Patrick Delany suggested the image obtained by Crikey could show him, then the Fox Sports CEO, 'demonstrating the similarity' between the Nazi salute and a gesture made by A-League fans.
Note: this article contains graphic content.
Foxtel CEO Patrick Delany says an image obtained by Crikey showing him giving a Nazi salute may have been taken while he was “demonstrating the similarity” between the offensive gesture and a gesture used by A-League fans, while on set at Fox Sports.
In a statement provided to Crikey, Delany said he was “shocked” to see the image, which appears to be from the 2010s. “The fact I demonstrated this offensive salute was wrong and I unreservedly apologise,” he said.
Crikey has obtained images showing the then Fox Sports CEO on what looks like Fox Sports’ A-League “Hyundai Matchday Saturday” pre-game program set during the 2014-15 season.
An image of then Fox Sports CEO Patrick Delany appearing to give a Nazi salute (Image: Crikey)
The images show Delany standing in front of a screen featuring a graphic that says “Hyundai Matchday Saturday”. In the image, his right arm is outstretched upwards with a straightened hand, consistent with the Sieg Heil sign used in Nazi Germany. His left hand is making a gesture by extending some fingers under his nose, seemingly imitating Adolf Hitler’s moustache. Crikey does not suggest Delany sympathises with Nazis, only that he has been captured making a Nazi gesture.
Know anything more about this story? You can anonymously send tips and contact Cam Wilson here.
Delany suggested the image depicting him making the Nazi salute may have been made as part of a comparison to another gesture made by an A-League team’s fans.
“I can only think that it is of me demonstrating the similarity between the gesture some Western Sydney Wanderers fans were using 10 years ago, and an offensive salute,” Delany said. A Foxtel Group spokesperson directed Crikey to footage showing the A-League team’s fans’ “Who do we sing for?” chant, in which supporters can be seen raising their arms.
The image appears to date back to Delany’s time at Fox Sports. He started as CEO of the network in 2011, before being tapped to head up Foxtel when the two businesses merged in 2018.
Delany is one of many prominent Australians who signed the “Say No To Antisemitism” open letter published last year in the wake of the October 7 attacks. The Foxtel Group’s website lists “inclusion” as one of its values, committing to “creating an inclusive workplace … that foster[s] inclusion across cultural backgrounds, generations, identities and interests”.
Since Crikey came to Foxtel with this image at midday on Friday, Delany said he has spoken with “a number of leaders of the Jewish community to express my deep remorse” and has requested a meeting with the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.
Despite audiences globally cutting the cord, Delany’s tenure at Foxtel has been so successful during a tumultuous period that it’s used as a case study in business schools. Under Delany, Foxtel has transformed from a cable television company into one with on-demand streaming services Binge, Kayo and Flash, as well as the new streaming hardware device Hubbl.
Patrick Delany (right) at the Australian premiere of House of the Dragon (Image: LinkedIn/Patrick Delany)
At a panel in 2018, Delany reportedly told an audience that “you buy the land, you get the Indians”, a comment that a source close to the CEO acknowledged to Guardian Australia was “politically incorrect”.
News Corp, which owns 65% of Foxtel, is looking to sell off its share of the company after years of talk about taking the company public. Delany is “exploring” an exit, the Australian Financial Reviewreported earlier this month.
How did we report this story?
Crikey received images from a pseudonymous tipster and was able to confirm a number of details that suggested it was real.
The image appears to be a photograph taken of another screen. Its metadata lists the image’s creation date at a time while Delany was still at Fox Sports.
Delany appears to be wearing the same shirt and distinctive tie that he wore in other public appearances, including Fox Sports’ 2015 announcement of its NBL broadcasting deal.
The location of the image is consistent with the new set used for the Fox Sports’ pre-game “Hyundai Matchday Saturday” program hosted by Adam Peacock, Mark Bosnich and Mark Rudan during the A-League 2014-15 season.
We first approached Foxtel Group on Friday asking whether Delany had made the salute on the Fox Sports set. The company’s director of corporate affairs responded shortly after to say that “this didn’t happen”.
When we responded by saying that we had photographic evidence, the director replied by asking for the photograph and conceded that “if [Crikey has] a photo … it suggests it did happen in some context”.
We declined to send the image through but agreed to meet with a Foxtel Group staff member over the weekend to show it to them in person. Several hours later, Foxtel provided Crikey with a statement on behalf of Delany.
Cam Wilson is Crikey’s associate editor. He previously worked as a reporter at the ABC, BuzzFeed, Business Insider and Gizmodo. He primarily covers internet culture and tech in Australia.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton (Image: AAP/Russell Freeman)
Peter Dutton has no record of race-based language. Well, except when it comes to Africans. And Lebanese Muslims. And China. And South Africa. And Palestine. But apart from that, nothing.
Some confusion has arisen over whether Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is racist.
Arguing for a ban on any victims of Israel’s attack on Gaza fleeing to safety in Australia on the basis that such people are automatically a national security threat looks a lot like an adoption of the Israeli government position that no Palestinians are innocent civilians, and that all Palestinians are simply terrorists-in-the-making who will reflexively engage in antisemitic violence.
Speaking of such violence, Dutton has defended his position on the basis that Hamas is even worse than the Nazis: “The Nazis tried to conceal their crime of murdering 6 million Jews. Hamas felt no guilt when they carried out their terrorist attack on October 7.”
