Unsurprisingly the issue is the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and just what the Coalition should do. Milne asks the question up front

If the Coalition votes in support of the ETS, what else is it going to fight the election on?

What indeed? The problem with going looking for a fight is that it can often blow up in your face.

The problem that the Coalition have with trying to make the ETS an election issue is that they’ve flipped and flopped from one end of the debate to the other. Climate change deniers blame Turnbull for being too green, while ignoring the fact that John Howard took a very similar ETS to that currently proposed to the last election as Coalition policy. Tony Abbott was for it before he was against it. Nick Minchin all but declared the entire topic of climate change a commie-greenie conspiracy on 4 Corners and Barnaby Joyce thinks that everyone is coming around to his belief that there’s nothing to worry about based on 84 people in Cooma coming to listen to him.

In the midst of this disorganised rabble, who can’t even decide whether they want to have a secret ballot about the ETS in their own party-room, Glenn Milne is championing the agents of disruption just so they can have a point of difference at the next election. Perhaps rather than defining themselves by comparisons to the ALP, the Coalition should try to find out what they actually stand for.

Yes, it’s time for the ’stopping us using tax-payers funds for electioneering is censorship’ bleat again, with added doses of the Rudd Government is white-anting Australian democracy for good measure.

The steady emasculation of the Australian Public Service under the current Labor Government has long been one of the worst kept secrets in Canberra. Even Kevin Rudd’s own Ministers have been sidelined by control-freaks from the Prime Minister’s Office who seek to dominate every detail of the political news cycle.

To have a member of the Howard government, who removed public service tenure for department heads and replaced it with short term ‘performance based’ contracts, complaining about the politicisation of the public service is chutzpah of the highest order.

Rather than working at arm’s length from government to prevent mismanagement and corruption, these statutory agencies are now forced to function as political auxiliaries of the Prime Minister’s Office.

They are routinely required to warn the Government of awkward media stories and thorny issues likely to come up during Senate Estimates hearings.

So, they’re briefing ministers? Isn’t that how the Westminster system works? Would you prefer that bureaucrats didn’t tell ministers about difficult issues? I guess that if ministers, or the Prime Minister refuse to listen to the public service then they can claim not to know anything, but that’s hardly good for democracy is it?

And here it comes again,

At the heart of the problem is a prohibition on “electioneering” that is applied to commercially printed material funded by MPs’ Parliamentary entitlements, or internally produced material sent out using the Allowance.

Actually, using public funds for electioneering has been prohibited for some time, as pointed out by former Democrats senator Andrew Bartlett, what’s changed is that the government has removed the grey area by properly defining what electioneering is.

Summing up,

I am not quite ready to accuse Kevin Rudd of deliberately subverting Australian democracy for his own advantage.

I am quite ready to accuse the Liberal Party of deliberately using The Punch as a venue for running a scare campaign that lacks substance.

We’ll update with details about TV programming for political tragics as they come to hand.

Also, just a note that a couple of us are travelling various places today – we’ll try to keep the moderation ticking over, but there might be a few gaps.

Update: Tonight – Craig Emerson vs Peter Dutton. Lateline ABC1 1040pm.

Update #2: Sunday morning:

• Meet the Press (TEN @ 8am) has Peter Hartcher and Julie Balogh interviewing Julie Bishop and John Coates.
• Insiders has Barrie interviewing Christopher Pyne, the panel has Misha Schubert, Malcolm Farr and Gerard “Could it be that conservatives just don’t get invited on to some ABC programs?” Henderson, and Mike Bowers talks to Reg Lynch.

I’d also urge the ABC to be very careful of Green’s quality control over his writers and blog readers. I was forced recently to write the following to his boss, Eric Beecher, the famous campaigner for “quality journalism”, and am still considering my options, as they say:

Last week I drew your attention to comments and blog postings you had published over the space of just a few days calling me a “proven liar”, “nutty”, “unhinged”, “underhand”, “loopy”, “paranoid”, a “hypocrite”, a “racist”, “dishonest”, “hysterical”, “petty”, “evasive”, “deluded”, “irrational”, lacking in morality, someone guilty of “deliberately misrepresenting” people, “full of poisonous shit”, and a “notorious liar” who practices “lies, misrepresentations, and deceit”, “lies, distortions and smears”, “fakery” and “cowardice and dishonesty”, while giving “tacit approval” to “extremist sickos” and “playing the paranoid schizo’’, resembling in my person an “asylum for the criminally insane”. You conceded that these comments included a number of statements that were “untrue and unnecessarily personal in tone”.

