What a Time to Be Alive: That and Other Lies of the 2016 Campaign

By Mark Di Stefano

What a time to be alive: That and other lies in the 2016 campaign is the ugly and un-sanitised diary behind the curtain of the double dissolution election campaign. A poll fought between two wildly ambitious men who want to win their first election, whatever it takes.

Mark Di Stefano finds out what is happening behind the scenes and how the two campaigns manufacture, massage and manipulate their parties, policies and principles. What a time to be alive documents the daily ride of an historic election campaign, week by long week, taking you into the bizarre world of staged photo ops, booze-drenched regrets and dirty direct messages.

The exposure of the unscripted moments with political leaders, their over-worked staff and secretive minders, shows how the sausage that is this Australian election, is made and reveals what is really inside.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9780522870633

Book preview

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The Budget

Tuesday May 3, 2016

The 2016 budget was being called by the experts, the most important in living memory. Scott Morrison, the Treasurer, had never done it before. Malcolm Turnbull, the Prime Minister, had never done it before. Incredibly, it was brought forward an entire week. The pressing need to get it done before calling the election meant that it came just nine weeks before polling day. Tony Abbott’s government had so royally stuffed up the 2014 budget, everything seemed to now stem from the awful consequences of that edition.

The last point is the most important. Former prime minister Tony Abbott and his treasurer Joe Hockey handed down such a shocking budget that, like a stone plonked in a still pond, its effects were still rippling out. Arguably, Abbott lost his job (and Hockey too) because of that budget of 2014. The one that included savage cuts to education and health and the ABC and everything else.

On budget day, Morrison was adorned in his traditional mauve tie. For a man with the reputation of being a political strongman, purple was an interesting choice. Morrison wore purple ties, purple polo shirts, purple baseball caps. One of his staffers once said the prominence of purple in Morrison’s wardrobe was an attempt at softening his image.

That kinder, gentler Morrison started the day with the government’s new three-word slogan: Jobs and growth. If you scratched the surface of the phrase it meant very little. It had been re-purposed from a campaign run by US president George W Bush in 2003. The Bush campaign was about two tax cuts, which Bush and the Republicans argued would trickle down through the economy. Turnbull and Morrison had co-opted the phrase and were repeating it so many times that headline writers had little choice but to use it in copy. When Cabinet Secretary Arthur Sinodinos was asked on Sky News in the week, What do you think the newspaper headlines will be, the day after the budget? he replied like a programmed automaton, Jobs and growth.

Our team of reporters, led by newly appointed news director Marni Cordell, walked into the lockup on level one of the Parliament House building at 1pm on budget day. Hundreds of journalists from around Australia lined up to surrender their phones and sign slips of paper that commit to a vague promise not to go on the internet. Their faces are overwhelmingly old (senior journalists are given the budget assignment), male (finance and economics writers tend to be dudes) and white (the majority of the journalism establishment).

Due to the internet ban, I sat outside the room downloading some final stock images to my computer. We would be entering stories in the backend of our website throughout the next six hours and we needed to have generic images already downloaded and ready for use. I was propped up on a desk outside the lockup rooms when two guys walked past, looking up at a whiteboard to see where they were sitting.

Where are we? asked one, wearing suspenders, like he was a throwback reporter from the 80s.

Looks like we … are … there, right next to BuzzFeed.

Oh for fuck’s sake. You’ve gotta be kidding.

The hostility towards our arrival in the press gallery was not shared by all. On the contrary, industry leaders like Sky News journalist David Speers and Fairfax photographer Andrew Meares were encouraged by our overseas political coverage and got what we were trying to achieve. Yet many still thought we represented loud children, out to steal people’s lunches.

Armed with a tote bag of budget papers and media releases, I traipsed into the lockup to join my colleagues. We were looking for something that would stand out for our readers. Something for young people. Often the stories that interested them would be focused on higher education, housing, cost of living, social issues.