Is Dutton racist? He’s famous for his claim in January 2018 that in Victoria “people are scared to go out to restaurants of a night time [sic] because they’re followed home by these [African] gangs, home invasion and cars are stolen”. In July that year, Dutton said “we don’t have these problems with Sudanese gangs in NSW or Queensland.”
More recently, Victorian Liberals have been trying to repair relations with African-Australian communities.
The rhetoric toward China by both Dutton and Scott Morrison — which included Dutton claiming without evidence China was backing Labor to win the 2022 election — was so alienating it prompted a backlash from Chinese-Australian voters, one that Dutton is now trying to fix by labelling himself, improbably, as “pro-China“. Dutton had attacked China and demanded it “change some of its ways” in relation to the circumstances around the origins of the coronavirus.
In 2016, Dutton blamed Malcolm Fraser for allowing in people of “Lebanese-Muslim background” in the 1970s, suggesting they — like Palestinians — were prone to terrorism. In 2023, Dutton justified the comments but claimed to have apologised for them — an apology that no-one in the Lebanese-Australian community can recall hearing.
Don’t let it be said, however, that Dutton is against providing visas to all refugees. In 2018, he asked the new Home Affairs Department to prepare a special refugee intake for white South African farmers. In remarks that appear at odds with his views toward Palestinian or Lebanese refugees, Dutton said “if people are being persecuted, regardless of whether it’s because of religion or the colour of their skin or whatever, we need to provide assistance where we can.” Dutton said white South African farmers would “abide by our laws, integrate into our society.“
Dutton also boycotted the 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generation, but apologised for that when he became opposition leader (in last year’s Voice campaign, Dutton said he was against racism, claiming the Voice would divide Australia along racial lines, and that it was “racist” to suggest Indigenous people are affected by policies differently to non-Indigenous people).
So, apart from Palestinians, Africans, Lebanese Muslims, China and the Stolen Generations, there is no evidence that Peter Dutton is anything other than entirely blind to race and religion — and an advocate for helping persecuted people. If they’re white. Plainly, Zali Steggall should apologise for such an awful slur.
Bernard Keane is Crikey's political editor. Before that he was Crikey's Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics.
'I am shocked that the first allies the Russians have found in this quest to constrain me are the Australian authorities, who have functionally denied me a visa,' Gessen said.
Writer Masha Gessen has said the Australian government has “functionally denied” them a visa, after delays and a “last minute” request for further documents meant Gessen was unable to board their scheduled flight to Australia this past weekend.
The Department of Home Affairs’ delay apparently stems from concerns over Gessen’s recent conviction in Russia. In mid-July, Gessen — a regular contributor to outlets such as The New Yorker and The New York Times — was sentenced in absentia to eight years imprisonment by a Moscow court after having written about alleged Russian war crimes during the nation’s invasion of Ukraine. The court claimed Gessen had spread “false information”.
“The Russian government’s persecution of me has one purpose: to make me feel unfree even though I am living in exile and they can’t currently jail me. What they can try to do is make it hard for me to move around the world,” Gessen said in a statement. “I am shocked that the first allies the Russians have found in this quest to constrain me are the Australian authorities, who have functionally denied me a visa.”
“This is exactly what the Kremlin hoped would happen,” Gessen added.
Simon Longstaff, executive director of the Ethics Centre, which presents the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, said Home Affairs was seeking, at “the last minute”, a US Police and FBI check “where no offence has ever been committed”.
“It would seem that the sole reason for the department seeking a police and FBI clearance has been the open declaration of a conviction for a ‘crime’ that all the world knows to be bogus and politically motivated by an authoritarian regime determined to silence its critics — by any means,” he said.
“Perhaps the most perverse aspect of this decision lies in the fact that Masha Gessen’s criticism of Russia directly reflects the formal position of both the Australian and US governments.”
Gessen’s writing, on Russia and Israel in particular, has frequently been a subject of controversy. Speaking to Crikey earlier this month about the risks their work posed to their safety, Gessen conceded they were always working with “incomplete information”:
[When I did that reporting] I didn’t know about the extent of extradition treaties that they were going to be signing, and also about the extent the assassination machinery that is operating outside of Russia … I’m not saying I would have made different decisions. I don’t think so because what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world at that point was write the piece about war crimes … And, you know, I’m not in prison there. There have been more than 250 people charged under those same censorship laws, and some of them are actually serving actual prison time in Russia, they are in danger. I’m at risk. I think there’s a difference.
Crikey asked Home Affairs whether it viewed convictions like the one handed down for Gessen in Moscow as part of a credible process. We were told that “for privacy reasons, the department cannot comment on individual cases, so unfortunately we can’t be of any further assistance on this matter”.
Charlie Lewis pens Crikey's Tips and Murmurs column and also writes on industrial relations, politics and culture. He previously worked across government and unions and was a researcher on RN's Daily Planet. He currently co-hosts Spin Cycle on Triple R radio.
NSW Liberal Party leader Mark Speakman (Image: AAP)
An internal Liberal Party inquiry will seek to establish what went wrong in last week's 'disaster' in NSW — and could provide an excuse for Dutton to take control of the state division.
An internal Liberal review of the party’s NSW division could end up being a pretext for a federal takeover, sources have told Crikey.
