Page 2743 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 20 October 1992
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In this chamber in the last four months we have had a number of MPIs which have talked around this issue of Canberra bashing, but it is some of our national colleagues who are as responsible as Richard Carleton for creating the climate within which people like Carleton can put to air programs which are lapped up in some instances by people around Australia. This is not only a call to Richard Carleton to get his facts right; it is a call to our Federal colleagues to get their facts right. Policies such as the decimation of the ACT economy are based upon quite erroneous presumptions about what is done in Canberra in the Federal bureaucracy and a lack of understanding of what Canberra is to the private sector. I will stand up and go on the offensive, not the defensive, about that. Let us face it, Carleton does not stand alone.
MS SZUTY (3.46): Madam Speaker, the topic of the matter of public importance debate today is the well-worn chestnut of Canberra bashing. Richard Carleton of 60 Minutes has more than exemplified the medium of so-called current affairs shows in that he came to Canberra with a story-line, as Ms Follett indicated, and absolutely no amount of input from the local community was ever going to change the tenor of his argument. For this ex-resident, Canberra is still a haven for journalists, public service mandarins and politicians, away from the hurly-burly of the real world. Mr Carleton has demonstrated his ignorance, prejudice and inability to accept that Canberra is now an independent Territory with its own government.
What drove Mr Carleton to present his Canberra piece as he did was not, as most people would expect, a desire to show reality. He was operating to a formula. As the member for Canberra, Ros Kelly, said, he admitted that the real story about Canberrans and the fact that they are ordinary people does not rate, and that is the name of the 60 Minutes game. 60 Minutes appears to have found a successful formula and is sticking to it. When the original concept was introduced from America there was an attempt to sell this new show as something different; but, like most things imported from the United States, it came with its own cultural imperatives - that is, if it does not rate, it does not get a go. In particular, on Sunday night's program, we were presented with a view of Canberra that Richard Carleton wants to believe is true - of cossetted public servants living in Mugga Way.
Whom does he call upon to reinforce his view? Mungo McCallum, who moved from Canberra to the north coast of New South Wales, and Geoffrey Blainey, a historian who lives in Melbourne - two well-known Canberra critics. The question can be asked: Just what do they have to do with Canberra? What can these two individuals add to the debate, except a little intellectual muscle for Mr Carleton's premise that Canberra is a haven for public service mandarins and that the recession we had to have was all our own doing? Once again we encounter the problem of how Canberra is perceived and identified. Since the issue of calling the Federal Government "Canberra" in news stories was raised earlier this year, the tendency appears to have been to adopt this practice as policy rather than dropping the unfortunate reference. With little or no knowledge of their national capital, most Australians would not make any distinction between our function as a national capital and our reality as a city of 300,000 people.
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