Domainfax journalism has collapsed

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For a long time we’ve mocked it but this week has really seen a new low in Domainfax journalism. First, admire the trivia:

Note that this is the most dominant owner of media eyeballs in the country. Three pieces of fake news sum it up today. The first is by political commentator Mark Kenny:

Pull the trigger, urged Labor as Malcolm Turnbull threatened gas exporters with draconian state powers to withhold enough gas for domestic use.

Convinced the Prime Minister was trapped between his bellicose lecturing and his reluctance to activate a domestic reservation mechanism, Labor taunted him to put up or shut up. Don’t wait until November or even January, pull the trigger immediately, was the message.

The gas crisis has been averted, but state governments in NSW and Victoria are to blame for forcing their residents to pay more, says Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Every time Malcolm Turnbull meets with gas producers, Labor chided, your bills go up.

Its calls for intervention look just that bit pre-emptory after a second summit this week with gas giants finally brought them to heel, giving household and business consumers a confidence of supply.

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Kenny has focused all of this energy on the political point scoring and none on the actual issue. How can he judge one without the other? Where’s the national interest?

The second piece is by Peter Martin:

So who’d get married? Typically, for the first marriage, it’s a man aged 30 and a woman aged 28 to 29. That’s a big advance on the early days of the contraceptive pill in the 1970s when, according to the Bureau of Statistics, the typical ages were 21 and 23. But even in recent decades, we’ve been doing it later. Twenty years ago we married at 27 and 25.

And we are staying together longer. The figures I am quoting are “medians”, meaning half of all marriages last longer and half are shorter. Those that get divorced typically do it after 12 years of marriage, up from 8 years in the 1970s. And we’re less likely to do it. Twenty years ago six of every 1000 married Australians got divorced each year. Today it’s 5.3.

Who cares, Pete? Why not dig into the insane population numbers over-running your city or perhaps tackle the greatest Banana Republic gouge in Australian history transpiring in the gas market? Do it consistently to bring some pressure to bear for change.

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Finally, there’s the Pascometer:

Pascoe’s Law of Stuff states that stuff expands to fill available space. Live in a small unit, it will be full. Live in a big house for a while, it also will be full.

The corollary is that less space means less stuff – as anyone who’s downsized knows only too painfully. And what follows from that is, if people can have fewer things, they’ll react by spending more on services and experiences.

Seriously mate, whatever.

I know you guys hate MB for holding you to account but that does not make us wrong. The issues at large today in the political economy are historic and your coverage is meeting it with a near perfect inverse correlation of total shite.

Have some professional pride.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.