparently dead-buried-and-cremated WorkChoices could be reincarnated, would sew the ashes back together with his bare hands, he starts to look not just weak, but actually just as scary, if not scarier, than Abbott. A $20 billion tax cut to his big business mates at the same time as moralising a budget disaster? Of course he would. That’s Malcolm through and through!

In order to defeat an enemy, you must know the enemy. It’s time to stop falling for the ‘old Malcolm will return’ trick, and wake up to who he really is. He’s not spineless. He’s not being forced into a situation he doesn’t approve of. He’s not weakly refusing to answer questions about the behaviour of his right-wing colleagues because he’s scared to offend them. He’s not scared of them. He agrees with them. They’re talking on his behalf. Wake up Australia. The leather jacket was a prop. The public transport riding was public relations. There’s not a nicer version inside Malcolm waiting patiently to appear. This is him. This is all you get. Our Prime Minister is not the man you thought he was. Santa’s not coming because Santa doesn’t exist. Get used to it.

If your doctor misdiagnoses your disease, you’re probably not going to get any better. The same problem will arise for people in the UK who voted to leave the EU because of assurances from Brexit campaigners that they could ‘solve’ globalisation. Similarly for Australian voters who chose the Hanson or Xenophon treatment, attracted to the anti-free-trade-deal rhetoric, which promises to reverse the ill effects of globalisation. And of course, Trump’s supporters could find they have opted for the wrong prescription if he wins the US election.

The patients in this metaphor share similar symptoms of wealth inequality: they’ve seen their stable employment disappear in the industries their families relied on for generations – like automotive, whitegoods, steel production and fabrication, coal mining, clothing and footwear manufacture. They feel resentful that the ‘establishment’ political process has left them to fend for themselves. They never wanted to be reliant on government help, which makes them even more resentful of needing it. They’re not educated in the professions which would allow them to take advantage of a changing global work landscape. They feel priced out of their local job market and often blame unions for pricing them out. They’ve seen full time, ongoing positions degrade into casual, unstable working environments, leaving them constantly anxious about the future. Their fear of change is sometimes scapegoated to a fear of people who don’t look like them, the immigrants who they see as living-next-door representatives of the new world order that has caused all their problems. They are told by right-wing politicians it is their fault they are poor, and they are ‘leaning’ on society, when all they really want is to be contributing like they used to. It’s no wonder they’re visiting the doctor.

But the problem is, they’ve all accepted the misdiagnosis of globalisation. The Brexit campaign, the Hansons, Xenophons and Trumps have made a villain of globalisation, and have promised a treatment to fix this disease which won’t do anything to cure it because it’s not the disease they are suffering from. What’s really making them sick are the ill-effects of neoliberalism. They’re suffering from neoliberalism playing out on a globalised scale. So what they really need is treatment to fix the downside of neoliberalism, not a fix for globalisation.

Once people come to terms with what they are really suffering from, it becomes much easier to talk to them about positive steps to solve the problem. The first thing we need to do is to stop voting for political leaders who think neoliberalism is the right answer. Malcolm Turnbull, for instance. Taking out the ‘lisation’ and ‘lism’ words from this complex situation, you could describe globalisation as a world market, and neoliberalism as a way of removing government mediation from regulating this market. Therefore, the only way to treat the disease is to change the rules by which the market operates, in order to share its spoils more evenly amongst all citizens.

I can already feel people flinching as they read the words ‘government regulation’, but that’s what we’re really talking about here. The treatment for the disease is government policy that aims to reduce wealth inequality which is caused by neoliberal agendas massively advantaging those who already have a foothold in the market over those who don’t. That means a legislated minimum wage and working conditions. That means supporting industries which are really important to the country, which employ lots of people, which in turn stimulates the economy and is therefore worth the investment – such as steel manufacturing, car manufacturing (it’s working for America!) and defence industries. It means investing government funds in high quality school, vocational and tertiary education so it is available to people who can’t afford to pay for it, in order to give them the resources they need to compete in a new market for jobs. It means healthcare available to everyone, no matter their income. It means guaranteeing those who are unemployed have enough government assistance to live in dignity, and be in a position to better their circumstances. It is providing infrastructure and government services which level out the playing field to make the opportunities of globalisation more evenly distributed amongst the whole society.