At the weekend, the party’s federal executive ordered an inquiry into the state division, to be headed by Brian Loughnane, a former federal Liberal director and the husband of ex-Tony Abbott chief of staff and Sky News Australia host Peta Credlin.
“The review will be a pretext for Canberra to argue the federal campaign in NSW should be separated from the state secretariat,” one source with insight into the party’s internal affairs said.
Some inside the party have speculated the federal campaign for seats in NSW could be run out of temporary headquarters in Western Sydney, likely Parramatta. Operating campaign headquarters in battleground states is a common tactic in federal elections — for example, the Liberal campaigns in 1996, 1998, 2001, and 2004 were all run out of Melbourne.
“[Opposition Leader Peter] Dutton will have the final say — the feds are obviously concerned the NSW division won’t be able to deliver in the lead-up to the federal election,” another source said.
Liberal Party rules say the risk of mismanagement, reputational damage or significant threats to the party’s electoral prospects could be reasons for a federal intervention into a state division.
According to The Daily Telegraph,Loughnane will deliver his report by September 2, and a meeting of the federal executive has been scheduled for the following day.
The developments come after the Liberal Party last week failed to nominate up to 140 council hopefuls ahead of local government elections scheduled for September 14, in what one Liberal dubbed an “absolute disaster” for the party.
Despite an admission from NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman that the “party administration [had] let the candidates, the party members, and the general public down” as a result of a failure to undertake “basic administrative process”, the Liberals are now hoping to pin the blame on the NSW Electoral Commission.
In a statement circulated on Sunday, a Liberal spokesperson said the commission had made an “error” and “did not comply with the timeframe to provide formal notice under its own regulation before closing nominations”.
The statement argued the commission published a notice five days before the close of nominations, rather than the required seven days.
The party was preparing to launch a legal bid to have the nomination deadline extended, according to the statement.
“It’s very much a ‘dog ate my homework’ case and I doubt it’ll get much sympathy in the Supreme Court,” Marque Lawyers managing partner and Crikey contributor Michael Bradley said.
Bradley said that while the commission was required to publish notice of the election on its website at least one week before the nomination deadline, the election manager had the discretion to make the deadline another date.
“It doesn’t follow from the error that anyone has a right to any remedy,” he said. “They’d have to show as a minimum that they suffered some actual prejudice, not hypothetical, because of it, which they can’t do because of course they knew what the deadline was and they simply failed to meet it.”
Anton Nilsson is Crikey's federal political reporter. He previously covered NSW Parliament for NCA NewsWire, and before that, worked for Sweden's Expressen newspaper as well as other publications in Sweden, Australia and the United States.
Donald Trump's electoral appeal is about who he is, not what he does. But Kamala Harris has him stumped for the moment.
Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential race and Kamala Harris’ ascension to the Democratic nomination has gone about as well as it could have for the vice-president.
In removing the greatest impediment to undecided voters voting Democrat and commencing her campaign as smoothly as possible, including in her selection of running mate Tim Walz, Harris has turned Trump’s 3-point average lead over Biden into her own 2.5-point average lead over Trump.
And Trump and his campaign are rattled. The first big sign that they weren’t prepared for Harris and were shocked at how well she has been doing was Trump deciding he didn’t want to debate her. He demanded in early August she appear on Fox News instead of the ABC, then reversed himself after a week and said he would debate her after all.
That revealed a lot. Frontrunners prefer not to debate — they have nothing to gain. Remember the contortions Julia Gillard went through in 2010 when the first week of her campaign against Tony Abbott had her cruising to victory, enabling her to dismiss talk of a debate with him, only for Kevin Rudd to blow up her campaign, leaving her the underdog who suddenly insisted Abbott debate her.
The second and more important sign was that Trump’s racist and misogynist abuse of Harris failed to stop her ascension in the polls (or diminish the size of her crowds, a subject Trump has a weird obsession with), forcing him to contemplate the unthinkable: talking about policy.
The pressure on Trump to scale back his personal abuse of Harris and focus on policy — which Trump has resisted — has come mainly from his own side, with GOP Senator Lindsey Graham overnight saying Trump the “showman” might not win the election and that he needed to focus on policy. Trump’s problems have been compounded by widespread, and correct, perceptions that his running mate JD Vance — widely considered a poor choice — has a problem with women.
The problem is, Trump doesn’t do policy. The GOP platform, which Trump appears to have directly dictated, is all assertion and no substance. Trump’s idea of policy is a half-formed notion to build a wall along the Mexican border and force Mexico to pay for it, or impose tariffs on Chinese imports under the illusion it will be the Chinese who pay the tariffs, not Americans. He’s the man who suggested Americans inject bleach or use sunlight to cure COVID.
The point of Trump is that he doesn’t have to do policy. His appeal lies in who he is, not what he intends to do — the sort of thing that quickly bogs down in the kind of detail Trump has no interest in. Trump is the embodiment of the grievance, hatred and hostility of his supporters, the man who says the things that they want to say, about the people whom they despise — the liberals, the elites, the media, the African-Americans, the feminists.
The moment Trump starts talking policy instead of abusing Harris and deriding the long list of “enemies of the people” is the moment he becomes an ordinary politician.
