Dirty Power, Impotent Media: Michael West
Last night I interviewed investigative journalist Michael West about his documentary and report Dirty Power that he completed in partnership with the Greenpeace Investigative Unit. Listen here. The report details how Big coal exerts influence on the Liberal Party.
How they do this will be of no surprise to anyone that has generated enough cynicism watching the major parties since Kevin 07. Power is exerted through three spokes - Industry groups, lobbyists and the media. Michael and Greenpeace reveal a sprawling system of influence based on existing relationships and a revolving door mentality between these organisations and the Coalition. An example from each spoke:
- Scott Morrison’s Principal Private Secretary, Yaron Finkelstein, was the former CEO of Crosby Textor, the Lobby Group responsible for Project Caesar - a concerted media campaign to discredit renewables.
- Morrison’s chief of staff, John Kunkel, was previously Deputy CEO of the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) and a lobbyist for Rio Tinto.
- His press secretary, Andrew Carswell was formerly chief of staff at The Daily Telegraph.
The list goes on and on. Perhaps the most chilling instance is Abbott speaking about Ian Macfarlane in parliament
commenting how the resources companies should show him gratitude for ending the mining tax.
Nor was Michael sparing to the Labor party. “Let’s say the Labor Party wins the election - you will have a flood of ex-Labor lobbiests and politicians down to Canberra because now their mates are in power.”
The striking thing about Dirty Power is what it says about the current state of the media in Australia in 2019. When I asked West why it was necessary for Greenpeace to fund an investigation instead of an existing news outlet like the ABC or the Fairfax he responded:
“There is a real problem with the mainstream media. ABC is gun shy… they tend to self censor when it comes to big business. No other major media would run it except maybe the Guardian.”
Furthermore, most of the information it presents is available on the public record, commenting that such a report was more a compilation than an investigation.
Here is another clear example in which the decline of the media in Australia is directly correlated to enabling corruption, and we should not hesitate to use such a word like corruption. Australia has after all fallen in the global corruption index. Dirty Power is an example why.