There are many advantages to globalisation which are hard to embrace when you’re suffering from neoliberalism. For instance, the availability of world markets for those engaged in high-paid, interesting and challenging work, such as in technology, engineering, professional services, design, science, academic, arts and entertainment fields. If you don’t have an education that makes you eligible for such positions (because you haven’t had your government-funded treatment for neoliberalism), it makes it hard to see these benefits. But once you feel better, globalisation doesn’t seem so bad.

The paradox is, the people offering the treatment to solve globalisation refuse to acknowledge that neoliberalism is the real villain here. Like Voldermort in Harry Potter, neoliberalism has become he who shall not be named and therefore it who shall not be blamed. It might sound like a story too good to be true: that you can have your globalisation cake and eat your more equally distributed economic growth too. But, all it takes is for voters to trust a government who is prepared to mediate the world market to make sure economic benefits of globalisation flow more evenly, not just to the privileged few.

Neoliberal governments, instead of offering the treatment people need, have been cutting back, stripping, undermining and hollowing out government’s role in every policy area imaginable. In doing so, they’re hurting economic growth, hurting the wealth of their country, and hurting the wealth of the individuals in these countries. We can all be better off by making all of us better off. We just need to identify the right treatment for the right disease.

We don’t yet know what caused the online census to crash. Either the site was attacked by hackers, or it couldn’t cope with the level of real traffic from people trying to fill in the survey. Either way, it’s a massive government failure. I’m not just talking about failure of security, planning, management and communication; though obviously it was all of these things. No, I’m talking about the beast of an elephant slobbering and wheezing in the corner of the room, which the media have done a great job of ignoring, but has crashed its way onto centre-stage regardless, in the most public and embarrassing way possible. By shitting on the floor.

The census fail is the public face of the consequence of slash-and-burn-small-government-cutting-spending-for-the-sake-of-cutting-spending-worldview which has been imposed on the public by the Abbott and Turnbull government and every Liberal government throughout history because, well that’s just how they roll. The Australian Bureau of Statistics, one of the victims of this mess, had a $68 million dollar cut in Abbott’s 2014 wrecking-ball budget. The same year, the census site was outsourced to IBM for $9.6 million dollars. I am not a tech-expert but I know enough about the internet to know that it costs money to keep sites secure, and it costs money to host a site on a server large enough to accommodate millions of users at once. If there’s not enough money, say if you’ve had a huge cut in the budget, you trim where you can. $68 million is a lot more trimming than a couple of redundancies and no biscuits in the tearoom. So when tech-experts scratch their heads and ask why on earth the census site could only cope with 1 million users an hour, when it needed to cope with 3 million during the peak evening hours, they should be drawing a straight line from the census fail straight to the small government ideology of the Abbott / Turnbull government.

The census fail has reminded us, not that we didn’t know already, that the budget is not just a spreadsheet of numbers, with cuts here, cuts there, cuts everywhere, which don’t impact on the reality of life in Australia. We’re not living in a virtual government spending world here. We live with the consequences of the Liberal cuts every day. Sure, we might consider ourselves a first world country with a high standard of living, as a country who is smart and has our shit together. But our government couldn’t even survey us without causing a huge debacle. The reason for this is because they cut-corners on the project. They treat the jobs of public servants – the servants to the people – like they don’t count. Like they’re dispensable. Multiply the census fail across every sector hurt by Liberal budget cuts, whether Federal or State governments, and you have the same problems occurring in education, health, public transport, the arts, infrastructure, social services, aged care, child protection, environmental protection, the list goes on and on. These cuts aren’t just abstract concepts. They impact on us. They impact on the quality of our lives. On the number of jobs in our economy. On our standard of living.