Trump understands this. It’s why he’s sabotaged his efforts to talk about policy. Last week in North Carolina, Trump told a crowd “Now this is a little bit different day [sic]. We’re talking about a thing called the economy. They wanted to do a speech on the economy. A lot of people are very devastated by what’s happened with inflation and all of the other things. So, we’re doing this as an intellectual speech. You’re all intellectuals today.” Then he added, “They say it’s the most important subject. I think crime is right there, I think the border is right there, personally.”
Trump thus confirmed that he was more or less giving an economy speech at the insistence of his advisers (“they”). He would later switch back to talk about migrants again, saying, “Rape and murder, rape and beatings, rape and something else, and sometimes just immediate killing. These people are brutal.”
On the weekend, Trump was making a virtue of abandoning talking about the economy to attack Harris. “You don’t mind if I go off teleprompter for a second, do you? Joe Biden hates her,” he told a rally on Saturday.
With Trump rightly understanding that policy is not his forté, and his standard shtick of racism not apparently working, the former president faces a real problem about how to tackle Harris, especially as she’ll receive a bump from the Democratic convention this week.
His best bet is likely to wait for the shine to come off Harris and for her to start making mistakes — inevitable in a presidential campaign — and to see what he can exploit in her policies and her attempts to differentiate herself from Biden, while also claiming partial credit for the strength of the American economy.
Harris knows interest rate cuts are expected to arrive as soon as September from the Federal Reserve, though these won’t have the same impact on American households as they would in Australia, given the reliance on fixed-rate mortgages in the US. But sitting and waiting are anathema to Trump, especially when he knows he’s behind in the polls.
Bernard Keane is Crikey's political editor. Before that he was Crikey's Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics.
The US Democrats have been energised by the Harris-Walz ticket, which is pushing bold, progressive policies. If only Labor would do the same.
To bastardise Dickens: let me tell you a tale of two progressive parties. One is experiencing the best of times (for now), the other the worst of times (well, not quite — it has suffered some doozies — but it certainly isn’t having much fun). One is heralding an age of wisdom, the other an age of foolishness. I could palaver on about belief and incredulity, lightness and darkness, but you get the picture.
The former is the US Democrats, who are riding high after Kamala Harris subbed in for Joe Biden as the party’s presidential candidate. One mustn’t get ahead of oneself, of course — Donald Trump could still win the presidency in November. But Harris has closed the previously yawning polling gap and her joyous campaign is both energising the party’s base and persuading gettable swing voters.
The latter is the Australian Labor Party, whose nascent reelection campaign could hardly be less joyous.
Despite the benefits of having one continuous, non-ancient leader for the past five years, and governing in a far less sclerotic and log-jammed political system, Labor under Albanese has led an unambitious and uncertain government that has whittled away such advantages.
The Australian Financial Reviewreported on Sunday that, for the second month in a row, the Coalition leads Labor 51-49% in the two-party-preferred rating. If an election were held now, Labor would likely still command more seats than the Coalition, but it would form a minority government.
Clearly entering pre-election mode, Labor has tried in recent weeks to neutralise supposed threats. It watered down its supposed restrictions on gambling advertising, for fear of getting the powerful industry and its beneficiaries — the corporate media — offside. Albanese also formally walked away from his shelved religious discrimination bill, which, among other provisions, would have limited the ability of religious organisations to discriminate against LGBTIQA+ staff.
His recent cabinet reshuffle also threw ministers targeted by media hysteria under the bus, and moved the government’s only effective reformer, Tony Burke, away from his impactful work on industrial relations to tamp down on controversies in Home Affairs.
This defensive crouch is perhaps the zenith of Albanese’s first-term strategy: be a “small target”. Much as he campaigned from opposition, he has continued managing expectations in government, eschewing bold schemes or nation-shaping reforms in favour of tinkering and projecting dour practicality. He has tried to, in the John Howard tradition, take politics off the front pages.
In small doses, such an approach might represent shrewd pragmatism. But as a defining ethos, or a calcified reflex, it willfully leaves a void rather than substance. Albanese now has relatively few memorable achievements upon which to campaign, because he baulked at most opportunities to implement any. If he were set for a landslide, that might be forgivable for now. But he is drifting towards being a forgettable prime minister with unremarkable longevity and diminishing political power — a remarkable failure on even his own terms.
Here, the contrast with the Democrats is instructive — particularly Harris’ new running mate, Tim Walz. On one level, Walz is an unremarkable choice for a Black presidential candidate: white, old but not too old, midwestern, a veteran, and a former teacher and football coach exuding daggy dad energy. Hand the man a hot dog and send him to a county fair in every swing district.
But he also articulated a distinct electoral strategy for progressives, which reportedly impressed Harris’ team — the polar opposite of Albanese’s approach.
Journalist Ezra Klein summarised that approach in a conversation with Walz, saying, “You don’t win elections to bank political capital; you win elections to burn the capital to improve lives.”
Walz replied:
I think too often we get into this… there’s a cautiousness around ‘I got elected, if I get a little too aggressive on certain things, it’ll make it more difficult to get reelected’. Whether it was school lunches or paid family medical leave, you’re there now. Why don’t you get that done? … I think that attitude inspires people to get going to find solutions and to move.
And boy has Walz moved. His achievements in only a few months of legislative majority in Minnesota put Labor’s first term to shame. Achieving a slim majority in both houses, Walz’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party rammed through paid leave, banning non-compete agreements, cannabis legalisation, tax changes, abortion rights, universal free school meals and universal gun background checks in just five months. The Minnesota Star Tribunecalled this legislative session “one of the most consequential” ever in Minnesotan history.
