title: The Media and John Howard P.M.: The Canberra Press Gallery 1996-2007
Creators: name: Ester, Helen
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2009
Subjects: subject: Federal Parliamentary Press gallery
subject: Howard government
subject: Media management strategies

description: This thesis examines the impact of the Howard government’s media management strategies on the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery (FPPG) and its capacity to fulfil the quasi-institutional fourth estate role of independent over-sight of the parliament and the executive government. Although the relationship between politician and journalist in any parliamentary democracy is neither easy nor harmonious, tenets of open governance demand that, at the very least, this relationship is functional. The evidence in this thesis shows that this functionality was tested to its limits under the Howard government. Chapter 1 begins with the development of questions about the Howard government’s media strategies, their impact on the Canberra fourth estate and the role of more intense government media management, new technologies and the co-location of executive government and press gallery in Parliament House. Answers are sought with multi-method research including historical research, documentary analysis, case studies and elite interview techniques*. Twenty-five journalists from the FPPG’s thirty-three mainstream bureaus participated in interviews and their willingness to answer open-ended questions ‘on the record’ added valuable empirical data. Chapter 1 concludes with a comprehensive review of relevant literature and a brief survey of the further chapters. Chapter 2 is an historical analysis that explores key continuities and changes in executive-media relations across a number of Australian federal governments located in Canberra since parliament opened there in 1927 in order to identify the drivers or levers on hand when the Howard government took office in 1996. Particular attention is paid to strategies used under the Curtin, Menzies, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating governments. Chapters 3-5 examine issues raised by government-FPPG relations during the Howard years. ‘The Interface’ (Chapter 3) deals with the effect of increasing numbers of ministerial media staff and closer control of face-to-face fora such as interviews, press conferences and background briefings. ‘Spinning along the Information Highway’ (Chapter 4) explores the reduction in access to political news by gallery journalists because new digital media technologies increase government control of the flow of political information, particularly by the deployment of sophisticated modern surveillance techniques. ‘News values in the New Parliament House’ (Chapter 5) examines changes in conventions arising from the new building’s architecture that facilitated the implementation of policies designed to maximise executive control of political news. Chapter 6 provides case studies of key moments in the interaction between the government and the gallery that demonstrate the executive’s powerful capacity to manipulate a relationship based only on convention and goodwill. The first study concerns the 2003 visit of US President Bush and the unprecedented way the Australian executive overrode longstanding conventions in relation to the FPPG and the parliament. The second concerns former Treasurer Peter Costello and the ‘Dinnergate’ episode that kept public information off the record for years. This thesis adds a fresh Australian perspective to international political communication scholarship by filling a gap in this literature where the self-reflexive views and experiences of political journalists working at the interface between the public and government have been overlooked. This study reveals the extent to which the Howard government used the executive’s latent power over media relations to maximise control over flows of information, and how its misuse can work to the detriment of parliament as well as political journalism. This thesis concludes that the Howard years bound and constrained Australian political communication because an increasingly dominant government executive successfully exploited the Canberra fourth estate’s poorly defined role and status. Whilst this study also confirms the need for reform in government-media relations, it is equally clear that it would be politically naïve to expect any government (or opposition) to develop the political will to tamper with conventions demonstrably weighted in the executive’s favour. However, the unpalatable media management regime of the Howard years also triggered an historic coalition of commercial and public media which conducted an independent audit of free speech in Australia (Moss 2007), and called for more explicit, legislative recognition of ‘Australia’s Right to Know’. This study argues that this presents a significant opportunity as any change for the better would not only need the pro-active goodwill of parliamentarians outside the citadels of party-executives, but also the media’s reassessment of the manner in which they resource Canberra political journalism. This thesis concludes that apart from issues relating to an imbalance of coverage in favour of the executive and away from the parliament, there are other weighty matters relating to the status of the FPPG worthy of the media’s further consideration—such as the status of media bureaus within parliament house (now that of ‘licensees’), and the fact not only is there no constitutional basis for the ‘right to know’ in Australia but there are few if any, applicable conventions in ‘either British constitutional precepts or Australian news media practice’ (Lloyd 2001, p.1).