Just because we don’t all get to see the massive failures of government as publically as we saw the census fail last night, doesn’t mean there’s not a huge amount of pain out there. But it’s not just the pain we have to worry about. It’s the lost opportunities. An ineffectual, underfunded, badly run ideologically-skewed government is bad for all of us. Bad for our health. Bad for our education and skills. Bad for our economy. Bad for our wealth. Don’t believe me? Take a look at this article about the wealth of blue Democrat run states in America versus red Republican run states. The authors describe how red states, who ‘cut and extract’, are poorer overall than blue states, who invest in education, health, infrastructure etc. Even though blue states pay higher levels of tax to maintain this investment, low and behold, the investment pays off because the people in blue states are healthier (they live longer), they are better educated and they are wealthier.

So next time you hear Turnbull, or a journalist for that matter, explaining how sensible and wise they are for cutting government spending, to fulfil their goal of getting-government-out-of-the-way of their profit-making-mates, remember you’re the one hurt by the cuts. Your country is poorer because of Liberal cuts. You are poorer because of Liberal cuts. The census fail is a public humiliation for the Turnbull government. But it’s not just a technology fail. It’s a failure of ideology. Full stop.

After watching Steve Price block Van Badham’s attempts to speak about the cultural problem of disrespect to women, in what could have been a training video to teach people exactly what disrespect to women looks like, I was angry. It wasn’t just that Steve was being rude and aggressive, interrupting Van while it was her turn to speak. It wasn’t just that he used the oh-so-typical-sexist description of Van as ‘hysterical’, attempting to put her back in her place, to tell the silly woman to shut up. I am used to seeing privileged-middle-aged-white-men treating women like this, including me, all the time. No, the thing that made me most angry is that this behaviour is Steve’s bread-and-butter. This is what he gets paid to do. He is a shock jock. The ruder he is, the more controversial, the more unpleasant, belittling and unapologetic he is, the more he succeeds in his career. That made me angry, not just at Steve, but at our whole society, which not only normalises Steve’s behaviour, but incentivise him to keep it up.

If we lived in a fair and respectful society, the Steves of the world wouldn’t be paid to be nasty and rude. When we bring up our children to have good manners, to treat girls and boys as equals, to show other people, even those we disagree with, respect, and then they grow up to see the Steves of the world being paid huge sums of money to be the opposite of all these things, what standards are we setting as acceptable in our society? What behaviour are we ‘normalising’ for the media audience? What are we telling everyone watching that it’s ok to do to others?

The more shocking Steve is, the more likely he is to move up the shock-jock career ladder. The more controversial, the more likely he is to get a regular seat on TV shows like The Project and ABC’s Q and A. These shows, and other similar programs, such as ABC’s The Drum and Insiders, justify having Steves on their shows in the pursuit of balance. Steve represents the ‘right wing’ perspective. It’s not clear who is balancing out the ‘left wing’ perspective; is anyone who doesn’t yell at others and generally be insolent, grumpy and disparaging about everyone else automatically count as left wing? As I saw pointed out on Twitter recently, to really balance out the Steves, or the right-wing representatives from shady-paid-to-think-tank-organisations such as the IPA, you would need a representative from the Socialist Alliance or even the Communist Party to balance out the extreme views espoused by these so-called commentators. How often do the media have a communist on a panel, or even a self-proclaimed socialist? Very rarely as far as I can tell, and when they do have one (Van identifies as a socialist), they get hectored to the point of silence by the Steves of the world and the producers think this is fantastic entertainment. Is this balance? Is this fair?

Even if you accept this shallow procedural formulaic tick-the-box token-rude-right-winger on every panel, what do the Steves of the world show us about the way ‘right wing’ representatives are allowed to behave? I often hear the argument that the Pauline Hansons, Steve Prices, Andrew Bolts, Alan Jones, Tim Wilsons, Piers Akermans, Cory Bernardis, Miranda Devines, Paul Murrays, Gerard Hendersons and all the other myriad representatives of ‘the right’ should be given a platform to share their nasty perspectives of the world so that more reasonable people can pull them up on their views, and we can have mature conversations about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in our society. But Steve Price’s attack on Van Badham, which shut down her ability to express her very valid argument, is a perfect example of why, in practice, these right wingers always get away with doing nothing other than offending people, denigrating, refusing to be polite, refusing to back down when they’re quite obviously wrong, interrupting, never listening and generally personifying troll-like behaviour at every opportunity. And what do they get for this behaviour? Another seat on another television show or another column in a newspaper, or a highly lucrative job on a television or talk-back radio show. And what does society learn? That this behaviour is acceptable and the representatives of the ‘right’ can behave however they want because, you know, that’s just how they are. Really?

