One-eyed coverage of waterfront dispute
By Peter Reid
Truth was the first casualty in the waterfront dispute, embattled wharfies being outgunned by the propaganda clout of Patrick Stevedores, backed to the hilt by the Howard government, the National Farmers' Federation and employer groups.
Add to that a chiefly one-eyed coverage by our predominantly right-of-centre media, plus questionable phone-in opinion polls on commercial TV and radio stations.
In the welter of deceitful rhetoric, distortion and blatant falsehoods, the media's proper role was to seek truth — to scrutinise, probe and analyse with strict impartiality — so the public could make up their own minds.
But neither the print nor the broadcast media, with few exceptions, earned any credit during the most divisive dispute since the pilots' strike a decade ago.
Coverage by commercial media, in particular, had a distinctly anti-union flavour. All too often, the focus was on picketing and face-to-face confrontation at the expense of in-depth reporting and balanced backgrounding of the issues.
Two of the most influential newspapers projected the dispute with gratuitous emphasis on conflict. The Australian labelled its day-by-day coverage "War on the wharves", while the Sydney Morning Herald, the nation's biggest selling broadsheet, used the tag, "Battle for the waterfront".
Disputable claims about wharfies' wages, crane-handling rates and alleged rorts, stridently parroted ad nauseam by workplace minister Peter Reith, were accepted as gospel and went virtually unchallenged early in the dispute.
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The SMH's Alan Ramsey was foremost in unearthing revealing details of corporate asset shuffling involved in the mass sacking of the Maritime Union of Australia's entire work force.
But most commercial radio commentators, plus editorial comment in the metropolitan press of Sydney, the country's media capital, tended to echo the government's demonising of the wharfies.
This was also reflected in media interpretation of reports on Australia's waterfront by the Productivity Commission, which blamed all sides in the dispute for inefficiency on the docks.
Even though the reports found a combination of factors responsible — including managerial incompetence and lack of competition among stevedoring companies, high port charges, berthing delays, as well as workplace practices — Reith was quick labelled them "an embarrassing indictment of the MUA", as if the union were solely to blame.
Reith's approach was symptomatic of the government's adversarial rather than conciliatory stance, which — except for mild rebukes from a few commentators — much of the media accepted compliantly.
No reporter, so far as I'm aware, dared suggest to Reith that harping incessantly on waterfront rorts smacked of hypocrisy from a government which sacked several ministers recently for rorting MUA.
Why wasn't media scrutiny, one wonders, more closely applied to corporate efficiency and productivity, bearing in mind the stevedoring duopoly of Patrick and P&O?
The millionaire boss of Patrick, Chris Corrigan, reportedly earns $480,000 a year, but what about other senior management salaries and financial extras? Any boardroom perks? No long lunches? No reserved car parking, or nicking off early to play golf?
Presumably Reith regards as irrelevant any such comparisons between stevedoring management and MUA workers, unlike overseas comparisons of wharfies' wages and crane-handling rates, which he uses to reinforce the image he helped concoct of the MUA as a dinosaur whose members get too much for too little.
Moreover, few if any journalists challenged Reith or Prime Minister John Howard over their unremitting use, some might say misuse, of the loaded word "reform", as in "waterfront reform", widely used to justify sacking the wharfies, and implicitly meaning to "change for the better". But better for whom? "Reform" has become synonymous with economic rationalism, resulting in rewards for the few and pain for the many.
It's noteworthy that the ABC advised its program-makers recently that "changes" for example, is a more politically neutral word, and that the use of "reform" should be confined to attributed quotes or when all sides in a debate regard the changes as beneficial.
Reporters constantly erred in referring to waterfront reform as if it involved only the MUA and wharfies — not stevedoring companies and the other related factors the Productivity Commission pinpointed as needing improvement.
When the Federal Court upheld the union's bid to have its sacked members reinstated, and found an arguable case of unlawful conspiracy involved, the tide began to turn. Media coverage took on a more balanced perspective as public opinion swung the wharfies' way, coupled with a slump in support for the government.
This apparently so rattled Howard that he and two of his ministers began sniping at the ABC over alleged bias, which backfired when the national broadcaster disclosed via Media Watch that if there had been any bias, it favoured the government in the number of on-air interviews about the dispute (Patrick/government: 182, compared with MUA/ALP: 133).
As the issue shifted from the courts to the administrators, there was scant hope among the wharfies of getting a better deal from the commercial media in the propaganda tussle ahead. But the ACTU helped redress the imbalance with sponsorship of TV adverts fronted by Hazel Hawke, supporting the MUA's cause.
Among the advert's visuals is the dispute's most defining moment: those masked security guards with dogs confronting sacked wharfies in the dead of night. Chances are that sinister image will linger in the soul and one day become a repugnant footnote to our history of industrial relations.
More importantly, there's no guarantee that such a workplace lockout won't happen again under this government. And if there is a next time, it's by no means certain the security guards won't be carrying guns.