By far the most newsworthy move by either major party in week one of this marathon election campaign came on Wednesday, when Prime Minister Scott Morrison abandoned his 2019 promise to establish a Federal corruption commission (ICAC).

Responding to the news, Opposition leader Anthony Albanese made what should have been a headline-grabbing claim, accusing the PM of shielding his own ministers from corruption probes.

“The reasons why (Morrison walked away from his promise) are sitting on his front bench. A national ICAC would look at the money that was paid for land at Badgerys Creek for a new Sydney airport – $30 million for land that was worth $3 million – (and) the sports rorts saga,” Albanese said.

“This is a Prime Minister who can’t be trusted to deliver on his commitments next term because he’s shown he can’t be trusted this term.”

For his part, Morrison blamed Labor for not supporting the government’s preferred model for an ICAC, a model derided as a “parody” which would effectively block investigations of suspect ministers.

“Morrison seems to be scared of what a Federal ICAC might do,” former NSW ICAC counsel Geoffrey Watson SC said.

The growing scourge of corruption in government, the need to combat it, and the incumbent PM’s apparent reluctance to go there, lest its ministers come under the spotlight, should be page one news by any objective criteria. Here’s what mastheads from News Corp and Seven West Media preferred to cover instead:


Tongue fetish: there was a certain sameness on front pages from Sydney to Perth last week. Images: News Corp, Seven West Media.

It seems a momentary memory lapse (“the gaffe”) from an Opposition leader dealing with some early stage fright on day one of the campaign was more newsworthy to Lachlan Murdoch’s and Kerry Stokes’ well-drilled cadre of editors than Morrison doing nothing about our precipitous drop to 18th in the world (equal with Uruguay, of all places) in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

Note the repeated use under the mastheads above of Albanese sticking out his tongue, a thinly-veiled intimation that he’s not up to the task of Prime Minister.

Australians gave several indications last week that corruption (and the need to stamp it out) was far more important to them than a single lapse of memory. An ABC ‘vote compass’ survey revealed that 85 per cent of respondents think corruption is either a big issue for this country, or “somewhat of a problem”.

In contrast, only one member of a Q+A studio audience put their hand up when asked if Albanese’s gaffe actually mattered to them.

There are many and varied problems important enough to make page one reading in this country, among them Jobkeeper graft, carpark capers, jobs for the boys, the Robodebt debacle, utter incompetence on the vaccine rollout, lack of action over the systemic abuse of women inside Parliament House, the erosion of Medicare, more than 700 aged care deaths from COVID-19 this year alone and the flooding on our east coast, made worse by Morrison’s incompetent response and made possible by the climate change this government won’t tackle head on. Why, then, is Australia’s media obsessing about the kind of brain fade we all have from time to time?

PLEASE HELP US CONTINUE TO THRIVE BY BECOMING AN OFFICIAL FOOTYOLOGY PATRON. JUST CLICK THIS LINK.

The less nefarious of the two main reasons for this is that, not unlike your average house cat, our media is attracted to shiny objects. They look for conflict, and prefer the simple ‘a’ vs ‘b’ contests you get in sports reports over more complicated (read ‘boring’) matters you’ll find buried on later pages.

Thus, we’re now being breathlessly regaled with hot takes on who “won” week one of the campaign, and who didn’t “keep their eye on the ball”. The near-unanimous chorus is that Albanese “lost” the week, and could pay “a staggering cost” for his memory lapse.

The other, less frequently mentioned, reason stems from the existence of a quid pro quo “kama sutra” between our media oligarchs and the current government. Take Morrison’s cosiness with News Corp for example: the coalition gets unwavering support from News Corp which, in turn, sees millions in advertising, receives another $30 million for Foxtel to cover women’s sport, pays no tax since the year after the LNP took power, broadcasts its propaganda unchallenged by a toothless regulator and has its near-monopoly of print media and market position in other areas protected from something as pesky as anti-trust enforcement by Josh Frydenberg’s appointment of Gina Cass-Gottlieb (Lachlan’s lawyer, no less) as chair of the ACCC.

Clearly, the Murdochs and their fellow media oligarchs have a vested interest in keeping this Morrison gravy train on the tracks. hence last week’s fascination with Albanese’s tongue.

“The gaffe” might not have yielded much interest among the Q+A crowd, but it establishes a narrative which could be more than handy in the closing stages of the campaign: “in a world of economic uncertainty and Chinese aggression, Albo’s just too flaky; better the Devil you know”. Look for that to get a run in the campaign’s final days.

Of course, with almost five weeks to go before election day, Albanese can turn it all around by throwing off his stage fright, being assertive on stage and, y’know, showing he can remember basic numbers. Wednesday night’s debate with Morrison offers him a chance to do just that: win, and “the gaffe” may be long forgotten by May 21.

On the flip side, another embarrassing blunder might doom his chances and have Labor insiders lamenting they didn’t give the leader’s gig to Tanya Plibersek or Jim Chalmers. No pressure at all, right?

Meanwhile, Scott Morrison keeps walking between the raindrops, his every blunder or blocking of an ICAC generating scarcely a tremor on the printing presses and airwaves of our Fourth Estate. On Sunday, our supposedly-unflappable PM repeatedly confused his questioner, Channel 10’s Chloe Bouras, with the Speaker of the House of Representatives (“Mister Speaker”, above).

A gaffe to embarrass even 79-year-old Joe Biden, “Mister Speaker” didn’t make it onto one front page.