Outlining her economic platform on Friday, Kamala seemed to have taken inspiration from Walz’s maximalist agenda, and that of President Biden, who similarly coalesced the Democrats around mammoth social and economic investments. Harris announced plans for child tax credits of up to US$6,000 for middle-class and lower-income families, extending Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire, capping the cost of insulin, improving planning rules to facilitate building more homes, and much more.
The family-friendly emphasis is straight from the playbook of Walz, who has sought to tout Minnesota as the “best place in America to raise a family”. Crucially, this undermines the supposed pro-family politics of Trump’s running mate JD Vance, who is more focused on penalising and demonising non-parents and LGBTIQA+ kids than financially supporting parents and their offspring.
Albanese has toyed with a more robust, pro-family offering at times, such as with his childcare subsidies. But from delaying superannuation on parental leave payments, to means testing miserly student payments, to capitulating when it comes to protecting kids from gambling harms (kids don’t just watch children’s programming), any real advantage here has been largely vacated and a credible narrative missed.
“Make Australia the best country in the world to raise a child.” I could think of worse slogans to run on. Albanese would be better off trying something like it than dying wondering.
What lessons can the Labor Party learn from Walz and the Democrats? Which policies should Albanese emulate — and which should he ignore? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Benjamin Clark is an Australian writer and digital journalist, now based in London. He is currently Prospect Magazine's head of digital audience, and previously worked for The Conversation.
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg (Image: EPA/Ronald Wittek)
Exclusive: Australian journalists sitting in climate-controlled offices have repeatedly failed when it comes to reporting on climate change.
A new scholarly analysis of 30 years of news reporting in Australia has found that journalists have overwhelmingly failed to report on climate change in a way that benefits all of society.
Our multidisciplinary team, gathered by RMIT’s Innovation Catalyst, used machine learning techniques to examine 180,000 articles about climate change and related environmental issues.
Climate change was just one of the team’s focus areas and was chosen because it is one of our most critical social issues at this moment in time.
The analysis found that Australian news journalists have overwhelmingly produced stories and narratives that serve the needs of the powerful and significantly distract from critical policy and social issues that affect ordinary Australians.
The full findings are detailed in a new report focused on how the Australian media reports on climate change.
A key observation is the staggering growth in the number of articles written about climate change over time. In the 1990s, there were only an average of 514 articles per year on climate change. By the 2010s, that number had risen to over 80,000 articles per year.
We found that as climate targets and timelines passed, the news media has changed in both its quantity and focus on climate change reporting: from writing about forecasts to covering disasters.
Of all the articles, coal mining stood out as one of the most-reported topics in relation to climate change.
The focus on mining is a result of the Australian economy being firmly reliant on extracting resources for export and charged political discussions about the granting or closing of mining licenses. Indeed, the effects of politics are clearest around Australia’s May 2022 elections, which resulted in the highest number of climate change articles: 1,328 in the month of May compared to just 259 articles in December of that year.
While some Australian journalists have played a part in highlighting the climate change crisis, the news industry has been slow to cover solutions such as initiatives that encourage more regenerative futures through recycling, remanufacturing, or reuse of products to reduce pressure on the environment. A clear example is with the term “circular economy”, which was first coined in 1988 but only started to be taken up by the Australian media in 2017. By 2022, it was reported in over 200 articles a year.
The RMIT team, working with related NGOs, also looked at how the news media covered climate activism. There was an extraordinary spike in reporting on climate activism and protests in the months around Greta Thunberg’s student climate strikes of September 2019. By 2020, however, the COVID-19 pandemic had shut down climate protests and strikes, and reporting returned to fewer than 10 articles a month and remained low.
Gendered differences in climate change reporting
The analysis also found an interesting gender issue with climate change reporting. Fewer than 40% of climate change articles were authored by women, compared to more than 60% by men.
The only topic area where women were more likely to write articles was on topics relating to the protection of biodiversity and regenerative systems such as circular economy initiatives — arguably the most direct way ordinary people can support “climate action” in everyday communities and the private sector.
Our analysis reinforces other studies that have found women are under-represented in reporting on fields related to climate change (e.g. mining, renewables, STEM) and that men are often seen as those with the most authority on the issue of climate change.
We argue that gender inequity impacts who is quoted as experts on climate change, with women’s perceived credibility and authority on climate issues being lesser, and women less quoted as experts by male reporters.
The domination of male voices in climate change reporting indicates that climate change issues tend to be perceived more from masculine points of view. This kind of news coverage can result in a negligence toward the interests of women, who are widely recognised as being more vulnerable to the effects of climate change and natural disasters.
While more research is needed on how and why these gendered differences occur, effective news coverage about climate is critical in generating support for policy and action.
Revealing the reporting patterns to support change
The analysis showed that news attention on issues tends to intensify in times of major crises and then taper off. But the problem for environmental issues is that they require long-term solutions, rather than quick fixes. The news media’s short attention span for Greta Thunberg’s climate strikes or interest in the immediate effects of coal mining has not helped Australians make sense of policy or assist in the conversation to consensus on energy transitions.
Further, a lack of gender parity in climate reporting means that most news stories are written from a male perspective about male interests rather than female-favoured ones, such as initiatives in local communities to drive more regenerative futures.
