How to fix The Guardian Australia

The Guardian Australia is celebrating five years:

Most of us take stock on a birthday – maybe a glass of bubbles and a pause for thought about where we’ve actually landed, for all that rushing and striving in the previous year.

This weekend Guardian Australia turns five. At no point during those five years has there been much time to pause for anything.

We launched in May 2013 as a tiny startup desperately trying to appear bigger than we were. (Our launch editor, Katharine Viner – now the Guardian’s global editor-in-chief – our first managing director, Ian McClelland, and I reminisce a little about that exhilaratingly mad time in this podcast chat.)

…But how to translate that ambition to our small just-out-of-startup Australian business when we have to stay in “the race” at least enough to cover the news of the day sufficiently that readers don’t feel they need to go elsewhere to get an overview, but still find the resources to interrogate the most important things with the persistence to have an impact. How should we balance those competing priorities?

…“You need to be radical in order to gain market share,” Sam Lessin, a former vice-president of product management at Facebook was quoted as saying in an essay on Wired that discussed this trend. “Reasonableness gets you no points.”

Guardian Australia readers certainly get outraged at times, often with good reason. And you do tend to click on stories about the figures that outrage you the most. It would be easy to just feed that outrage but that would be doing you, and ourselves, a disservice. Our job is to provide facts, context, background, solutions and sometimes an opposing view. And, contrary to Lessin’s opinion, many of you seem to crave the “reasonable” approach.

So, with that rough mud map for the next phase, I’m going to raise a glass this weekend, to all the rushing and striving and hard work by everyone on the Guardian Australia team, to all those who’ve helped and supported us and, most importantly, to you, our readers.

If you happen to have a few seconds to pause and think about the news you want to read over the next five years, I’d love to hear your ideas.

Jeeees…what MB could do with eighty people…the nation would be razed…

And therein lies The Guardian’s problem. It is resplendent with resources. But at the same time misrepresents itself as a struggling revolutionary. This cognitive dissonance goes to the heart of its failure. It sees itself as Left media but is, in reality, bourgeois status quo. Such definitions probably wouldn’t even make sense to its fattened 80 people.

It boils down to this: The Guardian Australia is a cultural not real Marxist and as such is advancing a voracious “globalist” system of working class exploitation while kidding itself that it’s doing the opposite.

Take Greg Jericho over the weekend:

…a new research paper out this week from the IMF highlights how economies could be set for a major shake-up in the future and how sticking with the belief that better wages for workers comes from reducing company tax in order to spur capital investment is a rather wishful proposition.

Economics research papers generally are not known for their optimism, but the IMF paper titled “Should We Fear the Robot Revolution? (The Correct Answer is Yes)” fairly hits you between the eyes with its pessimism.

This research goes very much to the heart of primary political debate in this country about jobs, equality and the role of government.

…Essentially the shift sees national income move from labour to capital – as the returns from investing in robots to do work previously done by people increase.

Automation is not a concern for workers if it is handled correctly by policy-makers. Indeed it is the answer to higher incomes as it grows productivity.

But the settings needed to share that rising income with workers will be crucial. We know that company tax cuts are a bad idea. But there is a far more direct threat to worker’s income share from automation that Jericho refuses to mention owing to The Guardian’s entrenched wowerism. It is that running mass immigration into an already oversupplied and stressed labour market guarantees to make automation a disaster for workers.

There are three dimensions to this. The first is economics 101 that any oversupplied labour market will deliver lower wages. Perpetually adding to an already over-supplied one will obviously make that worse not better.

Second, as you add automation, labour displacement will begin with the low-skilled but shift up the value chain over time. As pro-migration researcher Chris Wright showed last week, that is exactly where Australia’s immigration program now sits:

Since the 1970s, Australia has officially adopted a skilled immigration policy rather than a labor immigration policy. That is, the main permanent and temporary work visa categories have focused almost exclusively on selecting migrant workers qualified to work in high-skilled occupations, making it very difficult for lower skilled migrant workers to gain entry. Despite the pretense of this official skilled immigration policy regime, there is recent evidence that ‘side doors’ and ‘back doors’ to lower-skilled and unauthorized labor migration – traditionally features of countries that have been reluctant to accept migrant workers officially or unwilling to regulate their entry into lower-skilled segments of the labor market – have become features of Australia’s policy landscape. In this context, this article examines the reasons for the recent emergence of a de facto labor immigration policy in Australia. We utilize concepts from employment relations, migration studies and comparative politics scholarship and draw upon 59 elite interviews with policymakers and stakeholders to develop our findings. Our analysis identifies that the gradual opening of ‘side door’ visa schemes that fall outside of the formal scope of official skilled immigration policy, such as student and working holiday visas, and the growing number of ‘back door’ unauthorized migrants without any right to work, have allowed some employers in certain sectors to develop a reliance on large migrant workforces engaged to perform low-skilled, low-paid occupations. Inadequacies in Australia’s employment regulation enforcement regime have permitted employers using these sources of labor to flourish.

Third, automation will add enormous demand to worker retraining. Yet mass immigration has dramatically undermined the impulse within business to train anybody, let alone retrain them. These days it’s a case of out with the old and in with the “skilled” migrant on any number of visas. This regime has within in it not just the seed for the displacement of workers by machines but their being thrown on the scrap heap of the long term unemployed as well.

It gets ever more destructive when one considers that the primary rationale for mass immigration is supposedly to offset an aging population and reductions in the number of workers. Yet why do you need mass immigration as a solution when you already have mass automation providing it?

Greg Jericho and The Guardian won’t address any negative questions arising from mass immigration because, as he put it:

I must admit, to my ongoing shame I once wrote an article where I noted favourably some fairly simplistic research that suggested most of the employment from 2011 to 2014 was from migrants.

Sometimes numbers can beguile because they seem to provide a straightforward solution – if employment for example has increased by 400,000 over three years and in that time 380,000 migrants have been employed, it seems obvious that most of the jobs must be going to migrants.

And before you know it you are proffering arguments that would have you arm in arm with any number of racists slowly walking past with a grudge to bear and a desire to blame anyone else.

Similarly spurious is the argument that we should first improve infrastructure before then increasing our migrant intake. What you find is those arguing this path never reach a point of thinking it is time to allow greater migration – even if things are good, they never wish to increase migration because they inherently view it as a negative that will clog up roads, reduce wages, increase crime …

Immigration – because there are many desperate to hate – must be treated with extreme care by politicians and journalists, and certainly with more care than Abbott seems capable. The inherently racist parties will seek to use any discussion and any seeming evidence of the negative impact of migrants as fuel to burn their fires of hate.

As it mulls its future with usual navel-gazing, I would like to ask The Guardian why is it profane to hate very small groups of minorities but righteous to be so hateful of massive numbers of workers (including immigrants) that you actively campaign to destroy their standards of living?

So, how to fix this decadent publishing point of view? Easy enough. Stick it down in the muck:

• replace half of the staff with cheap foreign labour and cut the salaries of everyone else;
• shift The Guardian office from Surry Hills to Campbelltown. Require all employees to live at least two hours from work by car or public transport, and
• launch a real estate listings business for elite management to cream mass immigration as Guardian workers sink into poverty.

Let’s see how long it takes before it stops fretting over ethnicity and sexuality and instead dedicates itself to understanding why everyone but an elite few is getting poorer together.