Since then one of Green’s writers has urged in a headline that I be ”sodomised”, and his site has said of me that “we are dealing with fascism, plain and simple’’ and, referring to me and my readers, “I sometimes think Stalin had the right idea – line a million or so of ‘em up against a wall”. Yesterday I was named in a Crikey article as someone so corrupt as be evidently driven to scepticsm by “a desire for funds from fossil-fuel companies”, and was smeared besides as “undoubtedly more dangerous” than a “Holocaust denier”, and, in time, ”morally worse”.

Let’s get some facts and perspective on what Bolt wrote.

To begin, I’ll note that Possum has written his own post defending himself against the charge of conspiracy to commit aggravated sodomy with a mathematical instrument. You can read his post and form an opinion.

Next, I’m not going to say much about Clive Hamilton’s article, but I will note that he does not directly attack Bolt in the way Bolt implies. He lists Bolt as an example of a climate change denier and makes an ethical or moral argument about climate change deniers – you can read and form an opinion about both Hamilton’s article and Bolt’s characterisation of it.

To the best of my knowledge, the remainder of the quotes Bolt provides are from Pure Poison (although it has been suggested that some might be from the Poll Bludger), so let’s take a closer look at things. I have to start by saying that I’m surprised that Bolt is so troubled by comments that contain some rude statements about himself for several reasons. First, this week he approvingly quoted Sinclair Davidson’s argument that:

… to reject the legitimacy of conversation on the basis of tone is to place form above substance.

Our posts, and many of our comments, use evidence and argument to criticise Andrew Bolt’s writings. But instead of addressing or responding to any of that content, he chooses to focus on the tone of some comments. I don’t see how he can reconcile this with his endorsement of Davidson’s position.

Second, when he discussed concerns about comments on his own site last month he noted that:

On the other hand, it’s clear that some associate the most confronting comments on it with me personally.

As one prominent person from the Left told me in anger, these are comments I endorse. That I encourage. That secretly do my dirty work. Media Watch has implied the same.

The worst comments are said to be inspired by me, and the best not.

These claims are dishonest, or at best merely confused, yet I cannot deny the damage they have done.

Yet when it comes to our site, Bolt attributes the worst of the comments not only to us as authors but to Crikey’s editor.

But aside from his apparent general acceptance that a bit of rough and rude language is acceptable in a blog’s comments, there is the fact that his own blog has allowed many of the same comments to be made about people who are not Andrew Bolt. For example:

Al Gore – Proven liar.

Andrew McGahan – Unhinged propagandist.

Gough Whitlam – Underhanded. There’s not a single fibre of virtue or principle in that fellow.

Kevin Rudd – Paranoid

Al Gore – Hypocrite

Gordon Brown – Dishonest

Nathan Rees – Hysterical

Anthony Albanese – Petty and mean

Kevin Rudd – Liar

Jill Singer – Deals in smears

Professor Stephen Schneider – Evasive

Kevin Rudd – Fakery

Jerry Melillo – Deluded

Kevin Rudd – Coward

Brumby and Rudd attending disaster sites after Black Saturday - only there for a sicko photo op

But aside from wondering whether he applies a different standard to negative comments about himself than his opponents, I have another reason to be surprised about Andrew Bolt’s current attack – we agreed that many of those comments were inappropriate, and we took steps to change our comment processes and culture more than eight months ago.

Here is what Bolt leaves out of the tale he gave his readers:

• He sent that original message to Eric Beecher in late February, about one week after this site had launched. At that time, comments were published without moderator approval (apart from the first comment made by each individual user).
• The comments he quoted as being published “since then” were published on 28th February and 1st March – again, without prior moderator approval. You can see the “Stalin comment” here, and note that it was quickly condemned by Jeremy as well as several other commenters. The “fascism comment” is here, and can be read in the context of claims that legitimate, polite disagreement was being edited on Bolt’s site. You can form an opinion about the appropriateness of those comments and how we handled their publication.
• On 2nd March, Jonathan Green posted an apology to Andrew Bolt and an explanation of the standard of discussion we were aiming for on our site.
• In response to the obvious problems with not moderating comments before they appeared, on 2nd March we changed the blog’s settings. Since then, no comment has appeared on this site without being approved for publication by a site author. When we have concerns about a comment, a back-channel discussion takes place until we agree on how to proceed. If need be, we reject or edit comments, and commenters who repeatedly demonstrate that they won’t comply are blacklisted. We have also attempted to steer commenters toward our desired tone and culture of discussion. This sometimes involves sending emails explaining the problems with a comment and asking the commenter to rephrase what they have written in a new comment. If a comment is acceptable for publication but we have some concerns about the tone then we often post our own reply in an attempt to steer the conversation. In the rare event that we make a mistake in publishing a comment, we fix it as quickly as possible and attempt to address any concerns.