Is there still a role for solutions-focused or constructive journalism in covering this issue in this critical climate decade?
Despite all the odds, we believe there is, and universities have an important role to play in the support and development of this media agenda.
Data was obtained from Dow Jones content available via the Data News and Analytics (DNA) platform.
I was just one team member in this work which was led by the RMIT Innovation Catalyst’s Campbell McNolty, Sai Ram Gitte, Mondo Kad and Dr Brad Crammond and Infoxchange’s Dr Kristen Moeller-Saxone.
The climate change data was examined by: The Global Institute for Women’s Leadership’s Dr Elise Stephenson; The Victorian Circular Activator’s Dr Akvan Gajanayake; Centre for Urban Research’s Professor Wendy Steele.
Our research aims to expose the patterns of news reporting on major societal issues such as climate change to help journalists consider new and more equitable ways of reporting on the issues which impact everyone.
We hope to encourage public debate to answer questions such as how can the media influence the sustained societal change that is required for more holistic and systemic solutions to be adopted.
How should the media be covering climate change? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Alexandra Wake is an associate professor in journalism at RMIT University. She came to the academy after a long career as a journalist and broadcaster. She's worked in Australia, Ireland, the Middle East and across the Asia Pacific. Her research, teaching and practice sits at the nexus of journalism practice, journalism education, equality, diversity and mental health.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan (Image: AAP/Diego Fedele)
It is neither fair nor just to continue caging children in youth prisons.
The criminal legal system is supposed to be fair and just. But for years, successive Victorian governments have ratcheted up a dangerous “tough on crime” agenda resulting in a creep of police powers without any real accountability.
This has been made clear this week, with the Allan government presenting its political priorities to us in no uncertain terms — it is more interested in protecting police and their interests than protecting children. By backflipping on the Victorian government’s commitment to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14 by 2027, Allan has betrayed Victorian children.
When the chief commissioner of police fronted up to the Yoorrook Justice Commission — Victoria’s first formal truth-telling process into injustices experienced by First Peoples — and apologised for systemic racism, Shane Patton also committed to “operationalise the raising of the age of criminal responsibility” as part of his response. Yet Victoria Police vocally and vehemently opposed raising the age to 14. And Allan capitulated.
This puts Patton and Allan at odds not only with the recommendations made by the Yoorrook Justice Commission but also with international human rights standards, medical science and criminological evidence. It is neither fair nor just to continue caging children in youth prisons. The evidence is clear that pipelining children into prisons undermines safer communities by putting children at risk of being re-criminalised in future and becoming entrenched in the quicksand of the criminal legal system.
The fingerprints of Victoria Police can be seen throughout the youth justice laws that have just passed the Victorian Parliament, including alarming new powers that will allow for children aged 10 and 11 to be transported in a police vehicle and locked up in a police station when the age is raised to just 12.
You might think that in a fair and just system, increased police powers would be met with a commensurate increase in accountability. But no — the overwhelming majority of complaints made against police are investigated by police. Colleagues investigating colleagues. Even in the most extreme cases where a person dies in police custody, it is police who will investigate. So while the Allan government continues to lock children away behind bars, police are allowed to continue evading accountability for their actions.
The same day the premier reneged on the promise, the Victorian government announced laws that shield Victoria Police from liability for legal claims arising out of the dizzying LawyerX scandal. Who can forget the jaw-dropping revelations that police recruited a barrister as an informant and that senior members of Victoria Police allowed conduct described by the highest court in Australia as “reprehensible”, involving the most “fundamental and appalling breaches of duty”?
If enacted, the laws will hand the police immunity for serious misconduct of the sort involved in the LawyerX scandal and seek to override protections enshrined in the Victorian government’s own charter of human rights. This choice follows the decision of the director of public prosecutions last year not to charge any of the police officers involved in the saga.
It is politically convenient that the Victorian government can find significant sums of money to arm police with deadly tasers and shackle children with ineffective ankle monitors, but is unprepared to fund an independent police watchdog or compensate people who have been wronged by Victoria Police as part of the LawyerX debacle. It is not fair or just, and speaks volumes about a system bent in a way that permits police to act with impunity.
While the LawyerX saga is one of the most extreme cases of police misconduct in recent history, it is a mistake to see it as the only one. It is symptomatic of a broader problem of ever-expanding police powers, with abuse of such powers unchecked and most often meted out against the most marginalised communities. Yet the political will to create long overdue and much-needed independent oversight of police remains lacking.
The status quo of locking up children yet allowing police to dodge accountability for their actions must end. So long as the Victorian government remains beholden to Victoria Police, and the criminal legal system continues to be stacked in favour of increasing police powers and evading police accountability, the ability of our so-called “justice” system to deliver any real justice will be undermined.
Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton shake hands (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)
New polling suggests that a minority Labor government is a likely outcome at the next election, and NSW Liberals are considering legal action against the state electoral commission.
MINORITY GOVERNMENT LOOMS
The week starts with a new poll revealing minority government is the most likely outcome if the next federal election were called tomorrow. The latest Australian Financial Review/Freshwater Strategy poll has the Coalition leading 51% to 49% on a two-party-preferred basis, with its primary vote up to 42% and Labor’s up to 32%.
“If repeated on election day, it would send Labor well into minority,” the AFR declared, saying the government still trails the Coalition when it comes to economic management and national security. However, on voters’ number one issue — cost of living — Labor has apparently closed the Coalition’s lead by five points over the last month (the lead now stands at 35% vs 28%).