Luckily for us, there in the budget speech, on page two of the first document opened, was an entirely new measure: it was called PaTH. A headline-grabbing national internship scheme that got young, unemployed people into low-paying jobs via a 12-week training program. Looking past the dumb-sounding name (PaTH stood for Prepare, Trial, Hire … the a was apparently silent) we looked at the wages that would be paid to those who took part. The budget papers showed participants would get $200 a fortnight for up to 25 hours of work a week. We ran the numbers in our heads—young people would be getting paid $4 an hour (on top of their Newstart Allowance payments). This new program would replace the old work for the dole scheme—a program which was most definitely worse for young people. According to the budget papers, it was about getting vulnerable job seekers under 25 years old, into work. It was modelled on similar programs in the UK and Ireland. Without internet access in the lockup it was nearly impossible to fact check some of the more outlandish claims the government was making about the program. My god, it would have been handy to check whether the UK/Irish programs were leading to more young people getting into more jobs. SPOILER: They weren’t.

Hours later, Morrison faced a packed room that contained every political journalist in the country. Hungry for questions about the entire budget, Morrison brushed over the PaTH program, claiming with a sweeping gesture that it would create 120,000 jobs in the next three years. We discussed it again and it still sounded off. Our new news editor Marni Cordell came up with the eye-bulging headline, The Government Wants You to Work for $4 an Hour.

She got Workman to write a straight story including (very clearly) that the $4 an hour wage would be on top of unemployment benefits. Effectively, businesses were getting young, unskilled employees for free.

Amid the chaos of the final few hours of the budget lockup, I ran into a friend, Financial Times journalist Jamie Smyth. Speaking through his thick Irish accent, he told me about the financial and economic measures in the budget.

Oh, it’s good, it’s good. But Malcolm he’s following the Tories in the UK on going after Google. Smyth was referring to the Google tax that the Coalition had proposed to ensure that the multinational paid its fair share of tax. He really does love David Cameron, doesn’t your old Malcolm.

The rest of the budget had the traditional pageantry. Morrison’s jobs and growth slogan was so ever-present that it was literally stamped on the budget books and on the shiny press conference backdrops.

This was a campaign launch, not a budget announcement. You just had to look at Morrison’s speech. Traditionally, treasurers at the end of the speech say, I commend this Bill to the House. But Morrison couldn’t help himself. Wrapping up his speech to parliament, with an audience of hundreds of thousands of people at home, he had a little something extra for the occasion: Mr Speaker I commend the Turnbull Government’s economic plan for jobs and growth and this Bill to the House.

The second the Treasurer started his speech to the House, the lockup ended. At 7:30pm we flicked on our wi-fi and tweeted out the budget deficit number. There was a petty race to be first (pathetic bragging rights drove most journalists’ aggressiveness on Twitter). We loaded our stories—pre-written over the course of the last six hours—onto our website.

Our team was exhausted and hungry. We trudged upstairs to the press gallery. Lounging in our shoebox office, a Labor media adviser knocked on the door. By the time I’d turned around he already had his hand up to give me a high-five. It quickly became apparent that the $4 an hour PaTH program story was gathering steam online.

He smacked my hand hard. That was FUCKING it mate. That. Was. Fucking. It! The $4 an hour line!

We had tweeted about it earlier and it had been retweeted more than 100 times in five minutes. It was a team effort but Cordell, on one of her first days at BuzzFeed, had come up with the line that was clearly cutting through to the public. The presence of the over-excited Labor media adviser, squashed in our tiny office, was testament to that.

The unions had already jumped on board. Their Twitter accounts were all furiously posting our story and it was showing up on every available social media channel they had. Within an hour they had already started the basics of a new campaign against the PaTH scheme called $4 jobs.

And that’s when the calls started. The first came from one of the Prime Minister’s most trusted media advisers.

Hey mate, I answered the phone as cheerfully as possible, bracing for the arse kicking I was about to receive.

"Mate, what the fuck is that? What was that?" His voice was not angry. It was sad and disappointed. Like I was a puppy and I’d taken a dump on his new carpet. He kept going.

That’s got to be one of the biggest beat-ups I have ever seen, man. Ever. C’moooooooooon.

It’s easy to feel sorry for media advisers in this situation but this is their job, to put a personal face on complaints from an office. I liked the guy. I really did. I still do. Throughout this conversation he was devastated and sighing constantly.

