No science required: how the media regurgitated Albanese’s climate PR

The Albanese government sailed through its week of climate announcements, courtesy of media coverage that obsessed over the political fallout instead of the actual policy.

(Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

A version of this article was first published in Crikey, Oct 3.

Albanese was first elected on a pledge to “end the climate wars”, and in a strange way, with the support of the media, he succeeded. Stranger still, this appears to be the desired outcome for both major news outlets and the government. Never mind the science: today’s mainstream media would prefer not to engage in the troublesome realities of the climate issue.

The emissions target announcement should have been a significant moment for a government with a sweeping majority, but the response from most political commentators, rather than present it with due seriousness and rigour, was to tie a bow on it. They set aside any skepticism and simply reflected Albanese’s own “middle path” messaging – all the way to the UN general assembly, where somehow this pointedly underwhelming climate policy became evidence of his statesmanship.

When political strategy is given greater weight than objective realities, the result is the failed coverage of an issue like climate change. How did Albanese benefit from his announcement? What does it say about Sussan Ley’s leadership? et cetera. All but the most important questions.

Whether because it’s too complex, boring or depressing, Australian newsrooms treat climate policy as a game of political strategy, refusing to consider the real-world consequences. Policy “debates” occur in a bubble of denial, in which only the positions of the two major parties exist, even though these are utterly and inherently nonsensical. The policies of the Greens, whose raison d’être is environmentalism, are treated like an irrelevance.

Responsible reporting about Australia’s response to climate change would be framed by reality. Unfortunately the key facts – which make a mockery of Albanese’s climate claims – are largely absent from the coverage. Presumably part of the reason is that readers don’t click on this stuff. They actively don’t want to read it. But should that fact shape the way news outlets report on what is a real and imminent threat to those readers’ lives?

Australia is the third largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world. It is committed to extending and expanding fossil fuel extraction and export out to 2070 and beyond. The emissions from these exports are more than three times larger than Australia’s total domestic emissions – yet for the purposes of our climate policy, they don’t exist; we don’t count them. This means the emissions targets announced last week don’t apply to around 80% of the emissions for which Australia is responsible.

Further, we aren’t even reducing domestic emissions by any significant degree: excluding “land-use”-related accounting tricks, real emissions have barely moved under Labor, indeed barely at all since 2005. And despite announcing the new emissions target, the Albanese government has no legislated policies to enforce actual emissions cuts – across any part of the domestic economy. Its Safeguard Mechanism allows Australia’s biggest polluters to buy unlimited, cheap, bogus “offsets” instead of cutting emissions.

Meanwhile, the government continues to spend over $10bn annually subsidising fossil fuels. It continues to approve massive new coal and gas mines and expand existing ones, against all scientific advice. It collects minimal revenues from fossil fuel companies, while sparing them the responsibility of paying for any climate impacts.

Rather than mitigating climate change, Australia is unequivocally and inarguably exacerbating it. The climate destruction that Australia is fuelling is approaching fast: every major scientific organisation and every climate risk report, even from our own government, is telling us this.

The media, however, would prefer not to engage.

Across the major media outlets – the ABC, Guardian, Nine, News Corp – journalists instead complimented the Albanese government on how well it had managed its climate message, and the tactics it had used to show how it had shaped a vacuous policy debate. The cumulative effect of this type of coverage meant that the Albanese government sailed through its climate-related week of announcements without being held to account.

Speaking to The Australian this week, Albanese cited his government’s emissions target range as too high for business groups and the Opposition, but not high enough for the Greens – as if this proved that it struck the right balance. Readers will find this kind of framing everywhere in the media, most particularly in Labor-briefed articles that try to situate Labor as the centrist “natural party of government”, as per Albanese in the same interview. But common as it is, this framing is utter rubbish, especially on climate matters.

Unfortunately we exist in a world of scientific realities and consequences, not one in which you can make physics go away with media management and accounting tricks. Emissions from Australian fossil fuels are contributing disproportionately to climate change, whether we count them or not. This science is not up for debate, whether or not the Coalition, government or Woodside beg to differ.

Imagine 99 out of 100 doctors told you that you had cancer, but one paid cancer-denier told you not to worry. Would you base your treatment on the one? Yet this is what Labor is doing.