The polling sets the scene for what the government hopes will be a busy week in Canberra. The ABC says the Albanese government is confident going into Monday that it can secure the passage of laws to take over the CFMEU and restructure the NDIS this week. The Australian highlights Finance Minister Katy Gallagher saying she was hoping both pieces of legislation would pass the Senate soon and that the government is reportedly also closing in on a bipartisan response to the aged care taskforce report. The paper said it understood the government had agreed to further concessions with the Coalition on the CFMEU bill, including a minimum three-year administration term for branches where wrongdoing is found and more regular reporting to Parliament.
Gallagher admitted on Sunday: “Obviously we would like more legislation passed. Last week wasn’t the most productive week. I’m hoping that this week will be more productive.” Labor is reportedly hopeful the CFMEU bill could pass as early as today following negotiations between Minister Murray Watt and the Coalition over the weekend. It might not be that simple though, with the Coalition’s demands for the bill to include a ban on political donations from the CFMEU declared unconstitutional by the government. The ABC said Watt accused opposition workplace relations spokeswoman Michaelia Cash of “moving the goalposts” over the negotiations.
The broadcaster has laid out the scale of the legislative logjam currently facing the government, with things like the Help to Buy scheme, the Build to Rent scheme, a bill to restructure the Reserve Bank of Australia, plans to lift the tax rate for earnings on super balances above $3 million, and a new environmental protection agency all currently stuck with seemingly no way through. The ABC points out there are only five sitting weeks left this year.
NSW LIBERALS CONSIDER LEGAL ACTION
The incredible story of the NSW Liberal Party missing the deadline to nominate candidates for several councils continued at pace over the weekend with the party claiming it would be left with “no other option” than to take legal action if it was not given more time to submit its nominations, Guardian Australia reports.
After the state’s electoral commission rejected a first request for an extension on Saturday, the Liberal Party issued a statement yesterday in which it made the legal threat and claimed the commission had breached election regulations by only giving five days of official notice before the close of nominations, instead of seven. Acting electoral commissioner Matthew Phillips rejected that second request too.
“The commissioner does not consider there could have been a realistic possibility that officials of the New South Wales Division of the Liberal Party of Australia, or persons proposing to run as candidates endorsed by that party, could have been unaware of the nomination day or of the processes by which nominations could be made,” Guardian Australia quoted the commission as declaring.
The Sydney Morning Herald added Phillips said after the nomination date was first published in October 2023, it had been “widely publicised” in the months leading up to the cut-off date. The paper said Liberal president Don Harwin wrote an email to party members on Sunday afternoon claiming: “I assure you that I, the state executive, and the secretariat staff, are fully committed to pursuing every single option, including legal action, to rectify this situation.” Around 140 of its candidates for 16 councils were not registered by Wednesday’s deadline, the SMH added.
On the federal side of things, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has accused Opposition Leader Peter Dutton of whipping up fear with his calls for a ban on Palestinians fleeing Gaza from entering Australia.
The AAP reports Albanese told reporters on Sunday: “What does Peter Dutton do? He doesn’t talk about issues of concern to Australians, what he does is try and whip up fear. The fact is that the borders at the moment are closed, of course, through the Rafah crossing.”
Last week Dutton called for a halt in the intake of Palestinians fleeing from Gaza until strict security vetting processes could be applied. In an op-ed in The Sunday Telegraph, Dutton said: “We cannot tell who’s who, unless thorough background checks are done,” adding: “We need to be clear-eyed about Palestinians in Gaza. Some Gazans are Hamas terrorists. Some will have been accomplices in holding hostages.” Dutton conceded that “some Gazans will be people of good character”, but warned that even if they had “no fondness for Hamas” they could still harbour antisemitism.
Nationals leader David Littleproud, Opposition housing spokesman Michael Sukkar and Industry Minister Ed Husic all gave their thoughts on the row on the Sunday political shows, while Finance Minister Katy Gallagher called for elected officials to lower the tone of rhetoric, AAP said.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
The Swiss Defence Department is offering 50,000 Francs (almost A$90,000) for the best ideas on how to remove ammunition from the country’s lakes.
In a statement earlier this month, the Swiss government said the best three safe and environmentally friendly ideas would split the money. The competition announcement said the munitions were dumped in various Swiss lakes between 1918 and 1964. The majority is said to be in Lakes Thun, Brienz and Lucerne at depths of between 150 and 220 metres. The BBC reports in Lucerne alone there is an estimated 3,300 tonnes of munitions.
A previous assessment of potential munition recovery revealed all techniques at that time posed serious risk to the delicate ecosystems of the lakes, the Swiss government said. The statement added: “In addition to the poor visibility and the risks of explosion, the water depth, the current and the dimensions (4mm to 20cm size, 0.4g to 50kg weight) as well as the condition of the submerged ammunition present a further challenge. Most of the ammunition components consist of iron and are magnetic, however certain detonators are made of non-magnetic copper, brass or aluminium. All these factors represent major challenges for environmentally friendly ammunition recovery.”
The BBC said while many might question why the ammunition was dumped in the lakes in the first place, it claims geologists for decades had told the military it was safe to do so.
The Swiss government said entries can be submitted until February 6, 2025, with results announced in April 2025.