I note that Andrew Bolt has not quoted any comments since we made those changes. And I also must say that after those first couple of chaotic weeks, I am generally proud of the level of debate we have had at this site.

So, this is what Andrew Bolt has attacked us over – something that doesn’t seem so incompatible with his own site’s standards, that happened months ago, and that we addressed. And that brings me to my greatest concern about this attack. Back in the first couple of weeks after our site’s launch we acknowledged problems with the discussion on our site and took steps to change both the procedure and the culture. One month ago, I noted that the culture of comments on Andrew Bolt’s site was something he needed to address. Bolt himself described himself as “agonising” over what to do about commentary on his site.

But is there any evidence that he has changed anything? He holds up his quick reaction to the homophobic comment about David Marr as evidence that he addressed the issue. But his own tactics do not seem to have changed, and comments engaging in unsubstantiated personal smears such as this still appear:

No Mick, sorry mate, I reckon it was 100% of those papers was funded. That academic is known in that institution as a bit of a bully – but then again to be in that position in a University, he had to bury a lot of competitors.

We have worked to improve the standard of discussion at this site. When will Andrew Bolt do the same?

The first egregious value that Deveny highlights is the way that people from private schools sometimes use people they know to get things done, in this case the Principal of Melbourne Grammar helped to find a surgeon to see a boy who’d been injured by one of his students.

Through contacts. How kind and noble it was for the important man from the privileged school to help the boy less fortunate through contacts.

What’s astonishing is the stunning lack of insight those two little words revealed. What does it say about a school when the principal brags about queue-jumping? Through contacts. Celebrating a two-tiered health system that leaves one person to wait in pain simply because they have less money.

What would Deveny have preferred the man do? Refuse to help? I agree that it’d be much better for all of us if we had a health system that provided immediate access to treat every ailment, but we don’t. In the mean time isn’t it a good thing that this school is trying to help make amends for the reckless actions of one of its students?

Taking advantage of the network of people that we know is something that we all do, it’s not some kind of strange ritual of the well to do, it’s part of being a community. Would Deveny be so outraged if the roles were somewhat reversed and the campus co-ordinator of the local TAFE organised a panel beater to fix a car that had been damaged by a student?

The second value that offends Ms Deveny is a School asking people to contribute their time without compensation.

When I asked what the fee was, they said I was the first to ask and they hadn’t thought about payment. (Their school values did not extend to paying people to increase their company’s profitability but did extend to attempting to covertly shame people for asking to be paid for what they do.) I explained I was happy to do charity for charities, but I couldn’t afford to work free for businesses. Long story, but in short I suggested a $200 donation to the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre as payment.

Now perhaps there is a model of private schools that I’m unfamiliar with, but I don’t ever recall seeing a school being run by a company seeking to make a profit. Funnily enough, every school I’ve ever encountered has had the education of children as their driving motive. I won’t pretend for a minute that some schools are better resourced than others, but I don’t see how that should affect whether or not you volunteer your time to assist them.

Deveny, to her credit, was effectively volunteering, as the donation she asked them to make in no way covered the time she would have given, but why is she so outraged that the school would ask her to do this without compensation? Again I’d ask, what if the situation was different and it was a high school filled with kids destined to grow up to become Chadstone shoppers? Would she still ask for payment? If not, why not? Additionally, if she was so offended by the school “attempting to covertly shame people for asking to be paid for what they do” why didn’t she simply decline their request? Could it be that participating in the mentor program was also of benefit to her?

While I don’t begrudge Deveny the opportunity to take a swipe at the the established privilege that private schools can represent, she completely misses her target with this attempt.

Update:

I’ve been contacted by a member of staff from a Melbourne private school (both of which shall remain nameless), who had the following to say:

Cathrine’s “fee” was paid. She’s got that bit wrong.

Is it possible for a person to ring up a charitable organisation and ask about contributions from other poeple?

Update 2: I’ve been looking around the ‘tubes and have found a reference to another school where Ms Deveny participated in a mentoring program. Her decision not to name the school she claims reneged on their agreement is unfortunate seeing as there is more than one school which might feel that they are being targeted, hence the email to us.