I replied, OK mate, what do you object to?

The whole thing! It’s just wrong. I mean, it’s wrong. I ca—

What’s wrong about it?

We’re not making kids work for $4 an hour, so you’re wrong. Oh fuck. This is the biggest beat-up I have ever seen.

It went like this for another five minutes. As I stepped into the press gallery corridors, Workman’s phone rang. It was a more senior media adviser for the Prime Minister. Duelling complaints came at us from the PM’s office. Our story was clear—if students were going to be paid $200 a fortnight for up to 25 hours of work per week, then the work itself was valued at $4 an hour. It was a simple calculation that, over the space of 24 hours, we needed to spell out dozens of times to half a dozen government advisers.

The traditional dance with these advisers is tricky. One minute you’re best friends, getting tips and heads up emails, the next you’re getting yelled at. Most of the time they’re not even angry about the story: they’re the conduit of anger. Their boss or some guy from the policy team has seen months of hard work unspun in 25 minutes on social media. So they lash the media advisers. The advisers act angry, put out, offended, passive aggressive, hyper logical, sad. They would sometimes try out every emotion in one conversation, cycling through them to try and get you to change the story.

Post-budget festivities are held in Chinese restaurants dotted around Canberra’s suburbs. Journalists in gangs, tied to their masthead, sit around long tables, eating pre-paid banquets, washing it down with Tsingtao beer and sharing stories of the lockup. This year, BuzzFeed joined small digital groups like Crikey, the New Daily and New Matilda at one of the restaurants.

Still reeling from the dual verbal assaults from the PM’s office, we shovelled down dumplings and checked our Twitter feeds.

Penny Wong retweeted us! said one person proudly.

Oh look, the unions are really picking up our story.

Journalists who say they aren’t rabidly checking out how their stories rise and fall on Twitter minutes after they are published are simply lying. First-class narcissists, hoping for that little retweet notification that flicks the dopamine switch.

Employment Minister Senator Michaelia Cash’s media adviser rang this time. It was another complaint about our internship story. I walked outside into the freezing Canberra air.

Hey mate, how are you? A former boss once told me his strategy for dealing with advisers: Be the most chipper cunt in the world, make them feel like a dickhead for interrupting your happy mood.

Mark, I think you know why I’m calling. Your story is wrong.

It wasn’t. I launched into another simple step-by-step maths breakdown. With the phone glued to my ear, I paced back and forth in front of the big glass window of the restaurant. Looking at me was a table full of Fairfax journalists who were intermittently turning around to see why I was gesticulating wildly like my angry Italian grandmother.

You’ve buried the fact we’re paying Newstart, several pars into your story, he said.

We’d dealt with the adviser before in Cash’s capacity in fighting domestic violence and I liked him. But clearly he’d been called by the PM’s office after they got nowhere trying to twist our arms. It was his turn.

Look, I’ve done internships in my life and they’re really important, he said.

So have I! I work in the media.

Ten minutes ticked by, my teeth started chattering in the cold air, and the real reason for his anguish started becoming apparent.

To tell you the truth, we thought this would be a really great story that would play well with the BuzzFeed audience … and now you’ve made it out to be awful.

That’s why they were pissed. The policy this targets are our readers: young, straight out of school, looking for jobs. Morrison had spent an hour spinning the PaTH program on national TV and we’d already rejected that spin. He’d spoken about it like it was his baby, something he had developed while in his previous role as social services minister.

The best form of welfare is a job, said Morrison multiple times in the lead-up to the budget. For him, the notion that if you work hard then you’ll be successful was a central tenet of his upbringing.

Morrison’s philosophy was best explained by an old, wise public policy specialist we took into the budget lockup named Ian McAuley. Ian helped us read the budget and made sure we weren’t falling for the trickery. But he also sometimes sat back in his chair and came up with insightful gems such as: Our lovely treasurer is a Calvinist. He thinks that people who are wealthy have been virtuous to get to where they are. If you’re not wealthy, it’s some fault of your own.

This internship program, which could pay below the minimum wage, had this belief as its backbone.