I’m personally sick of it. I’m sick of media organisations favouring this rudeness over rational, the bullying over fair, the shouting and nastiness over considered and eloquent. The media have fed the normalisation of behaviour which has led our society to assume that to be ‘right wing’ means you automatically get away with being a horrible person, but to be ‘left wing’ means you automatically have to put up with people being horrible to you, and this is just the way the world works. The more horrible you are as a right-winger, the more valued you are in the media. The more colourful, the more lucrative. It’s blatantly ridiculous.

This situation is never going to change until we have some standard of what is considered acceptable behaviour and there are negative consequences, rather than incentives, for behaving this way. I enjoyed watching The Project hosts Carrie Bickmore and Waleed Aly criticising Steve Price’s attack on Van Badham. In this interview, Steve admitted he didn’t care if the word ‘hysterical’ is deeply-sexist; he is going to keep using it anyway because, like a four year old, or Donald Trump, ‘he tells it like it is’. But the result of this interview is nothing unless it finished with one of the hosts saying ‘do you know what Steve? We’re not going to give you a platform to be rude to people anymore. We’re better than this and we don’t think it is good television to let you offend people from a privileged position on a national prime-time television show. We won’t have you on our panel anymore’. Only when this starts happening will the Steves get the message about the standards of acceptable behaviour in our society. It’s all very well for there to be public backlash, and for advertisers to withdraw sponsorship due to controversy, which I applaud. But Alan Jones still has his job. Sam Newman still has his job. Cory Bernardi still gets a spot on the Liberal senate ticket. What on earth will it take for these people to be told enough is enough? You can have a debate, sure. But there is absolutely no excuse for rudeness, put-downs, discrimination, sexism, personal-mockery and bullying. We don’t want our children behaving like this; it’s time we stopped accepting and promoting public figures who won’t live up to this standard.

It is hard to understand why the media are surprised at another undecided election result where we are once again headed towards minority government, since the polls predicted this knife-edge outcome for the last eight weeks. Either way, the media’s prevailing election campaign narrative, which congratulated Turnbull’s clever, safe, detail-light strategy has come crashing down since Saturday, replaced with an analysis of what went wrong for the Liberal National government.

One of the more thoughtful post-election narratives is exemplified by Ian Verrender who says wealth inequality has caused mass-disenchantment with ‘the establishment’. Verrender writes:

A revolution is sweeping across the developed world, as an increasingly disillusioned lower and middle class find themselves threatened and disenfranchised by the economic forces unleashed by the rise of technology and an increasingly global economy.

This analysis is correct; there is no doubt people earning lower and middle-incomes are slowly awakening to the raw deal they are getting from neoliberal economic policies which hurt them whilst making a shrinking elite-class richer and richer.

Such a revolution is used to explain the shock Brexit result in the UK, and the popularity of supposedly anti-establishment candidates such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the US. Here, Verrender argues, it has caused an increasing number of voters to abandon the two-party system in favour of minor parties and new-or-re-released ‘others’ such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Xenophon’s NXT.

But while commentators like Verrender have identified the problem (wealth inequality), they still seem blind to the solution. This ‘inequality causing a pox-on-both-the-major-parties’ narrative is missing the elephant in the room. So, while journalists don’t understand, nor report the solution, their audience remains uninformed, and low and behold, the problem goes unsolved. Have the media forgotten that it’s not just their role to report what happened in the election, but to give voters the information they need to make the best decision before they go to vote?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but not once did I hear, see or read a mainstream journalist during the election explain that wealth inequality would not be solved, or even lessened by voting for an anti-establishment candidate. Nick Xenophon might be very good at attracting media attention through stunts and a hollow promise to ‘do politics differently’, and Pauline Hanson might be adept at attracting racists, but how far did any journalist get in unpicking soundbites to explain how a vote for these diverse ‘other’ candidates does nothing to improve a voter’s inequality of wealth?