At the same time, in all of the criticism about this issue I’ve seen very little discussion of what Rudd could or should have done differently. Greg Sheridan’s column is an example – he says Rudd has caved in, doing the worst possible thing for policy apart from bringing the asylum seekers straight to Australia. But he doesn’t really say anything about what Rudd should have done differently. Aside from a few reckless (and illegal) suggestions that potential and established refugees should be sent back to Sri Lanka, I’ve seen very few politicians or pundits tell us what other options should have been considered.

Am I missing something? It seems to me that we’re not getting any straight talk about the issues – not from a government that is trying to obfuscate, but also not from a media which is fixated on the domestic politics coming from this situation.

You’d think someone who can get 3000 people to sign his politically motivated petition in no time and who regularly gets to appear on all media outlets including the (biased!) ABC would cheer up and feel a little less like the world is out to get him.

Tim Burrowes has probably forgotten more about marketing and the media than I’ll ever know, but I think that in this case he’s simply missed the mark. The problem, as I see it, is that Burrows is trying to extrapolate his experience as a niche online publisher to News Limited’s operation, and it just doesn’t scale.

The reason for Burrowes’ self proclaimed change of heart was, ironically, the impact of a post he made regarding Murdoch and Google.

I came in the next day to find that rather than our typical weekday 7000 or so visitors, we’d had 34,570. And they’d gone from being mostly Australian to predominantly overseas on that particular tale. We had links to the story from about 40 sites, the last time I looked. Google was listing 413 related news articles.

Nice problem to have? Well not really, and Burrowes did well to explain why:

But do you know what? Almost without exception, those fickle new readers bounced away again after looking at that one page.
The traffic was nice as far as it went. Big traffic makes you feel special (and relieved that you’d recently upgraded your server). But it also left us with something of a dilemma. Some of our advertisers are on a cpm deal, which is relatively high, justified by our specialist industry audience.
Clearly we couldn’t really justify that to local advertisers when it’s an international audience. So we decided that our cpm advertisers could have that traffic for free, and emailed them to that effect before they started querying our startling analytics for that day.
So in this case this disloyal audience was, in all practical terms, not much good for us, or our advertisers. (Although, it will be good for us in the long term for us in SEO terms of course)

It’s the effect of this disloyal audience that started to change Burrowes’ mind about whether the benefits of appearing in the Google index is as obvious as the conventional wisdom holds.

But it makes me start to wonder whether Murdoch doesn’t have a point after all – not just in the direct value of a small, but paying audience, but also in the higher level of engagement this would bring to advertisers. It then becomes a conversation about engagement – and persuading advertisers of the value of that.

All of Burrowes observations are well made, but I think that he’s overestimating the level of engagement that we have with our news providers. A site like Mumbrella services a niche in the market place, it has a well defined and loyal audience that can be presented to advertisers, as Burrows himself notes, and as such advertisers are happy to pay more than they would for a larger, but more general audience. To use an offline parallel, Mumbrella is like a specialty magizine on the news stand, Sporting Shooter or The Bride’s Diary, advertisers know exactly who’s reading it.

Newspapers, on the other hand, do not engender the same loyalty and they certainly don’t deliver audiences that can be as easily defined. Although they do try to use demographic information to help advertisers, the selling point for newspaper advertising has always been circulation, or reach. Newspapers are excellent at delivering a message to a very large group of people, and online news sites can do the same. While a surge in one-off readers is of no help in the long term to the advertisers on a site like Mumbrella, on a general news site they fit the traditional model of selling as many eyeballs as possible to an advertiser.

News Limited’s problem is that if they go down the route of building a smaller, paying audience for their general news, that’s not necessarily of any advantage to an advertiser. Are the people buying a Herald Sun online subscription for Andrew Bolt or the AFL coverage? If you’re an advertiser being asked to pay a premium to reach this audience it’s important to know this, especially when a lot of these readers are likely visiting other news sites anyway.

The reality for publishers who are trying to manage the transition to online media is that the solutions won’t be as simple or straight forward as whether or not to use a paywall, their whole philosophy will need to be re-evaluated. Newspapers have based their entire business model on delivering the biggest number of readers they can to advertisers, if they suddenly decide to voluntarily reduce the size of that audience then they need a very good argument as to how the new model will provide value for the advertisers, that is something that I still haven’t heard clearly articulated.