Say What?
She had a saying that we were climbing a mountain. She never clarified whether it was Everest or the Dandenongs, but I think we got there.
Felix Cameron
The 15-year-old star of Boy Swallows Universe won the night with his emotional acceptance speech at the Logies in Sydney last night after winning the Graham Kennedy Award for Most Popular New Talent. The teenager was referencing his drama teacher Nadia Townsend, adding “couldn’t have done it without you” after first thanking his family and team. The ABC reports Trent Dalton, author of Boy Swallows Universe, later said in his acceptance speech (for Best Best Miniseries or Telemovie): “I just want to send a shout out to all the mums who were a bit like Frankie Bell. And they’re out in the suburbs tonight and they’re feeling a bit lost in the darkness and I just want to tell you, please believe me when I say that when your children look at you in the darkness, all they see is your light. Keep shining. We see you.”
That Labor looks likely to offer nothing beyond merely managing the problem of gambling advertising also makes sense. This is a managerialist government, offering better management of capitalism as its defining characteristic, convinced that voters alienated by thirty years of neoliberal policymaking will back a government that promises to do a better job of making capitalism work for them, even as the traditional advocates of markets on the other side of politics abandon economic liberalism.
That’s why the Coalition was ahead of Labor in calling for a ban on gambling ads, and why over a year later the government is still tangled up trying to accommodate the commercial media, for the same reason that the Coalition embraced break-up powers for big retailers while Labor dismissed them as a Stalinist fantasy. Under Labor, capitalism is to be managed, not banned and broken up.
It’s difficult to overstate just how much Harris is energising the Democratic base.
Her entry into the race catalysed one of the largest fundraising spikes in US electoral history, bringing in US$81 million in just 24 hours — most of it from first-time donors. Harris’ recent campaign blitz touring battleground states, with her newly minted running mate Tim Walz, drew crowds of a size and spirit not typically seen until far closer to election day. And that’s not to mention how she is gaining traction online, as users take to social media to memeify her campaign, stitching together videos of Harris with gen Z pop culture touchpoints. Some are even comparing the surge of enthusiasm for Harris to the wave of excitement that surrounded Obama’s campaign in the 2008 presidential election, which he went on to win in an electoral vote landslide.
Recent polling suggests that this new momentum is translating into shifts in voter sentiment. The latest New York Times/Siena poll finds an almost 30-point jump in Democrats’ satisfaction about the choice of candidates this election compared to May, and confirms that Harris is winning back the key Democratic voting blocs that Biden was failing to consolidate, like Black and young voters.
And remember what an unmitigated joke Donald Trump’s campaign seemed in 2016? The laughter over “Drumpf” and “Covfefe”. The way talk show hosts essentially gave up on non-Trump material for the year, figuring to make “scathing” assessments of his buffoonery while they still could. Trump’s candidacy wasn’t just an unpleasantness that could be gotten out of the way, he was tipped to lose so hard that it would disqualify the Republican party from office for a generation. The New York Times gave Clinton an 85% chance of winning, and just as he would four years later, Trump prepared for a loss by claiming the process was rigged.
And after the roiling, uninterrupted scandal factory that was Trump’s time in office, Trump’s popular vote increased by nearly 12 million. So the apparent panic and chaos in the Trump camp doesn’t necessarily mean much about what voters will decide in November.
I take absolutely no joy in bringing any of that up. I only do so because large swathes of the media seem to be so intent on forgetting it, caught up in the vibes of the last three weeks.
Poll shows why productivity should be the main game in Canberra — The AFR View (Australian Financial Review): The essential problem remains that the economy, amid a still very tight labour market, is generating more demand than can be efficiently supplied without pushing up the prices of goods and services. This has coincided with Australia’s post-pandemic productivity freefall, which is making it harder to get on top of the inflation that is eating into real wages and living standards.
Both Labor and the Coalition have failed to seriously engage with ambitious tax, industrial relations and regulatory reform agendas. This is the real main game to boost productivity, help tame inflation, and create the prosperity that most voters aspire to.
Today’s poll sounds a warning for Australia’s key economic challenge. A gridlock of minority governments would mean that Canberra’s productivity policy problem, which is already partly to blame for prolonging the cost of living pain, will only get worse after the next election.
Australians are in chronic housing stress. Can Clare O’Neil fix it? — Intifar Chowdhury (Guardian Australia): Currently, Albanese’s government relies heavily on the 11 Greens senators to pass bills, which gives the Greens an oversized influence. Labor’s anaemic primary vote share from the 2022 election means it can’t afford to spotlight the Greens’ achievements too much and risk losing votes to them rather than to the opposition.
Even though, at face value, the Greens might have lost the rent cap battle, they’ve scored a win by securing an extra $1 billion for public and community housing from the PM’s $10 billion housing plan. This move has won them support among renters.
With the Greens’ primary vote at 13%, but a whopping 28% among 18 to 34-year-olds, they’ve positioned themselves as a serious contender in Australian politics. Their shift to a broader economic agenda has resonated with younger voters who feel sidelined by the current system.
As the next federal election looms, it looks like we’re gearing up for a parliamentary showdown where party posturing is more crucial than ever.
Rich James is Crikey'sWorm editor. He was previously news director at BuzzFeed Australia, executive news editor at the i paper, senior editor of EMEA at Storyful, and deputy news editor at Metro.
