Ken Henry wants Australia's media to do a better job

Australia Broadcast Center

7 days ago

Ken Henry, a former treasury secretary, wants the media to do a better job.
He says the media has to hold Australia's political system accountable for its failure to deliver a better future for younger Australians.
"Report after report tells the same story," he said last week.
"The environment is not being protected. Biodiversity is not being conserved. Nature is in systemic decline.
"We have whole industries with business models built on the destruction of the natural world.
"We have turned nature against us. Our destruction of the natural environment now poses an existential threat to everything we value.
"I am angry at our failures. But we should all be angry at our collective failure to design economic structures, including environmental regulations, that underpin confidence in a better future for our children and grandchildren," he said.
Dr Henry made those comments at the National Press Club on Wednesday.
But in the Q&A portion of his speech, he singled out the media.
He said none of today's politicians will be alive in 100 years, but younger Australians will have to live in a world that today's politicians leave for them.
He said that unless the media holds the political system accountable for its obligation to deliver a better future for our children, that obligation won't be observed.
"We used to talk about the critical role played by the 'Fourth Estate'," he said.
"It's time that we rebuilt it."
What did he mean by that?
The 'Fourth Estate' refers to the news media.
In Australian society, the first three estates of our democratic state are the parliament (legislature), the government (executive), and the courts (judiciary).
As the so-called fourth estate, the media, is supposed to monitor the behaviour of those three estates to keep them accountable.
Dr Henry's plea last week for Australia's media to remember its crucial democratic role was important to hear.
But it won't be an easy task.
Why is trust in the mainstream media declining? Why are people increasingly turning to the 'Fifth Estate' for their news and analysis?
The Fifth Estate refers to the growing network of alternative and independent news sources, including bloggers, podcasters, and influencers.
It's where a large number of journalists who used to work for legacy media outlets are now working.
A significant amount of the journalistic output from the Fifth Estate is dedicated to documenting the chronic and systemic failures of our Fourth Estate legacy media to tell the truth about today's world.
The phenomenon reflects something bigger and fundamentally broken about the world we're living in.
A fortnight ago, the oldest living former Malaysian prime minister, Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad, who recently turned 100, shared his feelings about where he thinks we're all heading:
"Something has gone wrong with the world, with human civilisation," he wrote.
"For centuries we have been ridding ourselves of barbarism in human society, of injustices, of the oppression of men by men [...]
"But can we say we are still civilised now? Over the last three decades especially, we have destroyed most of the ethical values that we had built up.
"Now we are seeing an orgy of killing. We are seeing genocide being perpetrated before our own eyes. Worse still, the genocide is actually being promoted and defended [...]
"Will we stop? No. We cannot. Because the very people who preached the rights of humanity are the ones to destroy our hard-fought civilisation.
"I hide my face. I am ashamed. Civilisation is no more the norm."
In his speech last week, Dr Henry lamented that we have whole industries with business models built on the destruction of the natural world.
But many of the people running the world's major media companies are deeply financially invested in those destructive industries.
Their media outlets (and think-tanks) have spent decades attacking the scientific community and other media to undermine global efforts on climate change.
For how many decades have they been attacking the CSIRO?
But for the sake of argument, let's assume that Dr Henry gets his wish and the idealised ethos of the Fourth Estate can be resurrected by enough media companies to form a critical mass.
Where can a revitalised Fourth Estate seek its "agreed facts" about the world we're living in, to hold our political system to account for the next few decades?
Thankfully, in 2025, Australia's independent courts are still an accepted source of facts and truth.
We're very lucky to have a legal system that has avoided the corruption of legal systems in other countries.
And in recent weeks, the Federal Court has published a few judgements that should help the Fourth Estate to keep its bearings.
One of those judgements was Pabai vs Commonwealth of Australia, published on Tuesday.
As my ABC colleagues Kirstie Wellauer and Stephanie Boltje wrote, it was the first time an Australian court had ruled on whether the Commonwealth has a legal duty of care to protect its citizens from the impacts of climate change, and whether cultural loss from climate change should be compensated.
Federal Court judge Michael Wigney found the Commonwealth does not owe a duty of care to Torres Strait Islander peoples to protect them from the impacts of climate change or fund adaptation measures.
He also ruled that Australia's greenhouse gas emissions targets were matters of "core government policy" that should be decided by the parliament, not the courts.
He said he had "considerable sympathy" for the Torres Strait Islander peoples' case, but Australian law, as it stood, provided no real or effective avenue through which they were able to pursue their claims on the matter.
"That will remain the case unless and until the law in Australia changes, either by the incremental development or expansion of the common law by appellate courts, or by the enactment of legislation," he wrote.
"Until then, the only recourse that those in the position of the applicants and other Torres Strait Islanders have is recourse via the ballot box."
But Justice Wigney found some other things.
He found that when Australia's government set its emissions reduction targets between 2015 and 2021 — when the federal Coalition was in power — it "failed to engage with or give any real or genuine consideration to what was the best available science" when setting those targets.
"The best available science was and is clear," Justice Wigney wrote.
"To prevent the worst and most dangerous impacts of climate change, it was and is imperative for every country to take steps to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions so as to ensure that the increase in the global average temperature is held to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
"Those critical objectives were enshrined in the Paris Agreement, to which Australia is a party.
"The evidence in this case indicated that the emissions reduction targets set by the Commonwealth in 2015, 2020 and 2021 were plainly not consistent with those objectives or its international obligations under the Paris Agreement," he found.
At the Press Club last week, I asked Dr Henry about that finding.
If the media wanted to hold Australia's political system accountable for its obligation to deliver a better future for younger Australians, what hope does it have if Australian governments don't even care about the science?
"What has been missing here is a respect for the science, is a respect for the evidence, is a respect for the truth," Henry replied.
A second important judgement, published earlier this month, was Wertheim vs Haddad.
In that case, Federal Court judge Angus Stewart ruled that a series of lectures delivered by an Islamic preacher, Wissam Haddad, at a Sydney prayer centre in November 2023, must be removed from social media because they contained "fundamentally racist and antisemitic" material.
He found the lectures contravened the Racial Discrimination Act.
"They make perverse generalisations against Jewish people as a group," he wrote.
"Jewish people in Australia in November 2023 and thereafter would experience them to be harassing and intimidating.
"That is all the more so because they were made at the time of heightened vulnerability and fragility experienced by Jews in Australia, but they would also have been harassing and intimidating had they been made prior to 7 October, 2023.
"That is because of their profound offensiveness and the long history of persecution of Jews associated with the use of such rhetoric. Those effects on Jews in Australia would be profound and serious," he wrote.
In his summary of the reasons for judgement, Justice Stewart also had this to say:
"The Court has found that the impugned passages in the interview and the sermon say critical and disparaging things about the actions of Israel and in particular the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza and about Zionists, but that the ordinary, reasonable listener would not understand those things to be about Jewish people in general.
"That person would understand that not all Jews are Zionists and that disparagement of Zionism constitutes disparagement of a philosophy or ideology and not a race or ethnic group.
"Also, political criticism of Israel, however inflammatory or adversarial, is not by its nature criticism of Jews in general or based on Jewish racial or ethnic identity.
"The conclusion that it is not antisemitic to criticise Israel is the corollary of the conclusion that to blame Jews for the actions of Israel is antisemitic; the one flows from the other."
It was an important passage.
It should help Australia's media to think more clearly about one of the most profound conflicts of the 21st century, and to hold Australia's political system to account for its participation in, response to, handling of, and debate about the conflict.
Both rulings from the Federal Court have given the mainstream media a solid foundation to work with, for a revitalised Fourth Estate.