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In the Guardian, under the headline “From New York to London, Anthony Albanese plots statesmanlike course through global turmoil,” chief political correspondent Tom McIlroy also waxed that Albanese had shown he can hold his own on the global stage “while promoting Australian ideas on climate, Gaza, and social media”.”At a special climate meeting convened by the UN secretary general on Wednesday, the prime minister promised Australia would “do more than just guard against the very worst” and said no nation could go it alone.”

McIlroy continued:

A glossy profile in the paper dubbed Australia “the country pushing through climate partisanship”. It fell to Albanese himself to acknowledge the anti-net zero debate currently roiling the Coalition, even as he detailed careful cooperation with the Pacific and outlined why he views the challenge as an economic opportunity for the world’s 14th largest economy.

But, compared with Trump – who called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” – Australia is viewed as moving in the right direction, in part enabled by the government’s landmark parliamentary majority. “This is the decisive decade for acting on the environmental challenge of climate change,” Albanese told the stylishly produced event, “and seizing the economic opportunities of clean energy.

Albanese might have said these things, but they are completely inconsistent with his government’s actions. (Pacific leaders hate Australia’s climate policy because their islands are sinking while we expand our fossil fuel exports. And what of this “decisive decade”, into which we boldly march with no new policies?) McIlroy’s framing is openly admiring, and to an exact degree, Albanese’s own framing.

He continues:

It’s possible that in years ahead the domestic political debate will be shown not to have given enough credit to Albanese, Bowen and Labor figures for their work on climate internationally, even if they’re already being recognised overseas for making badly overdue process. Asked about Cop31, Bowen calls negotiations “a work in progress”.

7.30’s political editor Jacob Greber at least pulled the curtain back on Albanese’s media management, labelling it a “dump and run”.

“It’s been a shade over a week since the federal government dropped what might be regarded as the biggest and most important climate policy announcement in a decade,” wrote Greber. “Since then, it has been mostly silence,” he added, as if this were a marker of success.

Greber highlighted the dynamics – “reporters were given zero time to absorb several hundred pages of climate advice from the Climate Change Authority, Treasury and other departments” – but still couldn’t help but admire the chutzpah. “Nicely done”, Greber commented, only semi-ironically.

But he topped the piece by saying…

“As a national topic of debate, it’s been subsumed in the political discourse by the latest internecine Liberal Party stoush and prime minister’s selfies with the US president.

“But in terms of political craftsmanship, it’s been a stunning display. Aided by the good fortune of having a divided and marginalised opposition, the whole package was a masterclass in media management by the government.”

Here is a political journalist congratulating a government for dodging the inconsistencies and fallacies of its “most important climate policy”, not to mention the inconvenient fact that Labor has not significantly reduced emissions, and doesn’t have policies to do so. The target range Labor trumpeted is insufficient in terms of the science, but also meaningless. It’s a charade designed to look like the government is taking action. Are we so used to government failure in climate policy that negation of the issue is treated as a political achievement?

Greber argued it takes time to turn the ship after years of Coalition denialism. Having said that, he added that “unless emissions start to fall soon, that excuse will become very tired.” Will it though? Given journalists have been excusing climate-intransigent governments for three decades now, I doubt it. Not while they’re also praising the government for slick PR, anyway.

Paul Bongiorno in the Saturday Paper lauded Anthony Albanese for “putting his stamp on Australia’s sovereignty at the apex world forum of the United Nations General Assembly” by “carefully but successfully (navigating) his way to defy Trump on Palestinian recognition, climate change action and social media bans.” Trump was deceiving the world about climate change, but the Australian PM’s deception was cleverer: he had managed to deceive the rest of the world that Australia was taking action.

The most galling aspect of the week’s climate politics was this: the same news outlets that complimented Albanese also reported on the terrifying National Climate Risk Assessment released a few days before the emissions target was announced; as well as on the government’s approval of the North West shelf out to 2070, the most polluting project in the Southern Hemisphere. But rather than pointing out the contradictions, or that these make a mockery of Labor’s climate claims, the media applauded him for his tactics, instead of pulling apart the actual policy.

It’s understandable that political journalists view the world through the frame of politics – where success is judged according to the capacity to convince, lobby, influence. It’s probably inevitable, too, that political journos and editors come to see themselves as crucial cogs in the machine of national affairs. But when those same political journalists dominate newsrooms and front pages, over those with specialist expertise and knowledge, and they are handed the responsibility above all others to frame debates about society’s biggest challenges, the consequences ricochet.

Perhaps it’s easier to contemplate runaway climate destruction in the future than to imagine a disruption to traditional two-party politics.