They are far less important to the general public. It is typical of the isolation of journalists that, to the extent this disjunction is reported, it makes the general public appear to be moral cretins. The Australian's Paul Kelly is the doyen of his profession and clearly one of Australia's finest journalists. If Kelly and co. had allowed mainstream politicians to openly discuss difficult issues of national identity and race, there would almost certainly have been no space for Hanson to make her destructive play. You cannot convince those for whose concerns you do not allow a voice.
Indigenous issues are genuinely difficult.
Journalists parading their anti-racist virtue provide no answers and divert attention from the hard questions. But such peregrinations are a natural result of using 'racist' as a moveable tag to define virtue by stigmatising other people and views. The point is about quality of reportage and diversity of comment. But this was a rare bit of common sense from the commentariat, and an even rarer one from that newspaper. An Age journalist once confessed to me 'but Michael, we make our living from gratuitous left-wing crap'.