Can you just change the headline? asked the employment minister’s adviser. You know a lot of people don’t read the article and just look at that headline.

No. We’re not. Sorry mate. If tomorrow, we can interview the senator about the program, we’d love to do that!

If you change the headline we can talk about that.

Ahhhh blackmail. Got me. Dangling access in my face. It was a horse-trading game. If you do this for me, we’ll do this for you. Stay in the good books and when the next drop comes up, they’ll bring it to us for the exclusive.

No, that’s not happening. I was acutely aware that I’d been standing in front of the nation’s print media for more than 15 minutes now.

Look, it’s just disappointing. OK, speak soon.

That was how the advisers treated us—as disappointed older siblings. It felt like they saw us as little kids. This was our second budget and they believed that accepting our application to be part of the lockup was a benevolent act. In their eyes, we were misbehaving. It was disappointment in their voices because they wanted BuzzFeed on their side, especially on this particular issue.

If they had their way the headline would have read: The Government Just Launched an Internship Program that Aims to Give Young People a Future. BuzzFeed North Korea would have run it.

It was 11pm. Our travelling caravan found its way to Public Bar in the heart of Canberra’s suburb of Manuka. The post-dinner budget plans skipped to pale ales and over-priced bottles of champagne in a pub that tried its Canberra best to be a bar.

Public Bar sat on a street corner and was heaving with every single hack and flak in Canberra. Lobbyists rubbed shoulders with journalists. Politicians laughed and clinked glasses with public servants. If you wanted a distillation of everything Canberra, you just needed to visit Public Bar post-11pm on budget night. It was an orgy of conflict of interest. Just watching the crowd was fascinating. I thought, Hell, if you set up a live-stream right now you’d have nerds at home who’d want to see what I could see.

Over there was new Victorian Senator James Paterson flirting with a young SBS journalist. Outside was a prominent ABC radio host holding a bucket of champagne in one arm and threatening a Fairfax journalist with a broken-stemmed glass in the other over a story he’d written that day. In front of me, Labor numbers man Senator Sam Dastyari had people one-by-one coming up to him to give him handshakes and bro-shakes. He pretended like every newcomer was his best friend.

Do you remember me? someone would say to the extroverted numbers man with the great hair.

Dastyari would look them in the eye and reply, Oh yeah, yeah mate.

It’s Michael from DFAT.

Yeah MICHAEL! From DFAT!

Just off to the side, former NSW Liberal Party president and now MP Trent Zimmerman walked in amid the noise and clamour and went straight to a group of suited people, who opened up their circle and then closed around him, handing him a beer.

I lined up at the packed bar, which was now four people deep. My head was already swirling with thoughts of being berated by the PM’s office, which clashed up against periodic reminders that I should go home and call my girlfriend who was in the US. I was doing the time zone calculation in my head when I felt a hand slide into the back of my pants from someone beside me.

Whoa! I turned. A woman had wrapped her arm around my lower back, pulled up my blazer and placed her hand under my shirt. She pulled me in close.

"How is my favourite journalist?"

I was frozen for five seconds trying to scan the woman’s face, trying to figure out who she was and if I knew her.

She was wearing black and was pushing her breasts against my side. She knew I was a journalist, so she must have known who I was? Maybe the seven beers at dinner had dulled the side of the brain that registered who people were.

Yeah OK, I will play this game and pretend like yes, this woman getting right up in my personal space is not weird at all.

Heeeeey? Who are you here with?

Yeknow, she said slurring, those fuckers. Just the guys running the place.

She pointed with her right hand, which had a glass of champagne hanging from it. Over to the right where she was pointing, there were dozens of blokes in suits occupying a whole section of the bar. There were two government MPs, two people from the right-wing think tank, the IPA, and a whole lot of business chamber types and rent-seekers. They’d booked an area for this occasion and made sure that people would not disturb their post-budget piss-up.

The blonde woman had accentuated FUCKERS and was clearly proud of herself for knowing the blob of charcoal suits holding court.

Oh-k. How are they feeling the budget went?

The whole time two things were happening: 1) She continued to have her arm around my waist, hand tucked under my belt, brushing