For those who were looking, who weren’t distracted by the anti-establishment-rejection-of-major-parties symptom of wealth inequality, there was actually an election campaign going on over this very issue. In fact, the entire election campaign was a battle between Turnbull, representing the neo-liberal trickle-down narrative, where tax-cuts-for-capitalists are responsible for ‘jobs and growth’, versus Shorten, representing the inclusive growth narrative where the consumer-power of lower and middle-income families is the generator of jobs and growth. This consumer power arises from a more equal distribution of wealth, benefiting all. Labor’s narrative goes beyond the old ‘safety net’ concept of welfare for those left behind by a globalised economy, replacing it with an understanding that prosperity is driven by inclusion; by not leaving anyone behind.

If you want to simplify this conflict further, which no doubt journalists would prefer we do, we saw a merchant banker versus a union leader fighting it out over the best way to manage the economy. Don’t believe me? Do you remember when Turnbull said this during an ABC 730 interview with Leigh Sales?

Well everybody knows that their prosperity depends on the prosperity of their employer…they want to know that their business is doing well, that the company they’re working for is investing, is growing, is able to retain more of its earnings and put more of it back into the business. You see everything we’re doing is going to encourage more investment.

This is an example of the completely-de-bunked trickle-down narrative which assumes that any policy benefiting an employer will benefit employees.

In contrast, did you notice how Shorten, numerous times, in fact, every day of the election, said something like this statement he made on the day of the Brexit, when journalists repeatedly said share market volatility would help the Liberal campaign:

The argument about not changing the government goes down to the economic fundamentals and the economic plan… our decisions to invest in people through a good education system, a world-class education system, and a world-class health system … to invest in public transport, in infrastructure for roads, in tourism infrastructure, in the NBN, is the right way to go…It is all about building sustainable growth, and at the heart of sustainable growth is inclusive growth. When working class and middle class families… feel disengaged from the political process, then you see the sort of results you see in the United Kingdom.

Shorten’s entire policy platform and election campaign were, in fact, encapsulated in the inclusive growth narrative I wrote about before the election. I heard this storyline repeatedly in Labor candidate statements, and just as importantly, in Labor’s policy platform: funding for education, health, infrastructure, protection of wages such as penalty rates, reforms to negative gearing to reduce inequality in the housing market. These policies are the nitty-gritty real-world outcomes which help to reduce growing inequality, which in turn helps grow the economy and creates jobs for everyone’s benefit. How many voters were told by the media about this solution to growing wealth inequality and were told Labor is offering policies benefiting everyone’s collective prosperity?

While the media focused on soundbites, gotcha moments and gaffes, and reported the ‘jobs and growth’ slogan as if it were a plan, and while they gave endless publicity to the side-show-no-policy-detail-required to anyone running against the major parties, they missed the real ideological battle playing out right in front of them throughout the entire campaign.

The most interesting element of the election result, however, is that I don’t think the electorate made the same mistake the media did. Voters know personally how important education, access to healthcare, a fast NBN, public transport, environmental protection and renewable energy, penalty rates and childcare funding is to their everyday cost of living, and their ability to compete in an economy stacked in favour of the rich. That is why, even with a low primary vote, Labor has still managed, through voter preferences, to put themselves in a winning position.

Therefore, the real story this election is the backlash against the Liberal National’s neoliberal trickle-down agenda, which, even when propped up and maintained by the mainstream media, isn’t attractive to voters anymore because they can see the damage these policies cause to the economy and social fabric of their communities.

Even if the Liberal Nationals manage to form a minority government, with a wafer thin majority and possibly 20 crossbench senators to work with, every neoliberal policy brought to parliament will have to be sold, negotiated and justified to MPs and senators elected by voters who are concerned about growing wealth inequality. So voters have, in a way, got what they voted for; a government who will be forced to take their needs into account. What could be more exciting than that?

I look forward to the media catching up with the electorate to recognise that the major parties are offering two different world-views, and reporting their policies as such. I look forward to the media realising a hung-parliament and a diverse senate is a good outcome for Australians, rather than framing this situation as chaos and unworkable. An uninformed electorate has put Labor’s anti-wealth-inequality policies within striking distance of government. Imagine what an informed electorate is capable of.